"I'm at the end of my line."

by Skrubly

        It was late, and the glare off of the counter made Silverman
squint and go through the nervous motions of rubbing his forehead.  It
didn't get rid of his headache or make him feel any better, but he did
it anyways.

        For the past thirteen hours he had been working on a DeepSix
electron scope and a spectranalyzer respectively.  He had been
seperating individual genes from a set of macro bacteria, and had lost
the last splice he had been working on just an hour before.  The previous
hour was spent attempting to reconstruct it.  It was late, and his
mind felt like it had been spread thin across the stainless steel countertop
and beaten with a stick.  He rubbed his forehead again.

        The noise came from down the hall, and it was like the sound of
a cat stretching, a small child yawning, barely anything at all.  Then
there was a crash, and the plate of flexglass the man in black had
melted through fell to the ground. The man in black was now in the hall,
and he knew the exact layout of the entire building.  He knew, for
instance, that this particular hallway had twelve fire sprinkler heads,
a heating main, one fire alarm switch, and two fiberoptic cables that
were retrofitted to the ceiling via the easy mechanism of taping them to
the water main.

        Silverman started packing up for the night, turned off the
scopes, gathered his notebook, and put his readman in his briefcase.  He
was rummaging for his keys in his left pocket when the lights when out.

        The man in black also knew exactly which way the man would run
when he realized why the lights had gone out. He would rush the emergency
exit that led to the stairwell, whereupon he would attempt to make it to the
bottom before the man in black caught him.  Then he would discover that
the red door at the bottom was locked. The man in black looked forward
to this moment, because he always was curious as to how people handled
the concept of their lack of immortality in the face of death.

        Silverman panicked.  Many things flashed through his mind at
that moment: why the lights went out when they were on in buildings
surrounding him, a sudden realization that his life was probably in
danger, and a voice cursing him for working late without personal
protection.  He had his notebook, which was the only hardcopy of the
work he was doing, which was the way his supervisors wanted it.
Although his work was hardly top secret, they took basic security
procedures with all of their scientists.  If they did know exactly what
was in his notebook, they would be extremely pleased.  Three hours ago
he had managed to succesfully partially reverse-engineer the main
component in Quanorg's macrobacterium compound.  Quanorg was their main
competitor, and his company had spent over three billion in research
alone to attempt to bring a similar product to market.  The compound was
one that digested cellulose and converted it to ethanol.  Simply put, it
ate grass and shit alcohol.  Although it doesn't sound like much, it
accomplished this in approximatly 1/100th the time of conventional
fermentation.  Quanorg had made untold fortunes in the alcohol burning
automobile market.  They had guarded the secret under triple-deep
encryption, and twelve different people had part of the key.  He felt a
twinge at the base of his scrotum.  It was his body attempting to tell
him to get the hell out of there.

        The man in black calmly kicked in the door to the lab, and
entered just as the emergency exit clanged shut.  He took his time,
pushing the exit door open slowly, and began a leisurly place down the
stairs.  His implants let him see in the dark, and he took full
advantage of this.  No Dr. Silverman was on the current level or the
landing below.  He must be cowering by the locked door below, praying
for salvation.

        The wind was whipping at him, trying to tear him from the side
of the building.  MitsuBank was opposite, it's sheer sides stretching
towards the darkened sky.  He didn't want to die.  He'd never really
thought about it much before, but he'd wondered what it would be like,
once.  Now he knew he didn't, and it terrified him.  He had managed to
shut the window, and was now clutching a three inch wide pipe that ran
horizontally along the side of the building, and was hoping that the man
that had come to kill him would not notice.  It was futile, however, he
thought.  He would die.  He would die at the hands of a hired gun, he
would die because he found out someone else did not want him to know.
And then his hands slipped and he fell.

        The man in black was livid.  He had gone beyond pissed, skipped
furious, and went straight to livid.  The Doctor was not at the bottom
of the stairwell! He looked up to see if he was clinging to the ceiling.
He was not.  Then he heard a scream, and saw a crack in a safety window
that had been bent and put back into shape.  The man had gone through a
crack in an ill-maintained window. And then the Doctor had fallen.

        Dr. Silverman thought he had blacked out, but it was merely a
trashbag that was attempting to choke him.  He had fallen five stories
into a dumpster, and had rapidly gone into shock.  He scrambled out of
the top and promptly fell into a puddle below that began to soak into
his coat.  Glancing upwards, he saw the shadowy figure looking at him
from the window he had just exited.  A fletchette exploded next to him,
sending water and debris richocheting across the alleyway.  He stumbled
to his feet and started running.  The mouth of the alleway began to
tumble and turn before him, making him dizzy.

        The man in black jumped, and grabbed a pipe on the building
across the alley.  His shoulder was dislocated by the jolt, but the
nanoweave tendons in the joint took up the slack automatically.  He
leaped again, slipping when his foot made contact on the opposite wall.
The sky flipped and twisted, and he was falling, falling backwards, the
night sky expanding to fit his vision, the stars and rain and dirt all
slurring in his mind.  Then everything went black, as the red pool began
to spread out on the ground until all of the water turned pink.

        The Doctors vision had lost all color, and fuzzy edges began to
replace the sharp contrasted ones that had began to crop up during his
adrenalin rush.  Then a man was before him, and he stumbled,
backpedaling, attempting to move his broken body back the way he came.
The man before him was shrouded in partial darkness, and an earthy laugh
boomed from his lungs. The Doctor lay on the ground, becoming aquainted
with his own mortality.

        "You be granted a reprieve by Legba himself, boy." he said,
looking through crinkled eyes.  His skin was pale and he spoke with a
Jamaican accent, pushing the words out through the haze of the night.

        "Playing God with gaia is no way to keep living." he continued
"You've been held over for now, that man won't bother you no more.
You're caught in a cycle, a cycle that you can't seem to break.  The
whole world will be breaking soon, and then see where your cycle gets
you then.  Your life is a one way street, and that street is leading
straight to your afterlife.  But you won't be seeing any preachin from
me, no sir." he laughed "But then again, if someone don't preach, who be
there to listen afterwards? Not me."

        And then he was gone, and the doctor got up again and walked
into the light of the street.  The notebook lay where it fell, its ink
dissolving into the water that ran pink.