“Trust me,” John had promised as we caught the maglev train back towards his neighborhood, “I’ve got something that will blow your mind.”

I had nodded, but I secretly hoped that this man wasn’t going to turn out to be some sort of sex-obsessed pervert, or perhaps have some unhealthy addiction.  I wasn’t up for that, and the moment he pulled out the leather mask, I’d be gone like the wind.

The door had finally recognized John’s genomic signature, and slid open with a faint whoosh.  John smiled, reached down and caught my hand, and tugged me inside.  Hoping that this date wasn’t about to go south, I followed him in.

We passed through his kitchen, a living room, and then into darkness.  I got the feeling that we were standing in a large area, but as John pulled the door shut behind us, all light was extinguished.  “This is my pride and joy,” John’s voice said in the darkness.  “I built most of it myself.  I can spend hours in here!”

I opened my mouth to ask what it was, exactly, but then John clapped his hands together twice, and ambient light bloomed.  And I recognized exactly what we were standing in!

The room was a massive cube, the walls, floor, and ceiling covered with a gridlike pattern.  I spun around, my mouth falling open.  “You have a Second Realm world!?” I gasped.  “And it’s huge!  This must be twenty feet on a side!”

John looked so happy that his smile might split his head in half.  “When you mentioned at dinner that you played, I knew that I had to show it to you,” he said.  “I really wanted to have a simulator that’s immersive, where I don’t have to worry about bumping elbows with someone else.”  His eyes dipped briefly.  “Do you want to try it out?”

My rapid nodding was all the answer he needed.  He clapped again, and the light darkened, the tiles covering all of the room’s surfaces rippling into digital light.

A small window popped up in front of me, the hologram hovering at shoulder height, prompting me for my login information.  I keyed it in, but a glance over to the other side of the room revealed that John was already connected.  His character profile was surely saved on the computer here, easily accessible for quick loading.  By the time I had entered in all of my information, waiting for the servers to sync up, John was fully dressed in his digital gear, checking his spell bindings.

As my own character began to load, I sized him up.  Light blue clothes, a crystalline staff, waves of tiny ice crystals radiating out from him in a constant aura – it was easy to see his class.  “Frost mage, huh?” I quipped.

“Some of the best crowd control in the game,” he retorted.  “Besides, like that old movie said, the cold never bothered me anyway!  What about you?”

The last customizations of my profile were still initializing, but my spell bindings were at my fingertips, ready to be unleashed with a tingle.  As my headgear – a protective set of goggles – materialized on my face, I brought my hands up.  “Your polar opposite,” I told him, wiggling my fingers in one of the sequences I’d memorized.

With a “foomph” of ignition, a ball of fire grew out of the empty space between my hands.  I brought it down in front of me, marveling at the constantly shifting texture.  John certainly hadn’t skimped on the graphics engine!  I couldn’t even spot the individual pixels.

When I glanced back up, John was grinning once again.  “A firebug, I should have guessed,” he said.  “Goes with your hot… personality!”

I laughed despite myself, but then gave him a mock scowl.  “How dare you insinuate anything!” I told him.  “For that, I’m going to kick your ass!”

The flag of a duel came dropping down between us.  John raised an eyebrow, and then his hands.  I could see the light glinting off the ice crystals forming a sphere between them.  “Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked.  “You might want to chill out.”

“Oh, I’ll show you!” I told him, raising up the fireball and readying myself as the duel counted down.  “I’m too hot for you to handle!”

For the first time in as long as I could remember, the smile on my face wasn’t forced as I followed the man up the steps to his house.  Sure, my last few first dates had crashed and burned, but this one had yet to spontaneously self-destruct!  I was even starting to feel hopeful that it would lead to more.

John, at the doorway to his house, turned and grinned back at me as he slid his palm across the biosensor.  “It takes a couple seconds for the genome scan to fully complete,” he apologized as we waited for the maglocks to disengage.  “You’re sure that you want to come inside?”

I looked back at him, stepping up to the top step to join him.  “Absolutely,” I replied.

The date had quickly climbed over that awkward sensation of meeting a complete stranger with the possibility of seeing them naked at a later point in time.  I had left early, making sure that I would arrive at the restaurant on time, but John had still been sitting there waiting for me.

He had looked just like the picture posted on his ElectroDate profile – he was wearing a gray suit instead of a blue one, and the tie in the picture was absent, but he still had the slightly mussy brown hair and that same goofy smile.  Between his cream shirt and gray suit, he was a sight of neutral colors – a direct contrast to me.

As I had settled into the seat opposite him at our table, I had to fight myself to stop from running my fingers up through my burning red hair.  It was a telling habit, a clear sign of nervousness, but I could never totally squash the motions.  I wedged my fingers beneath me, catching them between my black cocktail dress and the seat cushion.

But after the usual introductions, backgrounds, and small talk (“So what do you do?  Oh, that’s so interesting!  I have an uncle who was in that field”), John had paused, leaning forward to gaze intently across the table at me.

“Listen, Kate,” he spoke up, his voice earnest.  “You seem nice, but I want to make this clear right away.  I’m not looking for just something fun.”

Not looking for something fun?  I quirked an eyebrow at him, and he suddenly looked flustered as he realized what he’d just said.

“Not that I don’t want to have fun,” he kept going quickly, trying to recover.  “I mean, I’m a fun guy!  Not a fungus.  But I don’t just want to have fun, you know?  I want something more serious, a real relationship.  One that could lead to marriage.”

My eyebrow climbed higher.

“No, not like that!” John burst out.  “I mean, I’m not proposing on the first date!  That would be crazy.  And I’m not.  Not crazy.  Or proposing.  But I want to find someone who thinks that they might want to in the future.  To be proposed to, not to be crazy.”  He threw up his hands in frustration.  “Is this making any sense at all?”

I reached out and caught his hands out of the air, holding them briefly in my own.  They were big, lightly callused – the hands of someone who took good care of himself, but still put them to use.  “I feel the same way,” I said honestly.

At this, that goofy smile appeared once more on John’s face, and we resumed our talking.  But now, the conversation felt smoother, more flowing.  We got each other’s jokes, listened intently to each other’s stories, and by the time the serving bot was bringing by our dessert, I had accepted his invitation to go and see his house.

“Trust me,” John had promised as we caught the maglev train back towards his neighborhood, “I’ve got something that will blow your mind.”

To be continued on Wednesday!

The discovery, like most truly great breakthroughs, came about entirely by accident.

We had received a DoD contract to develop nuclear power for smaller machines, with the original intent of the grant being nuclear powered drones.  Between our engineers and our more abstract researchers, we had plenty of knowledge and experience, and we figured that it wouldn’t be hard to miniaturize the reactors.

The discovery came about in a rare moment of shoddiness.  We had just loaded up our Mark III prototype, but Jed, leaning on the switch board as he sipped his coffee, accidentally hit the ignition sequence before Samson was clear of the room.

Oops.  The alarms sounded, of course, and since this was just a rod exposure test, we were able to reverse the ignition before we achieved full power output.  Still, Samson got a pretty big radiation dose, and we were pretty worried when we pulled the blast door back open so he could stumble out.

As we clustered around him, planning on escorting him to the medical wing, Samson made a mad grab for a notepad and pencil off of the nearby counter.  As we pushed him on a cart down the hall towards the med bay, he scribbled furiously, tearing off sheet after sheet as he scrawled out equations and charts.

By the time we reached the medical area, he had lapsed into semi-consciousness, but Jed, following guiltily behind, had been collecting the sheets of torn-off note paper.  “Damn!” he breathed, as we watched the doctor wheel Samson away.  “Alf, you’ve gotta take a look at these!”

Jed passed over the top few sheets, and I began reading.  As I worked my way down the page, my eyebrows slowly rose until they were in danger of leaping off my head.  This was insane.

Samson had been writing out string theory equations related to atomic decay – one of the thorniest problems we faced, and one that we had not found any solutions for.  And yet, here on the pages in scribbled pencil, the formulas were elegant and complete.  This was years ahead of any research we had performed.

“Well, shit,” I exclaimed, gazing after the unconscious victim.  “Where did he get that burst of knowledge from?”

As Samson explained after undergoing radiation scrubbing, the knowledge had apparently popped into his mind at the moment of exposure.  “It was like a big burst of light, shining all this right into my brain,” he explained two days later from his infirmary bed.  “It all started fading as soon as you pulled me out, so I had to get as much down on paper as I could.”

Sure enough, when we showed Samson the pages he had written, he had only faint recollections of them.  “It’s like I’m seeing everything through a haze,” he complained.  “I see an equation and I’m like, ‘oh, yeah, that makes sense,’ but I don’t remember how I got it in the first place.”

Of course, what kind of researchers would we be if we didn’t probe further?  Jed, maybe feeling a little guilty still, volunteered to be the next subject, and we hit him with a smaller, controlled exposure.  He wrote out several pages of sheet music before puking.  We showed them to a composer and he nearly cried as he read them.  “It’s pure beauty in sound,” he kept on exclaiming.

So apparently we get randomized bursts.  Jed said that he felt as though he could sense more, just beyond the reach of his consciousness, while he was exposed.  But he also nearly hacked up a lung afterwards.

We managed to finish the drone project well in time and budget, thanks to Samson’s equations, and the DoD was pretty pleased.  So pleased, in fact, that they were willing to underwrite our next request: we needed prisoners for radiation experiments.  Unethical, certainly, but we have high hopes of getting something useful out of the gathered data.

More discoveries hopefully soon to come!

It was only around 2 in the afternoon, but I was exhausted.  The three of us had been awake since five in the morning, up before the sun, when we had started our ascent.  We hadn’t realized it would take this long.  We had planned to be back down by now, back at our campsite, relaxing at the base of the mountain and maybe enjoying a couple beers.

But the mountain had different plans for us.  We had missed the trail, the easy route up, and had ended up hiking ass-backwards, hitting every false summit along the way.  Our trail had gone from a smooth path to hauling ourselves over boulders, struggling across rubble and trying not to slide on scree.  The wind had picked up, pelting us with sand and grit.

We were nearly to the top now.  I could see it – the last summit.  No more false illusions for us.  Only a couple hundred feet ahead.

But this high up, above the tree line, in the clouds and the snow, the air was thin and faint.  I could feel the weariness deep in my muscles, and no matter how long I sat and tried to catch my breath, it wouldn’t recede.

I was down to short little dashes, little bursts of energy between the exhaustion.  Struggle to my feet, fighting against the wind.  Duck around the boulder into the open air, head down, sucking in breath as I struggle up another six or eight feet, and then slump back down to rest again.  The climb had become a battle of inches.

Finally, I clambered to my feet, ran around the boulder, stepped up, stepped up – and stopped.  There was nowhere else to go.  All around me, every direction was down.

I was at the top.

Glancing down, I saw my two friends, a dozen feet still left in their ascent.  Up on the summit, the wind was unfettered by any shields and blew hard and fast across the rock.  I found a crevice between two boulders where I could hunker down.

Squatting between the rocks, at the top of the world, I gazed around.  The clouds of the morning had been swept away by the wind, and the snow all around us reflected back the color of the sky.  The world was inside a robin’s egg, the light blinding and brilliant.

A few minutes later, my friends joined me.  We shook each other’s hands, took pictures, made small talk.  But the conversation was hushed, and we would lapse off mid-sentence as we gazed around.

We were on top of the world, in the sky.  We had a long, tough descent still ahead of us.  It would be a race against the setting sun.  But before that moment, the sky never looked so…

I poked my head around, scouting the street for any sign of life. It looked deserted. My path to the grocery store, just across the way, seemed clear. I was going to go for it.

I dashed around the corner, picking up the pace, my feet flapping against the ground as I broke into a sprint. Forty yards. Thirty. Twenty. I was almost to those automatic sliding doors…

“There’s one! Fat-shamer!”

Oh, no. I had been spotted! I risked a glance over my shoulder. A blob had come stumbling around the corner, flapping her arms weakly at me as she waddled forward. Judging by the vast expanses of pink cloth draped over her in a vague sort of dress, I guessed that she was female. She was holding some sort of large cylinder in one hand, and droplets were flying into the air around her from it as she waved it back and forth.

I could outrun her. I could make it into the grocery store. My stomach let out a gurgle, reminding me of my hunger. But this woman would undoubtedly summon up more of her kind, would form a blockade. Would I be able to escape?

Another rumble of hunger came from my belly. The blobs left the fruits and vegetables alone for the most part, as well as most of the “low-fat” options. But being forced to subsist on these foods alone meant that I was always short of energy, always needing to replenish my stores. All of the processed foods, the high-energy, high-calorie protein options, were long gone. Inhaled by the blobs.

In the time that I had hesitated, the woman had managed to take another few steps towards me, rocking back and forth from tree trunk to tree trunk to advance. “Fat-shamer!” she wheezed again. Now that she was closer, I could see that she was waving one of the new Mega-Size(TM) cans of Diet Coke. “Healthy at any size!”

Screw it, I suddenly decided. “It’s not genetic, it’s lifestyle!” I roared at her. “Calories in needs to be less than calories out!”

The woman’s face darkened to a very unhealthy shade of purple and she lurched forward again, sputtering noises escaping from her mouth. I turned tail and dashed into the store, my white coat flapping behind me. I was faster, more agile, but she had numbers on her side. I had to move fast.

I held the glass up to my eye.  The liquid inside was a rather disturbing amber color, and a large bubble slowly rose to the surface and popped with a disquieting “gloop.”

I pulled my eyes back up to the girl across from me.  “And you’re sure about this?”

“Of course I am!” she insisted.  “I followed the recipe exactly.  Now stop being a baby and tell me if it tastes all right!”

Oh, the things I do for love.  Closing my eyes and trying not to wince, I lifted the small glass to my lips and tossed back the shot.

As the liquid slid down my throat, I successfully resisted the urge to vomit – but it was a close call.  “Ugh!” I managed to get out after sucking in a few deep breaths.  “That was terrible!  How did you make that stuff slimy and oily at the same time?”

Across the bar, my bartender friend looked concerned.  “Oh no, I must have gotten something wrong in the recipe!” she exclaimed.  “Maybe the maple syrup didn’t mix all the way?  I thought that I shook it up well…”

Maple syrup??  “Maple syrup??” I repeated.  “Where in a tequila sunrise are you supposed to add maple syrup?  That’s not part of the recipe!”

“Well, I couldn’t find the grenadine, so I figured that maybe syrup would kind of work the same… I put in a bit of maraschino cherry juice to balance it out too!”

I shook my head as I reached for the glass of water.  “I’m telling you right now that it is *not* an acceptable substitute,” I announced.  I took a long drink of water, trying to flush out the corners of my mouth and wash my throat clean.

Across the bar from me, my friend reached for the bottles.  “Oh well, let’s move on,” she said.  “Okay, next up is a salty dog.  Do you think they mean kosher salt, or does table salt work?”

I grimaced privately to myself.  This was not going to be a fun night of drinking.

I could hear the dull booming sounds roaring in the background.  They were still distant for the moment, but growing closer.  Shit.  I had to move fast.

I scampered through the deserted streets, a small corner of my mind loving how empty the city felt.  All the civilians had been pulled back already, leaving nothing but empty buildings behind.

Off to my left was the glass-fronted window of a jewelry store.  My crowbar sailed through the big glass plate like it was made of sugar.  Not quite empty, I grinned as I helped myself to a very sparkly tennis bracelet, draping it over one wrist.

My little ransacking was interrupted, however, by a rumbling noise from behind me.  That wasn’t a mortar shell!  It sounded far more… mechanical.  I turned, and ducked around the corner of the building just as a tank came crawling onto the street.

Curses!  The rebel forces must have moved faster than I’d anticipated, and they were already in the city!  I leaned against the wall, sucking in breath as I tried to formulate a plan.

On one hand, I liked my own skin.  I took good care of myself.  Ate well when I could, got in exercise, used moisturizer.  I didn’t want to ruin all of that by putting new holes in my hide.

On the other hand, though, I knew that this was a one-time opportunity.  This could be the score of a lifetime.  If I could pull this off, I would be set for life.  I could retire, get out of this war zone, go live someplace by the ocean and drink away the rest of my days in peace.

I took one last, deep breath, and made my decision.  First Federal Credit was only a few blocks away.  I was fairly confident that I could make it there, get into the safe, and be away with my haul before the bombs reached this place.  And besides, if the rebels were already here, this wasn’t likely to be ground zero for the firefight.  Right?

Breaking into a loping run, I hurried down a few alleys, cutting corners until I came out onto the Financial District.  Some bombs must have already fallen here; debris and rubble made piles on the street, obstructing the path.  I’d have to do some climbing.

Thanking whatever gods were around that I had kept up my cardio exercise at the gym, I struggled up over the fallen pile of shattered concrete.  I could once again hear the mechanical grinding of tanks from behind me.  Dammit!  The rebels must have decided to try cutting through the Finance District.  I just had to get into the bank, just on the other side of… this…

I had reached the top of the heap.  But what I saw on the other side made my heart jump up into my chest.

Marching around the corner at the far end of the street were soldiers, dozens of them.  But these weren’t the rebels in their comforting browns and grays.  These men wore black, armored uniforms, with matching helmets; carbines were slung over their shoulders.  This was the National Army.  And I was pinned.

I turned around, thinking that I could retreat, but the rebels had entered the street at the opposite end.  Only this big pile of debris blocked the two armies’ sight of each other.  I scurried down a couple steps and waved frantically to the rebels.

“Soldiers!” I mouthed, no wanting to speak aloud, but making exaggerated motions over the hill.  “The Nationalists are here!  You need to retreat!”  And let me hide so I could just get my money! I added inside my head.

The sparkling of the bracelet, still looped around my wrist, must have caught the attention of the rebels.  They paused in their advances, pointing at me and conferring among themselves.  “Yes!” I prayed fervently.  “Retreat!”

A moment later, however, the soldiers did just the opposite.  Raising their weapons and letting out yells, they charged forward, towards the rubble, towards me!  The turrets on the tanks swung around, and I screamed and covered my ears as they fired shells over the blockage at the Nationalists on the other side.

The attack, although barely organized and haphazard, caught the enemy army unawares, and I heard shouts and cries of dismay from the far side of the rubble.  They didn’t seem to be returning fire, and the soldiers were cheering as they shot over the tall mound of wreckage.

A large soldier came bounding up to me, loosely holding his rifle in one hand.  “Hero!” he greeted me, grabbing my arm and hauling me upright.  “You have saved us from ambush!”

“Er, yeah,” I replied, scratching the back of my head.  “Sure, that’s what I was doing.  Anyway, I’d better be on my way-“

“Nonsense!” the rebel soldier interrupted.  “I am captain here, and I say that you will drink with us in our camp tonight!  Much rejoicing!  You must be new scout, guarding and saving us from attack.  A true war hero!”

The man held up my arm in the air, and the other rebels around us gave an unorganized cheer.  I pasted a smile across my face and waved back at them, cursing inwardly.  I should have left the whole place when I had the chance, I thought to myself.