Glass Vipers

Chapter 1: Welcome to San Francisco

The honking horn of some large cargo vehicle caused Dale to wake up with a jump. He tried to sit up in his bed, his body flooded with adrenaline and coated in a film of sweat, but a sudden dead weight to his side brought him back down to the mattress with a soft thud. Looking around for a moment, his brain rebuilt his situation, piece by piece. His eyes darted around as he remembered where he was and what he was doing. Most people did the same in some small way when awoken quickly from a dream, but given the vastly different scenario in his dream-scape, it took him a moment to slow his breathing down and believe himself. The buzz of adrenaline started to drift away and slowly, his panic-addled mind returned to normal.

    He was Dale Cameron, a newly graduated member of the San Francisco Police Department, that much his brain was sure of. As for where he was, that took a bit longer to process. The ceiling and the room around him was still unfamiliar to him. He had moved in two days ago, but this was the first time he had slept in the apartment. Around his bed, unpacked boxes contained all that remained of his personal life and all were stamped with similar QR codes. Although the black and white dots in the QR code square were normally unreadable, he knew that it spelled out the address to his new apartment, nestled deep in what was formerly the Chinatown district of the city of San Francisco. The day outside was busy and somewhat warm, although a majority of the humid heat was because of the thick, artificial fog from the fleet of vapor trawlers in the bay, and the constantly rising heat of the restaurant below his apartment. He was uncomfortable and, after trying to get up again, he looked to his side to see his arm lying there, motionless and impeding his movement.

    “Boone...” he managed to cough out, his lungs gravely and dry from a night of warm and dirty air. Clearing his throat, he groaned, tried to lift his arm again and then flopped back onto the bed. No reply was forthcoming.

    “Are you ignoring me?” he called out, obviously starting to get frustrated. “Booooone!”

    His vision was suddenly, briefly, filled with text, the scrolling words moving in front of the image of the room around him as his visual interface systems started up. In the space of a couple seconds, the Arrowhead Imaging Corp logo came on screen - well, in the center of his vision at least - showing that his Augmented Reality Heads-Up Display had booted and was accepting commands. Dale once again reconsidered having the AR-HUD boot when he woke up, but sometimes he didn’t need to see text and data streams the moment he found himself in the land of the living. It was nice to see things as if he had normal eyes once in awhile.

    Once the logo had gone, a red ring appeared, spinning and occasionally changing shade; pulsing in brightness with each syllable of its electronic voice.

    “You whined for me, sir?”

    “Boone,” Dale sighed, “...can you please explain to me why my left arm isn’t working? Again?”

    “Your start up diagnostics indicate that your interface software had crashed during your sleep,” Boone said, moving to the corner of Dale’s vision as the diagnostic window scrolled through the error report in its usual, quick manner. “...Something highly indicative of your brain trying to force a reconnect to the hardware while your OS was in standby.” Boone stated and then paused a moment.

    “Bad dreams again?”

    “It’s nothing.” Dale said simply, dismissing the notion. “Reinitialize the drivers and reboot the interface.”

    “Affirmative. Re-initializing.”

    “Thanks,” Dale said simply and let his head flop backwards in the bed again. He let out a slow, resentful breath and looked past the mostly transparent text scrolling by, showing him the progress of his systems restart. He was barely aware of the different boxes - representing software connections over a basic image of his upper body - slowly changing to green until all flashed in unison. The whole process took maybe five seconds, but each time it felt like an eternity of waiting for his body to function as it used to. Dale had been having the same issues with his arm since the dreams had come back, but he figured the last software upgrade had dealt with his connectivity problems. Those under-educated prosthetic doctors in the public clinics were not exactly military grade in their skills. Now he was a fully trained and graduated police officer, he hoped he could make use of their excellent Augmentation Maintenance benefits, but even then there was no guarantee they would cover such a psychological problem.