Marathon: Musings of a Runner, pt 2

Musings of a Runner is the diary of a fictional character caught up in the pastel shoot & loot world of Marathon 26.

Log two. There I was, feeling cold rain on my skin. But it wasn’t skin and I couldn’t feel it, not like a real body feels things. My neural figment got torrented into what I later learned is called a shell, which is like a life-sized action figure, batteries included, whose Super Missile Strike Action shoots actual missiles that kill things.

Being in a shell is like having a body both heavier and lighter than it’s supposed to be. All your senses are sharper but more alien. Your robotic eyes can discern and parse out eighty five different shades of green, but none of them feel green when you see them, if that makes any sense. You’re deeply aware of all input but numb. In a shell, I can instantly tell you that it’s 15.228º C, but nothing emotional rides with that.

I didn’t have a lot of time to ruminate before the voice in my head told me to go hide in a house. Whatever happened to the colony left most of the buildings creepily pristine, but weird things were scrawled on a couple of walls. The chittering of UESC bots outside sent me to the floor in panic, though my shell translated my fool mind software’s freakout into a very smooth crouch-dive.

What happened next has blurred together. Somehow I had a rifle in my hands for the first time in my life, although technically I never held and will never hold a rifle in my actual hands. I managed to shoot and hide my way to an antenna that texted my shell into orbit and I was back as a digital mind floating in software.

I picked up at this point that I was running and gunning for a corp called CyberAcme, which sounds like a “How do you do, fellow tech megacorps” name if I’ve ever heard one, but I’m in no place to complain, in that when I’m not planetside in a shell I am literally in no place.

My second run would soon follow. For now -

Signing off.