“…you can ask me for anything but time.”- General Erika Lundgren, shortly before the Fall of Luleå, 2085. *It is this esteemed editor’s note that the late general was paraphrasing Napoleon*.

“You did,” the Proxy in red said.

“The records and the analysis both agree. It took 32 seconds for the nearest Proxies to react in. You bought 21 of those seconds.”

Unsaid went the additional nine seconds. If…if the Proxies had been faster. If they had better guns in the camp. If the walls of tent had been synthweave and not mere canvas. If.

The Proxy didn’t continue. Silence reigned, yet again. A comfortable thing, decided upon without words.

Eventually it, she, Martin thought, stood up. “You’ve been cleared for entry and housing in Vänern Arcology. That lanyard you carry will grant you Access 3. When you are ready, I’d like to continue this conversation.”

She gestured, and in the span of a blink Martin experienced a lurching sensation of weightlessness. There was no separation. He found himself staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. Hands roved around, and he realised that he was on a bed, a circular one. Soft, and not hard like his old one back at Camp Sala.

The room was…was not big perhaps in the eyes of an Accesser, but for Martin it was large.

He was still reeling. That - and it had to have been teleport - hadn’t just shifted whatever place he occupied physically, but also mentally.

He was in an arcology.

He jumped out of the bed and stared at the apartment. Not a room, but a collection of them. Apartment.

His bed was situated in a sunken area, the depression of which ended at a slightly raised section. That raised section curved around his bedroom, where to his left there was a couch and screen, right in front of him a hallway, and to the right a section with a table and multiple chairs.

He drew near the table, admiring the grain of the wood- properly resynthed- and spotted the door.

He grabbed the knob gingerly, as is afraid that the door would rear its head and smack him.

Through it he saw another table sat against one wall, with a kitchen-section right in front of it. To the left, another door. An actual kitchen. Not a formulator.

He walked through the kitchen and out in the long hallway. To his immediate right was a door, which he found to open into a corridor with doors very much like the same he had just opened. Other apartments.

He went left, walking down to his bed. An apartment in a arcology. Meeting an actual Proxy. Access 3, a designation reserved for civilians whose importance was deemed crucial. To gain a higher access, he’d have to be military or have a position of similar importance. And Camp Redsjö… the whiplash of all things that happened in the last hour caught up with him, and before he knew it, he was asleep.

____

Martin leapt up, feet stepping in a bullet-rythm. The bathroom! There was a bed, a kitchen, a place to have friends over and couch to watch casts on. But no bathroom?!

His bowels quickened. “Oh, come on. Where is the damn bathroom?!”

An outline shone then, diagonally from the kitchen out of the lowered section of his sleeping area, in the hallway.

He grabbed the door, wrenching it open and sighed. It was only after he finished, that he realised what had just taken place.

“Can you… can you hear me?”

“Yes.”