Fight or Flight

Anikevna was falling, in the ocean, in a glass box, naked.

She must have been drugged, she was waking up because the temperature was dropping. Her first instinct was to break the glass and swim for the surface, but it was getting dark.

Twenty feet away she noticed movement, a man in a box similar to hers. She raised her hand, but he kicked out and broke the glass. It imploded around him, shards of glass rending his body. He wasn’t moving.

Anikevna wanted to throw up, to scream or run away, but where? She fell silently deeper into the cold waters.

Not much later Anikevna was startled by the base of her box magnetizing to a conveyer belt, with dozens of other boxes, or parts of boxes. It slowly drew everything into a dome.

The inside of the dome opened up to display thousands of boxes, being stacked up the walls. Anikevna blinked. There was air, maybe she could escape. There was a woman ahead of her who thought the same, she broke her box and tried to run.

Two robots rushed forward, the first caught the woman by the head and crushed it, the second gathered up the body by crushing the bones and pulling the mass inside before moving to a new task.

Anikevna’s box was stacked and locked into place. It wasn’t long before she felt air circulating, and even less time before she was asleep.

Arm

Melena walked briskly into the Mike’s Tattoo Parlor. She cringed as the chime above the door rang, and brushed her platinum grey suit in an action that suggested she was brushing the feel of the place off her shoulders.

Melena stopped in front of the tattoo artist, a professional looking man much to her surprise, and the figure of her best friend.“Kassidy! What are you doing?!” she nearly shrieked.

“Calm down Melena, honestly you’d think you had just walked in on me skinning a baby goat alive.” Kassidy nonchalantly replied as she turned her right arm slightly to the left to provide the artist better access. He was finishing an intricate design that stretched from her lower neck and disappeared below her pant line.

Melena just stared, unable to comprehend. “Kass, I’ve known you for nearly 20 years and you have been vehemently against tattoos. You wouldn’t talk to my sister when she got one after her baby died” she paused, “I just spoke to you last Thursday, you never mentioned anything about this.”

“When was the last time you saw me?” Kassidy asked quietly, her eyes not focusing.

“Um, about 4 months ago, at Chantell’s Birthday celebration, right?”

“Well, things have changed a bit.” Kassidy murmured. She gripped her arm, just below the shoulder joint, and with a small click she detached the entire arm and handed it to Melena. “I needed something to cover up the scars.”

Wrong Time

“I was born in the wrong time,” Nico sighed, not for the hundredth time.

It was 2164, and it was too bright, too loud, and too much. She should have been born before technology had its big take over, when she could learn to hunt with a spear or to fight with a sword, not when she had to dive through layers of code to make any difference.

She went around her small apartment turning off monitors. She had two major rigs with three screens, a personal laptop, a work issued one, several pads and a couple cellphones. Plus or minus burners.

When it had all been turned off, it was eerily quiet, not very dark because of the thousands of adverts outside and the glow from her neighbor's windows. Nico rolled her eyes and turned on her laptop and faced it towards the window, if she didn't someone might call the cops for “suspicious activity”.

She sat on her couch and closed her eyes, and jacked in. Suddenly the world around her disappeared and she was surrounded by brilliant color. With a few motions, she organized everything into organic shapes and colors, her virtual self stood tall and ready for arcane battle. She drew her broad sword and started cutting through code, searching for a weak link.

“I really should have been born in a different time”, she muttered as she dove further into Cover ID's of the corrupt.

Wonderer

The figure materialized from the murky night not more than 50 yards from the city gate.

“Hey! Who goes there!” cried the shaky voice of the youngest member of the night watch. Weapons were gripped harder and shifted into an offensive stance.

The woman slipped forward with the silence and grace of a lion-fish. She cocked her head to the side for a moment, then replied in a stilted accent, “You can call me Wonderer.” Thinking the matter finished she moved forward to enter the city.

“Woah! Are you really expecting us to just let you, a stranger in with no identity?” The older pair of the guard said, holding out his hand to keep the woman away.

She paused for another minute, thinking, or maybe translating. The men were able to get a better look at her now. She was clothed in what looked like seal furs, decorated with sharp stones and shells. Her arms were bare save for a single strand of exotic looking kelp. “Ask travelers from Elyzil, I was there, before I was in Kabalia, and before that in Rielind, your city is the next in my concatenate.”

“Your what?”

Another silent moment, “in my. . .series. I have word and warning to bring to the people.” With an air of urgency she push between the two guards. The flick of her black scaled tail propelled her forward and the water currents stirred her midnight hair.