We accidentally found the treasure app on an outdated piece of tech called a "mobile" which was ridiculously far less mobile than any of the ocular implants on the market. Baz found it at an antique fair and managed to hook up the primitive charger to an old circuit inverter and within the hour we were scrolling through history.
The previous owner had been something of a code-monkey, a paranoid one too, but their passcodes and fingerprint scans were easily overridden. The treasure app was last activated 45,990 days ago, the location was about thirty kilometres away and we had a full charge in our community pod. It all seemed to click together into the perfect afternoon adventure.
If it wasn't for the images that popped up when we were practically on top of it, we would never have thought to look under the manhole cover, let alone willingly head into the darkness. Even after a hundred odd years, the motion sensors in the lights worked perfectly and the path to treasure was so close we could touch it.
Until we came to a sealed metal door.
One brief trip to a mech merchant later and we had a SmartTech™ radic-drill that adjusted to the door's thickness with a single hand gesture. In all of twenty minutes we had a person sized hole into a room that was full of ancient computers that refused to switch on, no matter how much power we pumped into them.
Baz joked for days about how "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" and then he keeled over at the gym, vomiting blood and brown pulp that the autopsy revealed to have been is internal organs. The official cause of death was internal trauma but our group was questioned thoroughly by both the police and a disease control rep who admitted that Baz's blood showed some kind of unknown virus that was thought to be airborne.
A few days after that Jan dropped off the social map and was presumed missing until her neighbour found her body this morning. She was surrounded in a congealed pool of her own blood and innards, same cause of death as Baz and the same day that Lee collapsed at work, dying less than hour later just like the others.
Seems the real treasure was the virus we accidentally set loose.
I'm sure Baz would have appreciated the humour in that far more than the rest of the world will.
The previous owner had been something of a code-monkey, a paranoid one too, but their passcodes and fingerprint scans were easily overridden. The treasure app was last activated 45,990 days ago, the location was about thirty kilometres away and we had a full charge in our community pod. It all seemed to click together into the perfect afternoon adventure.
If it wasn't for the images that popped up when we were practically on top of it, we would never have thought to look under the manhole cover, let alone willingly head into the darkness. Even after a hundred odd years, the motion sensors in the lights worked perfectly and the path to treasure was so close we could touch it.
Until we came to a sealed metal door.
One brief trip to a mech merchant later and we had a SmartTech™ radic-drill that adjusted to the door's thickness with a single hand gesture. In all of twenty minutes we had a person sized hole into a room that was full of ancient computers that refused to switch on, no matter how much power we pumped into them.
Baz joked for days about how "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" and then he keeled over at the gym, vomiting blood and brown pulp that the autopsy revealed to have been is internal organs. The official cause of death was internal trauma but our group was questioned thoroughly by both the police and a disease control rep who admitted that Baz's blood showed some kind of unknown virus that was thought to be airborne.
A few days after that Jan dropped off the social map and was presumed missing until her neighbour found her body this morning. She was surrounded in a congealed pool of her own blood and innards, same cause of death as Baz and the same day that Lee collapsed at work, dying less than hour later just like the others.
Seems the real treasure was the virus we accidentally set loose.
I'm sure Baz would have appreciated the humour in that far more than the rest of the world will.
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