Lex vignettes 8
"Lex"
My eyes snapped open to the pitch blackness in my room at the commune. My guide's voice was not something I was accustomed to hearing in my ear while I slept, and my heart was already racing.
"what is it?" I subbed, not daring to break the silence. If he was waking me now, something was very wrong.
"Troub - ble , le ex get out ge et ou u" his voice stuttered.
I was already moving by the time I heard the first stutter. I'd only ever heard his vocalization engine fail once before when he was facing off against another guide AI in newnet.
We had been playing hard, and he knew I wanted to win. At my request, he had given the game process almost real time priority. It was like watching someone have seizure, and there was no hiding that it hurt him to do so. I've never called on him to use that much mental capacity again, and here he was doing it for me of his own will.
I hit the floor running, making a mad dash for the window, and jumped.
The wind rushed past my ears and I felt my stomach come up into my lungs as my momentum turned from jumping to up out of the window to falling towards the grassy yard below. Time seemed to stop, hanging there in the cold night air three stories up, and I tasted a bit of null-g before our little pucker in the grid of space-time pulled me back towards it.
I'd never jumped before, and had no training on the stripwear for maneuvers like this, and it was becoming abundantly clear to me that my guide was too deep in his own trouble to take control of the system for me.
9.8 meters per second squared times three stories high is really fucking fast.
I landed on my feet, but didn't stay there long as I continued downward. My knees crumpled into my chest and I felt, quite acutely, two of my ribs crack. The second impact of my head into the soil was actually not as bad as I expected, but my wrist was certainly in a position it should not have been in when I shook off the blow.
Stupid.
I pulled my head up first, gingerly checking my neck before the rest of the pain hit me. I looked down, dazed, and saw my faceprint in the mud. In another situation, the negative image of my very surprised face may actually have been quite funny.
I didn't really have time to appreciate the image right then, however, and cradled my right arm to me as I slowly staggered up and out of the mud and to my feet.
I still had no idea what was going on, but knew that if my guide was risking a hard crash and throwing all of his resources at something, yet still took cycles to tell me to move, the last thing I was going to do was second guess him.
After a few steps, I could tell that I was at least marginally ok, and broke into a run, out into the cornfields where I would at least be off people's visuals, lost among the tall green stalks. Hearing the sprinklers, I turned towards the spray of water, hoping to keep my heat signature masked by the cold little droplets as they covered the area, and now, me.
Instinctively, I crouched low, eager to make as little a blip on whatever sensor systems were sweeping the area as possible.
As I knelt there, both the situation and the pain of my new injuries flooded into my consciousness. I'd been working at the commune for about 3 weeks now, without any real encounters with incity authorities aside from the initial reaction to my disappearance. Now, it seemed, someone or something had tracked me here, and had gotten a lot closer than I cared to admit.
The cold of the sprinklers was beginning to wear on me, and the shivers were making my wrist twinge in a way I wasn't that fond of. I wanted to know what was going on, and if my guide was OK, but I didn't dare try to communicate with him again until he got out of whatever situation I had gotten us into.
After almost an hour, the throbbing became unbearable, and my shaking was so bad that I could feel my teeth begin to clatter together. I knew hypothermia was setting in, and I needed some sign, but I was truly helpless, unable to move until I had some signal.
I bit into my bottom lip to keep from crying, holding back a massive sob which threatened to come out in a flood of bawling not conducive to hiding here in the corn.
I don't know how much more time passed, but I don't think it could have been long, simply because I don't know how much longer I could have lasted beyond that point. The next thing I knew, I could faintly taste blood in my mouth from where I'd bitten my lip, and I was being woken from my almost-meditative state by both the sound of footsteps and a single, soothing tone from my guide. It was his status sound, quietly indicating all-systems-normal. It was the all clear.
It was also, apparently, my cue to let loose with the most emotional jag of crying I can ever remember being on. I sank down into the corn and soil scented mud, letting out all of the pain and tension I'd held inside for hours, still no wiser as to why I'd been forced to run and hide here like prey.
I was vaguely aware of Sheila soothing voice saying "It's ok darlin', they're gone" and then Tiny's massive arms lifting me effortlessly back to the house, nearly a mile from the field I'd fled to. I must have fallen asleep right there in his arms, feeling so much more the little girl I'd been 3 years ago incity than I had so far out here. In a way it was comforting to know that there were people here who cared and would bring me back after something like this.
Just before losing consciousness in Tiny's arms, I checked my dim eyelid terminal for an update, and sure enough, a ticker of the events of the night was slowly marching across their insides in the blood red of my natural inner-eyelid. I guess I fell asleep while reading the words "anti-terrorism committee stages midnight raids outcity" as they progressed across the insides of my eyes.
