Phoenix 2125

Posted By Alexander Hollins on April 18, 2008

Following signs leading to the Capitol Building while trying to avoid the crush of humanity on main thoroughfares soon led Tom in circles. The capitol was in full swing already, early on a Monday morning. Following along the same official walkways were groups of lawyers, tourists, and those coming to the capitol for court hearings. Trying to press between the almost unmoving walls of people became simply impossible when he came upon two separate school groups, children in lines marching towards the dome. Realizing that he would be late, he looked left and right, looking for a side passage that would get him around the blockage. Passing through a small garden, he turned in the direction he thought led towards his goal. Coming through a covered walkway, however he found himself right back into the central square where the cable cars loaded and disbursed.

Pulling his phone from his pocket, he loaded up the map that had been sent to him, and followed it instead of the signs. Finding a locked metal door marked “Maintenance” that was shown on his map as his start; he tried his thumb on the lock pad. The lock clicked open.
“Good”, he thought to himself. “That means they’ve already coded me in. That should make things easier”

The room past the door was lined with padlocked cabinets, and a concrete tunnel slowly wound its way down. He started down the corridor, lined with cables and pipes running along the tops of the walls and the ceiling. Step by step he followed the instructions on his screen, moving from walkway to walkway. He headed down a tight access corridor, up a flight of steps painted an old red, and through a wooden door. Two feet in front of him was a staircase back down, this one painted military green. Taking an elevator back to the service, and ducking through a small restaurant and out its back door, he realized he had no clue where in the capitol he was. He had heard that during reconstruction of Phoenix, the area around the new Capitol Building had become a maze, but academic knowledge of a fact meant nothing when you were stuck in it. Turning a corner, he ran smack into a guardrail blocking a small maintenance tunnel that was the next step on his map. Standing there cursing silently to himself, he examined the map, scrolling in and out to try and find another way.

As he stood there, a door he hadn’t noticed, a mere outline in the steel wall next to him, popped open and slammed into his elbow, sending the phone skittering across the ground. A young girl, 14 or 15 at the most, looked out around the edge of the door.

“Sorry about that! Are you okay?”

Tom bent to retrieve his phone, and, verifying that his phone was undamaged, looked up at the girl.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just trying to figure out how to get past that.” he said, gesturing at the barricade. She looked in the direction he pointed, and banged her fist on the door.

“Damn. They must be ahead of schedule on cleaning out the main lines. Where are you trying to go?”

“Um, Planning and Revising, next to the Dome. I’ve got a map, but it just tells me where to go, not where I actually am. “He held his phone out to her, showing the map.

Looking at the map and scrolling through the directions, the girl nodded to herself. “Whoever drew this up knows this place almost as well as me. P and R, hunh?“ She looked up at Tom, appraising his face. “This looks like Deborah’s work, and that makes you Tom, right?”

Tom eyed her sideways, a little wary. “It does. Does everyone here already know me?”

“Well, Deborah and I chat a lot, and she’s been telling me about the new guy. Us admin types around here tend to gossip a bunch, so yeah, everyone’s already going to know who you are. “Sticking out her hand, she continued on. “I’m Daneel, by the way.”

“Pleasure is mine, Daniele.”, he said, shaking her hand, and then taking his phone back as she offered it to him and holstering it on his belt.

“No no, Daneel. Dah-kneel.”

Tom stared at her dumbly for a moment, thinking. “You mean, like the robot?”

Daneel smiled broadly at him. “Natch. My parents had a thing for the classics. Most people don’t catch the reference. Those that do complain that it’s a guy’s name. ”

Tom chuckled. “That’s silly. He was a robot. Gender was just a way of humanizing them, he wasn’t actually male, and so that makes it a gender neutral name, right?”

Daneel giggled along with him. “Exactly. Nice to see someone else gets it. C’mon, I was heading to blueprints, right next to P and R. Follow me. “

With that, Daneel led Tom back through the door she had first popped out of. Every so often checking a dog-eared notebook she pulled from a messenger bag strapped securely around her shoulders, she went through a mystifying series of tunnels, elevators, ladders, and staircases. Some were disused and dusty, others looked as if they had just finished painting them yesterday. As they went, she explained.

“You see, they added on top of the old streets and such that were there, and then added layers on top of that. We are just under the Dome here, but a good 6 stories down. As they rebuilt, they added as they needed, and a lot of rooms and such got filled in to provide support, but corridors and stairs remained. Its amazing how cluttered it got in the ten odd years they spent actually building. They got the surface level in order, but down here, you could get lost for days. “

Coming up out of a staircase, Tom blinked as sunlight suddenly shone on his face again, and sneezed.

“Bless you. That’s P and R across the square there.” She said, pointing across a small park. “Tell Deborah I said hi.” With that, Daneel skipped off in the other direction from where she had pointed, leaving Tom again alone without a guide, but this time, with a destination in sight.