The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 1: Dawnscape

It began as it always did, a slow swirl of color and vague motion that grew until it finally dominated the senses and filled the mind.  A heartbeat later, however, the maelstrom was thrown aside in a silent explosion of light as the morning sun peered over the eastern horizon to cast a net of luminescence over the rolling prairies of southern Alberta, in the west of the great North American country of Canada.  The brilliant eruption announced the dawn of another summer morning with the promise of clear skies and climbing temperatures.  Quickly the light burned away the last lingering mists and shadows of night and the air began to warm, stirring animals in their nighttime beds and bringing song to birds a-wing in search of breakfast.

Nature, however, wasn't the only force stirring in this place.  As the net of light spread further and further across the low hills and plains, it swept across gleaming cubes, rectangles and triangles of artificial glass and stone marking a dwelling place of Humanity.  This was no ordinary place; it was one of the greatest in all of Canada, the hub city of Calgary.  Spreading like a metallic spider across the prairie and over the sensuous curves of the Bow River Valley, Calgary was a living entity feeding on the dark nectar that was oil, drawn from deep beneath it.  Poised on the brink of a new millennium, Humanity's burgeoning civilization ironically still drew life from the fossil fuel, the ebony elixir filling its creations with monstrous life and malevolent intent.

Oil was a dark sea, shadowy and brooding, its shores only recently glimpsed as explorers hungrily searched for greater and deeper reserves.  And, just as the waters of Earth's seas spawned life, so did this petroleum sea, both in and around it.  The modern city of Calgary existed solely because of that life, created to service it.  Once a sleepy cattle outpost, home to a garrison of a police force formed by a British colonial government nearly a hundred and fifty years ago to govern the western frontier, it was now a metropolis that rivaled others in Canada, the heartbeat that now drove it unsleeping and unwavering.  Here, in shimmering towers of glass and steel, the power brokers of the Canadian oil industry worked their magic in time to that thrumming heartbeat, dealing and deciding, buying and selling hard-won fossil fuel resources to the rest of Canada and the World.

As the early sunlight glinted off the tallest of these towers, light began to wash through Calgary's shadowed streets, a flood of brilliance and illumination.  Immured in dark places between the artificial mountains some shadows resisted dispersal, stubbornly clinging to the base of several skyscrapers in Calgary's very heart.

Shedding sunlight like a living thing, the stubborn shadows visibly throbbed with a strange, perverse life in counterpoint to the natural life rushing through the streets with morning's return.  A pause then from the living shadows a strange, leached light began to slither like a living thing, a snake of color that moved with a definite purpose.  Light that was not light, color that was not color, more of a shifting of perception than actual energy, moving from shadow to shadow as it advanced out of the core and into the surrounding streets.  Pseudopodia split from the original invasion, sending additional streamers of serpentine hue reaching out with tendrils of pulsating indigo, faded emerald and slate blue into the city, quickly following and spreading from the first.

Moving slowly at first, the army of tendrils quickly picked up speed, its purpose as yet unknown.  There was no denying the malevolent intent they carried hard around them, however, an acid cold that gnawed at the very senses and bit deep into the bones.  With the streets quickly filling with people, it wouldn't take long before one of the tendrils came in contact with its first crowd.  And then its purpose would be revealed, whether for ill or good.

There, the first man-thick pseudopod of faded emerald slithered around a final corner to slide along a sidewalk, carefully avoiding sunlight streaming onto the street beside it even as it headed directly towards a knot of people that emerged from a patiently waiting transit train.  Apparently unaware of the tendril's presence, the people walked on, the knot partially dispersing as strangers went their separate ways.  On it came, blindly speeding towards the remaining travelers with unerring direction.  Only to pass through their midst when the last of them stepped out of the way to create a clear passage through what was left of the group.