Boom Town Boom

Maxx moves along with the crowd, a rarity for an anarchist punk like him, but necessary in the strictly monitored East Rise. He's on a recon mission, sussing out an opportunity to stick it to [Teklo Industries][~TekloIndustries].

This particular throng of Metrix citizenry is made up of success stories. There are office and lab workers, dressed neatly for conformity. There are executive types in power casual wear, and elegantly dressed elitists from the intelligentsia. They're all here for the distracting delights of Metrix's dazzling entertainment quarter.

He can smell the atmosphere of privilege by its air quality, fresh and crisp in his nostrils, clean like a line of uncut trixie dust. He inhales deep and wonders if enjoying it should feel like a betrayal of Coppertown and its homely smells of oil, tightly packed human bodies, and desperation. But Maxx figures air like this shouldn't be reserved for "paying customers only".

Maxx follows the current of corporate lackeys, letting it take him to the big event. A decent-sized crowd has already gathered for the opening of the East Rise Power Station, with enforcers standing at each entry, scanning for troublemakers.

His hands itch at the sight of them, always eager for a fight, but he left his shock-wrench at home — a little too showy for a stroll out in public. Maxx pulls his cap down low, careful not to dislodge the hologuise projector attached to the brim, sighing in relief when he passes the security checkpoint without incident. His face scans as Dudley Broon, low-level Teklo stooge.

Maxx pushes through the crowd until he can see the small stage set up for the night, with shimmering rainbow-slick balloons on either side and a glowing banner hung across the front building that reads, 'The Future of Energy is Here!'

Just in time.

Synthea Teklo steps up onto the stage to polite applause, followed by Thiroux and... Dash. Maxx sneers at the sight of her: Princess Teklo, turncoat extraordinaire, the perpetrator of his latest stint in lock-up.

Synthea taps the microphone and it squeals sharply; people wince throughout the crowd. "Welcome to the grand opening of the new Teklo Industries East Rise Power Station," she says, speaking slowly, like every word is a quotable sound bite. "With this new addition to the power grid, we will prove once and for all that Teklatic-dynamism is the energy source of the future. Clean, safe power for everyone!"

"Everyone who can afford the tallics," Maxx hisses under his breath. The rest of the crowd isn't so realistic. They cheer and clap while Synthea gurns for the hovering Mendacity camera drones.

Maxx looks to where Dash is standing behind her mother. He can tell by the droop of her shoulders that she's not sharing in this moment of triumph; she looks bored but mostly embarrassed to be up there, visibly cringing as Synthea cuts a wide ribbon with an oversized pair of scissors.

"Suck it up, Princess," mutters Maxx under his breath.

Lights all across East Rise flare and flash in hypnotically beautiful patterns, drawing a low hum from the power plant. And there's another sound Maxx can barely make out. He tunes his earpiece to isolate the noise. Interesting. The soft hiss of releasing steam.

Synthea turns back to the crowd: "That's Teklatic-dynamism in action! Thank you for your support as we shape the future together, through constant innovation. Now, for those with invitations, we look forward to seeing you at Vossen Theater for our celebratory ball this evening."

Maxx turns and pushes back through the crowd, a sea of faces lit by joy as much as by the light show.

"A celebratory ball for a power plant?" Maxx murmurs under his breath. A wicked smile creeps across his face. "It'd be a shame not to frock it up."

Maxx swaggers into a defunct pipe factory abandoned due to foundational slippage into Pit 2. Good as a squat for another couple of days, this derelict part of Coppertown not being high on the enforcers' patrol routes. He turns up the volume on a battered bronze radio, tuned to The Foundry, subterranean pit work bass lines punching satisfyingly in the guts.

"Find anything?" Rez asks, one hand tinkering inside a hollowed-out enforcer robot head.

"What?" Maxx shouts over the music.

"FIND ANYTHING?!"

"MAYBE!"

"WHAT?"

"GIVE ME A BLOODY MINUTE TO THINK, WOULD YOU?" Maxx turns the music up louder to drown out any more chatter. He needs to concentrate.

He pats the top of his terminal as he sits down, the machine humming warmly as it boots, the screen a bright flare of technic in a sea of clutter and detritus. Maxx's hands are battered and scarred, but his fingers still move over the keyboard with the grace of a seasoned hacker. He navigates to a weak spot he's found in the Registry, obsolete threads of code left dangling. He runs a penetration script and slips into their secure database.

"So much dirty, dirty data," Maxx whispers to himself, scanning through the flood of information.

He fires up a MHz script that cycles through keywords at a mind-blistering pace until he lands on the construction plans for the power plant. Maxx doubts the Registry would hold the building plans for official purposes. More likely they snatched them between Teklo nodes on the sly. Standard practice for Metrix's ever-vigilant watch dog. Not that Maxx minds at this moment. The Registry's his one-stop shop for all the info he shouldn't have, and he's got a five-finger discount.

He clicks the button to start the download, and a superstitious part in the back of his head expects enforcers to bust in the door. Nothing happens, except for pistol shots from the next room where Juice and Feral are shooting cans off each other's heads.

The complete plans drop into his terminal and Maxx opens them up, leaning close to the screen with anticipation.

Thought so. For all Synthea's talk of Teklatic-dynamism, East Rise is a hybrid power plant. Teklatics provide the output, a lot of output, while old-fashioned Cogwerx tech powers the cooling systems and regulates power flow. That's where the hissing of steam was coming from.

Maxx laughs, grabs his shock-wrench off its wall rack and slings it over his shoulder.

"REZ!"

"Yeah?" she says, voice muffled, wearing the enforcer head like a helmet, its robotic eyes staring blankly at Maxx.

"PREP THE WHEELS! WE'RE GOING OUT!"

Maxx grins wildly, white-knuckling the steering wheel of the Roadmuncher, their souped-up street car. Rez sits with him inside while Juice and Feral stand on the runners, clutching the handholds welded onto the auto's armored panels. He watches them in the side mirror, leaning out wide when he takes a corner fast, cheering and cursing, the car leaving a wake of crackling blue energy.

"Cranks for pranks?" Rez wonders, her voice clear and robotic, coming through the helmet's voice emulator. "We might need more than cranks for this one."

"Trust me, it's as easy as hit and run, Rez. You'll see." Right now, the whole of Metrix belongs to Maxx. And he's about to do some renovations.

They cross the district boundary into East Rise and Maxx floors it to blast through an enforcer check point. Sirens wail, but the Roadmuncher chews through the glistening blocks of clubs and casinos, putting a comfortable distance between punks and pursuit.

In the rear vision mirrors, Maxx sees Feral and Juice peer cautiously up at the night sky as though enforcer drones will swoop down on them at any second. They're not wrong to be cautious, but Maxx needs his gang feisty.

He howls and punches the roof, then turns up the radio, always tuned to The Foundry, whatever pirate frequency it's on. The Roadmuncher's jury-rigged subwoofer rattles with every heavy bass thump, the electronic noise and sickly sweet vocals infusing the car with undeniable energy. Feral and Juice head-bang to the pounding beat, and even Rez starts bopping with all the grace of the enforcer bot whose head she's wearing.

Maxx drifts into the last corner, tires squealing, laying down burning rubber as he brings their mobile mosh pit to a stop outside the back of the power plant.

He busts open the door and steps out, pulling the shock-wrench out from behind him, the tool always at the ready for a bit of street 'art'.

"Rez!" he shouts. "Release the drones!"

Rez opens the trunk. Out fly a trio of hacked enforcer drones, their chrome casings splashed with punk fluoro. They establish a surveillance perimeter and Maxx receives a readout on his wrist-comm.

"We've got forty-three seconds!"

From the trunk, Rez tosses the tightly packed explosives to Feral and Juice. Maxx rests his wrench on his shoulder and surveys the scene. It's just like the plans said. All that teklatic power generation happening inside wouldn't mean squat without the three carefully disguised Cogwerx pipes running steam into the building. They're high over the street, pretending to be a maintenance walkway, running above the power plant's chain-link fence on one side of the road, and disappearing into a field of towering air filters on the other. It's a terrible design, but makes perfect corpo sense. If Teklo let Cogwerx inside the building to install their steamtech locally, they'd be at risk of a little corporate espionage. The corps care more about secrets than anything else. It's a weakness, one Maxx is going to exploit.

"Chuck us a bomb, Rez," Maxx says, striding over to stand beneath the concealed steam pipes. She throws it to him, the grenade spinning in the air until he catches it.

"Watch me," he says, "just like this." Maxx tosses the bomb straight up and it hits the pipe, magnet sticking it to the surface.

Feral and Juice stack the explosives on the ground and start throwing them up at the pipes. Each hits with a clang, wobbles, but stays.

Rez gets her first bomb and triggers the magnetic lock, swearing and flailing when it jumps out of her hands and clamps onto her robohelmet.

"Hold still," Maxx says, disabling the lock so the bomb drops free. Thirty seconds later, all seven bombs are stuck to the underside of the fake walkway. Maxx's wrist-comm shrieks at him with alarm. "Time to bail!" he shouts. "Rez, you're driving!"

The punks clamber into the Roadmuncher. Maxx hops onto the runner, takes the detonator from his pocket and clicks the button.

Nothing.

The enforcers are closer now, coming around the corner, screeching on smoking tires. Behind the human outriders, Maxx can hear the metal clank of robotic feet against the sidewalk. A whole troop of them!

Maxx hits the button again. Still nothing.

He unscrews the bottom and sees the problem. No batteries. "Juice!" he growls through the winder. "You had one job!"

The guilty punk looks like he wants the Pits to swallow him up.

The enforcer bikers are bearing down on them, fast. The robot troops are forming a cordon around the power station, their artificial eyes fixed on Maxx and his crew.

"Only one thing for it," Maxx says. He throws the detonator up into the air, hits the pulse on his shock-wrench and swings it hard.

He hits the detonator, overcharging it for a split second before it shatters, triggering the explosives in a shuddering boom that destroys the steam pipes and blows the cordon of robot enforcers into parts. Maxx holds on tight as a concussive wave washes over him, grinning wildly at the enforcer bikers who are knocked off their rides.

As the explosive echoes fade, the low industrial hum of the power plant starts to climb higher and louder.

"Floor it, Rez! orders Maxx.

The Roadmuncher lurches forward with a roar. Maxx hangs on tight as he watches the power plant behind them. There's a flash of bright blue through its windows, then a crackling dome of raw energy bursts out of the building's roof. It swells, pregnant with unchecked teklatic potential, then erupts in a shimmering light show far more impressive than Synthea Teklo's sparkly display.

All along the street, the neons flicker out. The blackout rapidly expands until it eclipses all of East Rise. Then the fires start, dotted across the dulled cityscape, just about every power transformer in the area, overloaded to melt down.

Maxx whoops with triumph as the runner's headlights illuminate the path back to Coppertown.

Guests murmur sourly amongst themselves as they are escorted from the darkened foyer of Vossen Theater by flashlight-wielding wait staff. Synthea looks like she too is on the verge of a meltdown as her security staff ushers her out a side door.

Dash can feel the dismay, or is it rage, coming off her mother in waves, glad that for once, she's not to blame. She even put on a gown for the grand opening ball.

A champagne fountain stands nearby, untouched and devoid of effervescence. And in the kitchen, abandoned appetizers spoil in the rising temperature.

A secretary pushes his way into the foyer and approaches Thiroux, hugging a small radio to his chest, his pale face twitching with anxiety.

"Professor," he says, "have you seen Madam Synthea?"

Thiroux breathes in deep, about to explode. Behind her, Dash cuts the air with her hand, giving the secretary a decisive 'no-no' gesture.

The secretary nods apologetically. "Professor, you need to hear this." He places the radio on the table and turns it on. The Foundry comes through loud and clear.

"You already know the fancy new power plant has been punk'd by some unofficial pyrotechnics," λud@c!ty announces with a hint of amusement in their disguised vocals. "But what you didn't know is that their touted 'future of energy' is inherently unstable. Teklo's wonder-power is not only useless without steamtech, it's dangerous! Spare a thought for our brave Coppertown fire crews. They'll be busy tonight!"

"Of course, you don't need to believe me," assures λud@c!ty. "See for yourself. We're spreading the plans on our data frequency right now, so tune in your terminals and start downloading. Foundry out. Stay loud, crew. Stay free!" λud@c!ty laughs, their enthusiasm fading out as a junglesprawl classic starts to play: Boom Town Boom.

"Turn that racket off." Thiroux's voice is quiet, yet sharp and hard as a knife. The secretary reaches forward and fumbles at the radio, turning the volume way up before finding the off switch. "Leave us," Thiroux barks. Now red-faced, the secretary backs away in quick small steps.

Dash tries to bite her tongue, but her tongue wrestles free. "I told you it wasn't ready."

Thiroux's head snaps to face her daughter. "It must be great being right all the time."

Dash doesn't know how to respond to that. She's never seen her mother so... upset.

"Looks like I'll have to prepare something for the board tomorrow morning; keep Synthea calm when our stock prices tumble." With that, she turns and leaves.

Dash waves goodbye to her mother's back, but her mind is already elsewhere. Could Data Doll solve the teklatic instability conundrum? Would she want to? She turns the radio back on and lets the music wash over her.

Maxx strolls into the old pipe factory and sparks up the sound system. The massive hollow space rattles, choked with music booming from pilfered and repurposed speakers, ragged wires running this way and that. He grins and drops into his seat, pleased when a drink is shoved into his hands. He takes a long sip.

"That was wild mad," Rez says in her robot voice. She sits beside him and takes off her helmet, bright purple hair stuck fast to her head with sweat. "Bet you wish you could've seen the look on Dash's face."

Maxx laughs, but he'd forgotten about Dash in the rush and chaos. "You know what, Rez? Princess Teklo is just another cog in the engine. Tonight, we set the whole machine on fire."