Itty Bitty Bigger World: Hanging In

About thirty seconds after the capsule left the station, Amy gave up the 'tired, helpless female' imitation she had been doing, presumably for Bao's benefit.

"We have to get lost," she said crisply.

I had the documentation for the power armor open in a side window of my ware. After initial bitter complaints, my ware had settled down to working with the armor the best it could.

I have to admit something really shameful here.

When I was first educated on these matters, a "manual" was typically a booklet of bound paper. (_Not_ smart paper, dumb paper, you know, the kind dirtied by ink or toner.)

Later, manuals were in a flat file format known as Portable Document Format or PDF, which is three lies in one phrase. This lasted perhaps two decades until being replaced with dynamic formats which would cheerfully display text, pictures, or some artistic combination thereof.

I had selected "artistic combination thereof." A picture is worth a thousand words, and expert systems could do an excellent job of sketching, storyboarding, and even a rudimentary plot to carry the viewpoint character (the user) forward through the narrative (or how to use the device or system).

Nonetheless, I was very aware that due to time constraints, I was speed-reading a %@#&* _comic book_ on how to use my newly acquired power armor.

The hero of the manga was a CalFire firefighter newly assigned to Rescue Squad. The plot involved his first few days in training, first in a base camp, later in the field, learning to use his armor without risk to human life or excessive damage to public or especially private property.

I found that I was jealous of the non-existent lucky bastard, which only made me read more intently.

"Get lost?" I said while reading how he gyro-balanced his armor to stand on a curb without crushing either his feet or the curb in question.

"Bao said he'd received two offers. He didn't say if he'd accepted a third."

I tensed and my armor chattered. Then I closed my faceplate, which I had not looked forward to.

The capsule came to a halt in a crowded public place. Amy immediately dismounted and said, using amplified sound from her uniform, "Please Step Back. This capsule is Out of Service." In simulcast a half-beat later, her uniform provided Russian and Farsi translation.

I stepped out and people stepped _way_ back. Power armor was not something people typically saw in public. Think of a man wearing full riot armor - with no identifying markings - on a BART train. Kind of offputting and more importantly, unexpected.

The capsule doors closed and the capsule departed.

I only had time to get a glimpse of my surroundings -- crowd of people, busy pedestrian platform with a lot of capsules around -- when the same capsule hissed to a stop, _went off track_ and starting coming right back for us on internal power.

"Tac," I subvocalized instantly and got a wireframe schematic of my surroundings. My underground surroundings. Nothing above, nothing below. Standard capsule station with capsule lanes intermixed with pedestrian walkways, including speedwalks.

KINETIC HAZARD ALERT, my ware cheerfully advised as the capsule prepared to run both Amy and myself down like little bipedal insects.

Amy thought about running. But her entire career had taught her not to endanger human life, and we were surrounded by flesh speed bumps. Any move she made would endanger more lives, so she forced herself to stand stock still. Her hand swept across her empty holster. I could see her subvocalizing desperate commands.

I had a stupid move available to me, so I took it. I stepped back into the capsule lane, precisely where I had been a few moments ago - except no capsule.

An unarmored human would have been pushed aside by defense fields, or if somehow the fields had been turned off or defeated, either incinerated by the superconducting voltages or safe for about ten seconds until hit at speed by the next capsule and turned into chunkier salsa than usual ... relatively slow speeds, possibly intact corpse, still closed casket funeral.

My power armor made contact with the voltages and asked sweetly in an androgynous voice, "Do you wish to charge?"

The oncoming capsule corrected course slightly away from Amy and accelerated swiftly, almost faster than the eye could follow, towards me.

FIELDS UP! I subvocalized desperately and remembered a bit of lore from search and rescue training.

If you are about to get smacked by a kinetic force, it is better to act to minimize the force. Press yourself back into the seat if facing forward. Press your helmet against the cabin wall if facing aft.

In this case, I leapt slightly upward so that I would not be knocked off my feet, but instead struck by the capsule in mid air.

I was weightless for about three seconds and surrounded by a glowing white field. My power armor energy levels dropped from 62% to 11% rather suddenly.

Then I was pressed against a hole in the concrete side of the tunnel wall, made by my defense field as it (and I) were slammed into the tunnel edge by the renegade capsule. Bits of it were scattered all around us.

I dimly heard a voice saying calmly but very loudly,

"PLEASE LEAVE. THIS STATION IS CLOSED DUE TO AN EMERGENCY SITUATION. PLEASE LEAVE. FOLLOW DIRECTIONAL ARROWS TO A PLACE OF REFUGE. PLEASE LEAVE."

I stepped out of the hole. Amy was fine, on one knee, still subvocalizing.

A CHP flyer with black and white markings delivered itself in an adjoining capsule lane.

"Alan, get over here!" she shouted, so I did.

The CHP officer inside uncoupled his harness, took one look at the wreckage, and started triaging wounded with a spray pencil.

Normally I would help. But today I wasn't the help -- I was the problem, and the best thing I could do for these poor people was to get as far away from them as I could.

Amy climbed into the flyer and remotely unlocked the back cabin.

"Get in!"

I wobbled as I walked, but I managed to get into the flyer without touching the relatively fragile door. The flyer, even though it was still in track mode, groaned under the armor's weight.

I put my back to the heavily armored seat and the flyer closed its doors and departed.

Amy's face appeared on a view of my ware.

"Someone hacked the capsule. You still alive in there?"

"For the moment," I coughed, then took her meaning.

Everything was suspect. The capsule, Bao, his helpers, the power armor, the experimental energy charging device provided with it ... and hacked power armor could do cheerfully nasty things to the unfortunate occupant.

Ten billion credits could buy a lot of fail.

I scrolled the emergency systems menu. Yes, this power armor was equipped with automatic tourniquets. Yes, it was willing to assert to me that it was entirely under my control, and it would not for example fire all sixteen tourniquets simultaneously and leave me an armless, legless corpse.

Then again, I was breathing, so the life support was still in the life supporting business.

The CHP flyer broke surface to an above-ground track, then broke away from the capsule network and took powered flight. We banked in a sweeping arc away from the sun, gaining height quickly. My armor gave me a compass - we were headed north-west now.

"This is shaping up into a major battle," she gasped during the high-G turn. "Someone keeps trying to buy orbital laser time and getting kicked off the servers for protocol violations. But sooner or later, someone's going to be willing to accept the bid..."

We banked further, now headed north, over the hills west of downtown San Francisco and headed for the Presidio and the Golden Gate bridge.

That's when I found myself weightless for the third time that day, surrounded by CHP flier debris.

In the 21st century, this is how you get shot down. One second, a perfectly good aircraft. The next, wreckage - or if you are less lucky, vapor.

Amy punched chute -- good chute -- and still strapped to her seat, the parachute system carried her down slowly towards putative safety, well above me.

Meanwhile, my armor and I were doing our best imitation of a dropped rock.

I spread my arms and legs into spread-eagled free fall position by reflex. This kept me from tumbling out of control.

"POWER ON," I subvocalized, then paused. What was the command for powered flight? Was this bag of bolts even flight capable?

The armor announced, "You are falling. Awaiting commands."

I speed-skipped through the comic book, turning each page with the flick of a finger, then checked the index. Fail.

"Still falling. Deploying re-entry guidance chute."

A hard YANK and the armor dragged me upward. "Discarding external armor. Deploying landing chutes."

With that, pieces of armor fell off my arms and legs and torso, and another hard YANK, punctuated by yet a third YANK as the larger parachutes opened.

The piece of armor on my left forearm, to which the gauss energy absorber remained attached, fell with the other armor pieces.

Ten seconds later, my feet scissored into a large tree, snapped its branches, and my chute hung up on the remaining bits of tree. Then the chute material ripped and the suit and I hit the ground.

I tried to stand and the armor was having none of it.

"Escape, eject," I muttered, and the rest of the armor fell off, like a gentle metal rain, into pieces.

Back to a badly wrinkled -- and smelly -- smartcloth shirt and pants for me.

My ware still displayed the now useless comic book manual, and I closed it.

A crowd of people were staring at me. A police bot and medic bot were racing up on treads and under rotors respectively.

"You have made an unauthorized landing in an ecologically sensitive area. You are being detained," the bot announced.

I subvocalized a few commands that amounted to the cop-robot equivalent of "I'm a cop and I'm having a really bad day. File your logs and take up a defensive position." The copbot complied.

The medbot scanned me, turned quickly -- almost dismissively if it had been a human -- and whirred off to some other unusual event.

Amy was still airborne, not falling as fast because she hadn't had the benefit of several hundred pounds of gear. I tracked her by Mark I eyeball, not wanting to put a query into the Net. She was steering her chute into a landing on top of a high rise building. Neat trick if you can avoid getting slammed into the side of the building after failing to stick the landing. But she managed it.

I held up one hand in a L gesture. Thumb sideways, index finger pointed straight up, other three fingers folded.

A lyftaxi, just smart enough to realize that it could indeed drive on the grass when summoned at police priority, did so and I boarded heavily.

"Keep moving," I ordered it. It closed its doors, did not make idle chit-chat, and complied.

I needed to keep moving. No time to worry about details like where.




.