Nukes won, as it turned out.

Totally wrapping myself in my power was indeed an almost perfect defensive measure, and my star happily soaked up wave upon wave of nuclear energy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t maintain it indefinitely. Hell, I couldn’t maintain it all that long. As soon as the smallest flaw formed in my coverage, my body was exposed to the fury of the nuclear explosion, and I was dead in an instant. Ah well, live and learn.

I woke with a gasp, still feeling the phantom kiss of nuclear fire on my skin. The pale young man who was examining the readout on some machines next to me froze. Our eyes met, his going wide, pupils dilating to a comical level. Comical for me, at least. He, on the other hand, shot out of the room before I could get a word out. The door closed with a click, followed by a heavier metallic sound. A lock maybe?

I brought my hand to my head, and found padded bandages. There was a tube in my arm, delivering clear fluid. The machine next to my bed was connected to my body by physical wires and pads instead of using a wireless interface. I was a little leery of relying on such outdated machines for something as important as my health, but if Joe was right, then I had been relying on them for weeks already.

The room around me was a clean white, the floor light blue, probably some kind of easily cleaned finish. It was lightly furnished beyond the bed and machinery - just a small, uncomfortable looking chair in the corner and a set of empty shelves. There was a window next to my bed, looking down on an unruly looking park. Trees grew wild, with paths made from rough stone chunks embedded in the ground. It was like a savage reflection of the gardens on the arcology’s terraces. I estimated that I was on the second floor, but I couldn’t see far with the mass of branches and leaves at eye level. I was definitely entirely outside the bounds of the city.

A slightly hysterical giggle managed to fight its way out of me. I really wasn’t dead. I’d been executed, shot and left for dead, by the very people who were supposedly tasked with keeping me safe. The giggle evolved into a cackle, sounding unhinged and sinister even to my own ears. I was officially dead, probably far from the arcologies, or at least out of their direct influence, and my captors were relying on nothing more than a locked door or a second floor drop to hold me. They, whoever my captors were, clearly didn’t know exactly what I could do. My escape, all the hard parts at least, had been pulled off without me participating at all!

The laughter died suddenly. I still couldn’t feel my legs. No pain, no sensation, no control, nothing. Fuck. I could feel another surge of emotion, tears welling up. Fuck! I couldn’t escape. They didn’t even need that lock. I probably didn’t have the upper body strength to drag myself across the room. The small, passive improvements from the alien tech were nice, but they weren’t turning me into a bodybuilder overnight. It did have other uses though. I crushed down the feeling of despair, and drowned the remnants of it in liquid sunlight. My thoughts spun out of control for a moment, bouncing in all directions. That was fine though. Inability to focus included the inability to focus on my unfortunate physical condition.

After a few minutes to regain my equilibrium, I went back to taking stock of my situation. I was outside the arcologies and officially dead: I probably couldn’t get my spine fixed out here, not for any amount of money and influence. Did I… need to go crawling back to them? I suspected that the European and Chinese Unions probably both had the facilities and expertise to do it as well, but those were both dubious prospects. I knew next to nothing about the Chinese Union, nothing reliable at least, and the Europeans were more likely to work with the Arcology Governance Board than oppose it. A black sheep like Lindsey would have no chance at all of convincing them to give me refugee status or something like it.

Well, I guess I’m stuck here for the time being. I resolved to bide my time, learn as much as I could about these people, and try to avoid any further executions.

I spent the morning looking out the window. It wasn’t even locked or barred. Probably just a normal clinic, rather than one inside a prison. I did my best not to dwell on the fact that it was still more than enough to confine me, as I was.

It was late morning before anyone came to check on me. The distinct clunk of the lock heralded his arrival: a man about my age in the same blue pants and shirt that the skittish nurse had been wearing, but with a white coat over it. He was nearly as pale too. ‘Dr. Tanner’ was embroidered over the breast pocket of his coat. He was carrying a thick plastic tray, which was filling the room with a rather alluring aroma.

He dragged the chair near my bed, and sat down. As he did, I could finally see what was on the tray. It was greasy sausages, hash browns, some apple slices, a little box with a picture of a cow on it, and a plastic cup, sealed with foil, with what I presumed to be orange juice inside. Strangely, I didn’t feel hungry at all. I would have expected to be starving if I had been out for several weeks, but I wasn’t. I was, however, desperately thirsty and suddenly quite aware of it.

“Probably want to start with this.” The doctor handed me the milk box with a friendly smile. He spoke with a strange accent. Some sounds were drawn out, others suppressed. I could still understand him, but the experience was strangely similar to when I had first heard the aliens in town speaking English.

I took the offered milk box, and started the tedious process of unwrapping the little straw so I could get at the ambrosia within. The doctor’s eyes never left my hands as I worked. He looked somewhat perplexed.

“Uh, am I doing it wrong?” I asked, confused by what might be confusing him. My voice cracked a bit from disuse.

“No, no,” he said, giving me an appraising look, “Just surprised is all. You don’t seem to have any loss of coordination. Common in your kind of situation for there to be at least some.”

“You seem a lot less frightened of me than the guy this morning,” I said, finally managing to puncture the foil seal with the flimsy plastic straw.

“Hah! Yeah well, lot of the nurses buy into the dumb stories going around about you. I, on the other hand, actually took out your implants myself, so I know you aren’t some cyborg supersoldier.”

Droplets of milk spattered the white sheets covering me, as I coughed uncontrollably.

“Hey there, take it slow.”

“What?” I asked, as soon as I had managed to clear my lungs of milk.

“You’ve gotta take it slow. Your body needs to get used to drinking again-”

“No,” I interrupted, “What is this about cyborg supersoldiers?”

“Oh, that.” The man paused for a moment, idly tapping his temple, “Probably just something the politicians cooked up to justify poking the bear. The media’s been going on about cruel experiments and how the Urban States are going to give their cyborg soldiers alien tech with the results. It’s no wonder the rumors would get out of hand with how much hardware I had to take out of you.”

“Thank you for that, by the way,” I said. Despite my damaged state, I was not currently wracked with random bursts of shooting pain in the half of my body that I could feel, so it was certainly an improvement.

“Hm, I half expected you to be mad about it,” he said, as he passed me the cup of orange juice.

“No,” I said, once I had worked my way through that as well, “I will need my data implant though. I doubt I’ll be able to pull backups from the cloud.”

“Sure, once we get you a wheelchair I can have someone show you where they’re all being kept.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

“Sure. Don’t see why not. Now, would you be willing to answer a few questions for me?”

Ah. There it was.

“No.”

“Come on now. I feel like I’ve been awfully accommodating, and it’s medically relevant stuff, so it’s in your interest anyway.”

He wasn’t wrong. I didn’t want to alienate my captors if they wanted to pretend themselves rescuers instead. They weren’t even entirely wrong about that part either.

“Trade?” I tried.

“Sure, if that’s what you want.”

The next hour or so consisted of me answering some basic stuff about myself - name, age, medical history, nothing that’d get me accused of leaking corporate secrets or anything. Some of the things I told the doctor, basic stuff about life in the city, seemed to surprise him. That wouldn’t have been the case if they had managed to capture anyone else from my team (or anyone else from the arcology at all), so I was probably the only one they’d picked up. The doctor never asked anything with obvious military or economic value, so I refrained from pushing too much with my questions as well. In return for my answers, I was informed of the general state they found me in: shot in the head but no sign of a bullet, and my body trying to eat all my tech. Violently. I learned that I was in a place called Maryland, the town was Andrews, and that the rural population (at least here) didn’t actually live primitive lives.

Though my history classes never went into much detail, the textbooks always described life outside the cities as ‘arduous’, ‘harrowing’, and other such terms. I had always imagined people outside the cities using windmills and water wheels for power to cut rough planks or grind grain or whatever. Blacksmiths hammering out tools in the open, people carrying jugs of fresh water, big open air vegetable markets, that sort of thing. No, it turned out that outside the cities people didn’t live too much different lives than the poorer people living in the suburbs, though apparently they were a lot more cheerful about it.

I also learned that I was not technically a prisoner. They only had me in a locked room initially because they didn’t know if I might actually be some brainwashed combat drone or something. No, I was apparently a poor victim who had been rescued from peril, and was free to go about my business as I pleased. In a country I knew nothing about, where I had no support network, without an account for whatever the local currency was, and without a device to use it even if I did have an account. I had no means of contacting anyone in New York, even if I wanted to go back. Oh, and I was still paralyzed and didn’t own any clothing. Yep, not a prisoner at all.

As he was leaving, the doctor dropped something I would have liked to know earlier: “Oh, some Captain with the People’s Army will be coming by in the next few days.”

“People’s Army?” Wasn’t that what the Chinese Union called their army? Did they have something to do with the attack?

“Yeah,” he said with a grin, “the Chinese seem to think the only place that has any people is China.”

When I patiently waited for him to continue, his grin faded and he gave me a serious look.

“Right, this Captain is some kind of expert on the alien stuff, so I expect that his questions are going to be the sort that you were expecting from me.”

That was more along the lines I had expected. Why take me if you weren’t going to at least try to extract some secrets? I guess the value of taking me away from DA spoke for itself, but it would be a terrible waste to not leverage me further if you’d already spent the resources.

“If you need,” the doctor continued, “I can have someone stick around when he comes to talk to you. Just say the word.”

Well that was interesting. Despite the obvious collaboration between these people and the Chinese, I guess whatever group this doctor belonged to opposed the Chinese in some way. Still, I didn’t want to chance leaking information to additional parties, and a conversation with what might end up being my counterpart in the Chinese Dreamshards project was too tempting to risk derailing by complicating the situation.

“No,” I said, “I think it will probably be fine.”

The doctor gave me another perplexed look, then shrugged.

“Suit yourself. Just push the call button if you need anything. I’ll leave the tray. I know you aren’t hungry now, but you should at least try to finish the fruit. Body needs fuel, you know.”

He checked his smartwatch (or maybe it was just a watch?) and left the room, leaving me alone with my now cold food. I picked at it a little bit, but with zero appetite I made little progress.

I scanned the room, looking for any obvious cameras, but found none. There weren’t even any places to hide the smaller sorts, though as expensive as those were I wasn’t certain they’d even have those here. Audio only surveillance? I guess that was fine. I could probably work around that.

And then I was left with nothing to do. There was no smartscreen here, and I had no interface to access it anyway. I didn’t want to delve into my inventory, as that would make the time pass even more slowly. In the end, I settled on looking out the window. At least the view wasn’t bad. I passed an hour or two just watching people make their way around the stone paths. They were obviously smoother than they looked, as I saw one person in a wheelchair, and a number of elderly people walk across them with no trouble. The thing that surprised me the most was the sheer variety of people I saw. People pale as the first nurse I saw, people with skin so dark it was nearly black, there was brown hair, black hair, even some blonde and red. Back home, everyone had a pretty standard range of light brown skin, various shades and textures of brown hair, and brown eyes. Outliers were rare, and none so extreme.

Intellectually, I knew that other varieties of people existed. Prior to today, Lindsey had the lightest skin of anyone I’d ever seen in person, and golden blonde hair. I had always categorized her differently, though. Now that I thought about it, my previous worldview very nearly considered Europeans to be aliens in their own right. Distant, different things. To think that there was such variety in a place so nearby, it made me wonder how this had possibly happened. Weren’t we part of the same country back around the time I had been born? Even just my parents’ generation should have been more like people from this place, and less like the people I was familiar with.

In the time it took for lunch to arrive, I hadn’t come up with any reasonable sounding explanations. This whole thing was messing with my head. I was probably just trying to avoid thinking about more personally unpleasant topics, but that was fine. Maybe now was a good time to try to work through some issues and make peace with the new direction my life was taking. Except maybe that meeting with the Chinese Dreamshards expert, I doubted I would be facing any danger here. If their politicians were using stories about saving people from the sinister grip of the cities, then letting me come to harm while in their care would seriously inconvenience them, and if I was right that I was alone, I was also the only proof that their raid had accomplished anything at all.

Bringing me my lunch was a dark-skinned young man in medical scrubs. He handed me the tray, and retreated to check my vitals off the machines, seeming only slightly less frightened of me than the last one. After I finished the liquids, while I was contemplating trying the anemic looking yet fragrant slab of meat, I received another visitor. The woman was in business casual, a mark of middle executives. So surprised by the incongruence of the unfamiliar dark-skinned woman and the familiar style, I probably stared for much longer than was polite. If she was bothered by this, she didn’t show it.

She introduced herself as my refugee advocate, verified that I was comfortable speaking English, and began to explain various legal aspects and conditions of my stay here, as well as various government programs that I could apparently make use of. Were they actually serious about this? Was I really, truly not a captive? By the time she left, I still wasn’t entirely sure, though I did now have an old style phone, an account containing some dollars (the currency they apparently use here), and the woman’s contact information.

After my meeting with my advocate, the doctor, Dr. Tanner, came by with a wheelchair and took me to pick up the remains of my implants. Apparently his nurses were all too skittish to do it. The hallways of the hospital were similar to my room. The walls were white, the floors some kind of sealed composite that probably made for easier cleaning, the lights bright and cool. There were windows placed regularly, replacing the smartscreens I was familiar with as a way of brightening up the halls. There were also sheets of paper hung up everywhere. Though after my initial shock, I decided it wasn’t that ridiculous. These people lived in a place where there were literally trees as far as the eye could see, after all.

People were moving around and past us as the doctor wheeled me around, but something felt slightly off about them. They were constantly scanning the hallway, some were talking to one another, some moving with purpose. The flow was just… wrong. People stopped to let others move by at the wrong time, or blocked the hall entirely for seconds at a time. It was a mess. Then it hit me. Not a single one of these people had an interface. No one here did. There weren’t even any AR glasses. A few did have phones out, but it wasn’t practical to deliver traffic directions that you’d have to constantly look down at while you were walking. Everyone was just moving through the hallway entirely undirected. It was just weird to let everyone move about as they saw fit, so much that it even interfered with the routes of other people.

Maybe they didn’t have sufficiently powerful central servers to handle the job? I did my best to let go of the frustration, each time we were slowed or stopped. It got better once we were past the central halls, and moved on to a more sparsely populated area of the hospital. We entered an area with metal countertops with numerous cubby holes. The doctor looked around, checking something on a small notepad he pulled from his pocket, and eventually pulled a small cluster of plastic bags from a hole, each containing one of the components of my augmentations.

Several of them were obviously ruined, including the wireless interface and everything related to the sense link. Two were partially cut, probably damaged during removal, and another three were totally fused to chunks of dried meat that presumably used to be me. Thankfully, the storage implant didn’t look damaged. I picked that bag out, and set it on my lap.

“You don’t want the others?” Dr. Tanner asked.

“No real use for them,” I said. I tried not to dwell on how much of my previous life had depended on those now-ruined fragments of electronics.

“So,” he said, drawing the word out, “our hospital has ties to an electronics manufacturer. They do our pacemakers and whatnot. Maybe we could work out a deal for the rest?”

That kicked Nico into high gear. I controlled my expression, showing none of the surprise that anyone would be interested in a pile of damaged, used, last gen parts. Instead, I started going over the list of points I might be able to use to drive up the price.

“I guess I can consider it,” I said, careful to keep my voice even.

“Great!” he said, as I gathered up the remaining bags and set them on my lap as well.

“Can I get something to carry all this stuff?” I asked, “I’m accumulating quite a lot of things.” Didn’t want to show off that I could just drop these into my inventory, after all.

“Sure, I’ll have someone bring you a bag.”

I spent the rest of our trip back to my room contemplating whether or not it would be wise to actually sell my tech. On the one hand, I could potentially extract a great deal of wealth, at least on the scale these people were working at. While this probably wasn’t their first chance to get a look at our electronics, it almost certainly was their first chance to get a look at the ‘enthusiast’ model, which happened to be able to run unsigned code. It was a feature that was vital for development, and probably just as useful for a reverse engineering effort. Not many people were even allowed to get this model, and the sorts of jobs that needed them tended to climb pretty high. I could easily imagine literally zero sets of these implants ever being taken beyond city limits before. On the other hand, I’d be seriously endangering my chances of being welcomed back, should I decide to return. Though I could claim they were taken without my consent, the circumstantial evidence of whatever wealth I gain from the sale would be damning.

My thoughts ran back and forth all evening. I barely touched my dinner, a rectangle that may or may not have been intended to represent pizza, and instead spent some time idly familiarizing myself with the simple touch interface of my new phone. The majority of the little bags with my augs inside were in a backpack that another nurse had dropped off, which now sat on the previously empty shelf. I had kept my data storage implant separate.

When the nurse came by to turn down the lights so I could sleep, I wasted no time. As soon as she was gone I wrapped my power around the little plastic bag and stored it in my inventory. I was suddenly the proud owner of a blinding headache and a horrible pressure on my chest. I had braced for it, but my estimate was wrong. Instead of being about as difficult as the pen or maybe a little more, it was several times as bad. I gasped as the bag and implant appeared in my void. Had I become weaker over the weeks I had been unconscious? That didn’t really make sense, as Nico had been using my avatar and my magic to hunt for experience shards.

I checked inside my inventory, and when I put the pen next to the implant, I could feel a clear difference in ‘weight’. The implant was laden with information, apparently the data contained within contributing to its metaphysical presence. The pen, though… it had a little bit of the feeling of information as well. What?

I took a closer look at the pen, utilizing my sensory supremacy to look inside it. It was uncomfortable to do, whatever quality that made things from Earth so difficult to store also made it a struggle to look through. What I found, however, was worth the effort. The pen was a spying device. Inside it was a tiny cluster of electronics, complete with an encryption module and wireless interface. It wouldn’t have the range on its own, but if I could get my hands on a directional antenna, then I would be able to contact someone at Digital Arts. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea, but it was good to have options.

I noticed, on returning my senses to my body, that the headache had mostly cleared up already. Strange. The aftereffects of straining myself tended to linger. Had three weeks of taking it easy left me spiritually rested, ready for some intense exercise to expand my capacity once more? That was the sense that I was getting, when I tried to feel for my own essence. It was depleted, but already recovering and stronger than before. That settled it. I pulled the implant back out, feeling my essence rush away to make my wish a reality. After a few seconds of deep breaths, I stored it again. Slowly but steadily, I could feel my capability expand. Each repetition was easier than the last. I continued until the headache was slower to fade, then stopped, keeping my implant securely tucked away in my inventory.

Other than the time to recover afterwards, was there some limit to this somewhere? I knew now that it wasn’t a game, so there wasn’t some limit coded into me that would cap my growth. Actually… I peered inward, checking the area I had assumed were game functions. The veil was receding, slowly fraying around the spot that the Painter had punctured to point out the login function to me. I still couldn’t understand most of what was in there, but there was time to learn. By the time I ran into it, if there was such a limit, I would just have to find it and tear it out. And then what? Would I one day need to leave Earth, because storing and returning it no longer strained me enough to improve?

That was a daunting thought. I set it aside for now. Maybe killing some mindless monsters would help me de-stress? I still needed more material to finish up my last incomplete minion, and Joe might enjoy a distraction from his new job. Maybe we could take another shot at that dragon?