between scared and stoned. She also had a slight sheen to her, like she’d rubbed a thin layer of oil over her body. This oil was also on the faux-leather catsuit she wore, the green a perfect match for her eyes.
“What did I ask? Do you know where my wife is?”
Alter-Vicki reached down, into a pocket of her skin-tight leggings. She pulled out a small, white, bean-shaped object and held it in her palm.
As I watched, the object unfolded, then unfolded again, continuing to double in size until it was as big as a hyperbaseball.
In a quick, rehearsed motion, she slapped the object against the safety glass between us.
“Lean back, sir,” she said.
Whatever the thing was, it secreted some sort of clear goop, which dissolved the glass quicker than a sheet of toilet tissue in a rain storm. Not wanting to stick around for my state-mandated execution, I wasted no time crawling through the hole. Alter-Vicki squirted some of the goop onto my hands. It was warm and tingly, and under its own power crawled along my skin, disintegrating my handcuffs, leg irons, and supplication collar.
An alarm went off, and just as I got to my feet on the other side, guards began firing at us.
In this world, as in mine, real firearms were banned, replaced by non-lethal guns that fired Taser rounds. These bullets, made of wax, housed tiny needles, each fitted with a transmitter that attracted Tesla lighting. Once shot, the needle stuck in your clothing and/or skin and you were hit with a million volts coming from the Tesla field that surrounded the planet and powered the country’s wireless electronic devices.
Alter-Vicki and I were each hit with dozens of rounds. But rather than stick to us, they bounced off harmlessly. They stung—roughly the equivalent of being snapped by a rubber band—but we didn’t get shocked.
Rather than question why this was happening, I went along with it, grabbing Alter-Vicki by the wrist, leading her through the barrage of gunfire. We got to a barred door, and Alter-Vicki again squirted the goop ball onto it, creating a hole around the locking mechanism. I kicked the door open, then threw a punch at a guard rushing at me. My fist connected with his nose and came out the victor.
Alter-Vicki went through the door first, once again reaching down the front of her pants. She handed another bean-shaped object to me. It quickly unfolded into something resembling a firearm, complete with grip, barrel, and trigger.
Cool beans.
“What is this?” I yelled. The Tesla lightning bolts exploding all around, while not hitting us, were blinding and sounded like an enthusiastic round of applause.
“It’s a magzer, sir.”
“Is it applause.
&osd at the same time.
etlethal?” Though anxious to escape, I didn’t want to start killing guards who were only doing their jobs.
“No, sir. It magnetizes what it’s fired at. Shoot at two different objects, and they stick together.”
I aimed and fired at an oncoming guard, then fired again above him. In mid-step he became airborne and slammed into the ceiling, sticking there.
Wicked.
I shot two more guards, a desk, and a chair. I also shot a fat lady wearing a visitor’s pass purely on accident; not at all because it was fun to see fat people fly around and stick to things, which, incidentally, it was. As I cleared the path, Alter-Vicki squirted more goop on any locks in our way.
Then her faux-leather pants began to disintegrate. A little hole formed in the thigh, then spread out until she wore only a thong. Alter-Vicki’s butt was more sculpted than my wife’s, and defied gravity in a way that only implants could. While I preferred the natural look, her’s wasn’t without its charm.
I stuck a group of guards to each other, then onto the wall, and my smiley prison shirt began to fall off me in clumps.
“What’s happening to our clothes?” I said, above constant barrage of crackling lightning.
“The nanomite gel on our bodies is programmed to eat heavy