Scavengers

They waded through the baron wasteland. Their torches beamed on the empty stretches of rubble; their suits cladded through the dust.

'See anything?'

'Not yet, we're almost there.'

The Scavengers trudged through the debris. The sound of heavy breathing brushed on the audio receptors. After an hour the landscape opened up; a battered city stood before them. The towers had been ravished from the inside and burnt black on the outside; they stood as hollow shells, dead against the night sky, leaning out of the ground like giant fingers grasping for help.

'We're here.'

'Oxygen levels?'

'Safe, affirmative.'

Claude took off his helmet. The air stung his eyes. Lorene stepped beside him and took a shallow breath.

'Feel that air,' she said. 'Toxic.'

'We need to preserve oxygen levels,' he stated. 'Ok, scavengers - engage.'

The team dispersed behind them, rummaging through the broken bricks and digging into the dirt.

'Do you think we'll really find anything?' she said.

He looked mechanically into the bleak horizon. 'Here? Maybe. But there..'

He pointed to the tallest building into the distance. 'There, maybe.'

Claude and Lorene walked forwards; dwarfed by the central tower. As they approached their target, Claude observed the lifeless bodies scrawled across the ground.

'They look so young here,' said Lorene quietly.

Claude glanced at their hollow faces.

'They look very different, compared to how they are today.'

 Lorene paused. 'Do you think we'll find our own bodies here?'

'If you look hard enough,' he said.

He pushed the door of the main entrance open and a pool of darkness emerged from inside. They lit up their torches and stepped into a cold, musky vacuum. 

'Where do we start?' she coughed.

Their lights fell upon rows of filing cabinets stacked up against the wall. There were hundreds of storage units with thick layers of dust resting on the compartment doors. Claude started to open them up, pulling out various folders and spreading them across the floor. His light bathed each document.

'We're getting close. Old photos of the president's wife.'

Lorene was opening and closing each cabinet with large clangs which shook the room. The clatter of each door rung through Claude's ears as he analysed each document.

'Nothing important here.' she said. 'Pictures of people's dinner, cat photos, memes.'

Claude threw his folder to the floor, snapped his cabinet shut and kicked the documents across the floor.

'This is all parody,' he blasted. 'Another parody folder. Waste document.'

They shuffled silently over to their next compartments and started shifting through further folders. After half an hour, Lorene spoke.

'How long have you been investigating?'

'About 2 years,' he said. 'Although it's very hard to tell.'

'I have completely lost track of my own stay,' agreed Lorene. 'I'm not sure if it has been 1 week or 1 year.'

'It takes a while,' he muttered, 'getting used to it. Once we find this stuff we can be out of here.'

'Do you think there is anything to find?'

'There is always something,' he said coldly.

After a couple of hours, the couple started to walk back towards the other scavengers. The sky had turned to a dark shade of volcanic ash; strings of smoke crawling through the air like snakes. Their suits crunched under the baron gravel.

'I miss home,' said Lorene.

Claude nodded.

'Morale,' she added, 'is very low in camp. Everyone wants to go home.'

After a long, drawn out silence, the pair arrived back at camp. The scavengers had given up and were slumped across the wasteland, breathing hoarsely in the dense smog and gazing nonchantly at the sky. Claude returned to his tent and zipped the thin cloth shut. He took a deep breath and watched the dark silhouettes move tiresomely through the fabric. He tapped some buttons on his suit's armour and a distorted, miniature hologram of a man dressed in military badges appeared on the floor.

'Claude.' said the voice slowly. 'How is the hunt?'

 The image crackled and shuddered in and out of existence; it was no bigger than Claude's foot. Claude craned his neck forwards and spoke in a lifeless tone. 

'Not good, sir. We're struggling to find anything relevant. I think the president is clean.'

'Nonsense,' dismissed the man. The hologram crackled some more and Claude leaned closer to listen. 'You're exploring the wasteland of social media, a recreational archive. Everyone exposed something when they were using it. There will be something.'

'Sir, if I may, how long have we been exploring the wasteland for?'

'Is this for your comrades or for yourself?'

'It is for my own knowledge.'

'Many, many years Claude. The president is having another election soon. He must be stopped. You need to find dirt on the president. There will be something.'

Claude's face was still but a jarring discomfort writhed in his stomach. His eyes flickered with uncertainty and his mouth was dry. He wondered how many years his family had been waiting.

'If we don't find anything?' he asked hesitantly.

'You know the consequences,' replied the man gravely. 'Your team won't leave until you find something.'

An uneasy silence smothered the tent. Claude looked for the right words but there was nothing there. 

'There will be something,' reassured the man. 'You just need to keep looking. Now, Claude, if that is all. I have other matters to deal with. Keep searching.'

The hologram flashed away like a sudden flare of light and Claude was alone. He took a deep breath and left the tent. A black sky had melted across the horizon; blotches of crimson were swelling like clots of blood. He looked at the scavengers; they were sitting in a circle discussing stories from the real world, a longing lust for their old lives wobbled in their misty eyes. He stood and smirked at their attempts to escape their surroundings. He would join them, he thought, for a few stories himself.

As he stepped towards the crowd, a crack of lightning suddenly ripped through the sky. The bolt tore downwards and then crashed into the ground. The sound was like an atomic bomb; it shook the city and reached the inside of Claude's bones. A shockwave rushed through the air and knocked Claude to the floor. When he got up, he could see all of the paper from the scavenger's folders floating in the wind.

'Captain,' shouted one of the scavengers, 'look at this.'

Some of the crew were still on the floor and struggling to get up, but Lorene was holding a folder with both hands; her eyes bulging at the documents in front of her.

'What is it?'

The folder had black smoke pouring out of it like a chimney. He took the document, shook the heat away and then saw the commotion - the writing inscribed on the paper was moving and changing.

'What is this?' he gasped.

The words changed to his dialogue. When he said nothing, his thoughts started forming in print.

'It must be a glitch,' stuttered Lorene. 'The data is changing with our thoughts.'

Claude paused for a moment and then spoke quietly with a dry seriousness.

'How is this happening?'

'The system. It's monitoring our thoughts, it's conflicting it with the data.' She stopped to think. 'I can't believe it. The data is supposed to be locked. It can't be changed, and yet we can change it.'

'The president has been having an affair.' said Claude.

Lorene's eyes bulged. 'Captain..' she muttered in disbelief.

The words appeared on the document, and then as the smoke started to vanish, the words set like hardened wax. They both looked at the document and then at each other.

'We have our way out of here,' she uttered quietly.

'We have a moral problem. This is fake.' he breathed. He shook the paper and the words remained.

The other scavengers were getting up and dusting themselves down. He looked at their faces covered in soot, their armour suits battered by the explosion.

'What will you do?'

Claude folded the document neatly into a small square and tucked it into his suit pocket. He turned away from her and walked towards the large tower in the distance.

'Captain,' shouted Lorene after he had made some distance.

He turned to her.

'Please, think about it. We'll never find anything on the president. We have to leave here one day.'

He walked towards the building and then sat amongst the cold cabinets to think. It would take months to rummage through the data and it was unlikely they would ever find anything of value. He slid his hand through his own hair and felt grey strands collect in his palm. The wasteland was destroying him; he needed to get out. The scavengers would soon perish in the same way. If the endurance didn't wear them down; another blast of lightning from the sky might.

Claude lunged his arm out and pressed a button on it with his other hand. A flashing black hole appeared before him; swirling as a vortex. He looked into it. It was the place you sent documents back into the real world - a kind of file transfer. He fetched the folded document from his pocket and stood thinking. Once he sent the document to the real-life journalists there would be no way of bringing it back. He threw it inside. He would be destroying the president's life but he would be saving his own.

The vortex closed and a still air returned inside the tower. He waited for a response from his leader but the silence remained. For a while, Claude stood alone with his thoughts; milling over the act of betrayal, worried about the consequences of his deceit if he were found out.

Claude walked away from the tower. He returned to the campsite where most of the scavengers had retreated to their tents. Lorene was alone on the floor, rummaging through the papers that had scattered across the rubble.

'I hope you didn't send it,' she said.

'What?'

Lorene looked at him with a mournful look spread across her face.

'It was my interpretation that you wanted the freedom.'

'I did,' she said, 'but look.'

She held another document up to him and he saw that the words were still changing. They were forming into random words and sentences; some of which made no sense.

'I'm not commanding these words,' she declared. 'They are changing of their own accord. And look..'

Lorene pulled together some more papers. Her hand trembled as she held them.

'Lorene is having an affair.'

'What is this?'

'The data is mixing itself with other people's data,' she explained. She gestured to the bodies and towers of documents that sprawled across the wasteland. 'It is putting names next to data that doesn't belong to each other. That document you had. It may have changed. Maybe it removed the president's name. I don't know what you would have sent if you threw it to reality.'

Claude turned away and walked back to the distance. He stared at the bleak sky and then commanded the hologram of a senior official to appear before him. The same distorted image of his leader from the tent reappeared

'What have you received?' he said darkly.

The man looked up at him with a stern face. Claude sat down on the dirt and looked at the hologram dryly.

'You sent it directly to the media, Claude.' said the man. 'I can't stop it now.'

'It was a mistake. It's not what it appears to be.' Claude knew that he had caused damage to his own reputation.

'Why did you send it?'

'The data is incorrect,' said Claude desperately. 'It had details of an affair the president had.'

The hologram looked at him coldly.

'Well now the data claims you had an affair.'

Claude took a sharp breath.

'You've not just damaged your reputation, Claude. You've damaged us.'

'It's a mistake,' said Claude frantically.

'The data cannot be manipulated. The press will see it as fact. I don't understand why you sent it.'

'It can be manipulated, it's a big mistake.'

'I will need to discuss this with my superiors,' responded the man. 'For the moment Claude, you will need to stay stationed. Your crew will continue to look for problems on the president as usual. If this was your attempt to get out, you've only prolonged your stay.'

The hologram vanished and Claude was left with the howling of wind; the bleak sky which hung above him. He shuddered as he felt the prospect of imprisonment in the wasteland. He looked around at the corpses sprawled across the ground. Perhaps he would soon be another corpse for the collection. Perhaps there was no escape.