//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2 - Skylifts, Smoke, and Promises Kept 
// Story: The Neverending Climb 
// by TheDriderPony 
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The Peacekeepers were not everything I’d been promised in the holovid ads and recruitment posters.

Even now, years after I joined their slogans were still burned into my brain like a cheap pop song. "The sole line of defense between peace and anarchy". "Courage in the face of corruption. Duty towards the Founders. Honor amongst brothers". They had a great PR team, I’d give them that. 

I'd joined to try and do some good. To protect ponies from gangsters and scammers and other criminal scum. Maybe even to prove that someone could fight against it all.

But reality had been a real bitter pill to swallow.

I’d expected some corruption, sure. Everyone joked about it. How certain Peacekeepers were more likely to look the other way. How gangs supposedly sent their initiates to the Academy for free weapons training. Slag, ‘donating to the Peacekeeper pension’ was slang for cleaning dirty money! But even after hearing it all for years, the sheer depth of it had still shocked me.

It was like a bad joke. They barely even gave lip service to denying it. “Just part of the job” they said, followed up by career advice on which groups paid out the best. Some of the bolder beaters practically wore their gang colors on their sleeves, right below their squad patches. For a while I still thought I could maybe fix things from the inside, but that dream died quick. Who was I supposed to turn them in to when Internal Affairs was just as corrupt as the rest and the higher up the ladder I looked, the closer ties the big wigs had to megas-owned mercenary teams and dubiously rich scumbags?

Some days it felt like every crook and lowlife I brought it would just as quickly get transferred to another district where somepony’d coincidentally "misplace" incriminating evidence or “discover” something exonerating. I swear I had the highest arrest rate but the lowest retention. Probably didn’t help that I still refused to play their games, even if I was gonna be the only pony on the force not on the take or in somepony’s pocket. Somepony had to stand up for the oath we took.

But I guess I failed at that too. Just look at me now. Working for one of the most infamous Fixers alongside a notorious codejacker. No better than any of the rest of them.

At least it was only petty theft, really. And transport of stolen goods. Probably breaking and entering. Technically grand larceny. Maybe even espionage if Celestech felt like spinning it that way.

But at least nopony would be getting hurt.

I followed the codejacker through a confusing maze of tunnels and abandoned hallways, trusting in Midnight’s promise that she wasn’t about to stab me in the throat as we turned a dark corner. As much as the Fixer was on a lot of wanted lists, she did have a reputation for not double-crossing ponies. But I guess anyone who was double-crossed wouldn’t exactly be around to complain about it, would they? Either way, I didn’t have much of a choice other than to follow her. I didn’t know these back ways; a Peacekeeper coming here without heavily armed backup was a quick way to a very bloody retirement.

We didn’t talk much. Not that I really cared what a crook like her would have to say, but it sure made for a boring walk.

“We’ll be taking the main halls from here,” she eventually said as we stepped back into civilized space.

“Your back routes can’t get us all the way down?” I took a gamble there, not knowing if we were actually above or below our destination. We’d gone up and down a lot and I didn’t even know what floor Midnight’s lair was on to begin with.

The codejacker—Jackie, I think. Real original fake name, that—shrugged. “The Pipes can get you anywhere, but it’d take hours to climb that far and we’d have to pass through a couple of territories neither you nor Ah would be particularly welcome in. Best just take the Skyway from here.”

We continued on in silence. 

I didn’t have the luxury of hardware that could wirelessly connect to the Spire’s net and just tell me what floor I was on, but I had my workarounds and it didn’t take long to find patch of wall that wasn’t too covered in old graffiti for me to make out the original paint. Navy blue meant we were in the 1200’s, probably somewhere middlish since it looked mostly residential. 

The Central Skyway was near the center of the floor; same as it was on every other level. There were other, smaller skyways that crossed tens of floors, a couple even crossed hundreds, but only the Central Skyway went all the way from the top floors so new they were still under construction down to the very literal foundations. 

Looking over the edge was like looking into the pits of Tartarus itself. 

There had to be skeletons at the bottom. No doubt about it. A couple of ponies every month always managed to somehow sidestep every safety feature and fall in. Most hit rising sky lifts or lower terminals on the way down, but some had to make it all the way, far far too deep for anyone to bother retrieving or even checking. 

Jackie started to move towards the mass transit buses, but I pulled her back and kept us walking towards where they kept the private lifts. The last thing I wanted was any more eyes on us than necessary. I flashed my badge and the attendant let us skip the line, giving us full reign to pick whichever one we wanted. We settled on a four-seater, not the fanciest one they had but fine for a quick trip without having to get too cozy.

With the operator staying behind (another showing of my badge silenced his protest) Jackie had to input our destination. Whoever designed it never considered ponies without a digital interface. Then, with a rattle and a hum, the half-cloud half-steel gondola started descending the pit of the Skyway like a leaky balloon.

“Shouldn’t be too long,” she announced as she took the seat farthest from me. “We’ve only got about fifty floors to go.”

“Great.”

Silence again.

With nothing else to pass the time, I rifled through my uniform’s pocket till I found a pack of spectrasticks. I shook the carton and listened. Still a couple left. I shook it a little more till a red one poked out of the hole. Nice. I would have preferred a blue, but at least it wasn't brown or purple. Let alone a green.

Holding it in my teeth, I lit the business end with a spark from my hoof, small as I could make it. The stick flared to life immediately and I inhaled, taking in the sharp flavor. The smoke was a deep crimson as I let it out in a thick cloud.

Then I noticed the quirked-eyebrow look that was being leveled in my direction.

“What?” I jostled the carton. “You want one? I think there's a few purples and browns left.”

“That spectra?”

“Yeah. Well, off-brand.” A Peacekeeper's salary wasn't great if you weren’t getting any supplemental income.

She snorted and sent me a jeering look. “Ain't you supposed to uphold the law? Be a bastion against immorality, or somethin’?”

“They're legal." Though they'd probably be cheaper if they still weren't. A bunch of homebrew dealers would have more competitive pricing than Love Inc.'s practical monopoly.

She just shook her head. “That stuff'll kill you. Do you even know what it's made of?”

“Uhhh…” I took a subtle glance at the packaging. “It says, ‘Simply Made Of Goodness, Rainbows and Love’.”

She laughed at that, short and humorless. “Ha. Try all the smog they scrape off the atmosphere intake vents.”

Suddenly I was very aware of my own breathing. “What? No way. It's all natural and organic. Says so right on the packaging.”

“That just means it came from outside the Spire. They could put that on a rock. You're literally smokin’ the same sludge that makes the sub-hundred floors a toxic wasteland.”

…No. She had to be lying. She was a criminal, after all. She probably got her kicks off gaslighting good and honest ponies. I forced myself to take another puff, breathing extra deep out of spite. Despite her words the spicy, sweet, and sharp burn tasted the same as ever.

I shot her a victorious smile, knowing I defeated her mind games. “Maybe the double digits aren’t as bad as everyone says then.”

She chuckled a little and pulled her hat’s brim lower. “Ah wouldn’t count on it. Ah know a guy who repairs the integrity field generators when they burn out, and he says you can’t even go below one-fifty these days without a full hazmat. He uses piloted drones to reach the lower ones.”

I took another puff, focusing on the hot air in my lungs instead of the argument I didn’t want to have. Maybe it was time for a change of topic.

"So... what do you know about Midnight?"

Jackie gave me a look then that I couldn’t decipher. Seemed I’d made her raise her guard back up a little. “Ah know as much as anypony else. As far as Fixers go she's one of the best. Never flakes on a job. Always pays her contractors what she promises. More picky about her clientele than most." 

"I meant like her as a pony. Who she is when she's not running a criminal enterprise through her chatbot assistant."

She frowned and crossed her forelegs. “That’s none of my business.”

“Yeah, well, it is mine. Literally. I work in the Major Crimes division, and I got a theory.” And finally I had a captive audience to listen to it. No one at the precinct was ever interested in any actual investigative research. Maybe I could even gauge how close it was from her reactions. “You ever heard of a pony called Twilight Sparcode?”

Her face stayed staunchly neutral. “Can't say it rings a bell.”

“She was a minor celebrity in the upper floors like nine or ten years ago.” It was thirteen, but the inaccuracy didn’t get a reaction. “One of those once-in-a-generation geniuses, you know? She made headlines when she was seven for solving this big coding puzzle that’d had all the industry eggheads stumped for years. Anyway, the megas take notice and they start fast-tracking her. Scholarships, private tutoring, the works, and right when she graduates early she gets snatched up by Celestech.”

“Sounds like a common story.”

“Yeah, but here's where it gets weird. She works there just a couple months before she's in the news again. Fired and terminated and basically blacklisted.”

That got a reaction. Surprise, but not much. “For what?”

"Corporate espionage."

Jackie rolled her eyes and snorted. “Yeah. Sure. Ah think Ah’ve seen this holofilm before. Lemme guess; she refused the boss’ advances, got fired, then she goes to work for the competition, meets a unreasonably good-lookin’ young executive, falls in love, rises to the top, and eventually buys out the cruel ponies who wronged her?”

I’d seen that one too, under a bunch of different titles. “If it were a holofilm, sure. But that’s not how things work in the real world. No, what happened is that Twilight Sparcode dropped off the grid. Completely. There's a record of her making an offer on an apartment in the 1600's but nothing for all the years after that.”

And now, the finisher. “And you know who else suddenly started appearing in the backchannels right around that same time?”

For all that she’s a criminal, she’s smart and didn’t need me to spell it out. “You think Midnight is actually Sparcode?”

“The timeline fits and she looks about the right age.”

I expected a lot of things. Excuses. Denial. An attack. Depended how close I was. What I didn’t expect was her to throw back her head and laugh. Not the polite chuckle from before either, but deep, full-bodied laughter. “That has got to be, the wildest thing Ah’ve heard since you told me about the Lunarists. If that's the kind of investigative work Ah can expect from the local Peacekeepers, then it’s no wonder there's so many gangs running around unarrested.” She had to stop talking to get her breath back, wheezing for a minute. “You really think some spoiled, rich, private school filly like that could do a one eighty and become a big name black market Fixer like it’s a summer job? Not happenin’. Ah can’t speculate where Midnight comes from, but Ah bet your Twilight just changed her name to get out of the spotlight and took a quiet boring coding job someplace nopony’d ever connect her to her past.”

Any further discussion was cut off by the stomach lurching feeling of the lift quickly slowing down. The shifting blur of the walls solidified back into recognizable shapes. 

We descended past the security checkpoint on 1200 without stopping. They didn’t care about ponies going down, only ones trying to go up.

A minute later it pulled to a stop and we stepped out onto the terminal. Our lift whisked itself back up empty, called away to a shortage somewhere higher. 

There was just one problem. The buzzing neon sign over the exit read ‘Welcome to 1197’.

“Nice going,” I said, “You overshot us.”

“No Ah didn’t.” Jackie walked ahead with explaining anything further. Lacking other options, I followed.

Floor 1197 was not what I expected. It was tall, with a ceiling higher than any I’d ever seen. It was also messy. None of the neat hallways and planned construction that every other floor had; this place looked more like an actual town like they had in historical holofilms. Though a town made of junk.

“Back when the Spire was first bein’ built,” Jackie said from beside me with a grin. “The Architects designed 1197 to be a massive supplies warehouse. Not much was actually built save for a skeleton of dividers and support infrastructure meant to safely store decades worth of provisions. But after those supplies ran out and the population continued to boom, ponies adapted and turned the empty space into one of the liveliest and most organic floors this side of 3000.”

She paused and gave me a smirk. “That’s also why the numbers don’t make sense. Strictly speakin’, it’s 1197, but it’s three times taller than most and the next floor up is 1200. No one wants to claim to live on a lower numbered floor than they do, so 1199 is the popular choice.”

“And you just happen to know all this?” I pressed.

“Nah.” She tapped her temple. “Ah skimmed the wiki on the ride down. C’mon. Ah got a map to where we’re goin’.”

For a second, I hesitated. This felt exactly like the kind of place they warned us about in the Academy. Lawless floors. Ones where the plans of the Builders and the Architects were ignored and ponies did whatever their simplest urges pushed for. Hotbeds for crime and drugs and other illicit activity. Sure it looked friendly and warm and inviting like a town out of a holofilm about times Before, but that’s exactly how a good phish operated. Anything that looked safe was hiding something insidious, and anything that looked openly criminal was hiding something worse.

But I had to see this through. Midnight’s reputation said she always paid what she promised, and with Captain Dust telling me I wasn’t going to get that raise after all for ‘not meeting my arrest quota’... I wasn’t in any place to turn down the job. Even if it went against the oaths I’d taken, however mildly, I had to finish this. 

She was counting on me.

I took a deep breath of weird-tasting air and steeled my nerves. I couldn’t let my guard down, no matter what. Just get through this mission, then I could go back to a proper civilized floor where ponies smiled and tipped their hats when I did a patrol and there wasn’t a huge vaulted ceiling that stirred a strange longing somewhere deep inside me.