Chapter 295: Getting the Hell out of Dodge

Sunday, February 19, 2006 (Continued)

Before I busted out of the winch room - by doing the busting inward from the hall outside - I did a last sight blob search. I was in a utility area mostly, next to a kitchen and a cleaning cupboard, with the rest of the floor around me being offices. No lights were on, there were no people around, and no security cameras either.

There was the same low level of activity out the back of the building. Not having tens of feet of earth in the way, I could see out the front of the building now, and there were many people out there. By the look of them, security and management types mostly. There weren't any fire trucks or ambulances. I was surprised there was so little response, but it certainly made my getting away much easier.

I was high enough that I could check the remaining levels of this building. Judging from the animals it contained, the extensive laboratories and some notes and signs I read, it was a very large veterinary pharmaceutical research company. I was surprised by how large, but I realized it'd have to be to provide a good cover story for however many people the CIA's operation employed (I'd guess about six hundred). The large loading bay was obviously useful to both operations, although the CIA one would have gone through FAR more animals than the above-ground operation.

One thing I specifically checked for was whether I had internal access to the roof. If there'd been a nice roof garden that staff had their lunch in, that'd be a VERY easy way for me to get away. The building was so large that if I'd taken off from the center of the roof, no one standing around the outside would've had a hope of seeing me as I wouldn't be in their line of sight until I was quite high, where I'd be in complete darkness. Not only was there no such access, the building was structurally very strong. I could smash my way through to the roof, but it'd make a lot of noise that would give the baddies a time that the break-in had happened. If it was a break-in, why had it happened after the attack on the lab had finished? More worryingly, noises from the roof just before I flew away might give them time to get vision gear pointed up toward the noise, catching me in flight.

I preferred to leave the bastards with mysteries, because then they would chase around after all sorts of theories, wasting their time, resources and patience, and hopefully get nowhere. Leaving them specific details of my escape to think about, such as break-in or break-out times and places, made it riskier that they'd have a specific theory about my escape that I wouldn't like. I had a fairly simple, nicely mysterious exit already in mind, so I'd go ahead with that. It'd actually be quicker too, as I wouldn't have to stop to search all the building for cameras between where I was now and the roof access. Thinking of which, I did take a moment to check one of their stairwells and elevator lobbies, and wasn't surprised to see surveillance cameras on them. That confirmed it; I would definitely be exiting through the nearby office.

I formed some NP-fingertips and used them to push a big hole in the wall, from the corridor into the room. I was hovering above where the hole was being made so I wouldn't be hit by anything; just watching the bits and pieces fall onto the concrete top. When the hole was big enough, I dropped down and used my feet to slide all the debris to the sides, to be consistent with guys breaking in this way.

I didn't even need to crawl through the hole (crawling is so clumsy and undignified) because I could float myself out. I was in the process of forming an NP-rug when #4: <I know we're 99% sure there are no cameras, but let's play safe by crawling out. If one catches us flying, that's going to freak out the authorities magnitudes more than a simple raid on a bioweapon lab.>

So I put off being dignified for another time, clambering out instead, keeping my head bowed way down and a hand shielding my face too, as the suit had a very transparent faceplate. Then I reached back into the hole to grab all the platters.

I used NP to make four heavy indentations, two on the hallway's carpet below the hole I'd punched in the winch room's wall, and two below the hole in the wall. They were indirection, to look like someone(s) had leaned a short ladder against the wall in order to get high enough to climb into the room above the height of the winch's concrete casing.

I scuttled for the office I was going to use. Its door was locked, but it didn't need a key from the inside so that was non-destructively solved. I entered the office, shutting and locking the door behind me, then moved to hide under the desk. There was no need for me to physically look out the window because a sight blob did the job much better and couldn't be spotted by anyone. I'd already seen that this office had a bag lining the trash can (or I would've found a bag somewhere else), so I grabbed that to put the disk platters in, folding it up and holding it under one arm.

I was one level up on the same wall as the loading bay, and about fifteen yards to its left (looking outward). There were four cars parked outside the loading bay, which had its roller door raised now. There were half a dozen guys standing around the cars, with at least a couple of guys inside the loading bay (I saw two when I glanced in, but I couldn't be bothered searching to see if there were any more). There were also two guys walking from the loading bay toward the corner of the building that would be the shortest way for them to get around to the front, where there were about two dozen people standing near the building's front door, with quite a few more forming a large, unintentional blockade at the entrance gate.

I could've chosen to exit from an office farther along the building to be away from any observers, but they still might've seen enough of my exit to be extremely suspicious. Plus the windows couldn't be opened because they had no hinges, which meant I had to break one. That would draw attention and look like a breakout, both of which were bad. I could get around those problems by escaping from an office close to the guarded loading bay.

I searched through trunks of cars that were parked in poorly lit areas without people standing near them, looking for guns. I was successful on the first attempt. I popped the trunk, slid the weapon out, then pressed the trunk closed again. I floated the gun away from the crowd until it reached the wall. With the acceleration I had available to me now, I just rocketed it straight up. At most, someone might have spotted a brief flash of movement, but they'd have no idea what it was. I decelerated it just as fiercely so it didn't get out of range, then kept it high enough to be invisible in the night as I flew the gun to the top of the wall near the loading bay. The bay was to my right, so I placed the gun on the wall about forty yards farther away in that direction. I stole two more guns the same way, placing them on the wall, successively ten yards farther away each time.

I located each weapon's safety and switched it off, then I spent some time carefully lining up my shots. I wanted to shoot at the guys outside the loading dock, but not hit any of them since I didn't know if they were bad people. They might be, but they also might not be. Not being sure, I wasn't going to risk killing them.

I double-checked my aims, then fired all three weapons in rapid succession. Two of the bullets hit one car, the third hit the side of the building. While the guys were diving for cover, I raised my aim somewhat so I wouldn't risk hitting anyone, and fired again. When they were behind cover, I aimed better and fired a few more times. In the case of one of my weapons, "aiming better" meant apparently aiming worse. That shooter must've been a bad shot, because three of his shots were too high, two of them hitting the window to my room, breaking the glass very usefully (I was still under the desk. I'd left my dignity above the winch room, so hiding under a desk was fine with me). I fired several more shots with all the weapons to disguise the fact that I'd already achieved my objective.

I emerged from under the desk, floating to avoid the risk of any glass shards cutting my hazmat suit. I was pretty sure there wasn't any nasty shit on it, but I thought it better to be safe than dying in excruciating agony. I stopped shooting, something that wasn't immediately noticed given the huge amount of shooting back that was going on. Not just from my 'targets', but from other guys who'd rushed to help.

My sight blob showed me everyone near me was crouching behind their cars or in cover in the loading bay, facing away from me and giving ALL their attention to the wall-mounted enemy. I stepped onto a stack of two NP-plates about a foot back from the open window, and another two minds formed one tennis ball-sized NP-point inside each of my armpits. I fired a couple more shots, erring on the low side, to get their attention focused on the wall. No one seemed to be looking my way, so I leaned out the window and ACCELERATED!

I was using four minds and not bothering with a windshield. Two-thirds of one mind is needed to support my weight, leaving 3.3 minds each providing 1.5 g's, so a total of 5 g's of acceleration. That was an UNBELIEVABLE sensation!

In 0.1 second I'd gone half a meter (which doesn't seem very impressive, does it?). By 0.2 seconds I'd gone 2 meters; 0.3 seconds 4.5 meters. Unless they were looking in my direction already, which no one was, 0.3 seconds is about the least time it'd take for someone to START reacting to seeing a blur of motion in their peripheral vision. By the time they reacted and turned, maybe 0.7 seconds would have passed, by which time I'd be 25 meters up from the window. Remember it was night and there weren't any lights on behind me. Admittedly, I was wearing a white hazmat suit, which is hardly subtle, but white is only white if any light bounces off it. There was very little light nearly one hundred feet up in the air.

After ONE SECOND of flight, I was 55 meters (nearly 200 feet) above the ground, and going straight up into the night at 100 MILES PER HOUR! So were the three guns I'd stolen because I was using some of my many spare minds to fly them up too, after accelerating them sideways behind the wall for a couple of hundred feet, so no one would even catch a glimpse when they rocketed upward. I thought leaving them behind was too freaky.

Accelerating from 0 to 100 mph in one second is an amazing rush, but it's also an incredibly heavy g force. I could feel my internal organs shift and the skin on my face bulge downward. I had to hang onto the external bag of disk platters very carefully with both arms, hands and plenty of NP-plates, because the bag would've ripped from the weight it was now carrying.

I had a significant proportion of the force being applied to my armpits so my legs weren't having to support six times my weight, but they were still having to support a great deal more than they were used to. My legs are strong, but they were very happy when I stopped accelerating after the VERY LONG, stressful second. I canceled the NP-points in my armpits and the extra one under my feet. I made a mental note that applying 1.5 times my whole weight to a tennis ball in each of my armpits was not a comfortable way to travel.

I had to use other NP-fingertips to hold me steady and provide a conical windshield because at 100 mph, the wind is fierce. You know what sticking your hand out the window of a car going 100 mph feels like. Now imagine you're standing on a 16" invisible dinner plate, are totally exposed to the wind, and are scarily high in the air. Even though I wasn't scared of falling - even if my NP-points all canceled it'd take several seconds for my ascent to reverse so I'd easily be able to catch myself - it wasn't as much fun as I thought it'd be. Even in a hazmat suit, which has got to be the perfect thing to wear when flying fast, the experience was very unsettling. Starting my first real flight with a 5 g acceleration into the darkness probably wasn't a good way to ease into my NP ability's new trick.

I continued to accelerate upward, but only at about 0.1g, just to keep me feeling nice and solid on my 16" plate. I was gaining altitude at the rate of 180 feet per second, and getting to about 1000 feet would be ample, so it only took another 5 seconds. [During my imprisonment over the last few days, my minds had enjoyed themselves calculating the values for many flying scenarios. It was a fucking tragedy that I had to merge at least twice to be reasonably sure of escaping and hopefully to get the body adaptability necessary to avoid the CIA afterward, but it was incredibly cool that I could fly so awesomely now.]

At what looked like "high enough" I canceled all my NP, letting wind resistance and gravity slow me. That was scary to do, but I'd done it because I thought I'd enjoy it, which I did after the initial shock was over. Once the hundred mile an hour wind buffeting stopped as my speed dropped, it was cool and fun. When I figured I'd probably slowed down enough, I tried to hold myself stationary in space. That's when the fun stopped and the worry started.

I wasn't sure which way was up or down anymore. I could see patches of lights, especially from the nearby town, but they were spinning rapidly. So fast that it seemed they weren't even spinning the same directions! I wouldn't throw up inside my suit but mainly because I can control my body better than that. This was suddenly NOT pleasant at all! It'd been fun when I hadn't cared about what was happening, but now that I was trying to orientate myself, the disorientation was VERY unsettling. I couldn't even tell if I was falling although logically I must've been, and I couldn't create NP-points under me to push up because I didn't know which way "up" was. I was spinning rapidly in three dimensions, fast enough that I could feel the wind through my suit, but every fraction of a second the wind was changing to hit different parts of my body in different directions. There was no way I could process information changing that fast.

I moved my body to be the shape it'd be if I was sitting in a chair, then I created two chairs. One square-shaped NP-plate (they're more flexibly shaped now) under my upper-legs and butt, then another at ninety degrees to it to support my lower back. The second chair was in my lap, against the top of my upper-legs and belly. I made the four NP-plates push inward forcefully enough to hold me tight. I was spinning, so either chair would be useless without the other to hold me in place. I used some more NP-plates to completely surround the external disk platter bag and hold it firmly against my chest, then I extended my arms to slow my spin. I created NP-bars for each hand to hang on to.

Then I tried to stop the spinning. I learned that spinning in 3D space is something my brain has ZERO ability to react sensibly to. I could slowly and carefully think about what to do, by which time the world had spun around me twenty more times and it was FAR too late to do it.

Imagine that I was stationary and weightless in space, with the three dimensions as lines projecting through my belly button. If I spun around the line that extended vertically, then I'd be turning to my left or right. If I spun on the horizontal line that projected through my hips, then I'd be tilting forward or back. And if I spun on the horizontal line that projected forward and back, then that'd be like falling over to the side (cartwheeling). Doing all three spins at the same time while also falling was NOT fun, especially knowing that the "falling" was going to end soon.

I had to arrest my fall, and I couldn't do that until I stopped spinning. The trick that seemed to work best was to think HARD about one dimension at a time. I started with the horizon. Was it tilting to the left or right? That wasn't easy, because it was also rapidly spinning behind me, to reappear with the ground on top of the sky when directions were reversed. It was tilting down to the right, so I used NP to push my right arm down to match it. Checked again, still tiling down to the right, so more corrective force, etc.

Eventually the horizon wasn't tilting. I was still spinning like a top, so I was constantly facing a different part of the horizon; and I was still tilting over backward, so the horizon was rapidly sliding down my field of view, but the horizon was staying roughly level the whole time.

Tilting was my next thing to fix. The horizon was going down, so I pushed on the back of my head. Not enough, push again. Oops, too much, push back a little. Once those two dimensions were fairly stable, stopping the third was relatively easy.

By then I was falling quite rapidly, and the increasing airflow was staring to making me spin unstably again! Fortunately I knew where Down was now (under my ass, where it should be), and I had plenty of deceleration available, so I used a good chunk of it. I enjoyed the feeling of slowing down and stopping in such a deliberate manner, especially because the world behaved itself while I was doing it. In a few seconds, I was TOTALLY stationary: sitting in my chair, not rising or falling, not turning, tilting or cartwheeling. I thanked God it hadn't been a foggy night, because that would've killed me.

I slowly, carefully AND STABLY increased my height again, thinking about my first flying experience, and wondering where the three guns had gone. I wasn't immediately above the building I'd escaped from, so they probably hadn't fallen among the baddies, but I otherwise had no idea. There wasn't anything I could do about it now; it'd be another puzzle for the authorities if they found any of them.

My number one priority was to work out a MUCH safer way of flying. Having 5.5 tons of force is USELESS if I don't know what direction to apply it in! You might as well have no force, which isn't ideal when you're 1,000 feet in the air.

Back in the lab, I'd thought about flying through a cloud or rain to wash my hazmat suit, but I was NOT going to go anywhere near ANYTHING that restricted my vision. Until you've experienced it, believe me that it's EASY to get disoriented when you're up in the air. God knows how Superman does it, but if I meet him, that's going to be my VERY FIRST question.

I spent a couple of minutes thinking about it, but I couldn't think of a good way of recovering stability quickly. The best I could come up with was to make my body resemble a shuttlecock by bending it at ninety degrees and extending my arms and legs out at ninety degrees from each other. Once I was going fast enough, air resistance would push my body around so it was falling ass-first, like a shuttlecock does. If I held my body symmetric and firm, it shouldn't spin in any more than one dimension, to my left or right, and that wouldn't be too bad. I could create a seat for my ass and push upward. That could still be very tricky, because without visual cues I could accelerate my body ALMOST, but not quite, vertically upward, resulting in my zooming in a big, wide, trending-downward-thanks-to-gravity, circle, ending very messily when I circled forcefully into the ground.

In short, I decided to NEVER get unstable again, never to fly in bad visibility, and after I got rid of this hazmat suit, to make sure I got some good goggles, because the wind making my eyes water would be very bad too. This flying business wasn't working out quite as impressively as I'd expected it to.

Having decided to treat flying with a great deal more respect than I had before, I thought through my plan. I ideally wanted no one alive down there who knew a guy called Mark Anderson existed. I couldn't achieve that because there were three shifts of nurses, supervisors and many scientists who had experimented on me. I'd spied out quite a few of their names, but not all of them, so I couldn't hunt them down and 'disappear' them, but even if I could, that would cause people to wonder what they had in common, which would lead to me and have very bad consequences, probably resulting in my family being questioned urgently. I was sure that wouldn't be good. I'd already decided to leave the underlings alone, and that was still my intention.

The guy who had my stuff in his office and the big boss (Armani Phillips and Seth Byrd respectively) were a very different matter. Not just for revenge either. Those two had the power to make things happen. They had already acted on their considerable interest in me - obtaining a lot of additional equipment and allocating a considerable amount of their scientists' time to studying me - so it wasn't unlikely they might become interested in my family after I was 'lost'. It would be good to prevent that happening. Their disappearances wouldn't be connected to me either. They might even get blamed for letting the saboteurs in, which was ironically true, just not the way the authorities would think. My plan was to breakout, to utterly destroy the disks and hazmat suit, then to hunt down Phillips and Byrd, taking care of them when I got an opportunity. Once I'd had my recent merge, I could've escaped and fled in a fraction of the time I'd taken so far, but it was all about staying escaped. I had to do everything I could to ensure that "Mark Anderson" was as removed from the picture as possible, for my and my family's sake.

It still seemed like a good plan to me. I'd drifted - been blown probably - away from the bad place. It'd been built a few miles out of a small town; smaller than Corvallis judging by how many lights I could see. There was no army base in sight either, although I could see an airport in the distance. It looked to be a civilian one, which was good as I didn't want to get into a dogfight during my first flight. That started me worrying about whether I'd show up on radar, especially because I was carrying a large number of metal disks. It'd probably be a good idea to stop doing that. I was drifting tangentially toward town, which getting closer to wasn't ideal. Where I was above now seemed suitable, so I started carefully and STABLY losing altitude.