But whatever the case, recovering the black boxes came first.

“... Roger, B100 is yours. Stay safe.” After tossing out the line, Darkest cut the channel and turned to his teammates.

“Ten Punch Man is done, we better pick up the pace too!”

The squad quickly replied. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

“Roger!”

...

Over a hundred small players of the Storm Corps were still grunting and digging through the ruins of Shelter 100 beneath the 4th New District.

Meanwhile, far away at Camp 101, Chu Guang was watching his screen, already receiving the logs his players had recovered from the administrator’s office, courtesy of Little Seven.

Unlike the logs from other shelters, which often read like personal, emotional last words, Shelter 100’s log was more like a dull instruction manual packed in with a TV set, something nobody ever bothered to read.

The log opened plainly, outlining Shelter 100’s functions, the authority of Tree, the resources and obligations of the shelter, and the rules the residents were to follow.

Skimming the tedious contents, Chu Guang distilled some key points, enough to grasp Shelter 100’s rules.

Simply put, if the Shelter were a prison, then Tree was the warden, and the Treemen were the guards.

The Tree managed, and the Treemen enforced the rules.

The number of Treemen depended on the resident count. Aside from the initial 300, another was added for every 100 new residents.

Shelter 100’s mission was clear, to execute a Wasteland Rebuilding Plan after 63 years of isolation.

Though taking in survivors of nuclear strikes was part of the plan, the shelter had no duty to save anyone.

Thus, its starting point was the exact opposite of overburdened Shelter 117.

The Tree unhesitatingly executed the Shelter Protocol, accepting 30,300 residents, and then ordered its supervisors to exile all unnumbered survivors.

Records showed anesthetic rifles withdrawn from the armory on Sealing Day, evidence the exiles hadn’t been peaceful.

Not that peace had existed then anyway.

Inside, the 30,000 residents endured three anxious days. On the fourth, they were told the world was destroyed, the Federation and all old orders gone, and the surface would be uninhabitable for 63 years.

Chu Guang frowned at the discovery.

From Yore’s memories and other logs, he knew the war had lasted three years, not three days.

Until the war ended and the Post-War Reconstruction Committee formed, the world wasn’t truly a wasteland. Organizations of the old Federation were still struggling on.

But soon the log explained. It had been a decision by Tree.

Beside this section, a supervisor named Craig had left three notes.

[This was the wisest choice. In just three sentences, the great Tree calmed the restless masses. Under its will, we showed them proof of the end, the hellscape of Clearspring after the strike. Confronted with the truth, they gave up their fantasies and accepted hard biscuits, canned goods, and freeze-dried vegetables, and a life without android servants.]

[What puzzles me is what was so inedible about biscuits and freeze-dried veg. What did they used to eat? Pity Tree erased all images of the old world. I only heard scraps from my grandfather about the Prosperity Era. He and I both believed that age would never return.]

[To walk this thorny road, faith is all we have.]

“Craig.” Chu Guang murmured the name, then said, “Little Seven, pull this man’s file.”

“Got it!” Perched on his shoulder, Little Seven cheerily responded and soon projected the file.

Chu Guang’s eyes went straight to the employment date. According to records, Craig became a supervisor in the 53rd year of the Wasteland Era, at age 24.

That year was just after West Continent Lake flooded the tunnels, when the climate was showing signs of recovery, and only seven years remained until the shelter was due to open.

Life was improving.

New supervisors meant a growing population, suggesting conditions weren’t too bad.

Curious about this shelter’s past, Chu Guang shifted from Tree’s dry report to Craig’s annotations, having Little Seven line them up on a timeline against the logs.

He soon found Craig’s notes offered a wholly different perspective.

[... Feeding 30,000 people is an astronomical price. Prosperity Era people’s needs were unimaginable. Tree could watch their health but couldn’t assign each a personal aide. We had to lower their expectations and make them adapt.]

[So my grandfather, under Tree’s orders, reminded the lucky ones with the fate of the exiled. Shelter 100 had no duty to anyone. It belonged to all who suffered, but not to any single person. If they didn’t want to end up like wretches huddling in metro trash heaps, they had to obey Tree, and us. Absolute obedience.]

[In the first 50 years, we thrived. Tree’s wisdom and our devotion passed the test of time. Our Crunchies recycled nearly everything. Our Wolf-Spiders and Bite-class exoframes climbed near-vertical shafts, doing what standard gear could not. Even Tree hadn’t foreseen that.]

[We proved our creativity could shock even Prosperity Era AIs, if they had jaws to drop.]

[Don’t laugh. I mean it. You, born with hundreds of colonies can’t know the desperation of scarcity. Imagine tens of thousands crammed in an isolated station, making finite resources last. Even then, we created wonders.]

[I still remember the joy of becoming a supervisor. Like a child growing overnight into the heroes he read of. Soon I will lead the residents to create greater miracles.]

[But reality diverged. The clever residents thought themselves wiser than Tree. They scorned us as its slaves, called us Treemen, saying we weren’t truly human at all.]

[Perhaps I should’ve seen the problem then. We had long since drawn a line, we weren’t the same as the worker ants we once believed.]

[This shelter was a prison. Their sentence was 63 years. Ours was forever. Supervisor was a title the shelter gave us. We did the dirty work, got some perks. But once the shelter fulfills its mission and collapse as designed, it will all vanish.]

[And the ants wouldn’t punish an AI. They will come for us. The record of us exiling survivors can never be erased, not even by the administrator.]

[You can imagine our anxiety as the 63 year mark drew near. And our joy when the lake flooded the metro, reaching the gates. We perfected the Shelter to last forever. If we exploited a bug Tree hadn’t foreseen, we could delay the opening.]

[Indeed, we did. We extended 63 years to 70. Until we found a way out, we’ll keep pushing it, maybe forever. But we never expected the ants’ fury. They sabotaged the Crunchies with poison stingers, turned claws into shields and blades.]

[An absurd farce erupted. None of us expected it. But maybe the farce was us. We were so busy firefighting daily crises, we forgot the shelter’s true purpose.]

[As you see in the museum now, we were left forever in this cage.]

[Never to leave.]

[Craig, the last guard of Prison 100. The last Treeman.]

[Sorry I never saw the new world.]

Reading the end of Craig’s notes, Chu Guang fell silent. He didn’t pity the man, but the shelter’s ending was absurd.

Then Little Seven, on his shoulder, suddenly murmured, “Weird...”

Chu Guang looked up. “What now?”

It wasn’t the first time Little Seven’s connection was cut.

The only thing was, this time, Little Seven looked uneasy. “The error says the communications module overloaded. Our data transfer hit a threshold, and the connection to the outside was cut for protection. But that’s odd, our data isn’t that large. Unless someone deliberately set the threshold very low.”

The Shelter was a massive Faraday cage, blocking even high-energy particles, never mind faint radio.

Players’ communication devices couldn’t reach outside directly, they needed the special channel.

That was the rule, whether the gate of the shelter was open or closed.

In other words, if the channel was blocked, the shelter became a black hole.

Put simply, their signal seemed deliberately cut.

Seeing Little Seven’s odd look, Chu Guang’s expression turned strange too.

Well then... Here we go again!