Chapter 142 – Decay
I took the stairs down, arriving at the first level basement of the city hall. It seemed to act as a storage floor, with several rooms being marked as such. Yet, this wasn’t my destination. The signs for the gate indicated to continue down, which is what I did.
I ended up going much further than I expected. It was only on the fifth basement level that there weren’t any stairs going down anymore and that the signs directed me toward a room to the front. The mood was very different from upstairs, a lot graver with some tension in the air. As I moved forward, I came across a couple of guards guarding a large door, both being rank 3.
“Travelling through the gates?”
“Yes.”
“Show us your ticket.”
They quickly inspected it and let me go through the door. Inside was my destination, a very large space containing three gates at the end. Each gate was a large metallic rectangle the size of several humans filled with a grey surface of sel, corresponding to the spell itself. I was surprised to see one of the three gates being inactive, especially considering there wasn’t supposed to be any spatial mage in the domes anymore.
Apart from that, the area was filled with many guards, all being rank 4 this time. These women were the highest-ranked people I had come across in the inner world and I didn’t doubt they were 82’s elites. The room being so secure told me how critical this location was for the city, and probably for humanity in general.
As soon as I was in, I was immediately stopped by the closest guards. They all wore serious expressions and it was clear the mood here wasn’t suited for joking around.
“Your ticket.”
I gave it again, and this time the inspection was a lot more throughout. They passed a selnic tool over the piece of paper, which I guessed must have been the counterpart to the stamping tool from before. After a second, a light lit up in green and the guard who had the ticket in hand read its contents.
“Destination dome 6… There’s no direct way to it.”
She took a small notebook from her waist and checked it.
“You’ll need to go through dome 8, dome 23, dome 2, dome 60, and finally get to dome 6 from there.”
She wrote all of that on my ticket and showed it to the colleague next to her, who took out another stamping tool to officially approve it. She then gave me the ticket back.
“Do you know the procedure?”
“I don’t.”
“Fine, I’ll explain. This is your official route to your destination. You’re not allowed to go through any gate other than those. You’re not allowed to stay in any of the intermediary domes on your trip. And you’re not allowed to go out once you start your trip. You’ll need to show this at every step for security reasons.”
She turned around and looked at the gate, and then at her watch.
“The gate to dome 8 is only allowing incoming travelers for the next twenty minutes. You can go after that.”
“Is it switching every thirty minutes?”
“That’s right.”
This was a common issue when using gates. In essence, gates were not different from devices that allowed anything to teleport to a specific destination, which meant it had some of the same drawbacks as normal teleportation. Teleportation sickness was normally avoided because a gate was a lot stabler than a single spatial mage using the teleportation spell. However, there was still the issue of space, or more precisely, avoiding people from teleporting into each other and dying, something that a gate didn’t manage, unlike the teleportation spell.
As such, it was normal to set a schedule where people could only travel one way at a time, and only one at a time. This allowed the destination to stay clear of people and avoid tragic incidents. In my world, gate routes that had a lot of traffic usually were duplicated, allowing each gate to handle one direction. There were even some cases where four or eight gates handled a single destination for extremely popular and busy connections.
Just like the woman said, a few people came out from the gate from time to time. Sometimes, a group came out together with some cargo, which they soon transported upstairs, and this explained why basement floors one to four were full of storage rooms. Most of them wore nice clothing and looked like important folks, proving that the price wasn’t something normal people could easily afford.
I decided to expand my knowledge while we were waiting.
“May I ask why the third gate is inactive?”
The guard looked a bit annoyed by my question but still answered me. Her colleague watched the closed gate with sadness as she spoke.
“It isn’t inactive. It’s broken. Forever. No one can restart it.”
This was pretty much what I was expecting. One needed a spatial mage for anything related to gates. Since this world didn’t have any such affinity anymore, no one could fix it.
This was a very critical piece of information. It meant that, if the situation went on like this, it was only a matter of time before domes became isolated one by one. No matter how well-maintained a gate was, it was bound to malfunction or stop altogether after some time. It was already a wonder they managed to get those to last for more than eight hundred years.
It was easy to imagine what would happen if the gates stopped functioning. Humanity would be divided into small groups, and the resources that they shared today would stop being traded. It was even worse considering some domes had specialized their industries over time. There was no way to guess how long each dome would last by itself but, eventually, it was even possible they would have no choice but to take the ultimate decision of lowering their protective domes and accepting to merge with the outside world again.
It was all in the future but that future was no different from a certainty. There was only one variable in this equation. Me.
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