Immemorial

It was dark, and quiet, and cold.

    The neon glow of the day was dulled and faded: the streets were lit by sulfur lamps that cast the world into disorienting shades of black and yellow. Occasionally a flash of white and a dull red glow would interrupt the calm as an automobile roared by – miracles so commonplace that no one bothered to notice.

    Suddenly, a far-off wailing, and on the street there were a hundred thousand diamonds, a pool of glittering rubies…No. Glass and blood. Distantly, someone screamed. It smelled like burning rubber, and burning flesh. Sickeningly, that smell was not a bad one.

    She (we have no names, to our own minds) opened her eyes to grey and green and sterile white. With vision came pain, a dull ache, and her limbs seemed hot and leaden. All around, the dull white-noise of machinery. She took a sip of water from the glass beside her bed, and tasted the tang of copper. There were no windows in this little room, but somehow it seemed overcast; perhaps just because the overhead lighting was so weak and watered-down. She tried to sit up, but she was aching and numb. Frustrated, she fell back onto the flat pillow, and sank into blackness.

Disorientation

She was running, breathing hard, sweating. The night was warm, but not pleasantly so: under the smog-grey sky, the heat got trapped, re-used, recycled.

Disorientation

Bright neon colors flashed and flared in the corner of her eyes as she darted through the streets. Dosed on amphetamines, she had the energy and endurance to run, but her terror and paranoia was also at a peak.


Disorientation

A screen of text that glowed a soft white hung over her field of vision, displaying her medical stats. They were largely ignored.

Disorientation

All that mattered now was that she wasn’t caught.

Dis

The Cartel was after her, but even with their bio-engineered hounds and tracker mechs, a fast set of legs and a good old human brain might just have been enough to save her.

Ori

Something silver and sharp whizzed past her head: before it could loop around and get a lock, she dove into an unlit alleyway.

En

Her drug-induced sensitivity overcompensated—she stumbled, and fell.

Tation

A sharp pain, a sudden warmth on the back of her neck: then blackness.

Disorientation

    Someone had placed a heating pad behind her neck while she’d been sleeping. The gentle warmth was welcome on her injured shoulder. With a groan, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and tried to take a better stock of her surroundings. On the edge of hearing, as if seeping through from another room, a weatherman droned on mildly, predicting cool days with clear blue skies. Her left arm was in a cast, but she could still wiggle her fingers: her legs felt too heavy to move. She tried to stay awake, wanted to talk to a nurse, but the warmth and the quiet and the gentle drone were all somehow very calming, and she drifted back into sleep.

    …Where she was greeted with the sight of crumpled boxes and bulging bags. Trash spilled out around her: old bioware and outdated robotics mingled with empty bottles and greasy food wrappers. There was even a severed head amidst the junk; it looked startlingly human, but was filled with bits of circuitry instead of blood. Still, the relic seemed to serve as a gruesome reminder, and she scrambled quickly to her feet, furtively looking around as if expecting to see a Cartel spook appear around the corner at any minute. Momentarily satisfied of her isolation, she grabbed onto an ancient ladder that clung perilously to the building next to her and began to climb. Maybe from the rooftops, she could piece together a better view.
    After exerting the extra effort, she felt suddenly drained. The drugs were beginning to wear out of her system; she fumbled in her pack with one hand, searching for another dose. The air tasted like copper here. She hated this city, but, somehow, she’d never thought of leaving it. Beyond the chrome and neon, the drugs and smoke and desperation, what else was there? This city was the heart of a larger organism that was just the same: it might have been rotting, but that wasn’t going to stop its beating.
    Pain again. She gasped, and had just enough time to turn and see a man in a cheap suit smile a cold-blooded smile before consciousness was rudely ripped away.


    When she woke, she didn’t really remember her nightmares—only that she’d had them. They left her feeling confused and foggy, and even a little disturbed. But maybe that was just the pain. Maybe that was just the painkillers. The ceaseless ticking of a clock slowly made its presence known and she looked around until she found the source. 4:22 AM, the face read. Perhaps that was the cause of her disorientation.
    No one else seemed to be around, though occasionally she heard snatches of quiet conversations, or footsteps passing through the halls. The air tasted like antiseptic, an unwelcome tang. Around her, the machines beeped and clicked and whirred softly, telling the world that they were still functioning: that she was still functioning. It was at once, paradoxically, both frightening and comfortable. She closed her eyes, waiting for the cool numbness to seep through her and soothe the hot pain, and tried to settle back into sleep.


    There wasn’t much time to think. There wasn’t much time to act. Even her cybernetic battle-mods wouldn’t be enough to disable the larger-than-life guard-dog that hovered over her. The expression it conveyed was eerily life-like: it was hungry, and mean. She could hardly move through the fog of withdrawal, anyway; could hardly think. What had happened? Coherency came slowly. That’s right; she had tried to take another dose, but hadn’t popped in time. She could smell the oil and the iron of the mech, the sulfur-scent of gunpowder.
    Strange images flashed, unbidden, through her mind: a white, bitter room, the hum of ancient machinery, a thin, hard bed. What were these fantasies? Remnants of a dream? A nightmare? Footsteps clicked through the room, as steady and as menacing as the ticking of a clock. She had wasted all the time she had. With alarming clarity, she realized that this was the end of the road. No more close-calls. No more running. No more dreams. This time, if she fell asleep, she wasn’t going to wake up. The tall Cartel man in the cheap suit loomed over her, smiling like a Venus Fly Trap. A smooth, dark gun filled her vision: she stared helplessly down its barrel, and tried to imagine the mech’s panting was the sound of her life support machine.

She couldn’t move.

She didn’t wake up.

He pulled the trigger.