“Crap… crap… crap… crap… CRAP!” Rick exclaimed as he ran down the sidewalk. “Oh man, This… this is all my fault!” He stopped in front of his house to catch his breath for a moment. “I puffed him up… by calling him a superhero… and made him feel invincible.” Entering his house, he locked all his various types of locks. “How were we supposed to know… that tasers would make the whole thing… go haywire?” He went to the back door to do the same with the locks he had installed after Keegan’s visit earlier. “But I made him feel invincible and now he’s dead!” Heart racing, he got his best airsoft gun and curled up in a corner. “Totally disintegrated.” He sat there, trembling, just waiting for the agents who most assuredly followed him home to burst in.
“Bling!” From his computer in the other room came the sound of a notification from the encrypted chat application, making him jump and hit the back of his head on the wall.
That can’t be right, he thought as he sat blinking for a few seconds, Keegan is the only person who I have connected on there right now… Maybe I got lucky and they didn’t see me running away, but now they found his computer and are trying to get me to give myself away…
“Okay Rick, just breathe…” he said to himself, before getting out of his corner to see what the notification was about.
“It happened again, the woods thing, but the audio recording didn’t work. The memory card doesn’t even have a partition table any more… We’ll have to think of something else.” The message on the screen said.
Rick paused for a moment, contemplating whether to respond or to destroy any trace of the application from his computer. Deciding that he’d be fine so long as he avoided giving anything personal away, he responded…
“Dude, you DIED!”
“What?”
“You went to get your bike and a bunch of guys tasered you and then shot you and you fell to the ground and disintegrated!”
“…What do you mean disintegrated?”
“I mean disintegrated. Your entire body started to glow like you were burning and then your skin and everything started to flake away until you were gone.“
“What… What in the name of sanity are you talking about?”
“YOU. DIED.”
When the subject receives a fatal amount of damage, the experiment triggers a full activation. This involves dispersing all the subjects cells and reconstructing them in a completely different location. A full activation is more taxing on the subject’s mind and body than a partial one, and most side effects are most acutely felt after a full activation. The exact location of reconstruction varies between subjects, and currently we have no way of predicting where a subject’s location will be. Fortunately it tends to be a location in the subject’s recent memory, so by virtue of the preparatory time subjects are required to spend in the lab before binding we haven’t had any issues with them reconstructing elsewhere.
Well, here it is! A total of more than 8,000 words and the intro is over! Finally I can get to the real action… I just need to figure out what exactly that’s going to be. XD I feel like I should try to “wing it” a little less than I currently do, but it’s working well so far, so…
BTW, I will not be posting the regularly scheduled part on Good Friday. That’s still a couple weeks out yet, but I figured I’d let you know…
‘Till later
-David
chipgw.com 