I became aware of pain first. Blind and restrained, with nothing to focus on except the pain I found it to have layers and textures.
The white hot fires of healing were centered in my chest still. That too was where the most pain lived.
Everything else was smaller, somehow farther away.
The thumb of my left hand throbbed in a unnatural rhythm. The pain in my eyes was more a scratching static, akin to what I felt when I pushed wires into my body before my body adapted to accept them.
There were hundreds of smaller pains scattered across my chest and arms.
My mouth tasted of blood and both of the canine teeth from the top of my mouth had been removed.
I couldn’t move. Not as if I was incapable of it due to spinal injury, but because every shift of my body brought that body part into contact with something that wouldn’t make way.
I was trapped in a tight space.
The broken rhythm in the thumb didn’t have to do with the lurching and bouncing of the space I was trapped in, but instead, was a mirror to the broken cadence of my heart.
I was awash again in the memory of the shot and the pain.
I couldn’t see anything, and each eye was a bright source of intense pain. I couldn't move my eyes. I suspected they were no long there.
Apparently the system interface didn’t require eyes. I willed the icons to display and selected the appropriate one.
[Status]
[Name - Pete Redstone]
[Rank - STRAT/22K3.4.2]
[Health - Critical System Failure - 83%]
[Health Reserve nodes 12/34]
[Energy - 35%]
[Energy Reserve nodes 0/0]
[Modification - Charging port]
[Modification - Charging port (power correction and shaping node)]
Energy at 35% was worrying, but healing did take a large amount of energy. Health at 83% didn’t seem to make sense. Unless it was just an overall number. Even though I had damage to my heart, which killed every single animal I hunted, the rest of my body was mostly fine?
Health Reserve nodes were still a mystery. The system had been wholly unhelpful explaining anything at all about them. Not even recognizing the terms.
I tried to notice when the healing nodes were used up, discharged, or otherwise depleted.
I kept trying to feel something change. I failed to notice anything in even as the number of reserve nodes dropped from twelve to eleven to ten.
My heart actually stopped for almost half a minute while at seven nodes, when it restarted the rhythm was steady and strong.
The fire began to move then, sliding up my chest like some sort of heartburn. It seemed to flow wider as if fire washed over the back of my neck, then sideways toward my ears. The fire flowed under them, over my jaws and cheeks and began to pool in my eye sockets.
It paused there as it gathered.
I felt the fire in my left eye flow over to join the fire in my right.
I understood a short time later that my eyes were not injured, but that like my teeth, they were missing.
The number of nodes, whatever they were continued to drop until the status screen showed them at zero.
The fire in my eye didn’t stop burning though. I couldn’t detect any change at all.
I couldn’t hear much, not over the engine noise, but that was enough.
Sometimes the noises changed pitch and the bouncing and shifting I experienced changed accordingly.
When my Energy dropped to zero I expected the fire to stop healing. Instead it spread out.
The fire flowed out of my eye and down spreading and diluting the heat as it settled around my body.
I could still feel warmth in my right eye, but it was weak and pale compared to what it had been.
From time to time there was a warmth, a flash of warmth I should say. Sometimes it started in my thighs, in the large muscles that moved my legs. Then my eye would flash a bit warmer for just a moment.
After a while those muscles felt sore and used up, as if I’d just run across a field chasing down a deer. Except it wasn’t all the muscles in my leg, just those that had flashes of warmth.
Then the fire would use other muscles. My chest, by back, and my thighs were the ones used most often but it seemed all my muscles were being used and then being allowed to rest.
I didn’t understand the process, but it wasn’t hard to understand that somehow the muscle exhaustion was fueling the healing.
I tried to flex the muscles thinking that would help, but it seemed to cause the fires of healing to move onto other muscles more quickly.
So I stopped trying to help and waited.
We would come to a stop from time to time. Sometimes for moments or minutes. Once for closer to an hour. The engines didn’t stop running though, only the bouncing and motion did.
Eventually even that changed. We stopped, and the engines were silenced one at a time included the loudest and closest one.
I should have counted, but I didn’t realize the nose was from multiple engines until they started turning off.
I couldn’t make out words but I did hear talking. It was brief and sporadic and moved though I couldn’t have said from where to where.
I assumed we stopped for the night, or perhaps for meal time, though I did not smell anything over the smell of blood and engine exhaust.
Hours passed and there were only the brief muted sounds of talking.
Once, without warning there was a much closer sound and a shifting, perhaps a slight bounce.
Sometime in the night the fire spread away from my right eye and into my left.
A numbness and paralysis I wasn’t aware of began to fade and I could blink my eye and shift it about. Not that there was anything to see.
I know exactly when it occurred to me to pull up the map function to see if my implant knew where we were, because immediately afterward I remembered the system could also show me the time of day and day of the year.
I didn’t really feel shame or embarrassment as any sort of lingering thing, but I could easily acknowledge the wave of emotion as I realized I had once again failed to think things through properly.
I’m not sure what the information would have done for me sooner, but it certainly couldn’t have harmed me.
We were a staggeringly long distance away from the settlement. Surprisingly enough the path that I traveled was white in the map.
“Why is the map white?”
“The white portions of the map is where the opacity is set to zero. These sections of the map indicate recently updated data.”
“But how can they be updated to show ruins?” I asked focusing on one of the small icons that expanded to say ‘ruins’ when I focused my will upon it.
“A location’s image is mostly an estimation of general color and coincidence rangefinder data extracted from the visual cortex,” the system’s female voice said, as if that all made sense.
I wanted to learn what all the words were, but I maintained my focus else I wander down too many paths.
“But how can the map be updated if I could not see. I didn’t have eyes when we passed the ruins. And I am in a-” I flexed my arms and push with my feet and guess it was a wooden crate of some sort, “crate.”
“The map cannot be updated without visual data, but It can indicate recently traveled areas.”
That made sense. The ruins must have been there and I somehow had missed them when I had studied the map.
Though I had found other markers when I previously looked.
It didn’t feel as if I had missed them, I put a lot of time into studying the maps.
I may have slept, I wasn’t sure, but if I did I woke quickly enough when the engines began to cough to life.
Seven engines came to life. The sounds changed for while after they started until they became more uniform. Then I began to shake and bounce once more in my crate as the map showed I began moving.
“How did that marker appear?” I asked sometime later.
I was watching our progress on the map and a marker suddenly appeared. It read ‘Lumber. 22 accessible from road.’
“That marker was created and placed on the map and the icon was selected manually. It is not representative of the actual visual location as the entity that created it does not have that capability.”
“Which entity created it?”
“JRS/4J.3$23/F*d32.4”
She read the ID tag out including which letters were capital and which lower case. I stopped focusing on it when she got to the first forward slash. I’d dealt with the system doing this before.
“Display the entity ID please,” I said, as any gibberish in the form she had just repeated was always an ID of some sort.”
A yellow dot appeared on the map with the long ID I didn’t understand floating near it.
It was moving down the road slightly in front of my own blue dot. At a comparative speed.
I zoomed in watching for a while. The distance fluctuated a bit, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away.
“Is that a person?” I asked.
“It is an entity on the local feed.”
“Show me all entities on the local feed,” I said.
A dense overlay of colored dots and tiny IDs in gray-black font peppered the map. There were nine clusters, and three individuals that moved ahead of the group.
Two of the main clusters followed closely behind the clusters immediately ahead of them. The trailing two clusters were different colors. One was pinkish, and the other orange.
“Why are those dots different colors.”
“Extrapolation has colored entities by likely affiliations. Data used in extrapolation includes shared history, self designations, hostile designations of other entities, localization clumping, and general freedom of movement.”
“These are all people?”
“Unknown. Operator type is easily spoofed.”
“They could see me coming,” I said realizing that the person who shot me likely saw a dot approaching.
“Unlikely. ID pings, traffic finger printing, and exploitation testing indicate none of these models can penetrate local feed encryptions.”
“What does that mean?”
“Entities are likely limited to only public feed information.”
“This is not public feed information?”
There was a pause.
“Ambiguous question. This is information from the public feed, but it is not pubic information from the public feed. Did this answer your question?”
“Yes.”
“This is private information?”
“Some of it is private information.”
“How do I have access to private information?”
“Your implant was designed to penetrate networks with the express intent of providing its entity with as much information as possible.”
I explored the data more.
I didn’t have a lot of names for things, but I guessed there were wheeled sleds being pulled behind two of the vehicles.
The seven vehicles moved in relation to each other, sometimes traveling closer and sometimes farther away. The two different colored groups of people did not deviate in distance from the group directly ahead of them.
There were three individual dots that roamed ahead of the larger clusters. Those sometimes ranged ahead a good distance and other times one would pull back to travel along side the first cluster for a while.
My map was being updated by the other entities on the local feed. Most of the information seemed related to the road condition, something called choke points, lumber and how accessible it was to the road, and surface water.
Ruins were marked, sometimes with added notes including approximate length of metal cable, or recoverable wood planking. One was listed as ‘seasoned split wood. Four cords.’ Another was listed as ‘two car frames and assorted metal scrap.’
When we stopped moving, but the engines continued running it had something to do with the three single individuals. There was never more than one that came back at a time. Then we would stop, the yellow dots would scatter from the vehicles and the three individual dots would return.
They stopped near the second vehicle, where six dots waited. The six dots would move around in groups of two while the three dots, now at walking speed, moved forward to the cluster that remained around the first vehicle.
We were moving again when I realized the three dots were likely on smaller vehicles capable of only carrying one entity.
Some time later all three of the individuals in the front turned and raced back toward the larger vehicles together.
I heard the engine noise change as we began to slow when they reached the first vehicle.
When we stopped the clustered vehicles pulled in tightly together, stopped, and the entities on them scattered.
The three individual moved ahead quickly pasted the lines forming up and further down the road. They made tight circles and began to head back.
They paused briefly and then began to slowly return, all near each other.
From time to time other entities appeared on the map in black past the three. Where those more people?
There was a double line of yellow entities formed up between the three returning and the vehicles.
Black dots were not following the three yellow dots back. They yellow dots were moving just fast enough to stay ahead. There were nine black dots mostly clustered on the road.
The three suddenly sped up, coming into a single line as they passed through the double line of yellow. As they did so I could hear distant gunfire over the engine noises.
Slowly the black dots turned off one at a time until only two remained.
The gun fire stopped all at once.
Still two black dots remained.
“What were the black dots?”
“Entities that responded to pings from the local feed. Black is the default color for entities not yet assigned to local faction groupings. Would you like to change the default color?”
“Why were they not assigned to local faction groupings?” I asked repeating the things I didn’t understand.
“Not enough data to extrapolate.”
“Where did the dots go?”
There was another long pause
“Likely hosts died, or implants were destroyed or lost power.”
The two lines of yellow dots were advancing slowly. As they passed over the location with the two remaining black dots, those dots disappeared.
People that tried to fight back perhaps?
A moment later a new icon was added to the map. It looked like an arch with some sort of script on it. Beside the icon a label appeared, “43 class 1 zombies. No salvage.”
“What is this icon?”
“Tombstone.”
“What is a tombstone?”
“A tombstone was a marker often indicating the names of the bodies entombed within a tomb.”
“What does entombed mean?”
“It means to place a dead body into a tomb or to bury or trap an object.”
“What is a tomb?”
“An enclosure for a corpse or a monument erected over a burial site in memory of the dead below.”
The lines of yellow dots returned to encircle the vehicle.
Four teams of two were later sent ahead and they moved from the road to the side of the road over and over.
The three individual dots were back to riding ahead of the group, this time going much farther than they normally did and staying together as a group.
Then they disappeared.
Later as I watched the dots moving around the vehicle in patterns and clusters I couldn’t guess the purpose of, the three dots reappeared at the edge of the map. Even before they reached the lead vehicle the map updated with white. It showed a crossroads ahead and a good distance traveled down each of the three joining roads.
“What are class one zombies?”
“Unknown.”
“What are zombies?”
“Unknown.”