Pure as Glass / 1 /

It was a sleek world that Jonathan had stepped into. The floor was manufactured marble, the walls were made of a cotton fiber that stifled the harsh wind and let just the gentle breeze pass through. The walls were the color of the sunlight that they caught and refracted into the room to allow natural light to fill the room. Art hung suspended by tech that might as well have been magic. There were sculptures and paintings from a forgotten world. Jonathan read names suspended in air beneath the works that meant nothing to him: Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Tiziano Vecelli. They were long dead, no one except the sentimental cared who they were.

Jonathan had been a member of the Security Force for long enough to know that if he was being called up here, something was going to change. No one came back the same from the top of Clifton, sometimes they did not come back at all. It was a terrifying concept, but all Jonathan could focus on was the spiraling streaks of white that played out in the dark marble beneath his feet. It was like a spider's web made out of double helix. The web led him forward, carrying him along his destination and distracting him from the reason as to why he was called.

Last year his partner was called up and James Rook had never come back. No one could figure out why Rook was called up. As the days went on, Jonathan remembered something that no one else could. It had been a cold night, some cyber-punks had knocked out the power grid in Raven Rock and everything went dark. Jonathan and Rook went to investigate. they found the cyber-punks dead from a single gunshot to the head and a hundred ten pound canisters of nanites missing. The scene was squeaky clean, too clean to have happened in a blackout.

When the lights came back on, evidence of a quarrel between the punks appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly the message boards had a backlog of feuding between the punks, suddenly the guns that killed them appeared in their own hands, suddenly all the lines connected. The canisters of nanites were found damaged in an alley a few buildings away, most of them were broken and the nanites had apparently drained down through the cracks: labelled unrecoverable. Rook refused to let it go, Jonathan kept his mouth shut. Rook was called up, Jonathan was not.

Part of Jonathan's mind wondered if he was being called up now because they had been torturing Rook this whole time and he finally broke. According to the duty logs, Rook was the only one on duty that night, Jonathan had called out sick at first. When the blackout hit, Rook pulled Jonathan in against his will. Rook refused to go into the blackout without backup. If Jonathan had not come in, Rook would have gotten reprimanded for not going.

Today was similar, for Jonathan, because he had called out sick this morning. Last night had been a celebration and Jonathan had always been able to celebrate with the best of them. They busted a smuggling operation that was moving heroin from DevTown into Clifton. It had been a case the Security Force was building for years and Jonathan had been picked as Strike Team Leader Bravo. It was a good bust, his sixth as a Strike Team Leader. Now that he walked on that marble floor, Jonathan wondered if everything had been done by the book.

Bureaucracy aside, there would not be anymore heroin coming into Clifton for a while. The junkies would have to revert back to the artificial stuff that was laced with chemicals to help them get clean or suffer withdrawals.

At the end of the marbled walk, Jonathan found himself standing on top of the world. The fiber walls twisted in on themselves, completely disappearing in the morning light. The snow capped mountains in the distance made the wasteland between look more magical than Jonathan ever thought possible. It had not snowed in years, according to the weather reports that he still paid attention to, but there it was. Fresh snow. Fresh, impossible snow.