Chapter 7: Running the Wasteland

Midnight took me to an isolated stretch of desert somewhere south of the New Mexico/Texas border; east of El Paso and west of Odessa. It was Midnight who took me, not Serenity. She was in full dress as her superhero alter ego, and we maintained our personae the entire time we were outside of the Fortress.

"Its important to develop a public persona and to use it religiously whenever you're in public wearing the suit," she told me. "It is helpful that the suit completely disguises your voice, but if there are mannerisms that people associate with you, you will have to be careful to eliminate them."

making the suit do a double take wasn't easy, but I did a good enough job that she caught it, and barked a short laugh.

"Not the people. Eliminate the mannerisms."

I laughed back and shrugged in the suit to show her I was settled in and ready to go.

"Alright, lets run then. See that low hill to the south?"

"Uh huh."

"Go."

And I started running. It felt smooth to me, but I imagine from the outside it looked pretty intimidating. A fifteen foot tall steel humanoid shape, feet pounding the hard, sun-baked ground as it moved at a decent 30 miles an hour, shook the ground pretty good and raised a good sized cloud of dust.

"So far so good," came Midnight's voice. "Try cutting left and right, like you're dodging something."

I did, and found the dynamics of shifting all that weight suddenly caused some problems as, once again my body's idea of how to do it conflicted with the suit's, but after a couple dozen sudden shifts, it was beginning to smooth out.

"Alright, without slowing down, give me a forward roll coming to a stop after you complete it." Midnight requested.

I decided stopping to think about it was the wrong thing to do, and just went for it. The roll actually went pretty smoothly, way better than I expected. The stopping part? Not so well. I did a couple of rolls forward followed by a little wobbly one that sort of looked like a dying toy gyroscope when its on its last legs, and then I was laying in the dust, wondering what went wrong.

"That was fun," I said out loud.

So I did a couple more standing forward rolls and we talked about momentum and timing, and then I tried a running roll again. Better, but not great. Once I had those looking semi-graceful, we stopped those and began trying a full running shoulder roll, both left and right. Those didn't suck as completely as my initial full speed forward roll had, but they weren't pretty, and they were definitely harder on the system if you didn't get it right.

After lunch, I learned my first real trick. We practiced jumping to start with, and here in the open desert, it was serious jumping, using all the power and mechanical advantage the suit had to offer.

"Jump straight up."

I did, and I judged my effort as basically jumping my suit's height, about fifteen feet. Landing was like running as far as impact went.

"Flex slightly and jump again."

I did, and this time I jumped a good three times my own height. When I got to the apex of the jump, Midnight called out. "Initiate a landing sequence."

I have a pretty damned good memory. I usually remember things fairly easily. I'd read the manuals that Serenity and Trey Young had built, and thought I knew it pretty well, front to back, but how I pulled the landing sequence out of my head in time to perform it in the middle of that jump? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm beginning to think my legs weren't the only things Doctor McKesson may have messed with while I was under her care. There's no way I would've been able to remember that one detail so well without having isolated the procedure and practiced it.

The 'landing sequence' was just a particular one of those 'squint & twitch' moves, and a relatively easy one. The end result being me, in the suit, coming to a smooth, flex-legged landing at the end of the jump.

"You like that?" came Midnight's voice over the suit's comm.

"Yeah," I answered. "But we might need to have a little chat later about why I was able to pull that out of my head so easily."

We spent the afternoon working more on jumps, and a couple variations on them, as well as combining them with some of the running and other maneuvers that I was beginning to get comfortable with. Another couple of days like this, and it would really start to feel like boot camp.

I didn't realize it until I climbed out of the suit at the end of the day, but it had really been a physical workout. I was drenched in sweat, and I made a hasty exit for the shower. After I was clean again, it was back to the suit to clean the inside thoroughly. The last thing I wanted was to let the inside of the suit begin to smell like an old gym sock.

I didn't bother with the manuals that night. I ran a mile on the treadmill in the gym to work the knots out of my muscles from being in the suit all day, and followed that with another hour in the therapeutic bath. Serenity referred to it as a hot tub, but I'm not sure where that term came from. Dinner and a long phone call to Becka finished my night and I was asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

Sunday was filled with fighting! After an hour in the morning with the swiveling axles again, Midnight threw on something she called her 'giant midnight force' suit, and we began sparring. Punch and counter-punch at first, just getting used to the feel of actual moving around and throwing punches and blocking them. All at a very sedate speed. After a midmorning break, we ramped it up, and got into some serious fisticuffs.

I had been a decent brawler, back before the Battle over Kansas City caught me up in its drama. Decent enough I guess for the streets where I lived and hoped to escape from, but not what you could truly call an accomplished or effective fighter. What I did have was the sure knowledge that if I lost a fight, I didn't have the number, or type of friends who could keep the wolves at bay. I refused to play some of the games required, so I had earned no tolerance. By some manner of thinking, given the way life was expected to turn out for those who grew up where and when I did, the Sprite didn't ruin my life. In fact, she may have saved it.

What I knew about fighting got taken apart, sorted out, and what seemed like a billion new chapters added. Midnight then put it all back together. The process wasn't fast, it took that weekend and many others over the long winter and spring. Many, many looong weekends. Weekends where I was missing time with my new girlfriend.

To cover for those absences, I did write articles for the science and technology section of the Star. I wasn't submitting them yet, but I did write them, and Becka and I would spend time in the evenings, when we weren't otherwise occupied, going over them together. She was a harsh critic and a cruel editor, but she found a way to inspire me past my flaws and shortcomings as a writer.

In the middle of April, I got to fly for the first time.

Flying in the suit requires a little explanation. Just as a lot of Midnight's power is disguised with holographics, my ability to fly is disguised as being done with jets in the boots, shoulders and back of the suit. The jets, while real, produced negligible amounts of thrust. They're strictly for show — anti-gravity is the real power. Aerodynamic flight controls are also achieved with the use of complementary secondary gravitic fields, and although the science behind it was beyond me, the application of it soon prove to be far more natural than I'd have expected, especially since most of it is controlled by on-board dedicated flight control processing systems.

"We need to get you some flight time someplace where we don't have to worry about being observed," Midnight told me Sunday night. "Next week I'm going to take you somewhere different, okay?"

"sure," I said agreeably. Dinner was cooking and I was a few minutes away from calling Becka for a chat. I was feeling far less stress after today's workout than I had the day before, and I had finally gotten to do a little flying. I was feeling on top of the world.

Back at work on Monday, I continued to wait for the after-effects of the management training class. Someone would come calling to tell me I was going on temporary assignment somewhere, but I had no sense of the timing. Days, weeks, months — none of the participants or my bosses gave any indications. I was clueless.

Work was its usual mindless series of phone calls, sprinkled with the occasional moments where I actually had a sense of accomplishment, and they served mostly to mark time between visits with Becka. We ate together every day for lunch, and got together most workday evenings. So far Rebecka was accepting my excuses for being gone entire weekends at a time. But I knew I was going to need to come up with something better soon if I didn't get that temporary managerial assignment soon.

In the meantime, the two of us worked together in the evenings to see if I had what it took to write newspaper articles for the Star's science and technology section. The 'story' I had been writing and re-writing concerned the paging system used by KCGH; Kansas City General Hospital. It was a 'state-of-the-art' system, and combined both telephonic and radio communications to create a system that allowed those on call to at least move about their own neighborhood without having to stay in the house to answer the phone. The doctors and emergency personnel there raved about it, and it was brand new, only having been put in place a few months earlier.

I was fortunate in that the two base components, the Bell Systems DCX11, which was the heart of the telephonic system, and the Johnson and Brown Radio Dispatch Center, model IV, were both very popular systems, and I had been able to read extensively on them in a half dozen of the technical journals I subscribed to, and I was able to use those journals as resources while I wrote more specifically about the system as it was installed at KC General. A few phone interviews with some of the people involved, and I had a pretty thorough piece as far as the technical side of things went. The trick for me was humanizing what I wrote; making it interesting for the average person. Most of the polishing was for 'putting some heart in it', as Becka described it.