Chương 27: Welcome to Park Avenue: Try not to Die

Kelly had a thing with mayhem. She didn't tend to talk about it, but chaos just seemed to sort of... follow her around. She never planned for it. Never intended for things to collapse or for people to start screaming when she was just innocently doing her thing—not usually—it just sort of... tended to happen wherever she went. Mass hysteria followed her around like an expensive fragrance. She'd seen a movie once where people died because death developed a small, tiny, catastrophic obsession with them.

A romantic comedy. This was not romantic. Her first Tuesday at Park Avenue had yet to catch fire. No explosions. Nothing. Nobody had even begged for their life yet, despite her being there. In a city where chaos usually arrived before breakfast, this registered as suspicious. Her mayhem wasn't personal. Definitely wasn't planned. In fact, planning had never been her style; plans were for people with patience and better odds of survival. She preferred momentum and improvisation.

Collecting the data as things unfolded in their own spectacular way. But unfortunately, Kelly found herself in the exact series of unfortunate events that presented her with true consequences and required planning. So today, Kelly was profoundly suspicious. On the way here, Kelly had taken one look at the roads and changed her travel plans. The shorter route was a minefield.

The main roads were clogged with panicked drivers, engines burning hot as they fled whatever monstrosities had taken over the new highways—pileups and people trying to outrace creatures that looked like walking cargo transport—the relentless chaos of the apocalypse highways that ran through all major locations made it unthinkable. Instead, Kelly opted for a longer detour, weaving through New York's forgotten outskirts where utility reigned over leisure and buildings sagged under the weight of years of neglect.

She passed rows of crumbling apartments, graffitied warehouses, and factories long abandoned, heavy with oil and dust. By the time she looped back toward Park Avenue, the change was striking. It was like walking into a different city. She left behind streets marred by decay and stepped into a district still clinging to its sheen. Even with the creatures attempting to scar its streets, its polished surfaces reflected an order that stood in defiance to the chaos she'd just traversed.

It was as if someone forgot to tell them the world was ending again. Kelly parked as a GeneCorp hoodie-clad man, moving faster than her eyes could follow, ripped through a winged, horned, and multiple-armed beast's glowing ribs. The creature radiated energy and lashed out with a surge of light, twisting pavement into metallic vines. Unfazed, the man surged forward, crushing bone with an inhuman blow, then leveled a high-powered revolver to fire a shot that left the beast lifeless on the pavement.

Kelly's eyebrows rose, mildly impressed. She watched as the creature's remains were boxed, then scanned—prepped for whatever passed as research now. Even before the loops, she hadn't seen the guy in the Genecorp hoodie—probably a new hire, or newly assigned. Either way, it tracked. Creatures like that didn't just stumble into wealth zones by accident. She theorized that some creatures were attracted to greater resistance and the corpses of their stronger peers.

The center of New York had plenty of resistance, thanks to the over-engineered and deadly panic responses offered by the wealthy and their machinated attempts to protect their investments. Maybe the more ambitious creatures were looking to earn something from it—Titles, Traits, Skills... Ranks... Power. Anywhere with too much firepower and too many corpses was a hotbed. That made the outskirts relatively safer, right up until it wasn't, anyway.

Rather than fight her way into Genecorp right out of the gate, Kelly had decided to play a card she rarely ever used. Dr. Haider. Dr.

Haider wasn't quite her friend, and he was something of a globally infamous physician—boasting roughly as many active legal proceedings and criminal allegations filed against him as he held critical, field-defining patents—who happened to have met Kelly by sheer coincidence when she was a preteen; through an unfortunately less-than-legal connection long ago that she'd much rather forget.

For reasons he never fully explained, he had always looked out for her since—not quite a mentor, but orbiting suspiciously close, the way a satellite might hover over a country it's not technically spying on. Dodgy, shady, brilliant, and connected in ways no one wanted to ask about, he was nevertheless reliably—almost bafflingly—on her side. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"Reality has no anchor." Dr. Haider's projection stood beside her in the passenger seat, called through her neural phone—older, tall, and broad-chested, his shoulders crowding the frame like someone built for war and repurposed for academia. His posture was still, gaze fixed, every movement unhurried. Kelly leaned back in her seat, one boot against the glovebox, arms slack, expression unreadable.

"Yeah, well. I drive better sideways."

"I'd review the wisdom behind this run on Genecorp. When Vaughn's upper management finds out, you won't be able to escape them." Kelly leaned further, her boots propped up as she eyed the readouts.

"I'm not running. I'm just driving faster than usual." She smirked faintly.

"They're a syndicate. They think big, shadow economies and coups. I can think faster, act faster, and move smaller. That's all I need."

"Hmm... Unlikely," Dr. Haider said simply. Kelly stared at him for a moment before shrugging, her face relaxed, "Guess I'd better not slip, then." The projection vanished for a beat as Kelly fidgeted with her monomolecular blade, turning it into a dense, high-fashion and somewhat heavy monomolecular wristband with a hollow interior. She spoke without looking up.

"Since the law of conservation got kicked in the teeth, I've been wondering—why not the law of time too? And if time could shatter, what would do it? A crack in the scaffolding of the universe, some idiot poking a hole in the wrong place?" She turned the wristband over.

"Hypothetically speaking." Dr. Haider's projection flickered back into view, tall and composed beside her.

"St. Augustine suggested time isn't moving," Dr. Haider said, "and that everything is already fixed in place, like points on a map. If that's true, then your loops aren't progress; they're you revisiting a snapshot, like revisiting an old store. Some would say the anchor is missing. He proposed there never was one to begin with." Kelly blinked, staring at his projection.

"Wait, you actually... believe me?" She let out a low breath through her nose, barely a sound.

"Didn't think that'd land," she muttered, tapping the dash like it was her personal musical instrument. The corner of her mouth twitched, but she didn't smile.

"Most people just smile and wait for me to change the subject." Her eyes stayed on the display, the quiet stretching like it was supposed to mean something. Dr. Haider didn't react right away. Then, evenly, he spoke.

"I've known you for a long time. You referenced an ontological contradiction in passing. That usually warrants follow-up." He adjusted his stance in the projection, hands behind his back, eyes on the same display she was pretending to study.

"Next time, let me know if you're not really confused. Saves time with citations." Kelly shrugged, eyes still on the building.

"I'll let you know when I've figured it out. You might not like the answer, though." She bit into a protein bar that tasted like sustenance and denial, chewed once, and didn't elaborate. Let him file that under nutrition or existential threat—same shelf, really. A crater split the avenue clean through, its edge blackened and glassed, as if something had burned straight through the concrete and kept going.

Repair units marched around the rim, welding stabilizers into concrete that still sizzled while automated sweepers pushed aside melted signs and crushed luxury sedans like garden waste, doing their best impression of a functioning system. The towers above sparkled—untouched, self-satisfied—while the street below reeked of ash, blood, and alarms nobody planned to answer. A crashed escort drone smoldered near the curb, its wings folded like scrap.

Nothing moved nearby that wasn't working to make it all look normal again—just long enough for the next thing with too many teeth to show up and ruin it. Kelly drove into what locals called the Platinum Mile where the pavement still self-cleaned and drones issued fashion warnings instead of curfews. The air hit differently here. Crisp, filtered, running through the truck's intake, and so clean it almost hurt.

Somewhere overhead, corporate-grade atmospheric processors pumped out calibrated humidity and sterilized oxygen like luxury perfume. Back by the quarantine belt, you needed a respirator to survive ten minutes; here, you could taste eucalyptus. Kelly sniffed. It had been more than a while.

"Huh. Forgot air had a flavor." Dr. Haider's projection stayed composed.

"Obsidian Futures manages air in this part of the city. They just won the contract. They're assigned to filtration and containment—listed under infrastructure. They operate where property values justify the cost." They passed a store, H. Van Doren Historical Goods, bolted shut with blast latches and seismic clamps. Kelly swerved close to the glass, peering past the pressure seals at a preserved codex-2592, original spine, stamped by hand, pre-Augment War. Ink. Paper.

A signature rushed at the end like someone racing curfew.

"Never seen one that intact," she muttered. Most of the cities that printed these got glassed and rebuilt. The ones that didn't got hit later in the AI coups. She'd only started noticing them after the first reset. Something about how they just existed, when most things didn't anymore. Just like her. Dr. Haider's projection appeared beside her.

"You know Vaughn's been recovering relics from the cities they rebuilt after the wars. Some are preserved, others sold as part of the effort." Kelly parked just short of the barricade, tires crunching over dried ash and broken shell plating.