Xeno yearns to have access to The Nth Dimension like The White Boys, famed telepaths who suffered brain damage when they made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Out of work as a bartender since the Shoki Pao dance club mysteriously burned d...
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The black box on Trianne's chest streamed Andrea's Greatest Hints into her neocortex at full tilt, through a black node—a wireless transmitter linking the consumer's mind to the black box—stuck to the center of her forehead like a black bindi.
"The power within, is within your power," Andrea said, soothing and familiar, calmly narrating over a tropical vista, the message appearing in skywriter smoke across the bright aqua sky. The virtual self-help Eden hit a bad sector and began skipping on Trianne's sleep patterns, causing her to convulse. Her abdomen contracted upright as if her back were pierced by an invisible spike. Letters in the skywriter message flickered and dropped out of sight:
T E PO ER W THIN IS ITHIN Y UR OWER
Trianne jackknifed awake, her platinum hair drenched in perspiration. She jammed the palms of her hands into the transparent pod glass, sensing a warm sensation on her upper lip. Drops of blood raced past her chin, splattered onto the bright cotton of her tank top.
"Dammit!" She yanked the black box from her chest and tossed it aside, then yanked a tissue from a dispenser on the rail molding and shoved it in her nostril, clotting the blood. She gazed up through the pod glass, catching her breath, seeing nothing but concrete ceiling. The silence was broken by the pneumatic echo of a pod claw, rising towards her floor. She pushed open the pod glass, jumped out in her tank top and panties and stepped through the concrete bay, crossing to the circular catwalk with steel frame balcony, overlooking the central shaft of the motel garage.
She leaned over the rail, keeping the tissue to her nose, watching the massive pod claw lurch up through the shadows of the central shaft on a vertical track. Other curious observers leaned over the balcony rail, watching, waiting, dotting the central shaft with the blue glow of chemorettes, turning the gloomy interior to a faint galaxy of stars. The grimy metallic claw paused in front of a distant bay, expanded its mandibles, extracted a seemingly random pod, then swerved it away from the balcony in midair. The pod interior was fogged, obscuring the tenant from view. She could see traces of residual smoke escaping from the pod seals, as it was lowered towards the ground floor.
She got inside her pod and lay back down. The nosebleed had stopped. She trashed the tissue, flicked on her chemorette, inhaled, and let out a wad of smoke, then pressed GROUND FLOOR on the pod control panel. The LED clock read 1:00 a.m. So much for sleeping in on Saturday morning. Within seconds, she heard the whining of the pod claw, working its way back up the central shaft, pausing—a series of verification blips—the claw knocked the bottom of the chassis, shaking her a bit, aligned itself, then clamped down on the fiberglass.
Through the pod glass, she watched the concrete ceiling swerve out of view, as the claw swung her into the central shaft. Now, she could see all the way up through skylight, into the night sky. The navigation strobes of a pleasure dome drifted past the dirty window panes, on its journey to some exclusive event for fabled Metropans.
Upon taking another drag of her chemorette, she noticed something written on the underside of her wrist:
