Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 7-2

I’m a sitting duck during the download process and wonder if that’s maybe how Reginald had been done in. I click on ‘Spanish,’ and then continue in the order they’re listed on the site: Hindi followed by Arabic, and then Bengali, Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, Farsi, Italian, Dutch, Swahili, Malay, Vietnamese, Korean, Turkish, Thai, Cantonese, and Polish. The entire process takes just a little over an hour and a half, and when I’m done, I can shift in an out of each language easily just as if I had been speaking each of them my entire life. Next up was the last file to download: Fragment.

It’s just after seven in the evening. I chose ‘Fragment’ from the ‘choose ability’ option and then click ‘sync ability.’ The program data downloads, and as it does, my mind’s eye sees places, locations, and image files in the millions. Places from around the world appear in my head with attached coordinates mixed with code: lat=52.2975&lon=0.183333&zoom=15&layers=M. Each image has a corresponding data set, and there are also hundreds of thousands of other coordinates with no pictures at all, just variations of latitude, longitude, and elevation. Mountains and valleys and entire landscapes form in my head as the data pours in. The lines of data downloading into my system quickly reaches into the millions. What’s forming is the earth in a three-dimensional form that includes every current structural formation, including the depth values of the oceans, lakes, and rivers. It builds with expanding algorithmic geocode layer by layer, pouring data into me that no machines I’ve ever known could accept.

The sheer size of the data is impossible. As I convulse, I think about how I had probably been plugged in and shaking for a very long time. The previous data for the languages had felt like they had taken forever, but I'm sure this is longer. I’m only 46% completed, and the light outside seems to have gotten brighter. The morning had arrived.

The download process is moving too slowly. It builds a chunk of the world from the islands of Hawaii to North and South America, but I will need much more time to complete the process. Finland, Sweden, Norway had begun along with Ireland and the United Kingdom. Greenland is done. Iceland is done. Much of the North Atlantic Ocean is completed. It builds mostly eastward, but also grows pixel by pixel in a circular space that develops the actual shape of the earth, just as if I'm watching it from space. As the program builds the earth, all the coordinates of all the areas are input into my internal computer. I'm boggled by this and wonder, what would be the benefit of having the coordinates of the world downloaded into the nanos?

There’s a sudden movement of light in front of me. I shift my eyes and hear slightly muffled noises, but I can’t turn around. Somebody is behind me. I feel the danger but can do absolutely nothing about it. The status bar shows 56% complete. The sun outside is definitely up. The morning had come already, and here I sit shaking like a fool, easy prey to whoever is lurking.

A shadow crosses over the cubby. I look toward it and then a face is suddenly in front of mine. It’s a woman in janitorial gear. She leans in front of me looking concerned and saying something I can’t make out. I shake uncontrollably while she seems to repeat the same thing louder and louder. A man and another woman come into view. It’s more of the janitorial crew. The man is on the cell phone. I shake my head ‘No,’ or at least I try to.

The first woman gets the nerve to reach out and touch me. The man with the cell phone seems to tell her to stay away. She shakes me. She yells something again. Her eyes look to my arm and then to the computer. I try to shout ‘No!’ but I think nothing comes out. She turns and says something to the man behind her.

57% complete. The cleaning woman grabs the cord and yanks it out of my arm just as I download a coordinate in the United Kingdom: 52°11’56.75”N by 0°07’22.93”E. The inside of the library suddenly fragments and the cleaning lady pixelates in front of me and in a flash I’m falling from high in the sky to the ground like a lead weight. In my head, I know exactly where I am: 52°11’56.75”N by 0°07’22.93”E — the last coordinate that had been downloaded by Reginald’s program and sent to the nanos through the port in my arm. What I didn’t know was how I had gotten here. My descent started at 837 feet up in the sky and dropped quickly. I know exactly where I am, but it’s not possible. I’m no longer in Pittsburgh, but how could that be? Pittsburgh was over the length of an ocean away while I’m now dropping out of the sky over the UK like someone had pushed me from an airplane.

The elevation number in my mind’s eye lowers as I drop. I flail my arms, but it does nothing to slow my fall. Something dangles from my arm and flaps in the wind. It’s the cord. The cleaning lady had unplugged it from the computer but had left it in my arm. I grab it with my right hand and pull it out and wrap it around my fingers so as not to lose it. 690 feet.

The laptop is back at the library. Dammit. I have to get back there. 502 feet. Somehow I know that I will land on Tennis Court Road. I also know that the University of Cambridge is nearby because the map in my head tells me so. 455 feet until impact. The sky is clear. The blue sky is perfect. An airplane cruises away from me in the east. 286 feet to go.

From the looks of things, I’m going to go right through the thick branches of a full tree and land directly in front of a fast-moving BMW sedan. The car’s velocity combined with my falling speed means the impact is inevitable. I hope it doesn’t hurt, I think as I grip the cord tighter in my right hand. Without it, I won’t be able to complete the download once I get back to the computer. And then I realize how vulnerable I had left things. The laptop was open to externalsync.com, and that was a huge mistake. I can’t let anyone find out about externalsync.com. I have to get back to the library. There’s no time to waste.

175 feet until I hit the ground, and the car hits me. Don’t let the cord get smashed by the BMW, I tell myself. Don’t let it get smashed by the ground. Get back to the laptop as soon as possible.

132 feet. The pretty girl behind the wheel of the car is clueless about how much her day is about to change. I see a glimpse of her through an opening in the trees. Very attractive. Sixteen or seventeen years young. Dark brown hair. Pouty lips. Hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her seatbelt on. A tight ten-and-two grip on the steering wheel. An older woman in the passenger seat next to her with similar features. Probably her mom.

I fall through the tree and impact the cement street just 15.3 feet away from her moving car. She hits the brakes, but there’s just no chance of her stopping nearly in time. The front bumper slams into my shoulder, knocking me down and setting off the airbags inside the car, and then the front right tire runs over my face. I hold the cord carefully up and away, and I’m sure it’s safe as the back right tire runs over my torso. Her car comes to a screeching halt as I lay half under the tailpipe of the car and halfway under the openness of Tennis Court Road in London, England.

I prop myself on my elbows and make sure the cord from my brother’s laptop survived the landing. It’s okay, so I fold it and put it in my front pants pocket just before the pretty driver and her mom come out and stand stunned over me. I’m happy to see they're both okay and not limping or holding their arms or collar bones or heads because I had impacted her car as hard as a large tree stump.

"He looks dazed," the lady says. "Don't touch him. I'm calling an ambulance."

The young girl's disheveled beauty amazes me. I look at her in awe and blink to make sure I’m not mistaking her for an angel. Maybe this is how it is when people kick the bucket? Perhaps they move on to the next world and see the most beautiful woman they can imagine. The tight ponytail I had seen during my fall is loosened, causing strands of brunette hair to wisp down over her ears and in front of her face, reaching to her clavicles. Her hazel eyes are big and have the protection of the longest, thickest eyelashes I’ve ever seen.

She ignores the lady and reaches down to me and touches me on the forehead, and her hand is warm and feels nice, and something radiates through me as if our souls had just connected. She tries to take my pulse, which is funny to me because I’m obviously alive.

"Don't touch him!" Says the woman with a phone to her ear. The young beauty pulls her hand back immediately. "Someone just hit our automobile," says the lady on the phone. "I think he may have injured himself."

"Mom, I hit him--," the younger woman begins.

The older lady covers the speaker of the phone and hushes the girl angrily and stares sternly. Back into the phone, she says: “He seems fine, but there is no way that’s possible because we…”. She stops before saying she hit me. “I think he fell from out of the tree. You need to hurry because he must have numerous broken bones and head trauma. You need to get here as soon as humanly possible.” That’s a funny word, I think to myself. ‘Humanly.’ Am I human? I really don’t know anymore. The pretty girl and her mom are both looking at me like I’m not. They’re looking at me like I’m from another planet. I hear the operator tell her to stay on the line until the ambulance shows up. She pulls the phone away from her ear and holds onto it slackly by her waist.

I move out from underneath the tailpipe and sit upright, looking above me at the branches I had just bent, and the blue sky above them. I had just been in Pittsburgh. That had not been a dream. And then a moment later I had fallen out of the sky thousands of miles away. I had teleported, or more precisely, I had defragmented and refragmented. That’s what it was — a sudden defrag and refrag of my body. When the cleaning lady pulled the cord from the computer, my mind or body or both had just been downloading the latitude and longitude for this exact spot, and now here I am, fully refragmented in an entirely different location of the world.

I need to get back to Pittsburgh for the laptop. My guess is that time is constant between here and there, and that not even a minute had passed since I left the library. The cleaning people had probably seen me disappear, which must have been an interesting vision.

The coordinates for different locations around the world are in my head. I can visualize them from here in England all the way west to Hawaii. In my mind’s eye, they are a series of numbers jumbled about, but I’m able to put them together to form locations, like seeing an image of someone you love and associating their name to their face. It’s just that simple. Hundreds of memories of places had associated coordinates next to them: my apartment in Los Angeles, my favorite restaurant, where I left my brother’s car parked, and then, the coordinates of the Pittsburgh library where I had left the laptop: 40°26’35.84”Nx79°57’02.65”W.

The pretty girl bends her knees down to my level. “You shouldn’t move,” she says. “You’re hurt.”

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“Am I okay? You’re kidding, right? Mom, I think he’s concussed.”