The door unsealed itself in front of me, petals opening then spiralling away. Portal was no longer trying to engage me in conversation and was humming something not unlike Cavalleria Rusticana. It could have orchestrated the melody without taxing its diodes but instead chose to deliver it in a phlegm-filled murmur. Was it a critique of my fatuous desire for heroism, or just a mild annoyance to keep my mind occupied? I suspect both.
Once again, I ran diagnostic routines and all my sub-systems responded as intended. Peripheral fields offered me views of the chamber in all relevant spectra, there were no glitches in the autonomic suite and the displacement utilities were primed. I tightened some straps, smoothed my eyebrows and adjusted my lucky pants. I bit into my left thumb until I tasted copper, heard the polite chime of a pain response and watched as the puncture laced itself closed and a bead of blood fell to the floor where it bounced once then rolled to a stop. Portal stopped humming with a choking sound. I apologised, stooped and flicked the ruby out of the chamber.
I remained stooped as Portal cleared its non-existent throat. The door sealed itself behind me, the petals this time no prettier than closing jaws seen from the wrong side. The roseate light neither alarmed nor comforted and the silence was impenetrable, bereft of the whip and crackle of massive energies pulling at the leash. My fields showed me that the spots where my crystallised blood had touched the floor had just been irradiated. Portal apologised for being so surgical but this was after all a kind of transplant. It suggested I might like to count down from ten, assuring me that I’d be gone by zero.
I got no further than forming the words ‘ready when you are’ in my forebrain. I’d squeezed my eyes shut and before I could pry them open again numerous pain receptors were chiming and I was outdoors under a deluge of UV light being propelled away from a figure by pre-programmed reflexes. I stifled the offensive protocols which were vying with the pain to be heard. I gave myself a surge of stim to help cut down the processing time. I rocked on my haunches on hot stone as this new world rolled slowly around me.
Nothing I saw resembled a weapon, much less any hostile intent. I could see, hear, feel and breathe; all encouraging signs. I didn’t need my eyes to tell me the bad news. Portal hadn’t transported as much of me as it had planned. Had it been a carpenter, a discrepancy of a millimetre or two might have resulted in nothing worse than a sticking door. In my case, I’d lost most of my hair, all of my clothes and the tips of several fingers and toes. My skin looked like it had been flash-fried and was still crimson with heat.
I noted and filed the pain bulletins, raising a prayer of thanks to the gods of technology. Before my medtech had been installed, I’d experimented with old fashioned pain just to see what all the fuss was about. What I found would have supported an argument for an utterly malicious creator. Good as the entry level brain is at reporting pain, it can’t leave it at that. It has to keep screaming its message at lung-bursting volumes, and won’t desist even when the unfortunate victim has done all they can about the source of the pain. Opiates and the like seem to have been about as effective as holding a pillow over a screaming patient’s head; the only way to really kill the pain was to really kill the patient. Don’t hate me too much because I’ve never experienced toothache outside a virtual sensorium.
Had such a thing been possible, the flashing and jabbering of pain bulletins would have given me a headache. My nanonics could solve some of my problems, but I’d need shelter and nutrition first. Even then, I could hardly re-grow my suit and its fabulous toys. A short jump from where I squatted, on the lip of a smouldering, concave depression in the stone, teetered the figure I’d first seen. In the slo-mo time induced by the stim I could just make out that he was falling forwards. He was short and wiry by our standards, with a complexion like varnished maple. He wore a baggy linen suit with matching fedora. One hand was moving to protect his face with its clenched teeth and half-closed eyes; the other held the stalks of a bouquet of flowers, neatly cut and smouldering, the blooms nowhere to be seen.
TBC
