Chapter 28

Earth time: Saturday, March 30, 2019 5:51 AM Central Standard Time

Aina time: 1:50 PM, day 243 of 1418 H.E.

I love my weekends. I love working out. My routine is to take Route 61 southeast from home at Minneapolis Minnesota and drive out to the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest. A huge place, thousands of square kilometers of virgin forest, and with all the preoccupation with the plague, almost deserted. I love turning my body loose to run.

I locked my car and looked around, enjoying the coolness of the morning. It was just above freezing, and the air smelled clean and rich with the fragrances of the forest. The sun would rise in a few minutes, just before 6 AM, but there was plenty of pre-dawn light to star running. I did a few quick stretches and took off.

It's been over eight years since I've seen A'moth, eight long and lonely years. We'd had planned my fake-ID as Steven Smith to be only something temporary until she returned, but as the months changed to years I began to give up hope.

It's been an interesting life, I'll say that. My body continued to evolve after we split, becoming more Chungieran I guess. My hair and eyes have darkened. I've become quite muscular. And then my body stopped changing. Completely... I look exactly as I did eight years ago. I'm beginning to suspect I'm not aging. Chungierans don't age either...

My nickname at the Labs is Stevie Bod, though I work very hard to keep my real strength and speed hidden. I've taken up karate, and I'm my sensei's best student. I can also run a kilometer in two minutes flat when I open up, even over rough terrain. That's what I'm doing now, flashing through the forest at 30 kph. It challenges both my endurance and my reflexes. It's a dense forest, and I've never run into a tree at 30 kph. I really don't want to try it.

Once my face stopped changing, I picked Minnesota as an area to settle down in. I tried to teleport for a while, absolutely without success. I then started looking around for jobs in financial modeling, but the world's economy was in such a depression, the market for economists was almost nonexistent.

So I made a career change. I switched to analyzing the physical sciences. After looking at the job ads for a while, I went into medical research, kind of an obvious choice with the plague. Great job security, as long as anybody is still alive. Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but searching for a cure for the plague might well be the last.

It's sad, so incredibly sad, to see the total absence of young children in the world. The very youngest humans on Earth now are nine years and three months. My very last image of Isabelle was when she was eight years and three months. It's been that long ago. I often wonder what Isabelle looks like now as a teenager. That is, if she's still alive... Oh Isabelle...

The world's population now is just about 5.5 billion, heading down and getting older each day. In sheer numbers, it's where the population was 26 years ago, in 1993, but the age profiles are all wrong. The average age has just crossed 37 years, a few months higher for females, a few months lower for males. That's way too old. There's still a lot of grim determination to find a cure for the plague, but after nine years of absolutely zero results, the grim is growing and the determination... well... decaying...

Part of the problem is how incredibly stupid humans are. There have been hundreds of nuclear weapons used this decade. In August of 2012, there was a devastating nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. And then in May of 2015, two more hell-bombs went off, one in Israel and one in a jet over the Atlantic. It was heading for New York City. It's shear luck the city still exists...

The war in Korea turned into a gender war, and the females won. The world's estimate is that Korea is 100% female now, mostly from the north. After all the decades of being brutalized by men, I can't say I blame them. But the gender wars are spreading. All sorts of nasty little wars in Africa. And northern India is an absolute mess right now. Latest word is the guys are losing again. Damn, I hate the gender wars. Our species is racing to extinction, and all we can do is step on the gas...

But the lack of young children, that's the key hardship. People take off from work now just to stand outside the primary schools and watch the children. There's a surplus of teachers now. All the kindergartens and classes one through three are deserted. Everybody's looking back at the old problem of school overcrowding with wistful yearnings...

Oh, what I wouldn't give to hug Isabelle again, even once, hug and be hugged back by an eight-year-old girl. No one in the world has that pleasure now, no one... I sighed. At least the child-traffickers are slowly going out of business.

My senses are super-developed. As I approached a clearing in the forest, the wind was to my face. I sniffed and detected a super-faint trace of human sweat, and something else... gun oil I thought. A bit strange, the white-tail deer were not in season now. I slowed down my speed to something that's humanly possible as I emerged from the deep forest and into tall grass and shrubs.

There was a short ridge ahead of me, maybe 50 meters high and 150 meters away. My eyes picked up a flash on the ridgeline, and my sensei's training took over.

I have to be careful in the dojo, not to reveal the true speed of my reflexes. They are absolutely inhuman. I have less than a sixty millisecond response time to stimuli. But this was the real deal, no holding back here. I snapped my torso to the right, diving into the tall grass and shrubs as quickly as possible. I felt brief flashes of pain on both my arm and along my ribs. "Shit! Those idiots! Do I look like a deer?!"

My hearing cranked up to maximum alertness. A'moth once described it to me as scanning. I didn't really understand what she meant then, but I do now. I heard a man's voice from the ridgeline.

"Got him!"

A second voice spoke up. "Are you sure?!"

"Get out the shovels! Didn't you see the way his body jerked?!"

A third voice answered. "Yes! But he jerked sideways, not backwards!"

"I'm telling you! I was dead center on his heart! My shot was perfect! This Stevie Smith guy is history!"

"Christ!" I thought, "They're trying to kill me! And they know my name!" The reality of what I was up against hit me like a ton of lead bricks. I combat crawled back into the deep forest and took a moment to examine my body.

I was unbelievably lucky. The bullet had slightly grazed my lower bicep and ribcage, so slightly it left just a thin scratch on both. But there was no blood. So incredibly lucky! Talk about threading a needle... I took a look at my clothes, olive green sweatshirt, brown pants, not bad...

What to do? My would-be killers had no idea what I was capable of. And I felt like striking back! I could circle around, and then move it so fast... Oh hell, why bother? I was alone, unarmed, and up against an enemy I didn't understand. I shuddered as I realized these three were probably not the only people hunting me. I picked a new direction, south, and started to run as fast as I could.

Earth time: Saturday, March 30, 2019 7:00 AM Central Standard Time

Aina time: 2:59 PM, day 243 of 1418 H.E.

The V.P.'s private cell phone began to vibrate. "Yes?"

"We got another report. Alpha team is still sure they scored a solid hit, but it might not have been an immediate kill. They haven't found the body yet."

"What?! What the hell kind of report is that?!"

"Relax boss. We have all the teams converging on the area. There's no way for him to escape, even if he wasn't wounded. And Chester is sure his shot was good. Stevie Bod is toast."

"So they at least found blood?!"

"Uh... I didn't ask. But relax boss. We have him boxed in. We even have a team at his car. He has absolutely no place to go."

"You know he's a third-degree black-belt?"

"I don't give a shit. We're the ones with the guns, and we know how to use them. The guy's got no chance, absolutely none. He's either dead or dying right now."

"I want confirmation! I want to talk to the men who bury him!"

"Sure thing boss. I'll have the guys with the shovels give you a call back within the hour."

Two hours later...

Earth time: Saturday, March 30, 2019 9:00 AM Central Standard Time

Aina time: 4:59 PM, day 243 of 1418 H.E.

I just managed to catch the local bus at St. Charles, and was heading east on I-90. I'll be on an express bus within the hour, and in Madison Wisconsin by nightfall. My body is relaxed, but my mind is racing. I don't expect I'll get any sleep until I catch the overnight bus to Indianapolis. And after that, well, I've got a lot of thinking to do.

I smiled and shuddered at my close escape. Less than three hours ago I was peacefully exercising. Now I'm a hunted man. I ran over fifty kilometers over rough terrain. If the world were still having Olympics, I'd be standing on the podium for my gold medal.

A'moth taught me well about undercover identities, including the importance of a dead- drop. Deep in the forest there was a knapsack sealed in plastic and hidden under a boulder. I shaved off my mustache, trimmed my hair, put on some fake eyeglasses and changed clothes to a style Stevie Bod never wore. And then I kept moving.