“Exoskeleton on,” I said. An icon appeared on my HUD asking me to confirm the command. “Yes,” I said.
“Okay, now you can lift me,” Haywire said weakly. “It’ll be nice to be treated like a lady for once, instead of having to carry your big ass around.”
I shrugged before bending my knees and scooping my arms under her, lifting her up, cradling her body as though she were an infant. It was a marvelous feeling. I couldn’t exactly describe it as lifting her with ease, as that would’ve seemed like taking too much credit. I was carrying her only in the sense that one carries a passenger in their car. Indeed, it was the exoskeleton that was doing 100 percent of the work.
“That’s better,” Haywire said. “You can keep me stable this way and transport me.”
“Now what?” I asked.
“The legs are powerful enough that you could leap a five-story building, if you want. Getting us onto this ledge shouldn’t be an issue.”
I nodded. “Okay. Here goes nothing.” I leapt up into the air, trying not to put too much power behind it, lest I slam us both into the ceiling, possibly killing us both in the process. The leap was pathetic at best. I jumped straight into the air, just high enough to escape the water, then immediately came right back down, splashing into the filth.
Haywire called out in agony, tilting her head back as the pain shot through her. After the worst waves of it rolled by, she slapped me hard in the arm. “You idiot!”
“Sorry. This is new for me.” I tried the leap again, this time guessing the right amount of force to use. We came down gently on the ledge. It was a small victory, but it still elicited a smile from me.
Without so much as a word of thanks or congratulation, Haywire said, “We need to find a place to lie low.”
“Agreed.” I stepped forward, getting used to the feel of the exoskeleton almost immediately. The device was remarkable, and I instantly felt superhuman. When I made it to an intersection in the tunnels, I easily leapt from one ledge to another, all the while keeping Haywire stable enough that her pained groans were mostly stifled. “Perhaps we should copy my armor so you can wear one of these suits as well? That way I wouldn’t have to carry you.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Haywire replied, struggling to get the words past her quivering lips. “Even with an exoskeleton, I can barely stand. Talking is almost as bad. Shut up and find us a place to hole up.”
It was quickly becoming apparent that my Brad Pitt-in-Troy charm had worn off. I marched and leapt through the darkness, looking for some form of exit. I surmised that there had to be an access door somewhere. After several minutes of trudging, over the course of which I must have covered at least a few city blocks, I appeared to be no closer; much to my dismay, everything looked the same. I paused and opened my HUD with a voice command. “Web search.”
“What are you doing? Don’t go online!” Haywire urged. “She can trace it.”
“Don’t worry, I can’t. No signal down here.” I bent down and gently put Haywire down on the ledge.
“What do you mean? I’m serious, Professor. The second you go online, she’ll teleport here and rip me to shreds.”
“I have some experience with these things. I’ll be encrypting the signal. She won’t be able to follow the trail.” I retrieved my gun and pointed it straight up, squeezing the trigger and de-patterning a small hole so that a Wi-Fi signal could seep through. I hid my location before initiating my Web browser, an old hacker’s trick, and then searched for maps of the city’s underground labyrinth. I surmised that I should be able to find a place where the sewer system and the underground subway line would nearly intersect. I found a suitable target location and then downloaded the directions before going offline. “Got it.”
I picked Haywire back up and ran toward the near-junction as quickly as I could. It was only three blocks away, and we made it there in only a few minutes. When I arrived, I set her down partially, letting her legs rest on the ground while I used my other arm to prop her up. She groaned again.
Next, I retrieved my gun and made my own access to the subway tunnel, instantly boring a hole in the ancient-looking, brick wall. I replaced the gun, picked my passenger up again, and marched through.
On the other side, I slid down the slight curvature of the tubular subway tunnel, right down to the tracks. Across the way, I saw a door marked, “MAINTENANCE.” I leapt across the ravine and landed right on the doorstep, then kicked slightly with my right leg. I had no trouble cracking the locked door open on the first try. “Home sweet home...at least for a little while.” I reached up and grabbed the string that hung from the lightbulb in the middle of the room, the only means of illumination.
“I don’t see what’s so sweet about it,” Haywire replied. The maintenance room was small and packed with tools and cleaning supplies. It smelled of dust, mildew, and rat droppings.
“Ugh,” Haywire reacted as a rat the size of a Yorkshire Terrier scurried behind an industrial vacuum cleaner. “Great choice, Professor.”
“It’s a fixer upper, I’ll admit,” I replied as I set her down against the wall, forcing her to splay her legs out in the only part of the room clear enough to do so. “But you have to admit, nobody’s going to be looking for us in here.” I grabbed my gun once again and stepped around the vacuum cleaner, spotting the giant rat as it tried to hide, unable to do so with its enormous rump too large to squeeze under the vacuum bag. A moment later, I made it disappear.
“Nice. How do you know that wasn’t conscious?” Haywire replied.
I paused for a moment, confused.
She waved her hand in front of her helmet, and it removed itself from her head, folding back into a collar that she easily removed. Her lips sported a sideways grin. “I’m kidding, of course. Geesh. You are horrible with humor.”
I nodded. “Apparently. Now, let’s get you fixed up, shall we?”
23
“What in the hell do you think you are doing?” Haywire complained, perturbed as I placed my palm flat against the middle of her chest, just above her breasts.
“Does that hurt?”
“Yes. So what? You’re a doctor now?”
“I downloaded a step-by-step tutorial for examining for broken ribs while I was online.”
She placed her hand on my wrist and tried to pull my arm away. The exoskeleton made that impossible, unless she used a force blast, but I acquiesced and removed my hand for her. “Thank you, Dr. Creepy Touch, but I can do a diagnostic of my avatar on my own, please and thanks. Now back off before I’m not the only one down here who needs a diagnostic.”
“Oh,” I replied. “Okay. I’ll standby.”
“Yeah.”
Haywire shut her eyes, the dark eyeliner having smeared into the echo of tears shed from the pain. Almost instantly, translucent screens appeared in front of her, the holograms hovering in her field of vision. She opened her eyes and read. “Fractured two ribs. Fractured my scapula. Awesome.”
“Can you fix it?” I asked.
“Fix it? Like heal myself with my mind?”
“Yes. Of course. You can manipulate the physical world. I assume you can manipulate your body as well.”
“Levitating a manhole cover is one thing,” Haywire replied, “that’s just brute force stuff. But healing fractures in a bone requires precision control.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t post-humans give themselves the ability to heal their injured avatars instantly?” It seemed to me that this would be a relatively easy feature to incorporate in their avatars. I was perplexed by how they could have made such an oversight.
Haywire shook her head. “This is Kali’s sim. There are rules. We can bend them, but only Kali can break them.”
Her answer further perplexed me. “Why?”
“It’s a little beyond your pay grade, Professor. Just trust me, okay?”
“Try me.”
“No,” she replied, annoyed. She winced as she tried to take a deep
breath. “Look, I can heal faster than a normal person. It would take a biologically non-enhanced human six weeks to recover from this with proper medical treatment, but I can localize my immune system’s response to maximize healing time. In seventy-two hours, I’ll be as good as new, but as for having the ability to snap my magic post-human fingers and weave bone fibers together in an instant? No. Sorry.”
“But you have this ability in the physical world, do you not?”
She eyed me for a moment, as though sizing me up. “Sure,” she replied, looking down as she did so, as though she didn’t want to meet my gaze—or perhaps it was that she couldn’t bare to see her own reflection in my visor while she lied.
“What year is it in the real world?” I inquired.
Haywire reached out with her right arm and put her hand firmly on my shoulder. “I am in agony,” she said emphatically. “You have to get me something for the pain.”
“Are you suggesting I go up to street level to look for a local pharmacy?” I reacted in surprise. “I’d be detected immediately. There are cameras—”
“Everywhere, I know,” Haywire cut me off. “Your suit has a built-in camouflage feature. It won’t make you invisible in the sim—it isn’t that sophisticated, unfortunately. Fooling the image on a digital camera feed, however, isn’t all that difficult. The suit detects the cameras in the surrounding area and then hacks into their feeds, replacing the pixels that would usually display your image with clone-stamped pixels from the surroundings. You’ll look like a distortion at most. A wobble. It won’t trigger any pattern-recognizer security programs.”
I remained silent for a moment. Something didn’t feel right. My armor, conveniently—too conveniently—appeared to have the needed feature for me to overcome every obstacle. “Okay. I’ll get you some painkillers.” I stood up to leave.
“And a sling. I’ll need a sling for my shoulder.”
“There’s a pharmacy almost right above us,” I replied, having called up a map on my HUD after hiding my location again. “I’ll be right back.”
24
“Engage camouflage,” I said as I pushed the manhole cover aside as though I were waving a mosquito away. I jumped up into the street, the stillness macabre as I surveyed my vacated surroundings. The sky continued to pulse between indigo blue and deep pink, melding the sky into a nauseating and ominous purple haze. I kept my eyes lowered as I looked down the street, and I spotted the drugstore not too far away. I jogged toward it as pop-up screens informed me that cameras had been detected in the vicinity and neutralized accordingly. Relieved and disturbed at the same time, I grimaced. Something still didn’t feel right.
I pulled myself out of my musings, deciding it was best to concentrate on the dangerous task at hand. High-tech camouflage or not, all it took was one NPC in my vicinity and I was as good as dead. I carried the lynchpin within me and that meant procuring me was Kali’s prime objective from that point on. I had to be extremely careful.
When I reached the door of the pharmacy, I pulled on it only to discover it was locked. I found that odd, considering that the pharmacy had a sign in the window indicating that it was open twenty-four-hours. Would an NPC, after being activated by Kali, have still had the wherewithal to lock the door behind him or her? It seemed highly implausible, if not impossible and this incongruity led me to become even more cautious. Although I could have easily yanked the door open with my exoskeleton, the fact that the door was locked meant there was a chance it was also equipped with an alarm, and I couldn’t afford to take chances. I surmised that, though the door might be alarmed, there would be no way that the walls would be, and fortunately for me, I had a way to make a wall disappear. I slipped into the alley next to the building, aimed my pattern disruptor gun, squeezed the trigger, and gained access in no time. No alarm sounded. I sighed in relief and stepped through the small entrance I’d created, then opened an application in my browser. En route, I’d searched for the best over-the-counter pain relievers and analgesics and their locations in the store were already displayed by the HUD’s augmented reality. I went to where the icons were hovering in the air, displaying their brand names in brilliant color, and snatched the various NSAIDs and acetaminophen off the shelf, slipping them into a compartment in my ample utility belt.
However, Haywire, in her tender condition, required more than just over-the counter-medicine. I was on the hunt for opioids, especially codeine or Percocet. I strode to the pharmacist’s counter and easily leapt over it, landing clean on the other side. I whirled and aimed when I heard a woman’s scream that wasn’t quite stifled.
There, hiding under the counter, her legs huddled against her chest and her hands clasped over her mouth, was the pharmacist, her white lab coat filthy and wrinkled.
“Oh...hi,” I said.
25
“Helmet off,” I commanded, causing my helmet to fold back into the collar of my armor.
The pharmacist’s eyes were like saucers.
I holstered my gun. “Sorry I scared you.”
“You...you’re...” she tried to say, the shock overwhelming her.
“Yes. That’s me.” I shrugged and smiled, realizing how odd it must have been for her to see the world’s most famous technology guru standing in front of her in such an odd get-up. “I know. The last person you expected to see, right?”
She nodded.
“I-I don’t know how to explain all of this,” I said, forcing a smile in an attempt to be calming, “but I have an injured friend in desperate need of some codeine.”
“Oh,” she responded as she slowly crept out of her hiding place and got to her feet. She turned to look toward the front door, as though she were checking to see if the coast was clear.
“We’re safe for the time being,” I said, “but we’re going to need to leave. Would you be so kind as to procure the codeine while I pick up an arm sling?”
Her eyes narrowed in near disbelief. “I...uh, okay. Sure,” she said. She turned to get the requested painkiller, walking in a trance, as though she believed she were in a dream.
Meanwhile, I hopped over the counter again, snatching the sling from the shelf.
“Codeine is prescription,” the pharmacist said from behind me. “I’m not supposed to—”
“I think it will be okay just this once, don’t you?” I replied.
In a daze, she handed me the full box of pills. She was young—less than thirty by the look of her smooth features. Nevertheless, the stress of Armageddon had clearly taken its toll on her, her clothes visibly soaked with sweat, even causing damp spots to form under the arm of her white coat.
“What happened to you?” I asked. “How did you get left behind?”
“Left behind?” she responded, confused.
“Didn’t someone contact you to evacuate you from the city?”
“I’ve been working all night. I had no idea there was an evacuation. I knew a plane crashed earlier...but, that doesn’t explain...well, what’s been happening.”
“What has been happening?” I asked, curious to know the perspective of a clearly conscious person in the moments that the NPCs abandoned the fiction of the sim.
“Well, it was a pretty slow night at first,” she replied, her voice weak. “I-I was just trying to stay awake—you know, until morning.” She held her hand to her forehead, distressed.
“You’re in shock.” I stepped to one of the fridges that lined the wall of the pharmacy and grabbed a Coke for her, snapping the top open and handing her the red can. “This’ll help.”
“Yeah. Yeah,” she said as she took a gulp. “Thank you.”
“So how did you end up hiding behind the counter?”
“The other employees—a couple of hours ago—they just up and left. That was...odd. I called after one of them to ask what the hell was going on, but she just ignored me. It was all so strange, but I still didn’t panic. I just waited by the front window for them to return. I was more worried about what to say to customers. But t
hen...oh my God.” Her eyes seemed to focus on the memory as it played itself for her again. “People started sprinting...so fast. It wasn’t human. They were in groups. No. Herds. Herds.” She looked up at me. “What the hell is going on out there? And why, of all people, are you here?”
“It’s a long story,” I replied. “I’ll try to fill you in as best I can, but I have to be upfront with you. We’re in danger.”
The can of Coke trembled in her hand, and I leaned over the counter and gently took it from her before she dropped it.
“We’ll be okay, but you have to come with me now and do exactly as I say. Can you do that?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“All right. I know some of this might sound absurd...all of it will sound absurd, actually. Ahem. Well, the first thing we need to do is make you invisible.” I reached across the counter again and this time grabbed her under both her arms and lifted her, easier than I would have been able to lift an infant, and brought her to my side of the counter. I placed her back on her feet, ignoring the astonished expression on her face as I judged her height. She appeared to be only an inch or two shorter than I. “I’m hoping this is one size fits all,” I said as I pulled at my chest, pulling away the same copy of the armored chest plate that John had earlier. I smiled at the pharmacist. “What’s your name?”
She looked down at her name tag. “Patricia.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Patricia,” I said. “I guess I don’t really have to introduce myself.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
I handed her the armored chest plate. “Just slap this against your chest. The suit will do the rest.”
26
“Who the hell is that?” Haywire groaned in a barely audible whisper. She was conscious but groggy, lying on her right side.
“Patricia,” I replied as I knelt next to Haywire and removed the codeine from my utility belt while also popping the lid of a pilfered Gatorade. “She’s the pharmacist.” I looked up at Patricia, whose armor had intelligently melded itself to her body, fitting snugly like a second skin. “How much of this should we give her?” I asked.
Post-Human Series Books 1-4 Page 69