Marathon: Musings of a Runner, pt 3
Musings of a Runner is the diary of a fictional character caught up in the pastel shoot & loot world of Marathon 26.
Log three. Roland Durán may be no more, or may just be a little less. Still coming to grips with incorporeality. It’s sort of a violent Groundhog Day/Ship of Theseus situation. Two parts of me unite and are kinetically parted again, and again, and again.
I got a bit more of a primer from Oni, the CyberAcme rep. I think I gathered something from it. What’s unclear is any end in sight. But at least there are a lot of other runners here. Maybe some of us can form a bond. Before I had much more time to contemplate, my disembodied self needed to browse a selection of weaponry and gear. I picked some based entirely upon appearance and names and was flung into a new shell planetside.
Grass bent under my alloy feet. The glowing husk of the colony spread out again. I crept through little buildings on its edge, prying open the detritus of the dead. Little toolkits, unidentifiable scientific samples, odds and ends that my shell’s system gave names with no meaning for me. Then I pushed into where the larger structures slept.
I’d fought my way through some UESC bots in my first go, but something about them kept me slinking around. The sounds they make, the way they move. It’s terribly inhuman but there’s something disturbingly lifelike in it. Almost like there’s a little bit of a person buried deep in there under the blue and chrome horror. At one point I watched one of them at a distance, just drifting quietly along like a captain’s widow strolling the shore. I could’ve shot it or snuck past it, but I watched it a minute instead. I don’t know why. There was a serenity in its movement.
Shots rang out when I was farther in and I found a shipping container and hid for a while. I’m not sure why. I knew my shell’s destruction was a momentary awful crunch that my mind would be flung free from to safety. I guess millions of years of evolution still does its thing pretty well. I had a moment of comfort in that shipping container. Almost like I could turn it into a little cottage and stay there. Abandon the whole running thing. Start my own Tau Ceti Colony of One. Maybe I’ll restart that dream some time.
The only other thing to contend with before my run ended were the stupid little bugs. The glowy red fuckers that look like demonically possessed water balloons. I hate them so. Can’t even tell you. Flinging themselves out of nowhere and shrieking up a storm until you burst them into borscht shrapnel.
Ugh. That’s all for now.
Signing off.
