Itty Bitty Bigger World - Waking Up

[Trigger warning: this one is really dark and violent for the IBBW universe. You won't miss anything critical to the Mastermind plot if you skip it.]

Itty Bitty Bigger World - Waking Up

I have nightmares.

The 2040s are just too damn civilized for someone like me, who has seen as much as I have.

I lived through the Great Quake. I was in Kurdistan when the Last War stubbornly refused to kick off. I captained a rescue hovercraft at Sacramento River. I've literally traveled around the planet, and not the easy way either.

I survived the 2020s.

Yesterday - so many lifetimes ago - Captain Amy had asked me, "Why do you carry a smartgun?"

My answer was simple.

"Because of the day I didn't have one."

That day was April 11th, 2021.

When I wake up too slowly, I remember that day. I usually turn over in bed and start crying.

Not an option, when one is waking up in a UC Stanford hospital bed.

So instead, I consciously remembered. The smells of a hospital helped. Way too much.

###

That cold, crisp but dry April day, I'd decided to go shopping on my day off. I drove my electric to the mall - this was shortly after the new combustion engine tax had passed, but before mandatory autodrive.

I'd idled near the movie theater, looking at the marquee, deciding which movie I didn't mind watching.

Understand that we didn't have smartware back then. We all carried handheld devices, smartphones or cell phones or tablets ... it's blurry. We had apps but they were primitive, written by other people rather than software, not very customizable. This was about a decade before San San.

My smartphone pinged out a medical emergency at the east end of the mall. Someone's auto-medical alarm had triggered and this dispatched the local medical service, which at that point was the Milpitas Fire Department. This also triggered the PulsePoint app.

So I started heading that way, heedless of the people in my path, whom I tended to treat as dodgeable obstacles as I ran.

Only dimly did I realize that the people I was running past, were actually running past me. I was wading into something that other people were running away from. They were also starting to scream.

Then I heard an asthmatic whine and more screams, more intelligible.

"Needler! Needler!"

Before I had a chance to think, I slammed myself into a dive and hid behind a rack of massage chairs. The asthmatic whine -- a sewing machine gone mad, a steam engine chattering to itself -- got much louder.

The PulsePoint app buzzed three times and forced the phone to continuous record and silent mode. Active safety protocol.

I reached to the small of my back. I touched cloth.

Shit!

I looked up just in time to see a Hindi woman in sari running frantically, long legs pumping.

Her chest turned bright red, like a spreading dot in the center, and red fluid spurted in a arcing stream.

She crumpled. Her purse went flying, off her arm as it relaxed.

If you've ever been in bullet time, you know what it was like for me on that day. I will assume you have not. Pretty much everyone under 25 hasn't. This is something San San is very proud of, and justifiably so.

My vision was hazy and foggy around the edges. My heart pounded painfully in my chest, LUB DUB DUB. I did not feel the bruises from slamming myself down on tile floor and skidding into fixed metal objects. My brain was in partial shutdown.

Only partial, because I was trained. I focused on my breathing, remembering to make myself breathe, open-mouthed in strong but relatively silent gasps.

Run.

I had been running the wrong way. If I had known -- if only I had known -- I would have run for the parking lot, for my car, for my pistol. Now I could run only for my life, and there was nowhere to run to. If I ran, I would be as dead as the woman in front of me, her brightly colored sari turning reddish black with her life's blood.

Hide.

I had a rack of massage chairs, perhaps hip height, that I was already hiding behind. They would probably stop needler fire. Probably. They would not block someone looking past and behind them, and filling the air with ultra high velocity metal slivers that would shred my internal organs.

"First aid for needler fire. Limb injuries: immediately apply tourniquets. Abdominal injuries: comfort the dying. Chest and head injuries: don't bother with comfort."

Fight.

I had my hands, my feet and what God had graced me with upon my birth. I had a pen. I did not have anything that could be used as a weapon.

My eyes tracked what was near me, sliding almost to my feet.

The purse.

I forced my eyes up, scanning left and right, at range, trying to make the blurry black at the edges of my vision work. Then my eyes saw him.

Baggy pants, jacket with hood, load bearing vest full of cartridges, slung rifle, magnetic powered pistol-class autoneedler held loosely in both hands as if out for a fucking stroll instead of murdering people.

Nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide.

So I picked up the purse by its strap and threw it at him.

As I did, I heard-remembered the dry Russian accent of one of my instructors.

"If you point a gun at a man with a gun, he will shoot you if he can. If you throw something at a man with a gun, he will dodge, _then_ he will shoot you."

The purse struck him. Then _I_ struck him.

I don't remember much of what happened next.

What little I do remember, I will spare the reader. Except one detail.

I know exactly what it feels like when a skull bone cracks under the edge of my hand.

###

"POLICE! POLICE! STAND UP AND PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR! YOU MAN, STOP OR WE FIRE!"

Armored police, and none too soon. Milpitas police with rifles and heavy body armor, that would shrug off needles and gunfire and give a fair chance against the new electroplasma systems just coming into use.

Understand also that the police of the '20s had been fighting terrorism for a weary decade filled with horror.

I stood.

The police officer blinked the tactical light on his heavy battle rifle, which could pierce the armor he wore. Blinked at me.

"HANDS FUCKING UP!" he screamed at me.

My arms were coated with red to the shoulder.

It felt like it took me a year to bring my hands to my shoulders, then above my head.

He crisply swung the stock of the battle rifle smoothly into my stomach, then the back of the stock down on my head.

###

I was lying on my stomach on cold tile with my shoulders wrenched painfully and my arms touching behind me. Cold metal kissed my wrists.

A hand yanked up my hair and a blinding light shined into my face. An amplified voice boomed.

"WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"

"Alan Anderson," I mumbled.

"WHERE ARE YOUR WEAPONS?"

I shook my head, unable to understand the question. The hand tightened and lifted my cheek from the tile by my hair.

"WHERE ARE YOUR WEAPONS!?!?"

The tile under my stomach was strangely cold. I wanted to shiver but dared not.

"I am unarmed!" I gasped.

The hand on my hair relaxed and two hands started to crudely, harshly grope me from head to foot. Not a square inch was missed. The sensitive parts hurt as much as you would expect them to. My wallet was stripped out and the contents dumped into a baggie, except for my driver's license.

"WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"

"Alan Anderson."

"WHAT IS YOUR ADDRESS?"

I gave it, quickly.

The hand yanked my head up again and I briefly thought I was looking into a gun barrel.

No. Smartphone camera, ruggedized version. Police device.

It beeped cheerfully.

"CLEAR!" the amplified voice boomed. Then after a moment, "Medic!"

###

I was still handcuffed. But I had been helped to my feet and walked over to a curb. A frantic woman cut off all my clothes and pawed at me here and there, but especially my gut, my eyes and the lump on the back of my head. She demanded quick questions to simple answers. Who am I? Where did I live? What day was it today? She scribbled on a tag, tearing off a small part of it and sticking it in a bloodied chest pocket of her paramedic uniform.

My EMT training asserted itself. Triage Tag - Yellow. Delayed transport.

As I watched in a distant, detached fashion, a medical helicopter briefly landed in the parking lot. Running figures carried two somethings to the back of it. The somethings were too small to be bodies, I thought.

Shit.

The helicopter lifted and roared for altitude. Probably headed to Children's in Oakland.

A lot of frantic people were here today. But the next woman was a source of preternatural calm, dressed in sensible slacks and a nice shirt. She had an old fashioned paper notebook, half full of ink written notes.

"Detective Rook, Milpitas Police. Are you Alan Anderson?"

With that she asked me questions. She advised me of my rights under Miranda. I waived them. I did my best to answer them, while someone swabbed at my hands and arms and under my fingernails, taking the swabs and putting them in little paper baggies.

After the evidence tech was done, a firefighter with a huge stack of wet wipes started wiping off my arms and under my hands. He was careful. I realized he was cleaning wounds. Bruises and scrapes and splits in the skin.

I belatedly thought to ask the detective what had happened.

"Active shooters. Probably Unemployables again. Shot up the security office, then the mall. No bombs this time, that's why we didn't get here quick enough."

Just as now, chemical scanners were everywhere anyone cared about - and they would reliably detect most explosives. But the minimum-wage guards could only hit the alarm if they were alive to do so. Thus the mode of attack.

I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know how many of them. I didn't want to know who, or why, or how.

I didn't want to know how many they had killed.

I didn't want to know how many less they had killed, because of me.

I already knew that there had been one more, because of me.

Justifiable homicide, the Detective called it. Fully justified.

I was released on my own recognizance, to the hospital.

A few hours later, a friend brought me my gun.

I have never been without once since, except in court. Even in San San.

Until waking up today, in UC Stanford Hospital.