Layla’s burner bike was more of a coaster bike this evening, its runner add-ons gliding over a snowpack just a few shades lighter than the stray platinum-blonde hairs tucked under her hat. This far out, the roads were fully covered in the stuff and with the snow still coming down, the plows weren’t likely to come for hours. The blizzard gave Layla the peace and quiet she needed to pause, reflect, and make a little money in the process.
She passed some old wooden statues on her right: two sets for two different groups of heroes. The first worked tirelessly, succeeding at first, second, and third, only to fail at the last again and again, yet they still dragged themselves up until they had no more to give. The second group had less initial success than the first, but still somehow reached the summit on one glorious February evening decades before Layla was born. She gave the statues a quick salute then slowed the bike down; her target was coming up on the left. It was fitting that she was making her visit during a blizzard, after all, her target was at the center of the Second Blizzard of ‘77.
Scarcely 20 seconds after passing the statues, Layla reached her target. Even in its shattered state, the stadium was unmistakable: a monolithic, curving bowl of metal, concrete, and glass that once held almost a million spectators a year between all of its events, plus several times that many tailgaters.
What remained of it was treated like a saint’s remains: snow was cleared off the parts of the roof that weren’t caved in decades ago, and the memorials ringing its exterior had fresh flowers delivered every week. Even the field was maintained; at least it was when Layla attended the 44th memorial a few months ago. But much like a saint’s remains, all of these measures only made it more clear that the stadium was dead.
The fence surrounding the stadium was in a much better state than the partially mummified corpse it protected, its chains and spike-wire tops built to keep out death-tourists, copper thieves, and opportunists of all stripes. Layla couldn’t help but chuckle to herself about spending so much time and money protecting something in the stadium’s state of existence.
Layla parked her bike across from the stadium, leaving it a dozen or so yards off the road behind a small grove of pine trees. It wasn’t much camouflage, but was more than enough for a miserable night where nobody could take their eyes off the road even if they wanted to.
She opened up the bike’s rear storage compartment and pulled out her snowshoes, sliding her black-booted feet into the loops; the snowshoes’ straps auto-tightened around Layla’s boots once they sensed the pressure. She then dug a little deeper into the storage compartment and pulled out her great-great-grandmother’s light green backpack. It was a Kane family heirloom whose color had somehow just barely faded after a century. Slinging it over her shoulders, Layla crossed the still-deserted street, walking parallel the south side of the fence to get out of view.
Once she found a secluded enough spot, Layla opened up her pack’s front zipper pocket, pulling out a jumble of wires tipped with ovoid-shaped LED’s attached to a bookmark-sized circuit board. She flipped the switch on the board’s lower left corner, making a third of the LED’s flicker through the visible light spectrum before stopping on purple; the cameras drooped in unison once the jammer found their frequency. Layla repeated the process to turn off the alarms and motion sensors, making the other 2/3 of the LED’s light up yellow and indigo as the remaining security systems froze. Security would probably just blame the problems on the blizzard anyway.
With all systems down, the real fun began. Layla knelt down next to the fence and rolled down her fingerless, tempered leather gloves so her left index finger was fully exposed. She ran her thumb over the phoenix tattoo on the side of that finger, feeling it start to burn. Once it was warmed up, she struck her right index and middle fingers across it, lighting them like a match. Her fingertips glowed first red, then blue as she cut a hole in fence; its steel links didn’t offer any meaningful resistance.
Once Layla had opened a hole large enough to climb through, she let go, grimacing before dipping her scalding hand in the snow, melting a few inches and accidentally cooking the mushroom patch beneath it. Judging by the smell, Layla guessed they weren’t the edible type. “Fuck, I need to recalibrate the temperature when I got home.” She muttered under her breath, waiting for her hands to fully cool down before climbing through the newly formed gap onto stadium grounds.
The parking lot hadn’t changed much in the near-century since it was re-built; it was still bleak and overgrown with weeds that softly crunched under the weight of the snowshoes. Layla reveled in her solitude as she walked; just a few decades ago, this place was basically the center of the world, sparking half a dozen rebellions across the continent. Now that it was a backwater again, it was all hers. Well, at least until the morning.
Once Layla reached the twisted remnants of a ticketing gate, she swung her pack over her left shoulder and opened up its zipper pocket again, digging a little deeper this time to pull out a small tablet with a silvery rectangle attached to the top. “All right Ariadne, let’s get to work.” She muttered, letting tablet’s sonar tech in map out the stadium, its schematics gradually appearing on the tablet as the scan continued.
While Ariadne was scanning, Layla took off her snowshoes, walked over the broken beams and into the stadium itself, just like countless fans and socialites before her. Several of the ramps to the seating sections were collapsed, blocked off by walls metal and hunks of concrete with broken glass serving as de facto barbed wire, but a few still stood. Layla made her way down one that was littered with dust and hunks of metal that looked more like grenade shrapnel than structural steel. That is, except for one piece of debris that was really the fragments of two beams fused together. It looked suspiciously like a cross, forged by the heat of the fiery revenge dropped on the stadium forty-four-and-a-third years ago. Layla slid Ariadne into her coat pocket and opened up her pack’s main pocket, pulling out another, even older Kane family heirloom: a film camera.
Layla took a picture of the piece and slid it into her pack. She’d probably find some gullible believer to sell it to when she got back. Yet, on the other hand, that cross could have been someone making a point about the dead saint’s . . . no, dead stadium’s soul. Whatever small conflict Layla was feeling, she’d figure it out later. Every second she stayed was another second she could get arrested for trespassing, and now, theft. She trudged on into the stands, then down the stairs onto the field.
Layla climbed over the barrier separating the snow-covered stands from the dry field. Its below-surface heating and drainage kept the snow from staying on, and . The team logo in the center had been replaced by the seal of the Rust Belt Republic; a wounded stag on a field of rusty red-brown centered on a flag of horizontal scarlet, white, and azure stripes. Layla would have normally found such a display tacky, but in many ways, the RBR was really born that day, plus its colors more or less matched the team’s old colors, so she let it slide.
Layla took a picture of the flag, and a couple more of the stadium from various angles from the middle of the field, as well as a pair of shots from the corners, the wintergreen turf contrasting with the exposed pale steel and concrete, as well as the royal blue and charred black of the stadium’s remaining seats. Six shots of her allotted ten were taken—film was far too precious of a commodity to waste—but she was saving the best few for last.
Ariadne dinged in Layla’s pocket; her work was done. The players’ tunnel was totally collapsed from the bomb’s shockwave, but Ariadne had found another potential way inside. Apparently some of the pre-game pomp included props that would ‘magically’ appear on the field. These props ran on rails in access tunnels that were under the stands. The props were large enough that the tunnels were possible, if not necessarily comfortable, for a person to pass through. Most importantly, they were apparently still intact, as they’d been built to hold up under the entire stadium’s weight.
Layla made her way to the foam padding that surrounded the field. While the foam was intended to protect players who ran out of bounds, it ended up just something loud for the fans to bang on in key situations. Then again, given the kind of crowd typically in the first row, it was really just for social climbers to bang on once they got drunk enough, game situation be damned.
Layla pulled down on the panel and sure enough, it opened up to a tunnel. “What else have I got left to lose?” She said to no one in particular before turning on Ariadne’s front-facing light and climbing in. She was able to walk through the tunnel in a crouch, though her pack scraped against the ceiling.
Once Layla got completely around the bend, the tunnel opened up to the prop room, which while still intact, was barely so. Much of the ceiling had collapsed and the resulting leaks had created puddles that were more like bogs. The old props—oversized plastic bison painted a very loud shade of blue—served as rocky outcrops in the bog, the top of their backs jutting out of the murky gray water at mostly uniform distances. They were both too large and too damaged for Layla to take back and sell.
Layla emerged from the tunnel onto a miniature elevator platform for the props, though the water was now only a foot from the top. She hopscotched on the bison’s backs to the door, which according to Ariadne led to a long, curving hallway. The bog hadn’t quite reached all the way up to the staircase in front of the door, so Layla at least had a less precarious walk to the door, which while dented, was still intact.
Layla threw her shoulder into the door. It vibrated in place after two shoves before the hinges nearly exploded outward on the third, making Layla stumble forward into the hallway, landing on her hands and knees. The ceiling over the hallway was in much better shape than the room before, though there was still plenty of exposed steel and shattered concrete, plus dozens of intermittent leaks. Unlike in the prior room, the stadium’s internal drainage system prevented any deep bodies of standing water from forming.
According to Ariadne, most of the doors on either side of the hallway had been caved in, odd given the relative lack of structural damage. Still, Layla had neither the time nor the tech to get through the rubble; her alt-ed fingers could only cut for so long before scorching her hand off.
Layla would soon find the cause. Near the sixth demolished doorframe was another pile of broken metal, but this wasn’t from the stadium. They were mechs, and their white chassis with aquamarine piping were made of stuff almost as stern as the stadium. Still, these ones had been ripped apart by a mix of bullets shattering their spindly limbs and bulbous heads, as well as a fair few knife cuts, something Layla hadn’t expected.
The insignias on the mechs’ shoulders were not standard issue. Instead, they showed five aquamarine towers, commemorating the five skyscrapers in the Capital District that the Upstate Separatists had destroyed on the night of July 4, 2077. Layla remembered the dread in her grandparents’ voices when they told her about that night, and that two members of the governor’s cabinet were among the several dozen killed.
They talked about how the official story surrounding the stadium bombing was that the powers-that-be (both human and artificial) had assumed a Saturday attack would not lead to the loss of any life, as the team only played on Sundays. Conveniently, they launched the attack on the day of the final preseason intrasquad scrimmage, which was always in front of a full stadium on the Saturday before the season started. Not only that, but it was right at the end of the first quarter, not in the hours before the stadium opened or at night after everyone would have been long gone.
Much like how nobody East of the Hudson bought the Separatists’ claim that they meant to destroy the towers when they were totally deserted, nobody on the West side of the Hudson had bought the State’s claim about the attack. Within 72 hours, things had snowballed—hence the event’s blizzard nickname—with hundreds of officials defecting and dozens more who refused to do so being imprisoned. From Buffalo to Rochester to Syracuse to Watertown, state flags were burnt and replaced with local ones, as well as the original Niagara Territory flag. Those few days saw so many defections that the Triumvirate decided to only use mechanical forces until the formation of Acela years later, lest any more humans defect and give their equipment and expertise to the Separatists.
Her grandparents had also told Layla about rumors surrounding the “rescue” operation at the stadium being just another revenge op, rumors that were apparently true. Layla only hoped these mechs had failed in the same way their government eventually did.
To check, Layla used Ariadne to scope out the inside of the sabotaged rooms. As it turned out, the people who were barricaded inside were able either use pre-existing emergency exits, or make their own, as there were no human remains found. Happy at the thought of another Acela failure, Layla quickly snapped pictures of the mechs, including one where she flipped them off. These pictures would be freebies. Layla also finished the work started by some brave, possibly suicidal knife fighter (had he alt-ed himself like she had?) all those years ago and used her alt-ed fingers to finish decapitating a mech, cursing again as she wrung out her scorching fingers. Once her hand no longer felt like Hades, she slid the hunk of metal in her pack. It just barely fit, with wires jutting from the bottom of its head looking like blood vessels after a botched guillotining.
Finally, Layla came to the only non-destroyed doorway in the hall: a meeting room. The room itself was still in a rough state, with pieces ceiling tiles and concrete littering the floor, as well as what remained of the tables and chairs. Walking through the rubble and reaching the podium, Layla found an old, black binder, maybe a couple inches thick. Its cover was worn and charred, but the pages were laminated and the seals looked strong; Layla only hoped the pages inside had survived. She thumbed to a random spot near the middle and opened it up.
“What the fuck is 11 Gun Empty, Proton Bunch, Lofton Dagger, Thurman Chip Wide-Option, Jackson Drag—2 Fly Alert, Reed Smash?” She laughed, shaking her head and taking a couple pictures of the artifact before slipping it into her near-overflowing pack. Apparently she’d need to sell the thing to a translator.
Using Ariadne to retrace her steps, Layla made her way over the sunken props, off the field, and back to the parking lot. It only took a few seconds to weld the fence back together, plus a couple more to quench her hands in the snow. Once Layla had gotten back to her bike, she turned off the signal jammers and drove off into the still-snowy night. Her tracks were covered by the time the sun came up.