#sorry if this is how you find out ronnie is 6ft tho btw (i'm not happy pride)

[flatstarcarcosa]

SYSTEM REBOOTING

The words are the only thing she has awareness of. She blinks, knows her eyes are open, and is robbed of the sensory input of anything else. It is disorienting, if you’re not used to it. 

AUDIO/VISUAL FEED RESTARTING

She blinks again and the world turns back on, along with the voice in her head.

“Oh, thank god,” Mathias says. “Thank fucking god.”

15 storeys up, fire billows out of the office windows, plumes of black smoke choking the night sky and swallowing up the stars.The desire to lay where she is and simply watch the colors dance in the flames is almost enough to give her pause. Instead, she sits, and bites back a yell as the motion sends pain radiating through her torso. It branches out from her chest in waves, taking her breath with it.

“What the fuck happened?” she gasps. She manages, somehow, to get her feet under her and her weight supported.

“You know how I keep hassling you to let me update your implants, citing the two-point-six-seven percent feedback lag? And how you keep telling me no?” asks Mathias. “That happened. Bomb went boom too soon, you took the express way down, and your heart stopped. I popped adrenaline stims to get you going, but the lag made me think it wasn’t working so I popped more. The system caught up, I realized I’d overdosed you, so I had to flood you with a sedative to take the worst of it down.”

“I’m- I’m fucking speedballing, then?” she asks, taking in the alleyway around her. “That explains a lot.”

“You also have seventy-five seconds until the cops are on scene,” he adds, “sorry.”

“Seventy- that’s the best you could do?!” she snaps.

“It was 120 but you were kind of dead, which ate up our time!” he yells. “Go to the end of the alley, make a left, look for a black Mazda.”

The sirens in the distance get closer and louder, and she stops arguing in favor of moving. She locates the car, unsurprised when the security system is down and allows her to slip into the driver's seat like she belongs there. She depresses the break, jabs her thumb against the start button and throws the coupe into reverse.

“Remember, speed limits when the reds and blues are around!” sings Mathias.

“Yes, mother,” she growls. She waits for a break in traffic, engages her turn signal, and pulls seamlessly into the flow of other commuters now trying to avoid the growing cluster of police and fire responders. The dashboard beeps and the navigation system lights up with a pre-programmed route on a live traffic feed. “Rendezvous still clear?”

“As long as no one blows it up? Yeah.”

“You’re in a mood,” she mumbles. She blinks a few times as she slips through an intersection on a yellow light, and reaches out to grip the wheel with both hands. The temporary death and combination of drugs in her system leaves her seeing double. The system logs running in the bottom right of her vision do nothing to help.

Normally, the BIOS notifications from her cybernetic implants blend into everything else like visual white noise; she’s used to it, it’s not something worth paying active attention to. Getting your shit rocked and having a hard reset of your brain performed from the other side of the world has a way of making things a bit more… annoying than usual.

“Oh,” says Mathias, “am I? Am I in a mood? A bit of a fucking mood? Gee, Ronnie, I wonder why I could be ‘in a mood’. Would you like to guess why I’m in a mood?”

She rolls her eyes. “Is it six foot tall and driving a stolen Mazda?”

He responds by filling her head with a ‘you won’ jingle from a lottery commercial.

“Don’t,” she says curtly. “You know I can’t stand that shit.”

“Well, there’s a lot I can’t stand either, and yet here we are,” he snaps. “Hit the expressway and head south for the next 14 miles, you’ll see a sign for the docks.”

“I’m heading back on a boat?”

“No, you’re heading back to the mainland via the helicopter waiting on the boat,” he says.