My Gambling System: Chaos Engine

Chapter 3: The Black Box

The darkness was not empty. It was full of hard things.

Joseph tumbled. He did not fall straight down. He slid inside a giant metal tube. The tube was steep. It was slick with oil and slime.

He hit a bolt. Crack.

Pain exploded in his shoulder. He screamed, but the roar of the wind swallowed his voice.

He hit a grate. It broke under his weight. He fell through.

He hit a pipe. Snap.

Something inside his chest broke. A rib. Maybe two. The pain was sharp, like a spear entering his side. He could not stop. Gravity was a monster, and it was pulling him down to the belly of the city.

The air grew hotter. It smelled of rotten eggs and burning plastic. It was the smell of the Undercity. The smell of things that were thrown away.

Joseph saw a circle of dim light below. It rushed toward him fast. Too fast.

He curled into a ball. He protected his head with his arms. He prayed to a God he did not believe in.

Impact.

He landed on something soft, but not soft like a bed. It was soft like rotting trash. Then he bounced and hit something hard. Metal crunched. Glass shattered.

Joseph rolled. His body flopped like a rag doll. He slid down a hill of garbage and came to a stop in a puddle of black water.

Silence.

For a long time, there was only silence.

Joseph lay on his back. He stared up. Far, far above, he could see a tiny dot of light. That was The Pit. That was the world of the living. He was now in the world of the dead.

He tried to breathe. His chest refused to move. It was locked in a cage of agony. He coughed. A warm liquid bubbled up his throat. He spit it out. Even in the dark, he knew it was red.

"Elara," he whispered. The name was a broken sound.

He had to move. If he stayed here, he would die. If he died, Elara died.

Joseph rolled onto his side. He screamed through his teeth. Every inch of movement was torture. He opened his eyes, but his vision was blurry. The surgery from Chapter 2 had left him half-blind to data, and the fall had blurred his biological sight.

He blinked. He wiped the mud and blood from his face.

He looked around.

He was in a cavern. It was huge. The ceiling was lost in shadows. The floor was a sea of junk. But it was not normal trash.

It was the "Tech-Graveyard."

Everywhere Joseph looked, he saw dead machines. To his left, a giant battle-mech lay on its side. Its head was missing. Wires hung from its neck like intestines. To his right, a pile of androids lay in a heap. Their plastic skin was melted. Their eyes were empty holes. Some of them were twitching, powered by the last drops of leaking batteries.

Click. Whirrr. Click.

The sound of dying machines echoed off the wet walls.

Joseph tried to stand up. His legs shook. His left leg, the one injured before, gave out immediately. He fell back into the mud.

"Okay," he panted. "Okay. Crawl. Just crawl."

He dug his fingers into the dirt. It was full of sharp metal shards. He pulled himself forward. He dragged his broken body through the graveyard.

He needed a medical kit. The military dumped things here. Sometimes, they dumped supplies by mistake. Or maybe a dead soldier was buried in this pile. Soldiers carried med-kits.

He saw a crate nearby. It was marked with a white cross.

Joseph’s heart beat faster. Hope.

He crawled to the crate. He used his fingernails to pry the lid open. The wood was rotten. It snapped easily.

He looked inside.

Empty. Just dust and a nest of metal rats. The rats scurried away, their red LED eyes glowing in the dark.

Joseph rested his head on the empty crate. He felt tears mix with the rain and blood on his face. He was so tired. It would be easy to close his eyes. It would be so easy to let the darkness take him.

No.

He remembered Drax’s face. The smile. The rigged dice. The way he threw Joseph away like trash.

Anger flared in his chest. It was a small flame, but it was hot.

"I am not trash," Joseph hissed.

He pulled himself forward again. He crawled over a pile of rusted robot arms. He crawled under the wing of a crashed drone.

The bleeding inside him was bad. He felt cold. His hands were numb. The edges of his vision were turning black. He was running out of time.

…

Joseph had been crawling for an hour. Maybe two. Time did not exist down here.

His strength was gone. He stopped near a wall of compacted trash. He leaned his back against a tire from a vehicle that hadn't been made in fifty years.

"Just a minute," he whispered to himself. "Rest for a minute."

He let his hand drop to the ground. His fingers brushed against something.

It felt different.

Everything in the Tech-Graveyard was rough. Rusty. Sharp. Broken.

This object was smooth. Perfectly smooth.

It was warm.

Joseph frowned. He forced his heavy eyelids open. He looked down at his hand.

Half-buried in the mud was a box.

He dug it out. It was heavy. It was a perfect cube, about the size of an apple. It was made of a material he did not know. It looked like black glass, or obsidian, but it felt like warm metal.

He wiped the mud off the surface.

A light pulsed from inside the cube. It was a deep, angry red. Thump. Thump. Thump. It beat like a heart.

Joseph held it closer to his face. The red light illuminated his pale, bloody skin.

There was text etched on the side. It was not a hologram. It was laser-carved into the black stone.

PROJECT: C.H.A.O.S.

PROPERTY OF THE HIGH COMMAND.

DO NOT OPEN. DANGER CLASS: OMEGA.

Joseph stared at it. "Project Chaos?"

He had heard rumors. Old stories told in the bars of the Zero District. They said the military was working on weapons that could think. Weapons that could change reality. They said the project went wrong. They said they buried it deep underground so no one would ever find it.

He held the box. It was vibrating. The vibration traveled up his arm. It made his bones ache, but it also made him feel... awake.

"Is this a weapon?" he wondered. "Or a battery?"

He turned it over. There were no buttons. No seams. No way to open it. It was just a solid block of sealed mystery.

He should throw it away. The label said Danger.

But Joseph was dying. A dying man does not fear danger. A dying man fears nothing.

"Maybe it has energy," Joseph thought. "Maybe I can drain it. Jumpstart my heart."

He tried to tap into it. But he remembered—he had sold his implants. He had no interface. He was just a man holding a rock.

He laughed. It was a weak, wet sound. "Useless. Just like me."

He was about to drop the cube when he heard a sound.

It was not the sound of a dying machine. It was the sound of a hunting machine.

Scrape. Scrape. Hiss.

Joseph froze. He clutched the black cube to his chest. He looked into the darkness.

Two yellow lights appeared in the shadows. They were ten feet up in the air.

Scrape. Scrape.

Something big was moving across the ceiling. It was climbing down the wall of trash.