Arrival:Seattle (Chapter 1 of the community-based novel writing project)

She just couldn't get rid of the creepy feeling. Neia had almost forgotten how it felt, getting goose bumps not out of cold but rather...feelings. The peaceful atmosphere around here didn't match - the sun was shining, mummy nature was giving her very best to look sexy. In the distance, some kinds of bees or wasps were gently humming.

Still, this place was dead.

Looking around, she had difficulties believing that this was once a thriving city, on the cutting edge of society. For the first time, she experienced the full effect the nanoblast must have had, when was that again? One hundred, two hundred years ago? Those towering pillars, coated in reddish limestone, those must have been buildings. That huge phallic structure, a tower...they used to call them skyscrapers back then...an ancient radio tower maybe? She had learned about the incident at military school. Many details were classified (to the public) still, probably due to the fact that UNATCO had used nuclear 'seeders' in a desperate attempt to confine the relentlessly self-replicating nanites to the city’s core. No one knew how many lives were taken by the nanites, and how many by the seeders. In the end, the town was so utterly depopulated that humanity had never again attempted to rebuild it. As for the nanites, they simply stopped. They may have run out of organic mass. Maybe they were primed to stop after a certain amount of time. Now, Nature still had difficulties reclaiming the town. Which made for either a quite depressing large scale piece of surrealistic art, or a perfect place for wealthy people to hide, or enjoy their wealth, depending on the point of view.
This was why she was here.

She gently shook her head, as her eye had started to hurt again. That was her only flaw, she thought, that cybernetic eye. Sure, it had all kinds of useful techie stuff cramped in, especially for her current line of work, but it made her vulnerable. To all kind of things...the static white noise she got every time when she passed through skyport controls were on the nicer end of flaws. And it looked crap.
She could have upgraded it, to a concealed version, or one which was just a tick less prone to failure and interferences or better wired to her synapses. Instead, her version was just the standard Information-gathering-unit-officer-gets-harshly-wounded-and-we-will-pay-recompensation-military-lawyer-style eye. It looked so unhuman that on some evenings, she really wanted to rip the thing out just in order to find other real humans who wouldn't freak out at the first sight.
But she kept it, as a reminder. Emotional value. Back then, on Io, when she was still a real galactic freshie. Reminders of those others. Sophie, with her obsession of science. Everything needs to be provable, she used to say, amidst her quotes from various reports, newsbursts and scientific priority beepers, telling of some new breakthrough on asteroid xyz. Bo, always calm, always polite. A good companion. Stef, the psi of the unit, appearing out of nowhere, listening, disappearing, reappearing again...Laure, who packed the hardest punch but had the broadest smile, and made those funny cookies.

She wondered about herself - usually Neia wouldn't get into nostalgia. Nostalgia could make her sad. Nostalgia could make her vulnerable. She wouldn't allow that. She couldn't allow that. Unprofessional. Even now, her heartbeat had gone up - only for two bpm - and her epinephrine level had risen slightly, she noticed thanks to her cybernetic eye. Full of techie stuff. She smiled.

The humming got louder. That weren't bees. Nor wasps. That was the sound of a drone, a small one, she reckoned. She had arrived at the right place.

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