Tower Of Sol: A GameLit Novella by Kris Schnee

Author:Kris Schnee [Schnee, Kris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2019-04-29T22:00:00+00:00

4. Seeking Allies

We got home without trouble. I left the kids to their fate of getting grounded, and reported to the mayor. He'd called in Father Cypress too. Berg listened to my tale with patience, then poured us each a drink of our terrible local whiskey. While I burned my throat on it he asked, "Can we enforce a ban?"

"No, sir. We can try, but it'll get ugly. At best we'll have a bunch of sulking young people for a year, and then be right back to dealing with the robot missionaries. The good news is that we talked Sol into a sixteen-year-old minimum, so any fool kid who's obviously younger than that will get turned away by the AI itself."

Cypress waved with his already-empty shotglass. "You trust the machine to uphold that?"

"Sol plays by rules. Weird, arbitrary ones, but they're rules. It'll have to be your job, Father, to convince them not to get talked into anything."

Mayor Berg said, "If we allow them to keep going, then we need you to help make sure the route is safe. This threat of increased Gaian activity is a new wrinkle."

We knew all too well about the general design of the AI called Gaia. It had been created to "protect nature", as understood by people who didn't consider humans to be part of it. During the collapse there'd been a plague of infertility that was probably Gaia's doing. I was uncomfortably reminded that I wasn't affected, and would be expected to raise a family of my own; I'd been putting it off.

Berg said, "I'd like you to do some scouting, Sven. Try to find evidence of the motorized whatever-it-was in the woods. If we're lucky, it'll mean contact with another survivor community. But don't jump into danger."

"I'd like to take Mike along, if he's willing. He could use the scouting experience, and he's been wanting to visit the Tower."

Cypress scowled. "We're all now marching back into that place?"

"We might as well benefit from Sol's scheme."

* * *

The next morning, Mike and I headed out on bikes. We had provisions for three days. Along the usual trails we kept our eyes out, especially when we reached the spot where we'd spoken with the griffin-bot. From there we diverted west into the woods.

There was an old bridge between our area, Lancaster, and the town of York to the west and Gettysburg beyond that. We'd searched both places before and found no settlements, though the Red Horse Tribe held the Shrewsbury area south of York, southwest of us. Northwest of us was the old state capital, Harrisburg, which was nearly uncharted territory for us because of an unreasonable number of aggressive but seemingly natural animals. There could be a hardy settlement out that way, or just some badass hermit who'd put a bullet in my face as soon as befriend me. I didn't have high hopes for making new friends on this trip. My goal was to learn what I could and stay out of danger.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.