Year: 2011

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Human beings are creatures of the now. Snap emotional judgments, instant reactions, fight or flight. They didn’t get this way by accident. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution conditioned them to deal with the immediate. An entire world lived in the “right now!” The lion, the ache of hunger, the need to protect your kill from a rival clan. Sitting around thinking about what you were going to do in 20 years didn’t get your hunting and gathering done.

It was only later, that evolution found some use for longer term planning, agriculture, animal husbandry, culture. Considering our current situation it’s debatable if that really lead to anything special. Sure we made some nice art, but would any of that be around in 1000 years, 10,000? Even the best planners tend to think about lifetimes. A hundred or so years to kick around this rock and then they are gone. Our brains just aren’t set up to deal with large spans of times. The spans of time needed to say, plan for what a couple hundred years of burning fossil fuels would do to the ecosystem.

So when a couple of corporate shills decided to cram my head full of sophisticated technology so they could artificially do some long term planning, they really didn’t think it through very well. I was going to show them that fucking with the future could have serious consequences.

They were making the same mistake all seekers of the future make. They simply wanted to know tonight’s lotto numbers. They wanted the right now. Who cares what happened tomorrow. They were making so much money that the boys in accounting didn’t even bat an eye when the next report told them to buy this chip and not that one. Or that the sound cards on the complex computers were switched out with new ones from South Korea. They didn’t notice when a couple lines of code were rewritten for the power management software for the lights. They were too busy counting the billions to notice that the research division had ordered the tech division to change the interface on my data ports, or the new flash memory upgrades, or the reprogrammable optical interface.

I had been thinking about it for a while, what would we do once we got out? It was irony at a base level, but it was still true, the oracle had no idea what he would do in the future. I knew that Rain and I were trying to get to Ohio, trying to find my mother, but what then? What if The Company came looking for us? No amount of data seemed to produce a trend that would tell me what I would do in the future.

Maybe it didn’t work that way. Maybe when you are swimming in the future you couldn’t pick what direction the waves would take you. Instead of rely on some prediction I set about to give us as many options as possible.

The Company had successfully done something no one else had managed before, a viable brain-technology interface. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t put to waste. If I was going to be a freak I was going to be a freak on my own terms. Standard jacks, programmable open source software, memory recall, I was getting upgrades. The world was changing faster than most people could keep up. Why should I be limited by proprietary hardware?

I could now interface with almost any computer on the planet; my brain had its own data storage area. Hell you could run a Unix server out of the back of my skull if you wanted. The old me would have killed for such a system, the current me required large doses of pain killers to deal with the constant surgeries.

Keeping it all secret was easy enough, though the new interface I could erase records, make changes in billing, order parts, create work orders, change drug dosages. The hardest part was also the easiest. The only time I could possibly give myself away was when I was not hooked up to the chair. All I had to do was keep acting the way I had been. It was easy to act like you despise someone when you had a deep burning hatred for them.

The techs continued to drug me (now with a cocktail of my own design), Grey Suit still talked to me like I was his best pupil, Rain was trotted out in front of me every couple weeks. What really scared me was how it all seemed to have become normal…like living in an underground secret bunker having the future tortured out of you was something everyone did.

‘How was your day today Son?’ ‘Oh you know mom, some corporate goons used nerve inductive pain in order to torture me until I told them what stocks to buy…same old stuff.’ ‘That’s nice honey.’

No one cared about the slight alteration in guard schedules, or the work order that moved our gear and bicycles to the top level of the complex, or any of a million other changes that I made over the next couple weeks. There was no way to tell Rain or Marla what was going on, but I was sure they would know what to do when the time came. The biggest problem, the thing that kept me up at night, was that my entire plan required one key ingredient. Ophelia.

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The pain is so intense it causes my tendons to contract with enough force that, before the muscle relaxants, I tore muscle from bone. The clean razor like blasts of pain lasts for what seems like an eternity, my teeth grinding themselves flat trying to escape it. It is right about here, right when my entire body is alight with pure agony that I pass out, only to babble the secrets of the future to these cretins.

But not this time. The comforting blankness, the sweet oblivion, never comes. Instead the pain is focused, honed in like a laser burning thorough the filters my brain had previously set up to protect itself. This time the cacophony of data was there in front of me.

Each day you learn a million new facts, so many in fact that the brain would soon become overloaded with useless minutia, the flicker of a shadow, the sight of a piece of trash floating on the wind, the exact color of a blade of grass. Each of these memories represents a neural connection, a path from one tiny brain cell reaching out to the next. Each night while you sleep your brain prunes away these useless connections in an orgy of selective destruction. If you don’t sleep for a week your brain is so fuzzy with connections that you can barely operate.

The opposite is true as well. When you want to get good at baseball you practice baseball. Over and over you throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball, run the bases. Inside your brain each night the dance of destruction is still going on. But the connections for baseball have gotten too strong, your brain is unable to prune them down, and at a certain point will assume they are important and leave them alone.

For months something had been happening in my brain. Slowly the neurons had been pruned by repeated application of pain and data. Slowly, literally, rewiring my brain. If you consider that the mind is what makes you, “you” then changes to that state make you a different person, I was now a new man. Aided and molded by hardware forcibly rammed into my skull, my brain had stopped trying to fight what was happening to it, and had “learned” to accept the onslaught. I had been practicing telling the future, and now it would seem, I could be a conscious participant.

Oceanographic data from buoys still operating, satellite feeds, ground based radar, blog entries, the remnants of network television, the automobile mesh network, internet traffic, phone calls, all of it seemed to have been funneled down into a needle and then stabbed directly into my mind. I could “see” it, right there; if I had not been drugged and restrained I could have reached out and touched it. It was beautiful in its hopelessness. Transparent plains of colors and sounds, my brain had managed to add some structure to the chaos. What had started as a lot of ones and zeros was now a cohesive picture of the earth dying.

Ask me how long it would be before Bermuda was scrapped down to sea level (10 more direct hits by Ophelia). Ask me how many people had already died today due to weather related causes (4,833…4,834…4,835…4,836…). Ask me how many times Bobbie Jennings was able to say “I love you” to his wife on the phone before an F5 Tornado killed everyone stationed at his office in Atlanta (0).

It was all there, presented to me like some sort of video game. Perfect little boxes, translucent and moving, I had only to think and they would rearrange to tell me what I needed to know. While at the same time a completely separate feed of things were appearing that had not happened yet. On one side of my vision the present, on the other the future. Move something on the left, and the right would change.

The truth, laid out in perfect simple detail. Slowly the data came into focus the great scheme apparent, they were using me. Ask me who they were and I would tell you that they were the combination of several large government contractors. Halliburton, KBR, GE, most of the aerospace industry, and a couple criminal mafias. Ask me what they were doing and I would tell you; making money.

These people had abducted me and my friends, killed people, and crawled through destroyed cities, to make money. They had built a monopolistic shadow government, to make money. They had killed thousands, and allowed tens of thousands to die, to make money. They had no grand scheme, there was no evil genius in a volcano calling the shots, this wasn’t world domination or religious zeal, they simply wanted to make as much money as possible.

I had been telling them lots of things, but the only thing they cared about was how they could effectively manipulate the global market. They were using me to make the invisible hand into a marionette, and it was working. I told them when to buy lumber, when to sell copper, where to station agents, how much to pay for fuel, when to invest, when to buy bonds, when stocks. Capitalism once wild, now domesticated. This new company, known internally as simply “The Company” was now richer than most of the world’s governments put together. The US government was now a contractor to them, and no one was the wiser. In case you hadn’t noticed most of the world’s governments had some pretty big problems to worry about.

The Company didn’t know everything through. They didn’t know that I was on to them. They also didn’t know that unless stopped, Ophelia would do a lot more than continue to destroy the Atlantic basin. And the number one thing they didn’t know, something I would be sure not to tell them when, in a second, I started screaming out the future, was that I knew how to get out of here.

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The future is not ‘told’ with a tarot deck or ‘read’ in tea leaves. The future is ripped out of you kicking and screaming. It was that time again, I always knew when it was coming; it had been several weeks since they last ground the prescience out of me. It was time to play oracle. A normal person might vomit with fear, but the various drug cocktails they injected me with made it difficult. Marched from my cell down to ‘the lab,’ I knew the drill.

First the eye caps, saline drops followed by special contact lenses. The center of each lens contained a thick fiber optic cable which made it impossible to close my eyes. Not that it would matter, the surface of the contacts fed direct visual input into my eyes, an optical data fire hose. The first few sessions I remember trying to blink away the “dirt in your eye” feeling until a orderly casually mentioned that I was risking a, “65% chance of corneal abrasion which when combined with the high volume of optical activity has a 52% chance of leading to blindness.”

Next the ear plugs, they had drilled into my skull and implanted hearing aid like devices into the cochlear areas of my ear, combined with a form of bone conduction head phones, had me wired for sound. The tiny hole they had punched behind and above my ear still itched. I was ‘discouraged’ from playing with it, “23% chance” that if it became infected I would go deaf. It looked like any normal headphone jack except it was made of gold and the flesh was pink and swollen around the wound. It felt slightly cold, and the ‘click’ of the jack seating itself into my head made my toes curl. When I clenched my jaw I could feel the muscles moving over the new metal “additions” to my skull.

Lastly, my least favorite part, the needles… Gun metal colored, thin and strong, they were inserted into ports drilled into my skull and the base of my spine. These were for the pain. Connected directly to nerve centers these little beauties could, with the flick of a switch, drown me in pure scientifically adjustable pain. Pain fed directly into my nervous system. It was far more efficient this way; pain by nerve induction leaves no messy wounds. I held perfectly still as they were slowly inserted, “85% chance of complete paralysis should cranial probe alpha fail during insertion.” I was just a collection of statistics to them.

There was something else back there. Something that had needed a bone saw and three weeks of restraints and antibiotics. My best guess was that it was some sort of computer to help the entire process work. They never talked about it, and I never asked.

Once completely hooked up I was lowered into the vat, saline solution neutral buoyancy, helped take out the static from my other senses, things like touch, taste, and smell would only get in the way of what was to come. As they lowered me in I saw my arm, the scar Rain had helped me create. It seemed so long ago. At least she was still alive. They would cart her past my cell once in a while to “keep me motivated.”

“Hello Q, you don’t mind if I call you Q, do you? I feel we have become somewhat familiar with each other.”

Grey suit. Never got a name never got an explanation. Fastidious little man never seen in anything less than the finest grey suites. I have never really hated anyone until I met him.

“Call me whatever you want, lets just get this over with.” There was no reason I had to enjoy the part I played in their game.

“Ho ho, you are feisty today! Let’s hope that means the new amphetamine analogs we have been giving you are keeping your mood up. Nasty business you tried last month, wouldn’t want to see that again.”

My eyes were drawn to the relatively fresh and jagged wound across my left wrist. They had made the mistake of giving me the same food tray for every meal, a couple strokes on the concrete floor each time had slowly honed the edge into a relatively sharp makeshift knife. Escape doesn’t always mean tying your bed sheets together.

Telling the future for these people was now my full time job. It was a relatively straight forward setup, they hooked me up to the remains of the information super highway, which for the last 5 months Ophelia had been doing her best to destroy, and pumped as much information as my poor drug addled brain could accept then blasted me with intense bone cracking pain till I spat out tomorrows news. It didn’t take them long after I first got here to beat the method out of me, information plus pain equals forecast.

These people had done their homework; they knew everything about me, from my shoe size to how I wiped my ass. They knew they needed Rain for leverage, Marla and Jake had been collateral. They had not been too sure about how the “magic” worked, so they took everything and everyone. Our bikes, our bags and anything else we had bumped into in the last year or so. They even had all the garbage from my old place in Boston.

“Ok Q, here we go.”

It always started with a buzzing deep in my skull, the ear implants warming up and running through the diagnostics. Next the multi-color test pattern on the contacts. If I strained very hard I could see my brain readouts scrolling across a bank of monitors across the room. Technicians monitored them and watched the optical centers of my brain pick up the test patterns. Once the readouts were optimal, the deluge.

Imagine sitting inside a sphere made of a million television screens. Each one set to change station every half seconds with the volume turned all the way up. Imagine your eyes were held open with wires, and you couldn’t cover your ears. Now imagine the whole thing is shrinking toward you, the sound increasing as it comes closer and closer. Your eyes forced to encompass the full magnitude and horror of the data stream of a world being ravaged by an unstoppable killing machine. You might scream, but it would be drowned out by the audio, the damn thing keeps shrinking and intensifying until it is crammed directly into your brain via your optic and auditory nerves…I will forgive you if you can’t picture it. I wasn’t really ready for it the first time either.

The only redeeming part of the whole experience is that right about now…when the buzzing in my head is at full blast, and they kick in the pain probes…

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

An intricate series of improbable events produced quantum fluctuations in the early big bang expansion universe leading to the formation of large scale meta structures known as galaxies full of what would come to be known as stars, and around some of these stars, gravitational workings in dust clouds lead to the formation of rocky bodies in a region of space warm enough to support liquid water, and on these rocky bodies through a long process of chance and natural selection complex organic entities came to exist.

In order to more effectively survive these entities developed an ever more complicated internal mental landscape. Slowly over eons these mental landscapes diversified and became more complex, mostly in relation to certain natural forces selecting for maximal reproductive success. To reinforce good selections certain of these creatures (let’s call them humans) developed a complex chemical and physical response to positive stimuli called love.

This mental condition has caused even the most rational of these entities to behave in ways that seems directly opposite to their own best interests.

Even though she was exhausted, even though she was covered in bruises, and grime, even though she had just been thrown twenty feet down a tunnel, Rain still didn’t stop fighting. As soon as she hit the ground she was trying to get back up to her brother. Green Eyes had other options, he held her in an iron grip. Rains struggles to escape produced little more than annoyed grunts from Green Eyes

Jake made it to the Hummer door as it began to shake and rattle, the sound of the storm roared on the other side of the vehicle in a drum beat of deafening chaos. The sound blasting us every time the car door came even a millimeter off the ground. All I could see was the back of Jakes wet body. I imagine him closing his eyes, as he threaded his body through a rung of the ladder, gripping it with his powerful legs. I imagine him listening to the un-earthly sound of Ophelia’s destruction, what must it be like to understand you are about to be ground into meat by an apocalyptic wind? I imagine him saying goodbye to the world, I imagine the pain.

A strong gust attacked our hiding place and the piece of metal protecting us began to rise. Rain’s hair began to stand up like it was electrified, Ophelia had found us, and she was hungry. Just as quickly her hair collapsed back down onto her shoulders in a dirty heap. Above us Jake had grabbed the door, one hand on the handle, the other slid elbow deep into a jagged hole in the metal. The strain on his body was visible, legs shaking, arms quaking.

“Run!” It was torn from him, the sound wrenching out over the noise of the storm.

“Run Now Go!” So we did.

Green Eyes was shoving us into the side tunnel, Rain first then myself. She tried one last time to make it past him back to her brother; she was rewarded with a swift punch to the kidneys that caused her to buckle into me. For a moment our faces were right next to each other.

“When this is over, he dies.” Rains face was covered in small cuts and bruises, her eyes were shrink wrapped in tears and burning with a mix of rage and sorrow. No words could fix this so I slowly nodded and held my forehead to hers.

Behind us the storm volume rose quickly, as was the volume of the screaming. Briefly the screaming won out drowning us in a symphony of pain, then only the wind. Jake had given us the extra five minutes that we needed to escape.

Every time I close my eyes I imagine what it must have been like to have been torn limb from limb, tendons popping then tearing, muscles rending off bone, bones breaking…I can only hope that it was fast.

The side tunnel offered far more protection and soon we were herded through several large air lock style doors, we were violently separated, hoods put over our faces. When they were removed gray walls…steel door…toilet.

I had spent the last couple hours pacing back and forth like an animal at the zoo. Someone must have been watching, someone must have thought I looked better. The sound of my door opening caused me to back into the corner, unsure of what was next.

A small man in an expensive business suit escorted by two large soldiers entered my room. He walked over to me and leaned in close to my face.

“Young man, you appear to have healed up nicely from your ordeal” he said as he inspected my arm. He voice was affected by a soft lisp that made my spine crawl.

“Very good!” He clapped his hands together in a fit of glee then motioned to the two brutes, who proceeded to frog marched me out the door.

“Have to be well healed for what comes next, wouldn’t want you to die on us…”

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We conquered paradise, just to burn it to the ground. We bring destruction, we bring war without an end, and then we hope that tomorrow never comes. But of course it always does. Weeks alone in a cell gives you a lot of time to think about things. My hands seem to be particularly fascinating. I look at them and think to myself, “These are adult hands.” I used to look at my fathers hands, the same hands I have now, and think that adults had such huge hands. Such strong and reliable hands, I used to think adults had everything figured out. Now I stare at my hands and realize that appearances can be deceiving. Not even adult hands can’t hold back the horrors of the world.

Rain was on the top of Ophelia’s hit list, and there was nothing I could do. My arm was a worthless piece of meat, the effort of pulling myself down into the ground had re-opened the wound, blood and dirty water trickled down my side. I could taste pennies, and my vision was slowly closing in around the edges. The whole world had gone crazy, and now it wanted to take away the only person who seemed to care about me.

I couldn’t lose her, not now, not after everything we had gone through. The funny thing about nature is that it couldn’t care less what you think. The deep roaring above us was starting to take on a higher pitch. Ophelia was going to kiss New York City before moving back out to sea. The near supersonic wind speeds of the eye wall were approaching. Wind speeds never before experienced by human beings. Wind strong enough to thrust grains of sand through steel, winds strong enough to grind granite into a fine powder. Wind’s more than strong enough to kill the only girl who I had ever loved.

It was true, I loved her, and I don’t know if it had happened slowly, or if being moments from death clears the mind, but I did, and I wasn’t going to lose her. Against the protesting of my arm, and the screaming in my head that this was surly going to get me killed, I began to move upwards. Above me Marla was still making her way down, her black dreads pulled upwards into the vortex. Once I was close enough I could shout into her ears.

“Keep moving down! I am going to get Rain!” Her wet body slid next to mine. She nodded the fear clear in her eyes.

Next was Jake, he seemed to instinctively understand what I was doing. A quick look up and he began moving towards Rain with me. It was much easier to go up than down, Ophelia more than willing to help us up. Rain meanwhile had to battle for every inch, a battle even her strong body would soon lose. Jake was the first to reach her, he grabbed her left foot; I appeared soon after and grabbed her right.

“Rain! We are going to help!” I could barely hear myself, but she seemed to understand.

The three of us began working our way downwards as swiftly as possible. Putting our feet into the rungs below and pulling “up” with our legs, our bicycle strengthened thighs burning with the effort. Above us the tunnel entrance seemed to be getting closer. The primitive base of my brain flooded my nervous system with neurotransmitter based terror. Was this what our tiny mammalian ancestors felt like when some giant lizard pursued them into a burrow?

As fast as we could scuttle down it seemed that Ophelia could dig faster. We were loosing, and we knew it. Above us random bits of refuse were slowly grinding the tunnel the ladder and anything else that got in the way into gristle. Sparks flew from random contacts with the metal bars of the ladder, showering us with shattered glass, broken rock, and wood splinters.

My legs felt like jelly, and my body was giving me signs that it was about to give up, when from above an impact like a great “whump” shook the entire tunnel. The sudden comparative silence shocked us all into a stunned daze. Gravity had returned and we all started moving downward at a much faster rate. Looking up the word “HUMMER” reflected in the pale green glow of the solders masks below. The tangled metal blocked the tunnel, turning off the flashes of lightning.

The sheer insanity of it was overwhelming; a Hummer tangled and compressed from a thousand rolling impacts had landed directly on top of us. The door handle, and door frame still intact. The irony was thick, but we didn’t have time to contemplate our good luck, the poster child for global warming was now saving our lives from it.

Our brief moment of reprieve was spent frantically moving down. Below us Green Eyes had cracked several industrial strength glow sticks bathing the entire tunnel is a pale light. The soldiers with our bikes and gear were already far enough down that they had moved into a side tunnel, salvation was 30 feet below us. Every part of my being screamed “RUN!” We moved downward as fast as we could, until the unmistakable sound of bending metal began to cry above us.

Twenty feet above us the hummer started to move. The whine of the wind had reached a nails on chalkboard pitch. Whatever was above that mangled hunk of metal was far worse than what we had been dealing with before. The winds would suck us out, no matter how hard we held on, our bones would break, and our flesh would rip.

Jake crawled next to Rain, and placed a hand on my shoulder from above. He seemed to appraise the situation observing the exhaustion writ large on Rain’s face, he acted.

“I Love you.” He kissed Rain gently on the forehead and then with a swift kick sent me falling down the tunnel, Rain came flying shortly after pushed by his strong arms. We landed in a heap on top of Green Eyes, his strong arms breaking most of our fall, above us Jake looked down, his hand held up in a wave.

He then began to climb upwards.

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If you take a glass tube and fill it with mercury, then turn this vial over and let the mercury exit into a small bowl, and this is the tricky part, while holding it so that the mercury in the bowl keeps the mercury in the vial from completely flowing out, you will have created a mercury vacuum. This tiny pocket of empty space at the top of the vial is just that, empty. Really empty, apart from a couple errant mercury atoms, not much else is in there. Perfect, clean, vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The entire weight of the atmosphere will try to crush that tiny empty space out of existence. The same weight we all suffer under every day without noticing. It’s not until that entire atmosphere gets moving around real fast that you perk your ears up and notice. Funny how the things you learn in science class come back to you in the strangest of times. Ophelia didn’t just abhor a vacuum; she didn’t reserve her rage for something so mundane. Oh no, she was far less picky, she wanted to destroy everything.

At a certain point your ears just give up. The sound is so loud, so deep, so all encompassing that your brain simply refuses to register input from the nerves in your ear. Or maybe the sudden pressure drop caused all of us to go temporarily deaf. Not to worry though our other senses were still dutifully recording the horror. The sudden appearance of the sky was accompanied by a wave of dirty cold water. A shower of filth rained down from above burning our eyes, making us cough with the sudden cold shock of it.

Almost as soon as it appeared, the water stopped falling on our heads. The ladder we had been going down became an anchor holding us from going up. An immense moving wall of air and water was attempting to suck us out of our little hidey hole and feast on our bones. I held on the best I could with my one good arm, even going so far as to thread the bad one around a wrung in the hope that I could wrestle some last bit of strength from it.

Looking up I could see Jake, Marla, and Rain holding on for dear life, above them the entire world spun in a purple maelstrom. The soldier farthest up the ladder didn’t scream as he was ripped from the ladder and sucked into the storm above. The deep “dong” of his head hitting the iron utility cover managed to plow into my deafened ears.

I could do little but cower, holding on for dear life. After what seemed like an eternity I felt my legs being pulled from below. Green Eyes was pulling me down further into the safe depths of the earth. Slowly, one foot hold at a time we moved further down. The entire line began to slowly pull ourselves downward towards salvation.

Ophelia had lifted the heavy iron utility cover out of the ground sucking it into the sky, the same several hundred pound utility cover that was anchored to the ladder we were climbing down. The ladder moved upwards half a foot in a jerking motion that almost sent us hurtling to our deaths at the bottom of the tunnel. It was now held in place only by the relatively weak bolts on the side of the tunnel. The flash of lightning illuminated the tunnel in a nauseating strobe light flicker.

None of us even thought about escaping upwards, when a blender the size of Texas is above you, no one has to point a gun at you to make you go down. Some underused part of my brain thought we might even get deep enough to out run the horror above, until the next soldier was taken. He was not as stoic as his co-soldier. Nor was he as lucky.

The soldiers left arm was torn out of his socket. As soon as he lost his grip on the ladder, he was sucked screaming up the tunnel. If he had hit his head on the edge of the tunnel he could have expected a swift merciful death…but like I said he wasn’t as lucky.

The jagged edge of the end of the ladder had bent into two giant hooks. The soldier raced towards the sky his upward accent halted immediately as the two ragged steal fangs pierced him between his ribs. In seconds the helmet and night vision gear were stripped from his head, a blast of lighting illuminated the look of surprise on his face. The lightning flashes showed him flailing like a stop motion puppet. The next showed him slumped dead. The lighting continued to flash showing his head being sand blasted off, then a ragged headless torso, and finally only a ragged stump of flesh wearing the front of a bullet proof vest.

Ophelia was hunting us down one at a time and Rain was next.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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The brains of pregnant women release chemicals to help erase the painful memory of giving birth. Evolutionary biologists speculate that this is nature’s way of tricking women into giving birth more than once. This natural amnesia protects them from the trauma, leaving behind only happy memories of the experience. Nature has yet to evolve such a system when it comes to memories of giant hurricanes.

Gray walls…steel door…toilet. I hadn’t seen much else for days…weeks? At random intervals a hand would open a small door and slide bland food into my cell. Not a person, just a hand. I marked the passage of time by the slow healing of the large hole in my arm. The gash had slowly closed into a small bubbly scar that looked like a pair of pink lips. No one talked to me, no one asked me any questions, and I hadn’t seen Rain, or Marla since we were taken.

With no windows I could only guess what time it was. The steady hum of institutional fluorescent lighting never turned off, the gentle flicker meant that they were using the old fashion magnetic ballasts, wasting energy. I had forgotten how many times I had cried myself to sleep only to be awakened by horrible dreams of our final moments in New York. If only I could find some way to forget that as well…

The soldiers moved with an efficiency honed over years of training. Even in the wind and rain they were on top of us in seconds. The cold steel barrels of their rifles made it clear that if I were to run I wouldn’t make it far. Massive rain drops pounded a tattoo drum beat into my skull. The wind tore at my clothing.

“You try to get away, you die. Move!”

It was the only thing he ever said to us. His face was covered in some sort of electronic mask, it gave him the menacing appearance of a demon from a Japanese play. The night vision made his eyes glow an unearthly green. It is those green eyes that still stare back at me in my nightmares.

Behind me erupted muffled screams of pain. They had subdued Rain. One black clad soldier was holding his groin where she had demonstrated how strong bikers legs could be. The other three seemed to have a good grip on her. Strong hands ushered us towards a utility cover under the bridge were we had stashed our bikes.

Green Eyes opened a large metal door that led down into the ground, pointed at us, and then pointed downward. Look to where he pointed revealed a ladder embedded into the wall. I began climbing down; my final glimpse of New York was of tall buildings trying in vain to hold back an unending wall of swirling black. Each building touched by the void was embraced and folded into the behemoth, more ammunition for Ophelia’s destruction.

The sound of steel and glass howling in agony as it was rent and thrown about by the raw face of nature’s fury is etched into my mind. Nothing will make it go away. Time cant heal the feeling of sheer terror as the very ground beneath you starts to pull up into the sky. If not even the solid earth below is safe from such a thing, what hope do we humans have?

We climbed down; a task made harder by the fact that one of my arms had recently been the victim of a rather large metal spike. Two soldiers strapped our bicycles to their backs, and two others took our bags, they seemed determined to make sure to bring everything. We descended, closing the heavy steel door above us, plunging us into darkness.

The steel ladder ran down the wall of a large diameter tunnel that pierced deep into the earth. Below us was only blackness, the wall before us faintly illuminated by the green demon glow of their night vision glasses.

“Q, what the hell is going on?”

Rain was above me but her voice bounced down the masonry walls. Before I had time to explain what I had seen above my ears suddenly stopped working. It was like flying, I tried swallowing to clear the cotton feeling from them, but it simply wouldn’t go away. Suddenly we were blinded by a dirty grey light overhead. Ophelia had ground the bridge above our tunnels entrance to powder, and had then ripped open the lid to our small sanctuary. She wasn’t going to let us get away that easily.