Oh.. wait! Hold Up!!! Rewind.
Back up... to earlier that morning.
Or any morning. Every morning.
A quarter before the ass-hair crack of Dawn, she had an alarm on fleek. Never did it catch her unawares.
She always snapped open her eyes just moments before the first shrill clanging of the simulated authentic mechanical bells alarm clock pro v6.9She always let the first few moments of it play, and let it play very loud. Full volume. And then, snap- alarm button clicked off. 'Sap to attention and salute the day', she would recite to herself in her mind, half respectfully, half resentfully. Mental Rigor and vicious clarity first thing in the AM.
She was fastidious.
She blamed her second crewmate from way back beyond the grave. But she cherished every last lesson learned. Fastidious. New New York City almost felt like home. Like a home. Almost. Organized and orderly, she had her morning routines down pat. Stone cold solid. Always out the door, all items check and green to go, just as the main time-tower in Center Civic Square sounded off the six o'clock hour bells tolling the full start of the work day in the City of Cities, Capital of the Free world, The Big Apple II.
Immaculate make-up and hair, professional executive wardrobe always on point and never repeated in one work calendar year cycle as she stepped out the door into the city dawn of day hustle.
She was a professional's professional gold standard of professionalism.
And she knew it. Agent Macknally reveled in precision. And she excelled in it.
~~~
Cinematic Cut to: Mid-City Side-walk dolly shot of the busiest 2miles of 5th Avenue, bustling crowds battling in every direction like salmon swimming upstream, public transport monstrosities, the mega-mag-leves on the center lane, coasting by near silently in both directions. Fast-paced living and shopping at its finest street level postmodernity of automation and old school engineering reinvented for post-war level affluence.
Curiously, almost counterintuitively, she actually felt at home most here; lost amid a crowd of urban strangers.
Anonymous amongst the endless sea of faces.
Connected and yet totally unknown and under most people's radar.
A cacophony of street-level noises enveloping her like familiar soundscapes as peculiar and particular as any thumbprint.
Memories of her youth spent 'urban-splorin' deep in the maze-like warren of ancient cobblestone under-streets down in the basement level of New Edinburgh drifted painfully across her imagination station.
She hated such recall buffering error moments. But did not allow them to disrupt her calculated flow through the chaos of her daily routine. Pushing Play on her morning walk playlist, she brushed the taciturn memory away with the automatic reflex of ritual routine that's ground in deep, real deep. She noticed. But then the music swept her away from everything... and she just jammed with it as she
[Music Cue (pending rights permission acquisition) 001: Fool in the Rain, Led Zeppelin, 1989 Remaster]
She couldn't help but smile to herself as the music took effect. Subcutaneous mood-enhancing psy-dump modules mixing a custom-designed mod enhancement cocktail that her supervisors would probably mock her openly in sit rep if they knew she indulged on her morning commute to work. The drum break was its own hyper cinematic cup of psychedelic trance of mind trippy groovy caffeinated cartoon coffee funned directly into her cerebral cortex by legit "for work" government-issued bio-hacks gear installed discreetly under her scalp. As the trip wore off, she briefly re-remembered the trauma recall memory, and felt infinitely less tensioned-out about it.
'Cool Cat Mama Boss Lady Boss', she purred to herself privately. No one, but for three exes, knew she called herself by that pet name. And those three exes had no idea just how gruesome the story behind it all really was. Mack kept her personal privacy secrecy on G-Man Priority Level Lock Down.
Even her employer, which was the Government, didn't know all there was to know about Agent Mack McNally.
Calmly, she recollected and disassociated from the cold hard facts of that long, dark, violent decade.
A chill down her spine every day at precisely 6:69 amShake it off, Cool Cat Mama, shake it off.
[images: Agent Macknally, confidently walking up 5th Avenue New New York, Agency oversight surveillance asset #402060904. cluster images Delta # 004-009. REDACTED]
In her mind, an unexpected flashback to a pleasantly bitter-sweet moment, one of her last in the city, before finally abandoning it to go States-Side. 22, her final birthday in the rebuilt cultural capital of theatre nerds, redheads, and the remnants of the Scottish Empire. Edinburgh was Scotland's compact, hilly capital... once upon a time, in a universe quite near your own. Recognized as the capital of Scotland since at least the 15th century, Edinburgh is the seat of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament and the highest ranking military defenses ??
It had a magical medieval Old Town and exquisitely elegant Georgian New Town section as well as the finest in Ultra Post Modern Intrusions~ towering mixed-use skyscrapers that rivaled the world's finest buildings in their own right. Ancient chapels and Gothic horror alleyways buried under the rubble of targeted auto-drop drone-warfare. A subterranean excavated underground sub-city sprang up instantly. Instinctively, the huddled masses suffering the collateral damage of endless war became desperate enough to truly innovate in industrious ways that remain surprising to this day, in retrospect. Warrens of old-timey relics lovingly recovered, reconstructed, resuscitated into subterranean life. Replete with gardens and neoclassical buildings survived the literal and figurative collapse of Western Capitalism, twice, only to be ripped apart by the third world war in [DATE REDACTED].
Looming over the city is Edinburgh Castle, home to Scotland's crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny, used in the coronation of Scottish rulers. Arthur's Seat is an imposing peak in Holyrood Park with sweeping views, and Calton Hill is topped with monuments and memorials. ― Googleplex IAO SEDecades had passed, water under the bridle, bridges burnt, and the evidence destroyed. As far as she was concerned, those dark under-urban nightmare days were a well-kept secret to the world. No one in her professional circles knew anything of those troubled troubling times, except her mother. Or so she thought... Little did she know, someone was digging up her past, and digging deeper than any agency background check had ever dug before. Someone was scoping her out, had eyes on information that supposedly could not be found, should not exist. And that someone, was someone that she thought was dead. [music cue: Dun... Dun...DUUN!!!] [Cinematic Camera Field of Focus FX]; Cross-blur-Cross-fade into a tight close-up of Mack's face as she waits at a crosswalk. Vehicles occasionally obscured her face. She stood there blissfully unaware, that fateful morning.
On her way to the single worst SitRep Quarterly Review Meeting in her long and storied career, she did something she rarely had time to do- just enjoy the moment of being lost amid the innumerable other souls adrift in the cityscape and just walk on autopilot.
Shit that Mack did not know was flung was just about to hit the fan... but she was lost in the rhythms of her favorite song and the high-fidelity psychotropic ride that flowed with it.
[Sound Que: final moments of Led Zeppelin's Fool in the Rain, 1989 Remastered Special Edition]
[Fade to black with music]
YOU ARE READING
zero hour
Aksi"Set in an experimental sci-fi comic book action adventure literary world-building project universe of multi-book series nested within other book series, 'The Zeppoverse' may be a bit disorienting to navigate at first... but you kind get used to it...
