Chapter #6..brother! by: Unknown Her brother. Avery, she remembered, was her brother. And with that realization came a flood of memories.
She remembered her parents coming home with something that looked like a small, bipedal horse one afternoon. She was told that this was her new brother, and that they would all have to move someplace very far away so there'd be enough room for him. Sarah remembered her mom being pregnant before, but it took her a while to connect the two events. One in every ten million births resulted in this sort of mega-sapient organism, as they were called, and no one knew why. It just...started happening a hundred years ago.
That's when they moved to rural Pennsylvania. There was a burgeoning mega-sapiens community there, with an adjoining village where family and friends could be close by. She remembers going to school with Avery and a bunch of other students -- both human and mega -- and got along with just about everyone really well. In fact, she chose a rural veterinary college just so she could keep living at home.
She remembered Avery's first day at school. His first school play. How he had become a rambunctious, willful colt and how the destruction of half the farmland outside of their village cured him of that. She remembered having long conversations with him about how tough it was to be his size, how difficult it was to be so careful. But how much harder it was to imagine hurting his family. She remembered going out on double-dates with him and....
Sarah's head spun. She had to stop thinking about that.
Her parents were waiting for her downstairs, looking as they always had. Philip was a tall, middle-aged man with a kindly face and light brown hair streaked with grey. His eyes were almost honey-colored, always amused and sharp. Rory was paler, with nearly-black hair storming around her head and shoulders. Her blue eyes were almost predatory, giving her a hard look that made her maternal personality all the more surprising. Both of them wore conspicuous bracelets around their left wrists; they were a quarter-inch thick on all sides, and appeared to be made out of solid metal. Lights coursed underneath the surface in a pattern that made Sarah think of circuitry.
"Come on, sleepyhead," her mother said, reaching to usher her out the door. "You know how impatient your brother gets."
Her father moved in behind her as she was being lead out of the house. "And goodness knows we don't want him peeking in at us. He'll give the whole neighborhood a fright. Have you got your ID turned on?"
ID. Sarah briefly thought about it, and a phrase came to her: <i>interaction device</i>. The metal band around her wrist would let her interact with the megas safely. They provided a quantum forcefield that rendered her immune to an insane amount of pressure, in case something were to fall on them or (Heaven forbid) one of them stepped on her accidentally. It even came with a small supply of oxygen in case an incident occurred. They automatically synced with similar devices the megas had, allowing them to be seen and heard, mitigating the ear-splittingly, bone-crunchingly loud voices of the titans and making things that much more...manageable. The same part of her mind that recalled this information didn't seem too impressed with this. IDs had been available publically for at least fifty years, with new features being added all the time. But Sarah was floored by the technology. This is the sort of thing you only saw in science-fiction novels!
She briefly checked the ID, instinctively knowing where on the smooth surface to touch. The lights running just underneath the metallic surface turned green briefly and there was a strange prickle all over her skin. Her mind was telling her it was a familiar feeling even though she had never experienced before. "It is now. Let's go!"
Everything was so futuristic. The car that the Lancasters stepped into was completely self-run, leaving them to talk about their plans for the day as it whirred to life and took them out of their garage and onto the road. It was roomy enough to look like a small train car, with a navigational panel in the front that gave them their route, destination, weather and news, and approximate time of arrival. Even the large windows that Sarah looked out of had an option for some sort of "augmented reality" display. She played with it a bit while her parents talked, and learned that she had a near-instant directory of her neighborhood. She could watch herself traversing a map of her own village in real time. It was really quite cool.
Once they sped out of their neighborhood, they came upon a place that looked a bit like a train station. The front of the Lancaster's car magnetically locked with the back of the car in front of them, and there they waited for a moment as other cars attached to theirs or whirred to a stop in a side lot. People got out of those cars and joined the newly-formed train; a couple of people even wandered into their car, gave a polite greeting, and played with the augmented reality display in their windows. Some part of Sarah recognized them, but she couldn't for the life of her remember their names.
They only waited a few minutes before the 'train' of interlocked cars started moving. They were quickly whisked away from the village, into a beautifully-maintained buffer zone between their village and the place where the megas lived. Miles of forest gave way to fields, then rolling hills that looked increasingly deserted. Then, finally, the train came to the city of the megas around a bend.
It was hard to know what she was looking at, at first. Gigantic skyscrapers stabbed the clouds some distance away from the tracks they were on. Even though Sarah could see them, they appeared to be at least a mile away on either side. They were either incredibly huge or her ID was allowing her to see things in a way she wouldn't normally be able to. Each building seemed to stretch on forever; it took her five minutes to run the length of one, even at their incredible speed. Sarah looked at the map, and it told her that this one of the mega's houses. Privacy protocol wouldn't let her know who owned it, though.
Sarah's mind whirled; she had been struggling with the idea of creatures so big, let alone the idea of interacting with them on a regular basis, and each new piece of information forced her to re-adjust her ideas. It seemed every time she started to get a handle on how immense they were, she was being told by her environment that these beings were bigger still. How would she react when she finally saw Avery and his friends? Would she simply go into shock? Would some part of her brain take over in her stead, the part that found this completely normal?
The sky darkened considerably, quickly. It was enough to snap her out of her revelrie just in time for her view of the mega-skyscrapers to be replaced with a wall of waving white fur. It landed with a cataclysmic impact, the ground rolling like a wave away from it until it came to the train. It hit a forcefield and passed underneath with minimal effect. It just felt like Sarah's stomach dropped several inches. She shrieked.
All of the faces in her car turned to look at her. Her mother merely chuckled. "Excited to see Timothy, aren't you? He wanted to surprise you by meeting the train." She looked back at Sarah with a broad grin. "Don't be shy, you can wave in front of your parents."
Sarah felt her cheeks warming, though she wasn't entirely sure why. She looked out of the window and was met with the single biggest foot she had ever seen. It looked like a rabbit's foot, broadened out to fit a bipedal stance, and was immense -- even in proportion to the body on top of it. It rose like a great cliff for what looked to be thousands of feet, leading up to an ankle that stretched even higher and a great mountain of a calf even higher than that. She could barely see the knee from where she was sitting, and even that looked hazy with distance. The size of this thing was...unthinkable. Not knowing what else to do, she waved.
To Sarah's surprise, a hand came down from the sky, filling the rest of her upwards horizon. It waggled its fingers, and both of her parents laughed.
"Tim's such a sweetheart," her mother said.
The gigantic rabbit stepped beside the train as it rode into what looked like an enormous artificial hill. The car tilted back as it seemed to climb the tracks at a fairly steep, fast grade. Sarah realized that she was almost to her destination, and that once the car stopped it would disconnect and be carried (carried!) by Avery over to their meeting area.
It felt like Sarah's stomach never recovered from that first big jolt. Faced with the reality of meeting these impossibly-sized creatures, she started to panic. What in the world was she doing here? When and how would she get back home? Whose....whose strange life *was* this? She didn't have time to think about this much before...  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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