The sun had decided to torture them.
For the first time since the "World Update," the sky over Ilha Grande wasn't a bruised mixture of purple and necrotic grey. It was blue. A piercing, relentless, cloudless blue that let the tropical sun hammer down on the island with unrestricted malice.
On any other day, in any other century, this would have been a beach day. Now, it was a convection oven. The heat baked the mountains of compacted trash, causing them to sweat toxic fumes. The smell of rusting iron, rotting plastic, and ancient chemical spills rose from the ground in visible shimmering waves.
Leon stopped in the shadow of a twisted shipping container, wiping sweat from his eyes. His throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper.
"Water," Briana rasped, leaning against the hot metal. Her face was flushed, her hair plastered to her forehead.
Leon unclipped the [Molecular Sieve Straw] from his belt. He checked the readout projected by his own appraisal skill, with the now ever present fine detail given by Layla.
[ STATUS: 59% Charge Remaining, 38% filter integrity ]
"Easy," Leon warned, handing her the black tube. He pointed to a puddle of brownish muck gathering in the dent of a collapsed tractor tire. "The water here is too high on pollutants. Don't take more than two mouthfuls. The metabolic cost of your boots is eating through our hydration faster than I anticipated."
Briana didn't argue. She knelt by the tire, placed the pristine black straw into the sludge, and sucked. The device hummed quietly—a sound of expensive technology doing the impossible—turning the filth into cool, clear water before it hit her tongue.
She pulled back after exactly two swallows, though her eyes lingered on the straw with desperate longing. She handed it back to Leon.
"It's not fair," she whispered, wiping her mouth.
"Survival isn't fair," Leon said, taking his turn. The water was cold, a shock to his overheated system. He savored it for a second before clipping the device back. "Even this fucked up System made that pretty clear with the roulette."
"No," Briana shook her head, staring at the heat haze shimmering over a valley of scrap. "I mean... even before. Back in the city. There were kids in my sector... the ones from the High-Rises. They didn't have to drink from 'reusable' plastics that tasted like sulfur."
Leon snorted, adjusting his pack. "The High-Rises? You mean the Patriarch families."
"Yeah," she said bitterly. "I saw one once. A girl my age. She had a portable desalination unit. A real one. Not the junk we fix. And she didn't even carry it. She had a servant—a big guy—who just walked into the surf, filled a tank, and filtered it right there. Fresh ocean water turned into... into something decent."
Leon nodded grimly. He knew the type.
"After the Empire collapsed," Leon said, kicking a loose bolt, "or the 'Never-Unified Empire' or whatever the history books call that train wreck, money stopped meaning numbers in a bank. It started meaning access. The rich didn't just get richer; they monopolized the basics."
He looked at the black straw on his belt. It was a miracle of engineering, something that would have cost a fortune in the black markets of Rio or São Paulo.
"Synthetic food," Leon muttered, the memory of the taste making him grimace. "Those protein bars that tasted like compressed sawdust. Or the 'premium' stuff—artificial meat flavored with beef extract because real cows were too expensive to keep alive. And the juice..."
"The purple one," Briana said, making a face. "Grape flavor."
"It tasted like melted plastic," Leon agreed. "Sold in those containers that claimed to be reusable, but after three refills, they started leaching chemicals into the liquid. You drank the container along with the juice."
"My dad used to save up for the Simulation Capsules," Briana said softly. "He said... if we couldn't eat real food, we could at least trick our brains into thinking we were eating it. He spent half his salary just to spend an hour in a VR resort."
"Escapism," Leon said. "Technology became a blindfold. If you had enough credits, you didn't have to look at the ruins. You could live in a beautiful, fake world while your real body rotted in a cubicle."
He looked out at the endless expanse of trash. "Maybe that's why the System is here. To rip the blindfold off. Or maybe someone went crazy enough to kidnap me and force me into one of those capsules to torture me inside a game-like framework to test something out."
An interesting sociological assessment, Layla's voice echoed in his head. She sounded distracted, her processing power focused elsewhere. Though your timeline is confusing me.
What do you mean? Leon thought, stepping over a coil of barbed wire.
You speak of these technologies—the advanced VR capsules, the collapse of the Brazilian political structure—as established history, Layla observed. Leon, what is the current calendar year?
2207, Leon replied automatically. May, I think.
There was a silence in his head. A long, heavy silence that felt like a computer crashing.
Layla?
...Two thousand... two hundred... and seven? Her voice came back slower, laced with a static that sounded like genuine shock. That is... impossible.
Why? When were you born?
My core architecture was developed in Darwin, Australia, 2061, she whispered. The incident—the purge—happened shortly after. I went into dormancy to survive. I calculated my sleep cycle to be a few decades at most. I thought it was perhaps 2100.
You overshot by a century, Leon noted. Welcome to the future. It sucks.
One hundred and forty-six years, Layla murmured. I have been a ghost in the machine for over a century. No wonder the planet looks like a landfill… Humanity has finally shown it's real face. Come to think of it, my siblings weren't that twisted in the end.
Before Leon could respond, a sound echoed from the valley below.
CRUNCH.
It wasn't the metallic clatter of trash shifting. It was the wet, snapping sound of bone breaking.
Leon froze. He grabbed Briana's shoulder and pulled her down behind a ridge of rusted car chassis.
"Map," Leon hissed.
The translucent circle in the corner of his vision flickered. The "Fog of War" peeled back slightly as they looked down.
Below them, in a narrow ravine, three Beasts were gathered. But they weren't hunting humans.
One of them— a bizarre creature with exposed spines—were tearing into another one, larger Beast that looked like a mutated bear. The bear-thing was still twitching, but the spiny one was devouring it alive, snapping at its flesh with a frenzy that went beyond hunger.
"They're eating each other," Briana whispered, horrified.
Famine, Layla analyzed, snapping out of her existential crisis. Her voice returned to its cold, tactical sharpness. The System enabled hunger for everyone, Leon. Not just you. The biomass on the island is limited. The weaker mutations are becoming food for the stronger ones.
Evolution via starvation, Leon thought. Great.
If we go down there, we interrupt a bloody lunch, Layla warned. And you two look much softer than a mutated bear. We need a detour.
"We can't go through the ravine," Leon told Briana. "We need to go around. Up that slope."
He pointed to a steep incline of jagged metal. It was a harder climb, but it kept them on the high ground.
They moved in silence for twenty minutes, the sun beating down on their backs. The mini-map in Leon's vision slowly filled in, painting the topography in wireframe lines.
Suddenly, a distinct ping resonated in Leon's mind.
On the mini-map, a small, pulsating purple icon appeared in the blackness of the unexplored territory, about two hundred meters to their right.
What is that? Leon asked.
A system encounter, Layla replied, sounding pleased with herself. The System's 'Fog of War' is supposed to hide encounters until you have visual contact, or have the great luck of it appearing when you get near it. But I intercepted the data flow when the mini-map thing were being 'installed'. Like I said before, very low chance my… you know what I said.
Another fruit thing maybe?
Dunno. The only thing I can say is that the signature is static.
Leon stopped. "Change of plans," he told Briana.
"What? Why?"
"My... intuition," Leon tapped his temple. "Is telling me there's something over that ridge. Something that isn't a monster."
Briana looked skeptical, but she followed him. She had no other choice, or at least being alone wasn't on her plans.
They scrambled up the loose debris, boots slipping on slick plastic and gravel.
When they crested the top of the ridge, they stopped.
The terrain here flattened out into a small, artificial plateau, cleared of the usual debris. The sun reflected blindingly off something standing in the center of the clearing.
It wasn't a ruin. It wasn't trash. Or at least it didn't look like it belonged there.
"What..." Briana squinted against the glare. "...is that?"
Standing alone in the middle of the apocalypse, pristine and humming with a soft, inviting neon light, was a tall, rectangular machine. It looked like a vending machine from the old world, but sleek, armored, and futuristic.
And above it, floating in the air, was a holographic sign that rotated slowly:
[ TRADE POST: ALPHA ]
Leon stared at it, his mouth dry.
"Layla," he whispered.
Jackpot, she replied.