Up The Tower by J.P. Lantern Page B

eroding off from bottles in real time. He saw men and women smashed underneath these long sheets of rock—it looked so unreal, even just a hundred yards away. The sheets so large, the people so small. Water spurted after the stone, long cracks spilling down from their fountain points.
    Oh, right, thought Gary, preparing another scream. The Dam is a piece of crap twenty years behind on repairs.
    He turned and ran back over a series of banged-up metal carts, stumbling through the holes in their handles and sprinting with all four limbs engaged. He let out the ear-punching scream he had prepared. He could barely hear his own roaring voice over the cacophony of the disaster plowing through the area.
    Up! He had to get up. There was no way he was going to get far away enough to get out of the flood. Away from concrete. Away from gut-bursting pipes. Outside of the riot of people amassing as far as he could see. His only hope was to get up.
    Ahead of him. The Tower. Yes. He had to get there.
    In the quake, the outer-innards of the Tower streamed down, air ducts and wires twisting from the motion like a whirl-go-round.
    Down an alley ahead of him, the quake had left a building crumpled down onto a dumpster. He could climb up onto the defunct subway line between the buildings, twisting and curling but staying upright—and then climb again.
    * * * * *
    A s you may or may not already be aware, holographic records pose a certain amount of difficulty when it comes to the matter of obtaining and experiencing them. These difficulties arise both from the strict limits of our Halls—all of which I agree with wholeheartedly, of course—and from the nature of the recording technology presented to us from the past.
    Both Tri-American and Groove holowrist technologies possessed solar-powered fusion batteries that left them powered on constantly. As a result, their recording technology stayed on indefinitely, uploaded across the country and stored in ever-growing mountains of servers and datapiles. The holowrists recorded everything— everything —in the three-hundred sixty degree radius around a person for up to twenty feet, all the time. This is great today for personal records, if somewhat overwhelming to process. Through them it is possible to get a great many first-hand accounts of events as they unfold (so long as we can find the holographic records in question, which is not always possible, especially after disasters).
    But even before trying to disseminate all of these nigh-endless amounts of information—a titanic process unto itself—one must gain access to the information. First, a petition must be made to the Hall of Records, which then must petition the Hall of Security, which then must file a grievance with the Hall of the State for forcing the Hall of Records to petition the Hall of Security...and so on. It is a process, in other words, and I tell you (as humbly as is possible) that it is rather impressive that so many different forces operated to allow me the unrestricted access which I have been able to enjoy.
    At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not emphasize the fact that my record here, even with as narrow a focus as it has (comparatively speaking, to the epic histories that have been put down about this event in the past), has a distinct amount of bias and shaping to it. There is much that I have had to intuit, much that I have had to do the bulk of crafting all on my own. Some sort of saying exists, I believe, explaining that fiction begins the second someone tries to write down any story—even one as non-fictional as this.
    There are a great many reasons this happens.
    One is just the volume of material there is to work with. There is the argument made that the San Madrid Terror (i.e. Tri-American's End, the Tower Breaker, the Midwest Splitter, and—no doubt to some—simply the Big Quake) could be seen as the end of the corpocracy which ran the whole of the Earth for nearly one hundred years. Other, more