Turning On

In another quarter second, he made his decision. He reached down and pulled the table from the floor and tossed it at the woman. His muscles reacting agonizingly slowly, he pulled his pistol and fired two shots through the table at where the woman’s head had been before the table took flight. He then put perception as slow as possible, to where a second seemed like an hour, and noticed where the table buckled under the shocks of four shots from the other side of the table. He dropped, and returned to his previous speed, as the bullets lazily sailed over his head and he dropped another two at each of the woman’s feet.

He saw the table split as the woman smashed it with her fist, and they faced each other across 20 feet of floor space, barely 2 seconds after his first hint of danger. She leveled her remaining two shots at his head, and he dodged, barely with a hint of effort. Amateur, no one could hit a Lit man this far away. Then Takawa stood, moving with the glacial pace of a Slow. Before Takawa even knew what was going on, the woman’s thrown pistol had gone through his head, barely even slowing down. The rest of the clip was emptied at her, to no effect. The woman took one, two steps, and flew across the room.

As the woman hurtled at Logan, he opened his brain to full capacity, the real beauty of moving into the Lite. Quantum theory says that there are any number of possible universes, each representing every possibility, that only the brain (unconsciously) collapses them into one which is perceived, and that all exist simultaneously. A Lit brain can blur and collapse at will, using the virtually unlimited processing power available to it. So he collapsed into a universe where he had a full clip, and solved his dilemma neatly. But that was certainly no fun, almost cheating.

The Pit had yet another redecorating job on it’s hands, and the entire place was staring at him with his pistol in hand and the bodies of Takawa and the mysterious woman in red sprawled on the floor. His private perception Dimmed, as he came off, and he heard screaming, and cursing. The first was the owner, the second was himself. Half a million Yen lost, and surely a police investigation. They wouldn’t care about a Slow, but this was no ordinary Slow. Fuck.

His evening had, yet again, turned out to be a dismal disaster. Lost job, messy killing, and he even had to cheat to come out whole and uninjured. Oh well. He took the rest of his pills and left the Pit for a better universe.