Chapter 6: Chapter 6 – Awakening (1)

A dull thud woke her and Wave sat up in a daze. She pushed herself up from the bed and her circulation, clearly going too fast, threw her back to the mattress. She felt like she had just woken up from one hell of a bad dream.

Bad day at work. Efraim Müller, her supervisor at the agency, had once again turned down one of her requests. No piece of nature, no matter how important, could be allowed to stand in the way of the city’s growth. At least in his opinion. Then a desk had fallen on her hover car, she had fallen from a tower, and a hacker had fallen on her nerves. So much falling usually happens only in a dream. You wake up before the impact and it’s over.

She stared at the gray ceiling and noticed the lack of digital wall decorations. Yes, it would have been nice if this had actually been just a dream.

She threw her pillow in the direction from where the disturbing noise came, but the source of blaring sound was not impressed and continued to follow its task of getting on her nerves.

"All right! I’m getting up," she exclaimed and started a second attempt. Sitting up carefully, stretching her tortured limbs to get the blood pumping at full throttle to the farthest places, and then going in search of the troublemaker.

She didn’t know the sound. Was it even coming from her apartment or were her ears playing tricks on her? She would not use the hearing aid. No fucking way! And she didn’t give a damn how tedious the day would be.

Wave poked her head out of her bedroom. Outside in the living room, something glowed, bathing the room in a hazy glare. Wave rubbed her eyes and when she could see clearly, she made out the brightly lit media panel as the culprit. She squinted her eyes and recognized Hammer’s shaved baby boy face.

With quick steps, she was at the display and tapped the green button to answer his call.

"God, Wave," he greeted her with a pitying look. "You look like you’ve been partying the night away." His voice sounded so distant. No, she would be fine without a hearing aid! Without hesitation, she turned the volume up to the max. If the neighbors complained, she wouldn’t hear anyway.

"That bad?" She plucked at her hair, which were sticking out horizontally from her head on the left side. "Actually, I was just sleeping. What’s up? Did you win the game?"

"I noticed that you were asleep." Hammer laughed. "So tight that you didn’t hear me when I rang your doorbell. Had to move on then, though. Working and all. That term rings a bell?"

"Funny." She glanced at the time display on the panel. It was already past nine. "Okay, I get it, I overslept."

Hammer grinned wryly at the camera. The grin that would have driven her absolutely crazy years ago. "I thought I’d call you again to see if everything was okay."

"I didn’t want to go to work today anyway, as it seems, and my body just made the decision for me." Without a lens, she hadn’t had an alarm clock and she hadn’t thought of setting it up at the media panel. "Thanks, really nice of you."

"No worries. We won the game, by the way. Ember and Impact crushed the defense and the rest of the team surrendered on their own. Too bad you weren’t there."

Wave grimaced. "Yeah, bummer."

"Is everything else okay with you? Are you going to be all right? Are you calling the Secs because of the hacker?"

"Don’t even mention them to me. In a best-case scenario, they do nothing to help me, and worst-case scenario, they make up something to harass me. Lock me in a cell for a day for my own safety." Wave pulled one of the sticking-out strands straight, which popped back into its original position when released. "I’ll be fine. I've got a ton of things to do, but I’ll have all day for that now."

"Well then," Hammer hesitated for a moment, eyeing Wave’s attempts to arrange her hair, but then released his gaze. "Uh, I’ve got to get to work. I’ll be in touch with you later. Take care."

"You too."

Hammer’s face disappeared from the screen and icons flooded the user interface. Had they proliferated overnight? Each of them, in its own way, tried to attract her attention. One of them pulsed particularly persistently with a red border. The message inbox.

Wave tapped it and a list of new messages appeared. Reams of advertisements that would have already been destroyed by the lenses without restraint. In between, lurid news stories. Most of it was baloney or fake news. Things that no one in the Citadel paid attention to anymore, since there were a myriad of media channels where you didn’t have to read even this kind of 'news' yourself.

'Allosaurus destroys pedestrian bridge'. No surprise, what pedestrian bridge would withstand an allosaurus? Who wrote something like that? And who read it? Wave certainly didn’t.

From the same sender came 'Akimoto employees terrorize residents.' Akimoto Robotics was the company that owned the Arena and was the market leader in the field of robotics. The only field in which anyone was significantly ahead of the Kanter Group. She fought her curiosity, lost, and clicked it.

Wave skimmed the text. The writing style was ... bold and paved with grammatical potholes. The author, F34RLESS INV3STIG4TR, must have been pretty young, or he just didn’t care. Last night, according to him, two employees of the company had forcibly gained access to apartments in various locations around the city. The authenticity of the report was supported by numerous pictures that the victims themselves had taken with their lenses. The two guys who really wore Akimoto’s logo on their uniforms were burly guys who were better not to be messed with. If they were not let in voluntarily, they kicked in the doors. They looked as if they would not hesitate for a moment to use force even against the owners of the apartments. The article did not mention whether this had actually happened, nor did it address what they were actually doing there. The author denounced that the Secs had done nothing at all to help the victims or to prosecute the men. Then he started listing points about why Akimoto and the Security Corps were in cahoots, wanted to usurp world domination, and ...

"Shit, I almost fell for a conspiracy guy," Wave muttered. She clicked the message away and set the sender to 'Ignore'. She kept scrolling and skimmed the rest without paying much attention.

She was about to close the messaging service when she noticed Ember’s cheeky grinning face, wrapped in purple curls.

"Hi Wave, you really need to see this. Get back to me after."

Her message included a link to a news channel’s media library. Hopefully not another conspiracy theory.

"This is the place," a woman in a beige trench coat and artfully upswept hair spoke to the camera, "where radio host Aki threw himself to his death yesterday. No one knew his true face and even after his tragic passing CCR is guarding this secret, mainly to protect his loved ones. With this, the city loses another iconic voice and-" Wave paused the video and stared at the screen in disbelief. She was freezing. Not just because she was standing in the unheated living room in her underwear. This news had sent chills down her spine. She looked at the stain on the ground behind the reporter, the posts between the lanes, and then the wall of houses in the background.
"You’ve got to be kidding me," she whispered. Then she dialed Ember’s number.

"Hiii Wave," it squeaked from the speaker after half a toot. "Hold on for a second." Muffled chatter sounded in the background, to which Ember answered energetically. "Yes, it’s important! Just get on with your lesson! I’m already going out! Ughn!" A door was slammed swingingly shut, all the way to finally settle the question of who didn’t want to be disturbed by whom here. "So, now I’m here for you."

"Was that really your teacher in the background just now?" If Wave hadn’t still been so shocked by Aki’s death and where he had died, she would have snorted out loud. "I guess classes in your senior year aren’t that important, are they?"

"Oh, that’s all right. That was just History, and everyone knows the city’s history is bogus, right?"

At least, everyone who paid close enough attention to news about bridge-destroying allosaurs knew. Wave was better off not saying that out loud, though. "The news is real, isn’t it?"

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"At least it’s real enough that CCR is okay with it being broadcast on all channels."

Damn.

"When?" Her throat was dry and Wave swallowed. That didn’t make it any better. "When did it happen?"

"The same time you had your accident. They just let the show go on after that so no one would notice. Pieced together moderation from old recordings of him."

Again, dammit.

"Ember, you know where this happened, right?"

"Hell, yeah. You let the whole town know where you turned your hover car to scrap. Wasn’t hard to put one and one together."

Wave staggered back a step and slid down the wall until she was sitting. She brushed her tangled hair back and stared at the ceiling. "I think I saw his arm when I drove away from the accident scene. Aki was buried under the desk that fell on my hover car." She let go of her mane again, which was now at least partially tamed between her head and the wall. "That guy who hacked my hearing aid and claimed he was-"

"Wave, this can’t be a coincidence! Even if it’s a hacker or just a stupid joke, maybe there’s more to it than that."

"Something supernatural, perhaps?" Wave squeezed out a forced laugh. There was a lot that people in the city couldn’t explain. How there could be floating aliens or where the city got all the resources to keep growing. They just accepted it. And Wave had experienced much more stuff herself. There was a logical explanation for everything if you were willing to listen to it. But to have a person speak to her who had already died was beyond her belief. "Ember, this is nonsense. This isn’t the first time someone has tried to harm me in this way."

"Oh, come on, Wave. Where’s your sense of adventure gone? Did you lost that in the outside world?"

Wave just snorted, then blew one of her thick black strands, which had freed itself from captivity, out of her face.

"Any allosaur is braver than you, Wave. By the way, did you get the news article about the pedestrian bridge-"

"You know I can just hang up, right?"

"I love you, too." Ember smiled at her as if she had now come up with the idea that would finally convince Wave. "Haven’t you always wanted to talk to Aki in person? I know what a fan you are."

"Do you also know how much of a pain in the ass you can be?"

"Ow, that hurts." Theatrically, Ember put her hands over her heart. Then she abruptly became serious. That meant something else had actually occurred to her and her detective senses had kicked in. "You know what made me wonder about the newscast?"

"How you can recreate a hairstyle like that?" That reminded Wave of her own hair, and she went in search of a scrunchie.

"Yeah, I actually liked that one, but I mean what she said. Aki was another voice that went silent. So I did some research."

"You mean you were digging through your daddy’s files again?"

"Sometimes I think he used my birth date as a password on purpose like he wanted me to read his files."

"I’m sure it was so you’d lick blood and follow him into the Security Corps."

Ember lived alone with her father, and from the way Wave had known him so far, she couldn’t rule it out, at least. He had always hidden mysteries for her. Little secrets to make their everyday life more interesting. When Wave was with them for dinner, at least once the conversation would turn to one of his cases and they would get to guess who the culprit was, or how they had gotten on his trail.

"Wave, I admit it. I’ve actually drawn blood on this one. During the last two weeks, radio hosts kept disappearing or dying, even from other channels. But in the mass of news, it was never more than a side note. I wouldn’t have known about it without Aki, in fact, even with him. No one would have noticed."

"Except the Secs, you mean? But, yeah that sounds strange. Are there any suspects?"

"Hardly anyone knows about that, even among the Secs. They’re just watching at the moment. Could possibly be a channel trying to eliminate the competition. But the deaths aren’t relevant enough for that."

"Maybe someone just doesn’t like radio hosts? I could almost understand it with some of them if they weren’t people nonetheless."

"So, how does it look? Your chance to make a difference ..."

"Ember, I hate you."

Ember knew her too well, after all. Knew her sore spots. Knew she could drive her up the wall with her life in the outside world and her parents, but also knew of the problems at her work. Every time she was on the verge of just quitting her job at the agency, Ember was there, and she could cry to her. And if Wave was honest, she was already at that point again right now. She’d almost accepted having important requests turned down by her superiors. She was afraid that she was losing her drive, the reason she had come to the city. That she was only staying to move into the Arena with her friends in the evenings. She didn’t want to become just another good citizen, plodding along every day, turning a blind eye to all the injustice.

This was a chance to make a difference. To expose an injustice that was happening to the city. Maybe the city would return the favor this time.

When she looked Ember in the eyes, Ember smiled. She knew she had convinced Wave.

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