Upperlevel Security Enforcement
Welcome to Upperlevel Security Enforcement, kid.
So, you just transferred in from MLSE, and you're feeling damn good about it. You leave your little cubby-hole in Mezzanine-level behind, your neck still tingling from that fancy upgraded idchip they put in, and you waltz right past the Secpoint and straight into Upperlevel. You've only been here a couple of times before, when you interviewed for the job.
Interview. Sheeyit, don't get me started on the interview. Okay, I'll give you the short version. For about ten years they didn't even have an interview; you just put in your name for transfer, and when there's a vacancy, bzzt bzzt bzzt goes the mainframe and pulls your name out of the virtual hat. You got a good service record, you've got good scores on the standardized exams, and congrats kid, you got your transfer, sight unseen. 'Til the mainframe went haywire and random Joes started getting reassigned whether they'd asked for the transfer or not. The techs kept insisting that it was all working the way it was supposed to, that nothing was wrong with the programming, and yet it kept pulling in hardened ops-guys and stim-junkies from Sublevel and putting them on white-collar details in Upperlevel, while the hardworking guys in Mezzanine kept getting their transfers bounced. Eventually things got so bad that Greenlevel had to send in an audit team to clear out the worst of the crazies, and completely rewrite the Autotransfer daemon while they were at it. Anyway, they claim the new version is five-nines foolproof… but they put in place a face-to-face interview process anyway. Sometimes a computer program can screw up, and the smartest AI in the world can't see the kind of thing that a flesh-and-blood human can see right in front of them, plain as day.
So, yeah, your first day on the job in Upperlevel. It all looks so shiny and clean. Families get honest-to-God apartments, instead of just a randomly assigned cubby or a commune in a walled-off corner of a warehouse somewhere. The schools have better equipment, and the advanced technical courses that you just don't have access to down in LL. The vitabar dispensers still taste like cardboard, but other than that everything's a cut above what you're used to . You've done the math, too - you know that if you bust ass at work, get yourself a promotion or two, you could move up here in what, six months? Five if you're lucky. So you're on cloud nine for a week or two, as you take the training courses, get settled in to your desk.
But in the grand scheme of things, "Upperlevel" ain't all that "upper". Sure, it was the first major aboveground tier of C-Port, way back when it was first being built. So if you've spent your whole life in Mezzanine, or God forbid in Sublevel, it sure seems lofty enough. But the city's builders just didn't stop, and so now you go past Upper and you get to Tier, past Tier and you have Green, and it's anybody's guess how far it goes above Green. Upperlevel's just far enough up to fool you into thinking it's heaven. But then you go out on your first Code 69 patrol. There you are, your service revolver clenched in your sweaty fist, prowling those oh-so-clean corridors, gingerly stepping your way around the bodies, praying that you can put a Castigator round into the thing's head before it spots you.
And it don't help that the lights are all dead, and have been for weeks, because I'm sorry, this corridor's number is an even multiple of 1024, and the automated maintenance drones have a bug in their drivers that cause them to skip every 2^10th service panel. I mean, if this were Mezzanine and the lights went out for more than a few minutes, you can bet your ass that someone will bust out a screwdriver and start digging in the access panels, making it work again. But in Upper? There's something about Upper that makes everyone put blind faith in the autosystems and distrust their fellow man, even though the autosystems are only as good as the scripters who wrote 'em. Net result, it's pitch black and you're fumbling with the IR-caster on your 9mm trying desperately to draw a bead on the tangled mass of nanosinew that just ripped the head off of your squadmate. Some injuries, they can stick you in the vats and you come out with nothing worse than a splitting headache; all the joys of a hangover with none of the whiskey. But if some Thing rips your head off… ain't no amount of vat time'll set you right after that.
And the worst part about all this comes after you come down from the adrenaline high and then back up from the alcohol-fuelled hole you crawl into for a few days. There you are, nursing a hangover - vat-induced or otherwise - working your way through the reams of after-action forms and audit trails, when the boys from the lab finally send you the forensics, and the Thing that took down two of your fellow officers turns out to have been some bored teenage kid who just gave up on life, overdosed on nanostims, and got run over by a rogue cyberbrain virus.
That's when you realize just how scary a place Upperlevel is. You've got all the dangers of Mezzanine, they're just buried beneath this shiny coating, and everyone around you is so wrapped up in their own lives that it never occurs to them to lift a finger to help the guy in the next pod over. Mezzanine's too busy, too bustling for that kind of malaise. Upper's just quiet enough to poison your mind.
And at the end of the day, if you don't get your head ripped off by some nanocritter, you've gotta find yourself a path to walk. You can hang up your hat and go back down to Mezzanine for good, and forever wonder about the life you could have led. Or you can bust your ass even harder and try to get a transfer to Tier Level, I hear it's really nice up there. Some folks get so caught up in the Code 69s, in the adrenaline and the endorphins, that they transfer all the way down to Sublevel and join the Ops teams down there that keep the tunnels clear of crazy machines. But most folks just sort of give up and decide that Upperlevel is the best they're gonna be able to do for themselves and their families, and they just fade in and become part of the scenery. Get up, do the job, try not to think about what could have been. So, welcome to UpperLevel Security Enforcement. As we longtime ULSEr's like to say, "Utopia? Look Somewhere Else."
What, me? Why am I still here? Well… it's kind of embarrassing. I'm here because… because they have parks in Upperlevel. First time I came up here, for the interview, that was the first time in my life I saw a tree. Scraggly-ass little shrub, maybe four feet tall. And I don't know why, but it just made my heart catch in my throat. That's the day I realized I can't go back to Mezzanine. I've seen Upperlevel, and now I'm stuck here until the day I die.
