59

Introductory Text

How to Establish a Physical Link
Ben's Narrative Part 06 59th Post Posted 18 May 2016 at 03:48:53 EDT Link to original

As the elevator plunged down through the building, I tried to understand the implications of it all. It was horrifying. Enraging. All this time, my entire life, without me knowing it, elevators have had a secret faster speed that they don't tell us about. Those bastards.

A message from Karen appeared on my set:

"must lure them / they will fire in here / get ready"

They will what? This was out of hand. God, I felt cranked up. Fantastic. The elevator began to slow, everything becoming heavy.

"pls move the body away from the door"

Move the dead body? No, she meant her own body. I pushed the gurney against the side of the elevator.

"door will open / take cover"

I pressed myself up against the wall. The elevator came to a rattling stop, and the door popped open. The back wall banged and dented as bullets hit it. I cowered against the wall, hoping nothing flew into my arteries. The door clapped shut again, and the floor seemed to fall out from under me as we went down. Man, this little bird had some access. I'd never seen anything like it.

Another message from Karen popped into my set, and I read every word in an glance.

"silver haohua van / parking # 17A / 20 meters / pls take me / pls"

The elevator came to another shuddering stop, and the doors opened one of the underground decks, a dim concrete cavern filled with rows of cars. I yanked the gurney out and pushed it like a madman, rattling over the asphalt. The van was where she said it would be. I stood there for moment, waiting for it to pull out for us, but it just sat there.

"u must get me wired / i dont want to get fingerprints on its presence"

Wired? Did she mean physically? An article appeared on my set called "How to Establish a Physical Link to Your 2039 Haohua Luxury Chariot." I guess so. I followed the ER guide, looking around every so often to see if anybody was coming. Weird sounds were emerging from the elevators. They seemed to be malfunctioning. I got a wire from my bag and linked Karen's fleshjack to a physical jack by the van's gas cap. A second later the van's rear door unfolded.

"get in"

I did as she said. Following her orders felt totally natural. It was like I was right back at the tip of the spear. I remembered my time in Turkey and Greece, playing feed games with the platoon all day then getting dropped right into the kinetic, right into the warm bloody center of the war. Run here. Shoot this. Get down. 19 years old. Traveling the world and blowing shit up while other kids were sitting economics class. God, it was beautiful while it lasted.

I shoved the gurney into the van and jumped in beside it. The rear door folded down.

"pls secure the body. 90 secs left"

90 seconds left until what? I flattened a seat and clumsily transferred her body to it and strapped it in. The van leapt backward and began twisting through space, throwing me against a side window.

"sry / must go"

I got in the other seat and strapped in as the van peeled out. We found the exit ramp and went up. I felt like I was about to break a rib on the arm rest as we went on a never-ending left turn, up and up the spiraling ramp. Finally, the daylight of the ground level burst in view. The whole parking lot was swarmed with flashing cop cars, black armored vehicles and cops in hard gear. The van came to a stop in the middle of it all.

"Fuck," I muttered. The cops were moving in a hurry. It seemed like they hadn't quite formed a proper perimeter around the building, but they were close. "We've got go now. They're going to form a--"

"wait"

"For what?"

"air"

All around us, the cops were assembling, pulling their vehicles into place, leveling their pistols and rifles. I watched our few possible avenues of exit close up. The van just sat there. Karen's eyes were closed. She looked calm, at peace, just a sick little girl taking a nap.

I heard a sound, and my blood ran cold. I hadn't heard that sound in years, but there was no mistaking it. It was a sound that was etched in my brain.

In the Marines we used an app called Harpy to call in air-to-ground strikes. It was a wonky over-engineered DOD piece of shit, full of weird quirks that they were afraid to fix in the name of ultra-stability. It made a little sound like a sleepy bird chirping when a friendly missile was incoming and it was time to put your stupid head down so that you wouldn't get all that expensive training blown out of your skull. About 2 seconds after that sound, something would light up, and a moment later the sound of the blast would hit and the ground would shake.

I heard that sound now coming from my set. My god, what kind of access did she have?

"get down"

A moment later, police perimeter around us became a wall of fire, and the van was hit with a boom that felt like the earth splitting open. I put my head between my knees and let that old feeling flow through me, the shuddering rush of American air power being liberally applied. When I opened my eyes again, the van's safety windows had bowed inward on Karen's side, almost becoming liquid. Everything around the van was engulfed in fire and smoke. Slowly, the windows began to regain their shape. The van took off with a start, rushing blindly through the chaos.

Two minutes later, we were on the interstate, flying down the taxpayer lane, and I was sitting there, trying to remember how to swallow. It was unreal. Just unreal. She had called in a drone strike in the middle of Atlanta. The level of access required to do that was unimaginable. It meant completely basing the DOD systems. It was beyond any exploit collective. It was beyond governmental. It was planetary. It was god-level. I was sitting in van with an infraspace god.