Chapter 296: Tidying Up

Monday, February 20, 2006

I rose high enough to find a large collection of lights, then headed that way, dropping down to 450 feet when I got close so I could use a sight blob to read the signs. I was in St. Paul, Minnesota. I didn't know where Fort Dodge was within Iowa, but I knew Minnesota was north of Iowa, so I'd been going north rather than east to Washington DC, or south toward warmth.

I found a large, open gas station close enough to town that someone walking in wouldn't be noteworthy, landed myself in a dark area nearby, then walked the remaining distance. They sold hot food, so I got enough "for my family," plus a lot of drinks and snack bars for later, a hat that better covered my bald, blood-spotted skull than the one I had, and a national map.

I asked the attendant, "What's the best way onto the interstate east?"

He gave me directions to I-94. I listened attentively, but I had all the answer I needed in the first second, when he'd pointed.

I wandered down the road, thoroughly enjoying my hot meal. Down the road a bit, I cut into a field to get away from the lights, sat on an NP-seat, rose to 500 feet, then flew in the direction the attendant had pointed. It didn't take me long to find I-94, I turned right - which should be east if I'd been flying north - and followed the interstate while continuing to eat and drink. I'd had two weeks of too-short rations and no food at all for the last several hours, so the food was very welcome. I made sure to put the trash in my pocket rather than 'throw it out the window'; I was on a mission to do some tidying up, so littering would've been inappropriate.

When I'd eaten enough, I slowed to a hover, relative to whatever direction the wind was blowing in. I had to be careful not to take my eyes off the interstate for too long because it'd be easy to lose it or get turned around by the wind. Going to a camping store to buy a compass is definitely on the list for DC. I had about a thousand miles to go and it was about 4:30am now. I had to speed up a great deal, or take an extra day.

I'd very much like to catch Wright on his way to work in a few hours. Hopefully that'd be before he heard anything about Fort Dodge, so there'd be less chance of him changing his behavior or mentioning my name to anyone. Going 400 mph with me sitting in a chair would require a very big windshield as I'd need to protect my whole body. I could do that, but it'd have a lot of wind resistance and might get buffeted quite a lot. I was very eager to avoid buffeting, because I could imagine that easily leading to the dreaded instability.

I decided to try the flying rug approach, similar to what I'd used to fly through the wrecked doors during my escape. Compared to my first attempt at making a flying rug at the end of the casino kidnapping (there's far too fucking much kidnapping going on!) this rug would be much better. For a start, I can make NP shapes perfectly square now. I made a solid rug extending forward from the seat I was sitting on, allowing me to easily slide forward off my seat and lay flat on the rug, facing forward. I was navigating using a big sight blob so I could've flown facing backward, but that seemed wrong. A nice, flat flying rug should allow me to go fast in a stable manner, and of all the "manners" I know, "stable" is my favorite. I could angle a windshield diagonally up over my head, and even curl up the sides and back of the rug to hold me snuggly in place. I decided to call it my "Flying Sled".

I created the Flying Sled in front of my NP-chair. I was so used to sitting that getting off the chair and lying down on my stomach felt weird (try it 500 feet in the air yourself; it does feel weird, especially when lying on invisible plates). I got into position, and it felt like it'd work nicely. It was actually quite comfortable, so I hoped I wouldn't fall asleep. I tucked the food bag into a 'glove compartment', a box made of NP placed just behind the angled windshield and to my left a little, where it wouldn't intrude on my sight whenever I opened my eyes. I left the map open at the right place, putting it on the rug right under my face, with an NP-plate on top of it to hold it safe from the wind. Now I could navigate while I flew.

I was set, so I canceled my chair, oriented myself on the interstate again, made sure the horizon was perfectly stable, then started accelerating by pushing against the rear of the sled rather than on my feet. My body didn't slide backward because my feet were already held by the curved-up rear of the sled.

The sled worked REALLY well, being far smoother and faster than the chair. I'd accelerated myself with just one mind at a fifth of its full power, so at 0.3 g. That sounds weak, but without wind resistance it would've taken only ten seconds to get up to the same speed as the cars under me.

Wind resistance soon became a significant issue. The first thing wind resistance taught me was to put a copy of the windshield on the downward side of the sled, because wind pressure against the top one kept forcing the sled's nose down. I could compensate, but the compensation changed as the speed changed, so it was easier just to reproduce the upward windshield on the bottom so they canceled out at every speed.

I could've made the bottom one bigger, so it provided some lift, but I didn't want to. I had far more force than I needed, so getting a little extra lift was pointless, especially because the amount of lift changed with the speed. I just wanted a simple setup that I could operate with as little thought as possible, and what I had now gave it to me. The NP-plates of the rug itself continually pushed up with a never-changing amount of force to cancel my weight, all the NP-plates of the sled stayed in formation (easy, see below), and the acceleration had to be applied evenly to the back of the sled, which was also easy. It was a great setup, requiring almost no thought to maintain.

[Flying all the NP-'blocks' in formation was easy. Hold both your hands out in front of you with just your index fingers extended, so they're about 2 inches apart. Now write your name rapidly in the air, trying to move both fingers in perfect synchronization with each other. Their relative distances will wobble around, sometimes 2" apart, sometimes 1" or 3". Now repeat the exercise with the two fingers pressing against each other. It's easy to keep them locked together AND moving in random directions with almost perfect synchronization. Same for NP-plates flying in formation when they're pressed up against each other, especially with thirty two minds on the job.]

Wind resistance was increasing, so a 30 kg push was increasingly being countered by the wind's pushing back. To maintain a 0.3 g acceleration, I had to push harder and harder. The pushing mind maxed out its pushing power and the sled increased its speed to about 120 mph (about double the speed of the cars beneath me). That was very good, because in my flying chair it'd taken three minds max-pushing to get me up to that speed.

A second mind pushing got me up to about three times the speed of the cars.

I practiced turning, and it was as easy as I'd guessed, merely needing me to push harder on the outside corner of the sled (so left rear corner if I wanted to turn right), or less hard on the inside of the turn (both worked fine). Climbing or descending was by changing the upward force from the carpet. If I increased it, I rose, but unlike an airplane, I remained level the whole time. I could tilt up if I wanted, but there was no need to, not even to look where I was going because the sight blob did that for me.

It took 4 minds to get me up to 4 times the speed of the cars; 8 minds to get me up to 5.5 times faster.

I was experiencing an uncomfortable amount of wind blowing on my body, so I halted the acceleration progression while I experimented with reducing turbulence by altering the design of my Flying Sled. I extended the windshield farther over my head (and underneath too, to ensure lift was unaffected), but that didn't help much. Nor did making a complete nose-cone. What made me happy was widening the nose of the sled out to the left and right, tapering it down to either side, somewhat like a hammerhead shark (it would've looked very cool, if it hadn't been invisible). I could've built a completely enclosed canopy (with a small gap at the back so I didn't suffocate), but having some fresh air blowing in made flying more fun, especially as I had a nice heat blob going.

Once the wind buffeting was reduced to a comfortable level, I got back to accelerating. Sixteen minds got me up to eight times faster than the cars beneath me. Call it 500 mph (my Flying Sled was woefully unequipped with instrumentation). [I later timed myself between two locations on my map that were connected by a straight road, and 500 mph was about right; slightly over actually.]

Theoretically, 24 pushing minds would've gotten me up to about 600 mph, but I was happy enough with 500. The bumpiness of the ride had started increasing. It wasn't bad, but I had a feeling that it would be if I kept pushing the speed upward. I was also worried what would happen if I lost center for any reason. All my NP-points would instantly cancel and I'd suddenly be tumbling through the air. The faster I was going, the more dangerous that'd be, and I thought 500 mph was more than enough. I haven't accidentally lost center for a very long time, but better safe than sorry in this circumstance. If I want to get involved in something potentially distracting while flying, I'll remove a few minds from the 'engine' first (quartering the number of minds would halve my speed and quarter the air's 'impact' on my body if I lost center).

I was driven away from the interstate by rain clouds. I was NOT going to fly through rain at 500 mph and lose orientation. I could VERY easily have unintentionally tilted downward slightly, so sixteen minds would be powering me headfirst into the ground at over 500 mph. No thank you! Another thing I wasn't going to do was try to fly over the top of the clouds. I'd heard somewhere that above 10,000 feet people start to need an oxygen supply or they get drunk-like or even pass out. Flying at 10,000 feet at 500 mph with nothing but my mind to keep me safe had to be the worst possible time to impair my brain functions by getting drunk.

Not going through rain or over it meant going around it. I wasn't too worried about deviating from the interstate because I could easily fly over towns and catch their names. It was a clumsy way of navigating, but it'd work.

I did experiment with flying higher, up to what I guess was about 5,000 feet. It worked fine. It was cold but a heat blob took care of that. Another one heated my food when I wanted another snack; useful things, heat blobs. I preferred to fly at about 400 feet because I could read the names on signs to identify towns as I flew over them, so my high-altitude experiment didn't last long.

By the way, "reading the names on signs" isn't as easy as it seems, and was something I had to very cautiously experiment and practice with. The problem is that I have to fly with my eyes shut to get the much better visibility that a large sight blob gives me. So if I lower the blob to read street signs, then I'm flying blind. Flying blind is VERY scary, as a gust of wind might destabilize me, and I HATE the idea of being destabilized! I didn't so much "lower the sight blob to read the street signs" as zip it down and back up again, for a succession of VERY quick glimpses until one of them caught sight of a useful sign.

A couple of hours later, I arrived at Washington DC. It was good timing because I needed a comfort stop. I'd eaten and drunk too much during my trip, and my Flying Sled is also woefully unequipped for passenger comfort.

I quickly dropped down in the dark, behind the back wall of another gas station. A few meters above ground level I tilted the sled so I came down standing up. One good thing about Magic Flying Sleds, is that there are no parking problems, although I was forced to leave the bag of food on the ground. I walked around to the front the station, disposed of my trash, bought a street map and used their convenient convenience.

I read the map while walking back to my landing spot. I knew the address of the DHS's S&T office and where I was now, so it was easy to plan the final leg.

I checked that no one was watching, then recreated the Magic Sled so it was standing on its end right in front of me. I put the bag of food back in the glove compartment and the map layered on the floor, then I made like Superman, leaping into the air. I'd leaped slightly forward of vertical so I bumped into the sled, which was rising up to catch my feet. The sled accelerated upward and tilted slightly forward to make it easy for me to remain in place. An acceleration of 1.5 g was enough, as in 1 second I was 7.5 meters up, above the nearby buildings and outside of any light shining from their windows. My opinion of how cool I was got raised several notches.

I flew at 400 feet AGL to the DHS's S&T office, hovering nearby while I carefully checked that there were no cameras on the rooftop, or on the tops of the other S&T buildings. Some of them had a lots of equipment on top (satellite dishes and various types of antennas), but no cameras that I could see. My face was deliberately placed in the center of the map, so totally hidden from below, but I didn't want them to know that anyone could fly.

The way looked clear, so I moved closer to get good enough visibility to read. I knew Wright had his office on the top floor because I'd seen him punch that button on the elevator many times, so I sight blob searched that floor until I found his office. That was easy as it was one of the best and his name was in the "To:" area of most of the paperwork. He wasn't in yet (my watch said 6:45am but it was 7:45am here because of the time zone change). I went through his paper files (inside his desk, filing cabinets and safe) looking for anything about me, but I found nothing. That saved me the bother of covering his smoke sensor with an NP-bowl and having a fire.

I didn't want to use his computer because that would cause suspicions later, but there were plenty of other computers around and I knew that S&T's security was poor, so I didn't expect the trouble that using the CIA's Medical COO's computer had caused. I logged in with a senior researcher's password and looked up my file. It wasn't there, which I presumed meant that Wright had gotten rid of it. That was excellent, because it meant I didn't need to coerce any cooperation from him. This was going to be quick and easy. I logged out.

I flew myself away from the compound, found a suitably dark and obscured spot, checked no one was watching it, then dropped quickly to the ground. I walked briskly to a location closer to the front gate of the compound, but out of sight of it. I sat myself quietly in a corner, head down and hopefully looking completely uninteresting, although anyone who approached would be surprised how warm it was in my area. Not that anyone could approach unexpectedly, as I'd proximity sense them twenty four feet away (I was very pleased by that sense's range being so useful now).

I sent a sight blob to check the DHS. First I confirmed Wright's car hadn't arrived yet (I'd spied that out when they had me prisoner), then I stationed the sight blob outside the front gate waiting for him to arrive. There hadn't been a day planner in his office, so I didn't know whether he was coming to work today, but I'd find out in the next hour or so.

Every few seconds I zipped the sight blob to above me to check no one was approaching me, and then I zipped it back to the DHS. That took less than half a second so I missed nothing.

I saw him arrive just after 8:00 local time, so I'd cut my arrival very close. I was happy to see there was no one else in the car with him, so I could do this the easy way. I let him enter the compound and then I took control of his car. I pushed his feet back against his seat and his hands down by his side. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, unfastened his seatbelt and locked the doors. I steered his car for the corner of a building a good distance away, pushing the car from behind to help it accelerate (not hard enough to be freaky or leave indents in the metalwork, just enough to build a very impressive speed). He couldn't know, but I had nearly all my spare hands holding the front of the steering wheel tightly, to prevent the airbag deploying properly.

There was absolutely nothing he could do about it, so the driver's side of his car impacted right on the corner of the building at high speed, causing him massive injuries.

I pinched his nose closed and tightly sealed his mouth with an appropriately shaped, wide NP-fingertip. Another of my fingertips felt for a pulse. He had one, but it wasn't doing well. I didn't want to break his neck deliberately in case the similarity with the computer geeks at the CIA lab was noticed. Setting fire to his car might make people think about the mysterious fires in the lab too, so I just kept the suffocation going. He'd lost all his breath in the impact, so the lack of air was immediately causing him trouble. He was so injured he wasn't capable of fighting for a breath, not that he could've fought me anyway.

After my first kidnapping I'd learned the "3/3/3 Rule": "You can survive for 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food." (It's only roughly correct.) Wright didn't even make it to one minute before his pulse stopped. A crowd had gathered around his car and were already trying to come to his aid, but I'd been holding the car doors shut to ensure no one could get in even if the locks had been damaged by the crash. Someone eventually smashed a window and unlocked the doors, but even then they couldn't be opened (the frame of the car must've twisted to clamp the doors, or something).

One would-be rescuer climbed up onto what was left of the car's hood, cleared out the windshield and wanted to pull my victim out that way, but other spectators argued him out of doing it.

People kept trying to open the doors, but it wasn't until the EMTs arrived and cut the doors off that they could get his body out. He'd been dead for fifteen minutes by then. The EMTs had done very well getting there so quickly in rush-hour DC winter traffic, but not nearly fast enough.

I got up, moved to the main street I was sitting near, which wasn't the street the DHS entrance was on, and started trying to hail a cab to take me to a good hiking store.

This was all the tidying up I was going to do in DC. The only choices were to do Wright only, or to do everyone who could conceivably know about me; there was no useful middle ground. Just taking down the S&T building I'd stayed in, and the people in it, wouldn't achieve much because that was just admin. Most of the people who'd worked on me while I was their guest had been based in other buildings. I didn't think I had a chance of taking everybody in the entire complex down, destroying the buildings, the computer disks and wherever their computer backups were. As this was Washington, there'd be Army, Air Force and God knows who else all over my ass before I could get all that done. The Fort Dodge lab had conveniently been inside a secret hole in the ground in the middle of Iowa, so no one could see that I was wrecking it or respond quickly. Neither was the case for the DHS's buildings.

I'd just hope that Wright's apparent suicide didn't cause anyone to get suspicious about Mark Anderson. They shouldn't, as there wasn't anything to link them, especially because whoever investigated Wright's death shouldn't know about my being a guest of the Super Top Secret, destroyed CIA lab halfway across the country.

^

Getting a cab was a pain, but flying through a heavily populated area during daylight hours would have caused considerably more pain, so I had no choice.

I eventually found myself in a good hiking store. The Magic Flying Sled worked so well that I no longer needed to buy a set of motorcycle leathers, but I still needed a moderate-sized backpack to carry stuff in, and I DEFINITELY wanted a compass. If there were easily portable version of the other instruments that planes had, that would be very good too, especially if there was one that could tell you what to do when your plane was unstably spinning all over the sky.

I picked out a pack that was as big as I could carry around during the day without looking too much like I'd just emerged from the wilderness. That took most of my money, but I presumed that compasses were cheap. I was happy to buy something cheap until I got to Portland, where I could "Kill two birds with one stone", so to speak: tidy up Moran and dig up the $10,000 I had hidden just north of the city.

One of my concerns about buying flight-related equipment was anyone finding out about it. People do NOT carry altimeters around!

It turns out that they do. When I asked about compasses, and mentioned that I wanted something that I could carry around all the time for convenience, the salesman showed me their display of watches that had compasses in them. Some of them had altimeters too!

"Why do people need altimeters in their watches?"

He was a salesman, so I got the enthusiastic, gushing version, but basically they're for people who scientifically fitness train at altitude and for snow-skiers and -boarders.

Buying a new watch was an excellent idea because:

• They had AWESOME features (below).

• I had to buy a new watch soon anyway, because the one I had might be able to be linked to the CIA lab. (The ID I was carrying was certainly dangerous. I'd stolen the wallet of my vague lookalike from the lab, in case I needed some form of ID out in the world. I'd dump it as soon as I arranged a new ID.)

• I could wear a watch and no one was going to query it the way they'd query my carrying an altimeter.

• It'd be immediately "to hand" if I needed it in midair.

The store didn't have a big range in stock, but it had plenty of brochures. There were several watches that would be fantastic for me because they contained the functions of:

• Compass. Very useful for flying around at night.

• Altitude, from roughly 5,000 feet below to 25,000 feet above sea level; the models varied, all suiting my needs because I had no intention of flying outside of the lower or higher limits.

• Rate of change of altitude, so I'd know if I was going down; a VERY, VERY useful feature if I accidentally hit fog or rain.

• Altitude alarm. If I got below the setting, an alarm would sound, another WONDERFUL feature.

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