MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 17

The waiting passengers were getting restless. Some of them sat on the benches. Those without benches sat on the ground. They didn't know what to do without ThinkingCaps to keep them busy. Most just paced back and forth, stared out at the rising sun, or fidgeted with their fingers. Only a few tried talking to one another. Most were standoffish. Barely making eye contact and if you walked over to one of them to start a conversation they turned away, as if to shield their faces from an acid attack.

The time was getting late. Even if the trains started up again in the next few minutes I'd still probably be half an hour off schedule. I wished I'd met my coworkers in person. Maybe I could have found one of them on the platform, although I'd gotten up early, so they were probably stuck at the LivingTowers. I looked off toward the horizon, in the direction of the east-bound track, toward HooverDam, though I could not see it. There was a small mountain off in the distance. Brown and dusty in the dawn sunlight, rugged, with sharp edges and a menacing blemish on the otherwise flat landscape. I knew the Dam was beyond it. That the SkyLyft launched somewhere in those hills. I considered the time once more and then decided to walk.

I guessed it would take me four or five hours but the power outage could last even longer. None of the bots had provided an update, and from the dead look of the city it didn't look like one was forthcoming anytime soon. Even if I arrived hours late at least I'd still get there. Maybe I'd even be the only one to get there. Regardless, I had to get there. I felt a sense of overwhelming urgency. So I started to walk.

I took an emergency staircase down from the train platform into the city streets below. Then I followed the sidewalk, deserted, but a hell of a lot cleaner than GutterVille streets. I walked as fast as I could muster. I tried to keep my line of sight for those hills clear, between buildings, checking my bearings every few blocks.

An hour later I was nearing the outskirts of San Bernardino county, where the line meshed with the boundary of Vegas. The heat was unbearable. It was still early morning but soon enough the asphalt would begin steaming. By late afternoon it would be melting along with any unfortunate animal that happened to be walking across it without protective layers.

The brown hills by HooverDam had a green tint to them near the top. I could see pine trees along a ridge off in the distance and guessed two more hours of walking across the dessert road in a straight line would bring me to the edge of them. Then I'd have to trek up through those hills. Find a trail maybe and then the edge of the SkyLyft station.

I looked back at the city center once in a while to be sure. No hover traffic, no lights, no scurry of trams and people. Still completely shut down. Even the buzzing drones used to carry cargo in steady streams of boxes and food deliveries were absent. It was almost eerie. As if a neutron bomb had gone off and killed the city's inhabitants while leaving the buildings untouched. I could only guess at the functionality of the SkyLyft.

Another hour of walking and I could see the tiny line extending from the center of the HooverHills up to the clouds. It was a light grey line, barely visible amidst the haze, covered in portions by mist and glimmers of morning glare, orange and yellow, watery from the desert dryness and shadows of mirage, but clear enough to see that it was there. A cable, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, wrapped around itself in a tight conglomeration of a billion threads, tiny nano-bots constantly reforming it, refurbishing it, making it flex in the tremendous winds and gravitational strains of a moving planet, connecting the ever rotating ground beneath it, through the atmosphere, two hundred miles straight up, then arced off into the curvature of the globe, and connected to an orbital platform circulating in line with the Earth's natural rotation, ten thousand miles an hour, bending but un-breaking, a ladder to heaven.

I continued to walk toward it. My legs were exhausted, my clothes soaked with sweat and my hair a disheveled itchy mess. My legs and arms itched too. As if the skin was rebelling against me for the indignity and torture of this hike. While I'd worn LegGyms for years, stretching and flexing my muscles to tone and strength, they were no match for natural walking. Real walking exercised tendons in the ankles, calves, knees and hips that leg wraps couldn't possibly flex. It would have taken thousands of tiny nodes to reach all the possible segments of the human body that were burning and screaming with pain as I walked another mile, another step, in the direction of the SkyLyft, spiraling upward, off in the distant and roasting landscape.