With a metallic crash that Lu felt down to his tooth roots, the freight elevator came to a stop. The rusty grated doors slid open reluctantly a bit and revealed Level 5. It was a completely different world. While neon lights in Sector 42 above turned night into day, down here there was an eternal, dim twilight. Thick fog from the huge sewage and cooling systems of the upper city drifted through the narrow streets overgrown with cable bundles.
“Welcome to the basement of Neo-Chongqing,” Lu coughed and wiped the oily condensate film from his face. He checked his wrist display. “No signal. Absolutely dead. We are in digital no man's land.”
Mei set down Bao, who immediately began wading through the puddles with his small mechanical feet. His blue lenses scanned the surroundings. “Analysis: High density of recycled components. Poor hygiene standards. My sensors detect traces of... cheap synthetic grease. Unacceptable.”
“Get used to it, buddy,” Mei said, dragging her hoverboard behind her, whose drive down here only sputtered uselessly due to the lack of magnetic fields. “Only those who think analog survive down here.”
Suddenly there was a crackle in the dense fog ahead of them. Several figures peeled out of the shadows of the rundown market stalls. They wore clothing made from patched Kevlar scraps and glasses with bulky, analog zoom lenses. In their hands they held not laser blasters, but modified scrap shotguns that worked with compressed air.
A lanky man with a cybernetic eye patch that ticked rhythmically like an old pocket watch stepped forward. He looked first at Lu, then at Mei, and finally at Bao, whose polished blue casing shone like a diamond in this dirty world.
“Look what the elevator spat out for us,” said the man with a smoky voice. “Upper city gringos with a high-tech toy. I am Zhao, the scrap king of Level 5. And everything that lands down here automatically belongs... to me.”