The bots pried the shaft doors open. We found that it opened up onto a balcony that wrapped all the way around the spoke. Apparently in better days this was an open air cafe; the tables and chairs had long since all floated away, but the signs remained, along with a small kitchen, some bathrooms and an emergency closet. Fortunately there were hand holds… railings on the wall and the edge and ivy that had spiraled around the spoke and covered everything. We held onto the railings and ivy to keep from floating away.
Again, everything looked perfectly intact, if rather mossy and weed-covered. The emergency closet intrigued me, so I had George use the bots to pry it open. Bandages, meds and other first aid supplies came spilling out, floated off into the great green beyond.
Latched into the emergency closet were what I was hoping to find: fanpacks. These were rescue models, designed to be put on in a hurry and jet you off into the sky in a moments notice to get to the spine or go up the outside of the spokes, or even just get from one side of the hull to the other faster than the elevators could do it. If we were to go down, this would let us get down there, and back up, in short order. The closet held five of the packs; one each to the three humans, one to one of the bots. The other two bots linked together and shared the fifth.
Cranston could see where his sister’s apartment building must be, roof just under the canopy of green a few hundred meters to one side. I had George take over flight control of the fanpacks… he was a pain in the ass, but I’d rather have him piloting than have people flying incompetently all over everywhere.
So down we flew, in formation like so many ducks. The point should have probably been taken by one of the bots, seeing as how they’re expendable, or by me, seeing as how I was wearing armor, but George put Cranston at the point. Cranston was first to reach the foliage, feet-first while decelerating. George flew him down to where he could get a hand hold on the broad leafs, then folded the fans over his back, then did the same for the rest of us. So there were stood, sorta, our feet in the weeds, the rest of us in the sky. The bots set to work; they turned into a flurry of activity and mowed a path down into the tangles of vines and stems below us. They didn’t have to go very far. The greenery was little more than a shell; more than a few meters in, the leafs were gone, as were most of the stems… and most of the light. With the lights on our suits, we could see a good distance; the stems formed a vertical forest, kinda like stands of bamboo, but with several meters between each stem. The plants were all slowly growing towards the core spine lights, I guess, and didn’t waste much effort or material growing down here in the dark.
The shell of greenery was about a dozen meters above the roof of the apartment building. We crawled our way towards it, found that it was covered with a tracery of mostly dead vines. Like any apartment rooftop, it had a door leading into the building; of course, it was locked. The bots saw to that. As soon as the door opened, Cranston leaped through and shot down the stairwell, demonstrating better zero-g agility than I would’ve credited him with. The lights in the hallways were still on.
His sister’s apartment was three floors down from the roof, so it didn’t take him long to reach it. When we got there, he had already opened the door… he either had a key, or it recognized him. Don’t know. Anyway, we followed him in. I hadn’t known what to expect. I would’ve guessed that it’d either be empty, or a scene of horror… dead bodies, blood splashed around, something like that. But it was just an apartment like any other, furnished like you might expect, except that the furnishings were all floating in mid air. Cranston was dashing from room to room, basically swimming through the cloud of stuff that filled each room… books, clothes, childrens toys, bedding, chairs, pictures that once hung on the wall. It was all there… but it all looked terrible. Everything paper or fabric was moldy, blackened by mildew and decay. The kitchen and bathroom showed evidence that the water had come out and floated around, splashing everything. The walls, floor and ceiling were stained by substances mundane but disgusting. Were it not for the unreal sight of everything simply floating around, it would have looked squalid, like some 19th century tenement out of Dickens. The decay seemed the product of years, not the few days that had passed since we had communicated with this place. Apart from us bumping around, it was silent.
The items floating around seemed like they had, in better days, been fine products — a lot of it hand made. The squalor was clearly the result of whatever had happened to the station, not some economic distress or other calamity prior to everything going to hell. There was no sign of packing, nor sign of disaster… nor sign of the people themselves. They simply weren’t there. Cranston… well, he went frantic, then went mad. He screamed. He threw things. He wailed, yelled things that didn’t make much sense. And he bounced off the walls. Sarah floated up beside me, put her hand on my shoulder and nodded towards the door. She looked sad. I couldn’t blame her. We were in the presence of some great tragedy, and we couldn’t even begin to explain what had happened. She and I left the apartment, leaving Cranston to rave at his loss and confusion.
The bots were in the hallway, forcing all the doors open. From what we could see, the same story played out over and over… apartments full of floating stuff covered in filth and rot, slowly bouncing off walls that had once been brightly colored, now indescribable tones of gray and brown and black. It didn’t help that the lights were failing, and the surviving lights were themselves smeared with a thin coat of the muck of mold and dust and dirt that seemed to coat everything. A few apartments showed signs of fire, but in rooms full of floating water, fires hadn’t stood much chance of taking hold. Sarah wandered in to one apartment; I floated through the door on the opposite side of the hallway. In the dimly lit main room there was only a limited cloud of stuff; the previous inhabitant apparently wasn’t much of one for knicknacks. Plus all the interior doors were closed, locking away whatever cloud of flotsam those rooms held. But the main room did hold one item that caught my attention…a grand piano. It its day it must have been a marvelous piece of work… all wood and ivory and steel, not plastic and glass. It might’ve even come from pre-Evacuation Earth, from the looks of the ornamentation. But the general decay had done the wood no favors.
The piano floated about a meter above the floor, in what looked like the position it had originally been in. It seemed to have simply… risen. Something about it fascinated me… just the wrongness of the situation, I think. I can’t play a tune to save my life, but floating in front of it I poked a few of the keys. The piano actually worked; I think it was out of tune. But the sound echoed off the moldy walls in a way I just didn’t like. I felt like the sound was attracting the attention of things that were best left undisturbed. I pushed off from the piano, sending it slowly drifting backwards. I bumped into Sarah; she had come in and was floating behind me. She looked… I dunno. “Concerned,” I guess.
“I want to get out of here,” she said. I nodded glumly. “Want to show you something first, though.” She led me out of that apartment and into the one across the hall. Here, there was not nearly as much stuff floating, even though it had clearly been a standard family apartment based on the larger furniture which remained. But the windows were fully open, with no screens; the smaller floating items had apparently drifted out into the murk beyond. A few vines had penetrated the window and had tried exploring the apartment before they dried up and died. Sarah pointed out the window.