Instead of finding himself in the outskirts of a modern city, village-like communities, apartments, townhouses, stores, and clean, orderly streets, he found himself looking down at a slum. Slums like inner-colonies hadn't seen since the end of the Inner Colony War. Something his grandparents wouldn't have been alive to see. Even during the Covenant War, they had the resources to establish refugee camps with standards an order of magnitude higher than this.
The best analogy he could come up with was the 'tent cities' he remembered studying when he was getting his degree. Swaths of homeless gathering together in a mass of poverty and drug use. It was something humanity, at least the inner colonies, hadn't seen since they were able to move most harmful industries off-world. 150 years ago.
While this wasn't quite that bad, there were plenty of what looked like permanent structures, it was a huge plot of land taken up by shanties and temporary buildings packed so close it would have been difficult to walk between many of them.
My parents would be so proud of me. The four years I spent getting my history degree are finally paying off…
A small smile slipped across his face, despite the circumstances.
Those conversations had always been interesting. But it wasn't the time for reminiscing.
Things only got stranger as he neared.
There were a few streets between him and the edge of the slums. He was extremely careful when he neared and approached them. He didn't want to have another episode like the last one. Not only did he not need anyone else recording him, he didn't want to have to dive away from a street race again.
While he didn't know what time it was, wherever he was, it seemed late.
Even so, people were bustling around the large slum like it was the middle of the day.
And these people looked… off. He was still a few hundred meters away, looking down toward it from elevation. Even with the magnification his visor provided, it was difficult to make out details. Something about it just didn't seem right.
A lot of the people milling between the buildings had… lights coming off of them in the same, strange, sometimes nonsensical geometric patterns he'd noticed in the city's towers. There were all sorts of different colors, too. Blue, red, green, violet, yellow, pink… whatever.
Beyond the expansive slum was what looked like a real suburb; rows of houses and apartments mixed together in a grid. The streets were, from what he could tell at that distance, clear of anything besides vehicles. There were a few huge towers in that area that looked like they belonged in the city proper but that was the only oddity in the area.
Under normal circumstances, his first move would be to contact law enforcement. This kind of built-up area would have to be on an inner colony and any inner colony law enforcement department would have a line of communication with a UNSC liaison.
He might not know what was happening, but he knew these weren't normal circumstances. Law enforcement might be somewhere he goes later. For now, his gut was telling him the best thing he could do was avoid notice entirely. At least among the more standard populous. So, instead, he started down the hill toward the slums. With this much concentrated poverty, it was unlikely he'd run into any standard law enforcement.
Observation from this distance would only get him so far and, come morning, he didn't know how busy the streets around him would be. He'd have to stay out of sight but, with the number of buildings crammed together, that shouldn't be much of an issue.
As he made his way down the hill, he stopped every hundred meters or so to backtrack. While it had been quiet, and he didn't think there would be anyone watching or following him from the landfill, he didn't make it this long by taking chances.
A thought occurred to him as he slipped under an overpass; it would make sense for the slum to be here, just a klick or so away from the largest landfill he'd ever seen. Plenty of discarded resources for the inhabitants to use. As… morbid as that sounds. It was common throughout most of human history for those living on the fringe of society to survive off of others' scraps.
After 10 minutes of carefully picking his way down the hill, he ended up at the top of a rock-shelf looking down into the slum. The dam was behind him and to his left, looming over the collection of run down buildings and their desperate inhabitants.
Dropping to his stomach and crawling to the edge, he could much more clearly see the people milling around the slums from this vantage point.
And that made him even more confused.
The lights weren't coming from clothes they were wearing. Instead, if someone did have them, they were shining from the people themselves. Most of it was coming from arms and heads ranging from slim strips to outright light shows. People were walking around with what looked like robotic prosthetics.
… How? How would someone living in a slum afford something like that?
In the collidescope of different brightness and color lights illuminating the collection of closely packed 'buildings' below, he could see some even had pieces of their heads replaced with… the best word he could come up with was 'implants'. That was something he'd never seen in UEG space.
Cloning technology to replace missing limbs and organs had been developed centuries ago. Some soldiers would opt for robotic prosthetics if operating in the field. Even they would generally have cloned replacements made once they returned to an installation.
And it was a free service for anyone living in UEG space so these people would have no reason to not do it.
What explains what I'm seeing, then?
Brain trauma?
Funny.
… Maybe this is some group of fringe believers who reject cloning? But then… why would they live in a slum like this? They'd still have access to housing and food far beyond their conditions here. And if they rejected those things too, why would they live so close to a major city?
Everything he was seeing said the same thing: this was a deeply impoverished community that had no help. That's something that, as far as he was aware, didn't exist in the inner colonies. Even on planets with heavy Insurrectionist presence, the UEG tried to do what it could for people.
He wasn't naive enough to think that was out of the goodness of their hearts. If you let people wallow in poverty like this, you drive them into the arms of others who give them any potential alternative. So the UEG learned long ago the best way to prevent Innies from burrowing their way into poor communities on inner colony planets was to make sure there was nothing to burrow into.