Earth, 35th Century. You can cheat death by downloading your consciousness into a Virtual Universe, with thousands of imaginary worlds to choose from, and countless 'lives' to be 'lived.' But someone of vital importance to the Virtuaverse has been m...
"Bank left!" yelled Pixell, who managed to knock out our pursuer's solar drive with a well-timed shot from Les' disruptor – which worked on real-world digital systems as well as virtual ones, but in a different way. Yeah, I know I'd promised Helena that I wouldn't use disruptors. Les, however, had made no such promise.
The bastards kept coming, which meant their hover-jet had a secondary diesel drive. Sunny was desperately trying to rewire the medi-bed to restore power to it after some peanut-sized laser from a grenade had passed through its self-contained power source. We had about two minutes left before the medi-bed, and possibly Holly herself, shut down. Wanda was providing Sunny with specs she'd downloaded from the medi-bed's online instruction manual.
"Not that wire, the other wire!" shouted my crow-bot.
"I'm a genetics student, not an engineering nerd!" cried Sunny.
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"Fuck this!" growled my adopted son in an unfamiliar voice. Teepee shoved me away from the window and shoves One-eyed Willy into my hands. Before I could call him a worthless semi-human low-tech pre-teen toaster, his right arm morphed into a laser cannon and toasted the cockpit of the hover-jet. Ignoring the ensuing massive explosion, he threw himself at the medi-bed, hugging it while his fingers extended themselves into its guts. The bed lit up and became fully functional in a matter of seconds.
We all took a deep, well-earned breath of sanitized air. Holly's timer read "00:22" and there appeared to be no damage to her healing procedures. Time would tell, of course.
You're probably wondering, "Crow Feather, just what in the hell happened?"
And you'd be in luck, because I'm gonna be Mr. Nice Narrator and tell you.
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Overland travel around the world changed radically after the Big Ka-boom. There are lots of deadly things out to kill you – most are chemical- or radiation-based. I'm not gonna lie, but just as scientists predicted, cockroaches had a grand old time filling in the now mostly empty tiers of the food triangle.
The predator/prey diagrams also changed radically. Rats came in a close second, followed by worms, dogs, rabbits, mice, ferrets, snakes, spiders, hyenas, vultures, ravens, piranhas, sharks, horseshoe crabs, seagulls, lemurs, and kangaroos. After a millennium and a half, you wouldn't recognize them. There are some of the originals left, and zoologists are breeding them in captivity with high hopes. Frankly, I think their days are numbered.
