Author: admin

Kevin Paulsen was a famous hacker in the 80’s best known for a stunt he pulled where he controlled the phone system of an LA radio talk show so he could win a Porsche. I wasn’t hacking phones to win a fast car, but I was hacking my own brain, at least enough to run my heart and lungs…a boy can dream.

I had been poking around in my own brain for weeks. Only twice has Jason had to fry off some more hair. Fucking around with the inner workings of your own brain doesn’t come with a manual. For a couple hours last week I couldn’t smell anything, and lately when I rub my big toe it makes the back of my neck Tingle…all in all not bad for a beginner.

The problem so far has been that apparently your brain doesn’t work the way a computer does. The programs seem to have been written using trial and error. Bits and pieces of my brain copied into the memory on the chips in my head and combined in random ways until something works. There was a lot of junk in there. The only way I was even able to read them was because some sort of deeper level program could decode it all into words and feelings.

“This is never going to work… you are going to be electrocuting me forever!” The frustration was getting to me.

“You should get out of here man, you been back for three weeks now and have barely left this room, go find Rain or Marla they are out in town working.” Jason was justifiably sick of having me sigh and curse in his computer lab.

He was right though, I needed a break. I checked the laptop one last time to make sure my brain was running smoothly, grabbed my bag, and was out the door and onto my bike. Since we had gotten back Rain, Marla, and I had made ourselves useful by starting our own bike messenger service. Running around town doing local deliveries, packages, letters that sort of thing.

Most of the residents of Watkins Glen had given up on the US Dollar after the stock market crash and instead moved to a local currency called the Watt. The Watt was like the old gold standard, each Watt worth something real that you could trade in. In this case it was worth kilowatt hours from the towns wind turbines. At any time you could take all your Watts down to the local credit union and trade them in for electricity from the turbines.

Since the wind didn’t always blow, and there wasn’t enough electricity to provide pre-crash levels to everyone, the market was lively. You could buy just about anything that the town produced with Watt’s, and seeing as how even Jason’s generosity had limits we had to earn our keep.

Such was born the Watkins Glen Bicycle Messenger Guild, Rain and Marla had even gotten a lady in town to create us some little badges for our bags, in exchange for a month of free deliveries. The badges had three lighting bolts over a stylized hurricane. Rain said it symbolized the three of us escaping Ophelia, saying “if we can outrun that bitch we can outrun anything.”

They were probably out on the town doing deliveries, that or making out some place. This thought made me smile. The three of us had grown even closer over time. It was like we were all dating each other. Rain being the glue that held us together. I loved Rain, Marla loved Rain, and Rain Love us both. It could have been really weird, but it wasn’t.

The people in town were nice, but they just couldn’t relate to what we had been through. We spent every night together curled up in a pile in Jason’s garage. He had been nice enough to put us up and found us an old mattress. Sleeping together made the sex easier, but it also meant someone was there to hold you when the nightmares returned.

I rode down to our little corner shop to see if the girls were around. Originally an old newspaper stand, it wasn’t much, but it was free and centrally located. We took over when the previous owners industry became impossible. It’s hard to distribute any nationwide printed publications when shipping costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars per truck.

No one was around, but there were a couple of packages sitting in the drop off bin. This gave me a chance to try something I had been working on this morning. I took the package in my hand and blinked twice with my left eye. This turned on what I had started calling my Second Sight.

I held the packages in my hand, and thought about how much they weighed. This was a little tricky because I had to think about the weight in a very specific way. Not like weight of the world, but good old fashion pounds. Human beings are notoriously bad at telling how heavy things are by hefting them, but I had written a program that would interpret the strain on my arm muscles and show me how much something weighed.

Checking the boxes on our scale I got pretty close, a couple ounces off. Of course if I started hitting the gym I would have to recalibrate the whole thing, but there wasn’t much danger of that. I tossed the smaller ones in my bag, and blinked twice with my left eye again, followed by a special pattern of looking to the four corners of my vision. This turned off the test programs and turned on my normal Second Sight.

The weeks of work hadn’t been completely wasted, and I have to admit riding around town on my bike with a heads up overlay of a Google map in my vision was almost cool enough to make it worth all the surgeries it took to get that way. It was like a cross between Terminator vision, and having a web browser overlaid on your eyes.

That isn’t to say it was always normal. There was a whole class of “programs” I had found deep in my head there were just too strange to mess with. I was afraid that if I fucked with them my kidneys or something wouldn’t work anymore. These programs occasionally would assert themselves in my vision with phantom overlays, only sometimes would it get bad enough that I would have to have Jason blast me.

It was impossible to concentrate when these little bastards would be telling me how tall something was, or worse making random characters in parts of my vision, but today they were behaving. I rode around town following the map when needed, and turning it off when I knew where I was. Or at least I thought they were behaving.

I was just about back to our shop when my entire vision blinked bright orange. I nearly lost control of my bike skidding to a stop just in time. The orange faded but was soon replaced by what could only be described as a visual hallucination. A tie-dye array of colors and feelings. I sat, and watched…

The girls returned to find me crying in front of the shop, my head in my hands.

“What’s wrong Q?” Rain sat down next to me.

I looked up at her, my eyes red and swollen.

“Rain, it’s going to get worse its going to get much worse.”

There is a story about the crew filming the last landing of the Hindenburg. They were having technical problems with their cameras; the airship was due to land at any moment. Desperate to get the cameras working, the camera operators balled up his fist and struck the top of camera sharply, the camera began to work and they were able to capture the fiery last flight of the grand air ship. Some say it is the first recorded case of “percussive maintenance” in the modern age.

I planned to do basically the same, smacking my brain, not with a fist but with a giant blast of electricity. I could only hope my situation turned out more like the camera, and less like what it filmed.

“What! What the fuck are you talking about Q?”

“Seriously Q, that sounds like a really bad idea.”

Both Rain and Marla had perfectly rational reservations about my stopping and then restarting my brain. I would have had a long reasoned chat with them about the pro’s and con’s of my approach if the sound of them talking wasn’t making my head explode with pain.

“I…can’t…don’t have time to explain, I need you to whack…shock my brain… electricity lots of it here and here.” I pointed to the two gold connections in my skull.

“Trust me…” I had to keep my eyes closed because looking at anything was causing an agonizing flood of visual stimuli.

“How high should the voltage be?” At least Jason was asking useful questions, too bad the only thing I could do was open my arms wide, only to quickly return my hands to my head so that I could writhe in pain some more.

“Are you kidding! That’s going to kill you!” They both loved me, but right now I needed someone who would electrocute my brain without reservation, because if this didn’t happen soon I was going to die from neural overload, or bash my own skull in to make the pain stop.

I nodded my head toward Jason, hopefully indicating that, yes, please shock my brain with large amounts of electricity.

“I have a transformer out back we use to convert the output from the wind turbines to the inverters…on a day like today that’s putting out a couple thousand volts. Will that do?” Jason said pointing to the back door.

Thumbs up. I stood heading to the transformer, and almost immediately fell flat onto my face. Blood was streaming from my nose as they carried me out the back door. The pain lost in the buzz going on in my brain.

Rain and Marla carried me out the back door while Jason ran around the shed to return shortly with a pair of jumper cables in his hand. I couldn’t help but smile slightly. Maybe it was the absurdity of it all, or maybe I had been spending too much time with Marla.

Jason quickly turned off part of the transformer, and connected one end of the jumper cables to two large metal connection points. He turned the switch back on and touched the two ends of the cables together briefly sending sparks flying into the air.

“Do I like hold them on, or just give you a quick juice?” He seemed remarkably calm for someone about to electrocute a friend’s brain.

I made hand motions indicating a short blast and then removal.

“Ok here goes nothing…umm…clear?”

Wow…that sucked. I sprang back to existence with a giant sucking breath, my vision was slowly extending outward from a tiny dot of black and my arms and legs felt like they weighed a million pounds. My toes and fingers tingled as blood slowly made its way back into them.

The smell of burnt hair hung heavy in the air, a quick check revealed I now was missing a small patch of hair around each connector. Couldn’t really blame Jason for that, but I might need to wear a hat for a while.

“Jesus Christ Q.” Marla was watching me from one side of the table.

“You stopped breathing for a while babe, so umm I had to slap you around a bit, I don’t really know CPR.” Rain was hovering over me looking very pale.

“I’m sorry I scared you, but I couldn’t think of an easier way to restart the boot loader in my brain.”

“Should we even bother having you try explaining that?” She sounded incredulous but you could tell by the look on Marla’s face she was happy I was OK.

Jason got me a glass of water and I laid it out for them.

“When we were in The Company compound they needed a way to connect their data feeds to my brain so they could make it do the future forecasting thing. The problem was that my brain only had the normal type inputs, sight, sound, touch, that sort of thing. My human senses wouldn’t allow them to cram enough data into my skull, I mean what were they going to do, sit me in a class room and teach me all that shit?”

“Yea but why did we just have to electrocute your brain?” Another sensible question from Jason, who to his credit, seemed to be taking this all very well.

“Well what they did was they put a small computer in my skull that had some tiny wires that lead to different parts of my brain. This allowed them to pump data directly into my brain, but it needed some simple programs to allow it to regulate certain things. Before I left I made some small edits to that system.”

“What I think has been happening is that the edits I made to the system have allowed the system to work in both directions now. Instead of just having programs on a chip that allow data to enter my brain, the data can now flow out of my brain into the chips. My subconscious has been…creating programs.”

“How is this possible I mean how does that work?” Rain looked pretty confused.

“My head is so full of shit at this point that honestly I don’t really know, but what seems to be happening is that my memory and the computers in my head are getting together and creating… I guess you could call them helpers. They calculate things, measure things, help me remember things, seem to tap into my predictive abilities.”

“Umm that sounds pretty awesome dude…you got like Google in your head.” Marla could understand body modification.

“Yea if I could get it under control, instead the interaction between the programs and my normal brain functions seems to be causing some sort of feedback loop.”

“And that is bad?” Rain said helping me up. As I looked at her, faint traces of orange shapes briefly appeared but faded away.

“If I don’t electrocute my brain every time this happens, my brain will get so overloaded that my heart will stop beating.”

“Ohh…”

You can get used to a lot of crazy shit when your head is crammed full of silicon and fiber optics. You don’t immediately freak out when data streams flicker across your vision. These sorts of bugs are to be expected with new technology.

You do however freak out when you look at the Watkins Glen wind turbines and instead of just seeing lovely rotating blades creating energy you instead see a detailed overlay detailing all the mechanical parts of the machine as well as a real time estimation of the amount of energy it’s producing.

“Guys! You’re back! Damn that kid he must be asleep again out on the south lookout.” Jason was covered in grease and smelled like fish sticks; maybe he was having problems with the grease truck.

“Who’s the new girl? Hi my name is Jason…” He said holding out his hand to Marla.

“Q what’s wrong man?”

Not much, only that my brain isn’t under my control, and it feels like spiders are crawling around inside my eyes.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a laptop and about three feet of cat5 cable would you? Also I think I need to lie down, like right now.” Rain dropped her bike and was at my side almost instantly.

Jason ushered us into a barn built up against the base of a huge wind turbine. To our surprise a wave of cool air blasted us in the face when we opened the door. Rain and Jason sat me down gently in an old wing backed chair that had been reupholstered with plastic rice bags. The sound of the turbine was transferred down the poll and filled the room. A sharp contrast to how quiet it had been 100 feet away.

“Evaporative cooling system, keeps the computers cool, pretty neat huh?” Watkins glen had developed quite a bit since we had left.

I guess I wasn’t going to pass out just yet; instead I was going to be treated to an orange glowing overlay in the left of my vision informing me that the ambient temperature had just dropped 15 degrees.

“Q whats wrong, you haven’t been like this in forever? Is it the stuff in your head?” Rain’s voice was visualized as vibrating waves in my right eye, while a series of geometric objects appeared superimposed on her face, calculating the surface area of her face.

“I don’t know man, you look pretty pale, and your eyes are all dilated and shit.” Marlas dreadlocks shot off little golden ratios, and fractal patterns. My vision was being drowned out by all the data coming off her.

“I need you all to be silent for the next couple of seconds, and Jason could you turn the lights off, it’s getting worse.” Even my own voice was causing my vision to light up with the definition of “light” and “worse” streaming across my field of vision like a stock ticker.

I got the laptop booted and opened Firefox, jamming the cat5 cable into the socket behind my ear. The feeling was strangely comforting remembered from the hours upon hours in the chair. The controller chips in my head were directly IP addressable, and my “modifications” had produced a graphical interface, just like a router.

I typed in the IP for my own brain and was presented with a simple program that I had built from a bunch of pieces of open source software. The last time anyone had done this it had shown several small process running, mostly power monitoring, and simple input and output processes. This was how my brain had interfaced with the system that The Company had built for me.

Now it showed a multitude of programs running, they had names comprised of random ASCII character. None of this had been put here by “me,” although I was starting to suspect that “me” might be becoming a little more complicated.

The Company had hired some of the smartest people on the planet. People who lived and breathed brain science, and the best they could come up with were a couple of simple algorithms that allowed my brain to dynamically modulate how much power it was drawing from the machines connected to it, and a simple system by which I could revive and send data from my mind. The unique nature of my brain handled the rest.

This shit was totally different, complex, broad, and overwhelmingly strange. As I stared at the screen trying to make sense of it all, the random characters began to shift. A couple letters became a word, which became a sentence. Some of them became images; one became the feeling of cat fur, another was the smell of peanut butter. One bit coalesced into the color blue, surrounded by the sensation of cold water on my arms.

There was a feedback loop; whatever was happening to my vision to cause it to draw data out of the world around me was chewing up the seemingly random code in my own head and turning it into something my conscious brain could access. My brain was running a program and that program was able to decode the mess in my own brain…no wonder my head felt like it was in a vise.

The pain was getting worse, and I was starting to feel really hungry. My brain was burning the sugar in my blood at a rapid pace. I was also starting to get an idea of what was going on. It’s like calling an Indian tech center with computer problems sooner or later they always suggest the same solution.

“Guys…” Speaking caused my eyes to explode in a torrent of data overlays, accompanied by a sudden burst of pain. I grabbed my head in a futile attempt to make it stop, everyone had been perfectly silent the entire time, drawing closer to hear what I had to say next.

“Guys, I think, I think I have to, reboot my brain.” Speaking was becoming impossible.

“The good news is, I think this will fix what’s wrong, the bad news… I am pretty sure it’s going to stop my heart.”

Take a ping pong ball and cut it in half, tape each half over your eyes, add some headphones playing white noise and lean back onto a nice soft bed. In only a couple of minutes most people begin to see shapes and lights and some even feel or smell things. The human mind is so used to processing inputs that when you block out the major sensory inputs your brain fills in its own bells and whistles.

Some people find this experience very pleasant. Me, not so much. After months of being fed nothing but drugs and high bandwidth sensory input, not being hooked up to the machines was kind of like being in a dark room. I felt like a three dimensional being smashed violently into a two dimensional world.

Faint ghosts charts kept showing up transposed over the landscape around me. Shapes and colors, figures, faintly related to the objects around me, but like a word on the tip of your tongue they maddeningly refused to coalesce into anything meaningful. I shook my head hard and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands, now was no time to figure out what was wrong with my head, we had to get out of here.

The world outside the compound was a moonscape. Everything higher than a couple inches had been swept away by repeated passes of Ophelia. The rest had been scooped out and polished leaving smooth divots that would catch the blowing dust and propel it up into our eyes. A wall of clouds was to our right, lightning cracking loose in such rapid intervals that the thunder was a constant sound pounding at our senses.

At least one thing was working in our favor; Ophelia was late. She was taking her sweet time enveloping New York City, although calling the small smoothed lump of sand and gravel a city would be a creative use of that word.

Silently we mounted our bikes and pedaled westward, our legs aching from months of inactivity, running from the storm, running from what had happened deep underground. When we came to the river we saw where most of the city had ended up, we walked our bikes across, leaving long island behind.

“What are we going to do now Q?”

It had been days and we were still working are way westward, fleeing from the coast and its many memories of death. Jersey had bled into Pennsylvania, we would hide on the side of the road whenever we came across anyone else, too paranoid to trust anyone.

“We run, I guess, Watkins Glen is a couple hundred miles north of here we could see Jason again.” It was the only place I could think of with someone we could trust.

While Rain returned to cycling like a robot that had finally gotten its legs reattached, Marla and I were returning to the cycling lifestyle with a bit more trepidation. Our bodies ached deeply at the end of each days travel. At night we slept cuddled together. The nights were much warmer than they used to be, but sticking together made us feel safer.

It had been months since we had been above ground. The mad world we had left had only gotten worse. The already rapid pace of change had accelerated. In many places the once dead or dying trees were now replaced with acres of char. Forest fires had swept through northern Pennsylvania, and southern New York clearing out everything and everyone.

People had moved on, leaving the black wasteland to packs of feral dogs, and crows. Great murders of crows darkened the sky, these clever birds had someone found a way to thrive in this new arid wasteland. They would stare at us ominously when we would stop to rest. Bobbing their heads while patiently waiting for us to drop something edible, or die and become food.

Food was mostly cans of crème corn, and string beans found in old gas stations and abandoned houses. Water was harder to find, the land was drying up here, but some farm wells still had water. With less people around to draw from the aquifers the wells would eventually fill again.

Cars didn’t run anymore, oil was just too important, with the Atlantic and the Gulf permanently off limits, what little oil was still imported had to go the long way around. What few people we did see were on bicycle, or walking. They never seemed to wonder why we didn’t want to talk. Humanity hadn’t gone Mad Max yet, but after the horror of the last 20 months, they had become somber.

“Guys I am fucking beat, I got to rest.” Marla had not lost her penchant for swearing, but over the weeks of traveling she had spoken less and less. In a barren world, you found yourself spending a lot of time in your own head. We found an abandoned farm and made camp.

“Is there really any point to all this?” Rain ran her fingers through my slowly growing hair tracing patterns around the scars on my head as the three of us lay in a pile under a shed in some long abandoned field.

“I mean those fuckers are going to hunt us down and force us back to that horrible lab. Even if they don’t, look around, what can we do to fix this?”

“I say fuck all this shit, lets get as far away from those fuckers as possible, find some place and live the best life we can till this shit hole of a planet sheds us like a bad parasite.” Marla’s dreads slinked snake-like into my face as she got worked up.

Marla and Rain went back and forth. The problem seemed so large and we seemed so small. I was so lost in thought that I barely noticed when a pair of lips gently locked itself on my ear.

“I love you.” Rain whispered in my ear.

The troubles of our world were put on hold. Rain began to gently kiss me, slowly removing my shirt. It was impossible to hide our actions from Marla, and we didn’t try. When Marla leaned in to gently kiss Rain I didn’t make any moves to stop her. A bond had been formed between the three of us, and in this harsh world concerns about traditional social norms seemed stupid.

The three of us found comfort in knowing that we were alive and together. We slept well that night in each others arms, a small drop of comfort and love in a giant ocean of desperation and destruction.

The next morning we scrounged up what little food was available and headed north. It would be good to get to Watkins Glen, see Jason, and most importantly take one of those fine solar heated showers. This thought kept my legs turning for the next two days. I was good to be going back to the only place that had shown us any sanctuary in the last year.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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When I was taught about Newtonian physics my science teacher told us all about objects in motion and cause and effect, planetary bodies, the whole nine yards. She had pointed out that according to Newton it was possible in theory given the state of the universe at it’s creation to tell where every atom would be at any point in the future. If you knew the location and speed of each particle in the universe all you had to do was churn the physics and you would know where they would all be in an hour, or a day, or a year, or a billion years.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The idea that I was simply playing out a part in a play written at the moment of the big bang was the most terrifying thing I had ever contemplated. How did things like free will play in a system like that? I was a strange kid.

The next day when I brought my concerns to my teacher she was kind enough to explain Heisenberg Uncertainty. For instance Newton didn’t know that it is impossible to know with certainty both the location and velocity of a particle. It might seem strange, but the universe was indifferent to human’s sense of what was normal.

For most people the idea that there are fundamental parts of the universe that human beings can not know bothers them. Not me, I was happy that no one could predict my every movement based on how a couple of hydrogen atoms were arranged a couple billion years ago.

Newton was a smart guy, but he didn’t know everything. If someone like him could get things wrong, what was I missing?

It was with a mind full of such doubts that I set my plan into action. If everything worked as planned we were going to be escaping into the tail end of the largest storm this planet had every seen. But what was the alternative; live the rest of my life in this cage predicting tomorrow’s stock prices?

“Sleep tight freak.”

Guards sometimes grow to sympathize with the people they guard, not this guy. The door slammed shut, and I began to count. Ten steps and the guard was at the corner, ten more and he would be back to his office. In twenty minutes he would be back, or that’s how is normally worked, but not tonight.

At exactly 10:59, (or exactly 1371985143 seconds since January 1st 1970 as many unix servers measure time) the improperly created memory buffers on the sub par North Korean RAM chips were sent the result of the current accounting program which, because of a recent purchase of illegal ivory products resulted in a number just big enough to create a buffer overflow error. Usually this would result in one of the servers being reset, but because of a slight change in work schedules the current server tech was delayed 30 minutes.

The crashed server was the one running the software that controlled the fans on the base power center. There used to be others, but they were removed, a work order had been filed anonymously weeks ago. With the fans off it took approximately 5 minutes for the power supply to overheat and shutdown. Normally this would sound an alarm, but recent work on base phone systems, meant that this particular alarm was disconnected.

When the power supply died the battery backup power supply kicked on. Among other things this was to ensure that the electronic locking systems on the “visitor” cells would stay closed…too bad each of the batteries for Rain’s, Marla’s, and my cell had been power cycled several thousand times over the last week to ensure that they wouldn’t hold a charge.

Simultaneously a recent re-write to fix “memory leaks” in the software for the water treatment plants firmware had the unintended consequence of causing all other doors (except the ones needed for us to walk to the surface) to lock.

With a tiny “snick” the door sprung open, I hadn’t planned on the locking mechanism being spring activated. I actually jumped a little at the surprise. It had been a while since anything had come as a surprise to me. And just like that, I walked into the hallway free from control for the first time in almost a year.

“Q, is that you! Q!”

Rain and Marla walked around the corner, confused and unsure what to make of their sudden freedom. I knew they would follow the series of unlocked doors and empty corridors. She was paler, and the institutional scrubs that The Company had bought in bulk (at my insistence) made her tattoos look strangely normal, but it was the same girl I had fallen in love with months ago.

The embrace was strong and natural. The kiss that fallowed was just as sweet.

“Q, oh god what have they done to you.”

Rain ran her hands gently over my skull, her fingers stopping to circle the new holes and ports. Her shock was understandable, they had begun shaving my head to keep hair out of the interface, and the repeated surgeries had left my head a patchwork of scars, some still fresh. My temples bulged slightly where the optical interfaces connected, and the overall effect was admittedly pretty creepy. I guess when it happens a little bit at a time you don’t realize how strange you are getting.

“How the fuck did this happen! What the fuck is going on?” Marla had remained silent until now.

“I don’t have to time to explain right now, but we have about 15 minutes before the base wakes up and realizes we are gone, and we have about an hour once we get to the top to get our bikes, and get on the road before Ophelia gets here, Marla you can ride Jakes bicycle, they have it inventoried, and it is almost your size.”

It wasn’t much of a plan but it would work. The mention of Jakes name brought a pained look to Rain’s eyes, a look that hardened into something ugly. We ran up the stairs to the supply room where our gear and bicycles were left, gate unopened waiting for us. We began dressing and stuffing our stuff into our bags as fast as possible.

It was a shame that the soldier who I had come to know as Green Eyes had contracted quite a hangover the night before, making him several minutes late, meaning he was not in the mess hall when I expected, meaning he was not locked in with the rest of them, meaning he was now clear to raise his firearm and shout.

“Get the fuck on the ground, I don’t know how you got out but you are going back now!”

He looked far less intimating without his night vision and tactical body armor, but the voice was the same. His gaze was intent on me. I began to crouch down, hands raised, when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement.

Rain exploded, the U-lock from her bag held like a club in her hand. It might have been the effects of the alcohol, or the almost inhuman speed at which Rain moved or maybe we just got lucky, but when that reinforced steel shackle made contact with his skull in rang out with a deep clang that made my teeth vibrate.

Again and again she struck, taking revenge for her brother, for us, for the state of the world. It was an animal thing, something born of anguish, something that I would have been appalled by before. Something I understood much better now.

“You fucker! I told you I would kill you!” Again the deep gong of steel against skull.

Marla and I could only watch, unable and unwilling to bring ourselves to stop her. Rain stopped when she got tired, the man lying dead at her feet. She began to cry, not for what she had done, but because it meant nothing. What was one more death in a world like this?

I put my hand gently on her shoulder.

“Let’s go.”