Is ammo cheaper in the Hyperreality?
For a moment, he felt something like the shadow of pain, and knew the impact of his head hitting the triple-thick window should probably have killed him.
They had slammed into a car that had backed out into the center of the row, and was now crumpled into the wall ten feet ahead, with no driver. Sam turned in her seat and looked back at him. His heart jumped.
Blood was pouring out of her nose. She smiled.
“I think this airbag just deviated my septum. Guess I’ll have to—”
Bullets struck the back window like hail and muzzle flash blinked down the row.
“Coming!” she said, sing-song, and stepped out the door. More gunfire raked the SUV and she dropped to the ground.
“Owie!”
“Sam, cmon,” said Angel. “At least act like—”
“You just gonna sit there!” Philip growled.
Gradie sprung up and threw the center passenger side door open.
Four guys moved down the row, leapfrogging to cover behind pillars and cars, muzzles flashing relentlessly. The SUV shed bullet fragments and the cars next to Gradie coughed up glass.
“Shit!”
Fire, cover, fire, a voice in his mind reminded him. He raised his rifle and fired as he stepped out, as he moved back toward the front of the SUV, even as he threw open the passenger side door. One guy dropped dead and the others snapped down, becoming just dots of muzzle flash peeking over cover.
“I think we got an oil leak,” Sam said from under the SUV.
Gradie got behind the center door and reloaded quickly, then stepped up on the rail, and returned fire through the gap between the center door and the doorframe. One shooter dropped back behind a car, but the other two kept up the pressure.
“Shit!” Gradie ducked back into the SUV as a round took his ear off. Most of the window glass was solid white, but the fire didn’t let up.
“Did you get em?” Sam whispered in his earbuds. Through the foggy fractal haze of the SUV’s back windows, guns flashed and dark figures emerged slowly from cover.
Gradie clawed at the memory of every pouch and object in the SUV. One caught his attention, and a plan formed around it.
He took the rifle sling off his shoulder and reached into the bottom compartment of the center console. When he had the new weapon in hand, he let go of the sling and the rifle clattered to the ground outside. As he crawled between the seats and along the floorboards, he heard one of the men shout and the gunfire lessened. He raised his head just enough to see the dark silhouettes marching confidently down the row, and put the barrel of the GM94 up to the slot in the back window.
He pulled the trigger. A blazing flash of fire lit up the crystal white window and the bang set off car alarms and shook the air. Two of the guys died instantly, but the last one sprinted towards the SUV with his rifle raised.
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“I got him,” Sam said. A gun went off under the SUV and the guy dropped. The gun kept going for a few more seconds, then Gradie heard it smack against the concrete.
“Help,” she said dryly.
Gradie rushed out of the side door and drug Sam out from under the SUV. The empty CZ slid out with her and blood smeared behind her.
“She’s bleeding out,” Philip said.
Memories of first aid and trauma drills, and then of the real thing poured out of his head, but they banged against something else. Fear.
“These are a little squirrelly,” Nova said.
“He soaked the gun stuff up like a sponge,” Angel noted. “Medical’s gonna take a little work.”
“He’ll need to prime all that anyway,” Philip said, with something like sympathy.
Gradie had strapped two tourniquets on, administered an injection, applied seals and pressure and quickclot, but had done them in the wrong order. It was like his mind had reached for the knowledge, but found only shadows.
“Might be just panicked,” Lindsey said.
“Hey, just relax, focus on—” Sam said. Nova interrupted her.
“Why are you talking? You’re dead.”
“Oh.” Sam rolled her head to the side and stuck her tongue out, then dropped through the floor, leaving only a smeared puddle of blood behind.
“What—”
“Ok, she’s dead,” said Nova. “Now you gotta get out of there without being seen. Extraction procedures, go.”
Police sirens echoed from outside and jammed with the car alarms. The word ‘extraction’ lit up wisps of memory like a flare in the fog.
Look uninvolved.
He dropped the medkit, pulled his bloody jacket off and dropped it on the ground, then stepped all over it to get the blood off his shoes. In a side compartment at the back of the SUV, he found an old wrinkled hoodie and pulled it on.
Get clear.
He sprinted to the concrete barrier at the core of the garage, grabbed the low wall, flipped around, and lowered himself down. He swung his legs above the next level barrier and let go. Ten stories glared up at him as he fell, and for a moment everything was as real as anything he had ever known. Half a second later his feet met concrete and he eased himself down into the space between two cars.
“Oh shit, nice!” Nova said. “Where'd you get the parkour from? I didn't feed you any of that?”
Gradie realized he had no idea. It had felt like something he had done a thousand times, but he couldn’t put a finger on where the memory had come from.
“I left some supplementary mem in the framework,” Angel said. “He must have tapped into the contextual—”
“Cops up the ramp,” Lindsey said.
Sure enough, sirens rose through the center shaft. Now what?
Get gone.
He got out the phone and looked around.
Shit.
“Uh, which one of these cars, has like,” he whispered as the sirens beat against his eardrums.
“What are you trying to do?” asked Lindsey.
“Use this, uh,” Even with the phone in his hand, the memories were hazy. Wasn’t there some kind of app to unlock cars? Which one was it? None of the icons looked like anything that gave him any clue. No keys or masked chibis or anything.
“You’re in the wrong OS, first of all,” Nova said. “But you got the right idea. Look for the—”
“I think this has about run its course,” Philip cut in.
“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve got all I need. You good bro?”
Gradie almost answered, but Angel beat him to it.
“Yeah, let’s cut it here. One sec.”
The world stuttered and Gradie saw himself bring up the hidden OS, navigate to the parking spot marked by EP, press the keypad command to spoof the locks on a mid-'10s hatchback, slide into the driver's seat and hook the phone up to the vehicle's dashboard. In a few minutes, the software had started the engine, killed the gps, and even canceled the owner’s phone plan. Then Gradie pulled out of the garage and mapped himself to the nearest swap point.
It all happened in a few seconds, like someone was fast forwarding through the unimportant parts, and his mind reeled from the sickening onslaught of information. When everything settled, it felt like dream knowledge, and his brain found it familiar.
“Good shit, bro.” Nova clapped him on the back and he realized he was back in the satellite-esque control room. Angel’s eyes fluttered and reflected a prismatic light. He nodded and smiled at Gradie.
“So, now that we have a baseline of how your Spirit contextualizes memory, and you get the general idea of how eating mem works, we can move to the actual priming.”
“What?” Gradie had been looking around for Sam, some part of him still screaming that she was bleeding to death on a concrete slab, and hadn’t even tried to understand what Angel had said.
“He’s saying here comes the hard part,” Philip said. Angel and Nova nodded. Before Gradie could ask what they meant, another door appeared in the wall.