Precipice Chapter II: A Casual Stroll

For chapter one, follow this link.

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It had been Nikolai Garcia’s weekly custom since his new position to take a stroll around the quasi-abandoned harbor district of TRUEcit. Not much came from outside anymore. He remembered in his childhood when junk tankers came in from the badlands to sell metal and plastic scrap and scavenged biomass. Now everything was produced in the city’s recyclers and bio-towers by the corporation, so the harbor district slowly starved and decayed to its present run-down and melancholic state.

The reasons that drew Nikolai to this obsolescent and putrescent quarter were twofold. The first was nostalgia. This was his old beat when he worked as an EMT for the corporate emergency services. The second reason was simpler, and surprisingly primal: the sea. He would stay and walk for hours along the aging concrete seawall to feel the wind on his face and smell the salt in the air, a stark contrast to the sterile metal and polymer tile of his current employment as a junior researcher in TRUE Corp’s Scientific Division. That, and the mindless tossing of the waves was soothing to an always active brain.

Instinctively, Nikolai controlled his TRUElink audio-cerebral implant to search for a radio frequency to occupy his mind. After a moment of static, he found something acceptable.

“...o’clock daily news! We are expecting a surprise cold front from the east bringing heavy showers and high winds, so bring an umbrella today, folks!”

Nikolai looked to the mouth of the harbor to see an encroaching wall of gray. His olfactory implants identified the telltale smells of ozone and petrichor in the air. He looked down at his sweatshirt and track pants and shook his head.

“That would have been great to know an hour ago. Damn weather,” he said aloud to himself with a hint of dismissal.

He continued walking a short ways before eventually stopping to lean against the metal railing of the sea wall. The waves were getting ever rougher and the dark storm was getting ever closer. Nikolai sighed knowingly, it would not be long before he would be drenched.

"A few more minutes, then I'll have to turn back."

To Nikolai, this ritual was so routine that he did not notice the first body being tossed from the waves upon the concrete wave breakers below… nor the second body… nor the third. But when the waves began cresting ever higher and dropping corpses by the dozens, he certainly saw. It was a silent and dispassionate spectacle that made his blood run cold.

"... so stay indoors, folks…" the radio droned in his ear, "... it's going to be a wet one out there. After that, it's light smog tomorrow and Wedn-"

Nikolai touched his hand to his ear, silencing the implant. He beheld the seawall breathlessly as horrifyingly broken bodies began piling upon the wave breakers below him, some even over-shooting them and cracking against the seawall itself.

Something spoke inside of Nikolai, some buried impulse, an instinct long unused but remembered just as easily as eating or sleeping: he ran down to help.

Nikolai put his hand to his ear and spoke, "This is Junior Researcher Nikolai Garcia, ID 990-1285. Urgent call for emergency services. Permission granted: ocular and auditory feed. Send all available response units."

At that moment, a report was sent to the corporation and they watched the events unfold from his own eyes and ears. He ran down an access staircase down the seawall and onto the beach. Sea spray was falling everywhere as high tide was beginning to reach the wave breakers and the storm was almost over their heads. Instinct and education each took over Nikolai's body and mind as he ignored the carnage around him and searched for survivors. After some searching, he found one, a woman approximately his age. She lay there half draped on a breaker. Her right arm was shattered and mangled and her entire body was badly bruised. Her head lolled as she exhaustedly gasped for precious air.

"Confirmed, one survivor, apparent female, aged mid-twenties," said Nikolai clinically.

Nikolai touched what remained of her right palm and then her neck. He took his hand away, confused.

"Ma'am? Ma'am? Can you hear me?" he asked.

The woman did not respond.

"The survivor is unresponsive. Her ID chip is missing…"

Nikolai checked her neck. He could find no surgical micro-scar.

"... no, she's never had one…"

Suddenly, her breathing stopped. Nikolai began performing CPR as he felt the turbines of the aerial ambulance overhead.

"Come on, stay with me! I'm not going anywhere, come on!"

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Nikolai walked down the hallway with an unwelcome sense of déjà-vu. During his tenure in his previous job, he grew to dislike hospitals. To him, hospitals became a promise of loss and grief. This time was no different, except this ward was home to survivors of the event he himself witnessed the week before. By all rights, he had no business being here, but when he heard the patients had begun waking up, he knew there was one person he had to see -if only for his own peace of mind.

The doctors and nurses knew him for the most part. When he explained his connection to the 'patient' and gave her description, the medical staff was positively ecstatic. All of the survivors lacked ID chips, so a reunion with familiar faces was altogether impossible for those finally waking. He had been in every day for the last week, and the day prior he had witnessed her first return to consciousness.

Nikolai looked to the nurse who was escorting him through the ward. “Has there been any improvement, Joyce? She seemed rather disoriented when she woke up yesterday.”

Joyce shook their head. “None that we can tell, Nikkie… oh, I’m sorry… Researcher Garcia,” they said with a wink, “it’s good to see you moving up in the world. But yes, as you saw, we put her on a mild sedative drip to keep her calm. We expect her to wake up in the next few hours and we will try to assess her again.”

This knowledge gave Nikolai a sense of purpose as he strode down the corridor. Every so often he would pass by an open door, each time met with variations of where am I and who are you as the nurses attempted to calm the patients. He could feel his datapad heating slightly in his arms as his cerebral uplink’s linguistics software struggled to keep up with the veritable banquet of languages he was hearing.

Dialect detected: Spanish, Castilian; Dialect detected: Mandarin; Dialect detected: French, Canadian; Dialect detected: Arabic, Egyptian; Dialect detected: Russian…

Nikolai silenced his implant as the information became too overwhelming. Suddenly, he heard incomprehensible screaming from far down the hall.

“Per caelum! Ubi sum? Qui estis? Qui sum? Cur non verbis mihi quis loquatur?”

The hospital ward was becoming a madhouse, Nikolai thought. Instead of distracting himself with anything else, he let the nurse lead him to the room of the woman he met that day on the beach below the sea wall. It was only a short walk further before the nurse arrived at the room and knocked on the open doorway. There was no immediate answer, so they walked in.

The nurse looked back to Nikolai with a gentle but stern look, “Nikkie, she should be coming out of the sedative anytime soon.”

“Understood. Thanks, Joyce.”

As the nurse walked out, the woman stirred. Nikolai adjusted his coat nervously. He had just arrived, he was not even sure what he wanted to say to her. He simply sat in the chair next to the bed and took out his data pad. He had written a few notes that morning that he wished to review, perhaps he could start there. But before the datapad properly synced with his cerebral implants, her eyes opened. Despite their grogginess, her eyes looked like they were piercing into him, trying to place him.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said out of impulse.

“You were there…when I woke up,” she said matter-of-factly.

He raised his brow, intrigued. “Yes, ma’m. I was the one who rescued you from the sea wall. The name is Nikolai. I’ve been checking in on you since you arrived last week.”

Her attention was rapt, yet somehow also distant. “You found me…on a sea wall?”

Nikolai nodded, determining the best way to tell the story without alarming her. “Yes, the one that surrounds the harbor. Unfortunately by the time I found you, you were dying. I had to resuscitate you in order to get you breathing again.”

“The others?”

“By others, do you mean the other people who were washed up by the storm with you? I haven’t kept track, but there were a few who were lucky like you.”

The woman locked her fingers together and lowered her eyes to them. She eyed her new appendage just as Nikolai had seen many amputees and newly augmented do.

“Lucky me,” she muttered.

Nikolai sighed as he watched her gaze. The drugs were clearly wearing off and she was realizing the gravity of her situation. Another instinct of his prior medical career kicked in as he gently held her hand.

“I know all of this must be very overwhelming,” he said. “I want to ask you a few questions, but I will understand if you’d rather wait until you feel more ready.”

Nikolai watched as the woman seemed to draw her attention further inward.

“Depends on what you want to ask,” she replied, fluttering her fingers in his hand. It was post-augmentation jitters, he knew. They would pass.

“Firstly, I think it would be prudent to ask you your name.”

“Avery. Avery Thompson.”

“Thompson, huh?” Behind his eyes and on his data pad flashed a query screen, the name ‘Avery Thompson’ combined with her facial recognition features offered no immediate returns.

Nikolai nodded, flexing the fingers of her prosthesis to help her get used to the feeling of the new appendage. Nikolai nodded, giving her fingers a little shake in return. “Secondly, I want to ask you where you're from. We couldn’t find any ID chips on you, and the brand names on the clothes you were wearing don’t exist here in TRUEcit, or in any of our current databases. There’s a lot of blanks -”

“A forest.”

Nikolai looked at her in disbelief. “Excuse me?”

The woman lolled her head to the side as she looked past him.

“The last clear memory, before the fall,” she said. “I was in a forest. And then…”

“And then?” Nikolai asked, intrigued.

She turned her gaze to him blankly.

“And then there was a shadow looming over me. That’s all I remember.”

Nikolai began typing on his datapad, listing her symptoms and descriptions. In his head, he began piecing various bits of information together. Deduction and hypothesis, these tools were part and parcel of his trade.

Delusions from blood loss, misfires of the bio-mechanical interface? What forests are even left?

These thoughts spun inside his mind, he did not say them, he did not write them. The last thing he wanted to do was cause Avery any further distress. However, every single thought screeched to a halt in a moment as Avery looked directly into Nikolai’s eyes.

“What’s gonna happen to me, Nikolai? I… none of this feels right. What happens to me after all of this?” Avery said, gesturing to the hospital room around her, trying not to look at the chrome interfaces and myriad wires running from her and off into various directions.

Nikolai’s heart sank. “You will likely be assigned housing in a corporate dormitory.”

Forgotten, another statistic in the thronging multitude of TRUEcit, he thought.

Avery looked at him pitifully. The beginnings of tears welled in her eyes as she considered his words.

A swallow hung dryly in Nikolai’s throat.

Cold, clinical, that’s the temperament of a researcher.

Nevertheless, he considered her, he considered her story, the many blanks… the hidden person behind the mystery.

Sod it.

“But there is another option…” said Nikolai trailingly.

Avery looked up at him expectantly, a phantom glimmer of hope in her eyes. Nikolai could scarcely believe the words coming out of his mouth, but they felt right in the moment.

“... I have a little spare space in my apartment. There’s space you can sleep, a modicum of privacy. I know this is highly irregular, but you can crash at my place until you can adjust and get back on your feet.”

Avery looked at him incredulously. “Those are my two choices?”

Nikolai shrugged awkwardly. “Pretty much.”

Avery looked at him, then her metal arm, then the door with a defeated nod.

“Gee, let me consider,” she said with a dry sarcasm, “yeah, your place sounds nice. I’ll have my own place to sleep?”

Nikolai smiled weakly. He felt good about this, but an unplaceable dread still hung in the back of his mind, a sense of foreboding.

“Of course, Avery. I wouldn’t have offered otherwise.”

Oh boy, he thought, what am I getting myself into?

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Be on the lookout for the next chapter which will be released on Amanda Stark's page next week! Be sure to subscribe to her so you don't miss it!

Also, if you missed the announcement, you can get in the grove by listening to the playlist we put together for the story. Additions are to be made in the future.