"Attention, all workers, please come down to the 676th floor. An evacu-Mind will be waiting for you. I repeat,.." a voice started to speak through the futuristic commute; the haste in the cabinet milled upon hearing those orderly words. The alarm screeched, though.

"What could they want from us?" Esra asked, rhetorically. American didn't try to comment on the issue in her characteristic manner, unusually so.

"Something happened," Talissa whispered, thoughtfully gazing up at the ceiling, at the area where the commute broadcasted the news. What was happening today?

"The Lark office will be closed down from 12 pm today to 7 pm tomorrow, in view of unexpected events. We insist everybody come down to the 676th floor. The evacu-Mind is leaving! I repeat, the evacu-Mind is..."

"Well, as they say, the best is yet to come," said Cassitude, quickly gathering her few belongings. "I'll try to do as they say."

She opened the door.

"May get a day off work at least," American girl shrugged. "I be lookin at IntChain in my home."

She went off.

"I'm sick of this working. Hope they cancel it longer, much longer," Faouzia, radical as always, complained as she went out

Carla had already left. She was alone, at last.

The best was yet to come... - Talissa sighed. She knew that quite well... She had been told that ever since her birth, her childhood, her teenagehood and her adulthood that the best was yet to come, yet to teeter over the edge of the union between normalcy and the supernatural; only she no one did tell when that best was yet to come. That best just didn't come into her life. The worst did, like this. Red lights. What happened?

***

...What happened?!

The door was half-closed, not fully opened, it was eerie. She realized she was lying on the ground, hair slightly disheveled, with her eyes closed until now. She rose from the ground. Her head hurt, pained so mightily that she thought that someone had drugged her. Not as if she had ever been drugged. Struggling to get off the ground, Talissa took the Mindphone out of her pocket.

It was 16.11.

Getting more-so unnerved, the woman stood up, without the expected difficulty, and waddled her way out of the office.

She was met with desolate corridors along the way, and no one to greet or ask. There was nobody. No one. Her heart beat rapidly as she walked towards the elevator, steadily but hurriedly. Some extraneous fear had nestled inside her soul, especially because of all that had happened the day before. The same insipid flame began to spread her body out.

She found the elevator, found the flights of stairs, yet how would she ascend 680 floors?

She didn't have a clue.

So she decided to start the rusty elevator.

For some unexplainable fear she wouldn't dare to check the Mindphone, in hopes of any news associated with the evacuation, but she fought her doleful.

The Mindphone's screen was full with no alerts.

No connection.

She was shaken out of her troubles by the sharp sound of the elevator starting.

Talissa stepped inside, fighting over her worry, and somehow gaining the upper hand. Something in her wished to get away from the office's 680th floor; something she clearly had to escape!

There were different elevators in the building. There was one on every floor (their sum over a thousand), and they worked flawlessly, transporting people up and down hundreds of floors. Of course there were invented things more efficient than elevators (like InsTranses), for example); however, the prior was at those times still a bit too on the pricy side. The office shareholders would've met quite some financial difficulties buying a thousand and twenty four of them.

Expensive InsTranses could transport you to any point in space at a speed of 50 thousand kilometres per second (for a maximum distance of 100 kilometres), using cryo-camera genics to mitigate the effects of immense speeds. Although, they were generally intended for the "gems of architecture" video skits or for the aircraft and spacecraft industries, where settling high enough they didn't pollute the already contaminated atmosphere downtown. Many invalids and sometimes (relatively) healthy people came up a huge distance to breathe "fine air"; though due to the rarefaction of the air in the many marble park structures built upside, more and more with each year contracted heart and respiratory illness and had to leave where all the "dirty debitage" resided. On top of that, the air upside was also getting infected slowly but surely by aircraft and spacecraft potency.

The problem of pollution never ceased to have popularity or importance; however, each step humanity took in order to solve this issue always came back to some sort of disadvantage, no matter the number of conferences held. A "no loss" position was frequently promoted by the middle-class – between a Belman and a Leviathan – nonetheless, the consummation of physical renewable resources, without delay, produced some physical waste or pollutant. Whenever one used something organic and transmute it into something inorganic, side-contaminants were unavoidable.

There were lots of lifts in the office, but they didn't have special functions. Ergo, it was just an ordinary middle-Belman class workspace with over five thousand employees. It was just one of the hundred more in Engel, offering ordinary workforce jobs and comprising an ordinary artisan environment. At the current hour, it didn't appear quite ordinary as it had appeared a few before, though.

Red lights shone everywhere. The emergency systems already went awry with alarm sound, and out of the tall ceiling streamed a spilth of gas, thick and vapour-like. It was from the series of Emprevistas, which were preserved to cool the room body, as far as Talissa knew, in case of health or machine-related emergencies due to heat. If they were active outside, they would've, perhaps, prevented her brief faint fit of wabbit a few hours ago; however, the current situation stopped her from thinking more.

The animalistic dread didn't settle down in her system until the cabin reached the first floor, and gave a squeaky noise.

She was so glad to get away from Larks she didn't stop to see a Chinese robot smiling at her. Normal, yes?

But its features were frozen, deep in the mist of the darkened office.