Is ammo cheaper in the Hyperreality?

  For a moment, he felt something like the shadow of pain, and khe impact of his head hitting the triple-thick window should probably have killed him.

  They had smmed into a car that had backed out into the ter of the row, and was now crumpled into the wall te ahead, with no driver. Sam turned in her seat and looked back at him. His heart jumped.

  Blood out of her nose. She smiled.

  “I think this airbag just deviated my septum. Guess I’ll have to—”

  Bullets struck the back window like hail and muzzle fsh blinked down the row.

  “ing!” she said, sing-song, and stepped out the door. Munfire raked the SUV and she dropped to the ground.

  “Owie!”

  “Sam, ,” said Angel. “At least act like—”

  “You just gonna sit there!” Philip growled.

  Gradie sprung up and threw the ter passenger side door open.

  Fuys moved down the row, leapfrogging to cover behind pilrs and cars, muzzles fshilessly. The SUV shed bullet fragments and the cars o Gradie coughed up gss.

  “Shit!”

  Fire, cover, fire, a voi his mind reminded him. He raised his rifle and fired as he stepped out, as he moved back toward the front of the SUV, even as he threw open the passenger side door. One guy dropped dead and the others snapped down, being just dots of muzzle fsh peeking over cover.

  “I thi an oil leak,” Sam said from uhe SUV.

  Gradie got behind the ter door and reloaded quickly, then stepped up on the rail, aurned fire through the gap between the ter door and the doorframe. One shooter dropped back behind a car, but the other two kept up the pressure.

  “Shit!” Gradie ducked bato the SUV as a round took his ear off. Most of the window gss was solid white, but the fire didn’t let up.

  “Did you get em?” Sam whispered in his earbuds. Through the foggy fractal haze of the SUV’s back windows, guns fshed and dark figures emerged slowly from cover.

  Gradie cwed at the memory of every poud obje the SUV. One caught his attention, and a pn formed around it.

  He took the rifle sling off his shoulder and reached into the bottom partment of the ter sole. When he had the neon in hand, he let go of the sling and the rifle cttered to the ground outside. As he crawled between the seats and along the floorboards, he heard one of the men shout and the gunfire lessened. He raised his head just enough to see the dark silhouettes marg fidently down the rout the barrel of the GM94 up to the slot in the back window.

  He pulled the trigger. A bzing fsh of fire lit up the crystal white window and the ba off car arms and shook the air. Two of the guys died instantly, but the st one spriowards the SUV with his rifle raised.

  “I got him,” Sam said. A gu off uhe SUV and the guy dropped. The gu going for a few more seds, then Gradie heard it smack against the crete.

  “Help,” she said dryly.

  Gradie rushed out of the side door and drug Sam out from uhe SUV. The empty CZ slid out with her and blood smeared behind her.

  “She’s bleeding out,” Philip said.

  Memories of first aid and trauma drills, and then of the real thing poured out of his head, but they banged against something else. Fear.

  “These are a little squirrelly,” Nova said.

  “He soaked the gun stuff up like a sponge,” Angel noted. “Medical’s gonna take a little work.”

  “He’ll o prime all that anyway,” Philip said, with something like sympathy.

  Gradie had strapped two tours on, administered an iion, applied seals and pressure and quickclot, but had dohem in the wrong order. It was like his mind had reached for the knowledge, but found only shadows.

  “Might be just panicked,” Lindsey said.

  “Hey, just rex, focus on—” Sam said. Nova interrupted her.

  “Why are you talking? You’re dead.”

  “Oh.” Sam rolled her head to the side and stuck her to, then dropped through the floor, leaving only a smeared puddle of blood behind.

  “What—”

  “Ok, she’s dead,” said Nova. “Now you gotta get out of there without being seera procedures, go.”

  Police sirens echoed from outside and jammed with the car arms. The word ‘extra’ lit up wisps of memory like a fre in the fog.

  Look uninvolved.

  He dropped the medkit, pulled his bloody jacket off and dropped it on the ground, then stepped all over it to get the blood off his shoes. In a side partment at the back of the SUV, he found an old wrinkled hoodie and pulled it on.

  Get clear.

  He sprio the crete barrier at the core of the garage, grabbed the low wall, flipped around, and lowered himself down. He swung his legs above the level barrier a go. Ten stories gred up at him as he fell, and for a moment everything was as real as anything he had ever known. Half a sed ter his feet met crete and he eased himself down into the space between two cars.

  “Oh shit, nice!” Nova said. “Where'd you get the parkour from? I didn't feed you any of that?”

  Gradie realized he had no idea. It had felt like something he had dohousand times, but he couldn’t put a finger ohe memory had e from.

  “I left some supplementary mem in the framework,” Angel said. “He must have tapped into the textual—”

  “Cops up the ramp,” Lindsey said.

  Sure enough, sirens rose through the ter shaft. Now what?

  Get gone.

  He got out the phone and looked around.

  Shit.

  “Uh, whie of these cars, has like,” he whispered as the sire against his eardrums.

  “What are y to do?” asked Lindsey.

  “Use this, uh,” Even with the phone in his hand, the memories were hazy. Wasn’t there some kind of app to unlock cars? Whie was it? None of the is looked like anything that gave him any clue. No keys or masked chibis or anything.

  “You’re in the wrong OS, first of all,” Nova said. “But you got the right idea. Look for the—”

  “I think this has about run its course,” Philip cut in.

  “Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve got all I need. You good bro?”

  Gradie almost answered, but Angel beat him to it.

  “Yeah, let’s cut it here. One sec.”

  The world stuttered and Gradie saw himself bring up the hidden OS, navigate to the parking spot marked by EP, press the keypad and to spoof the locks on a mid-'10s hatchback, slide into the driver's seat and hook the phone up to the vehicle's dashboard. In a few mihe software had started the engine, killed the gps, and even celed the owner’s phone pn. Then Gradie pulled out of the garage and mapped himself to the soint.

  It all happened in a few seds, like someone was fast f through the unimportant parts, and his mind reeled from the siing onsught of information. Whehiled, it felt like dream knowledge, and his brain found it familiar.

  “Good shit, bro.” Nova cpped him on the bad he realized he was ba the satellite-esque trol room. Angel’s eyes fluttered and reflected a prismatic light. He nodded and smiled at Gradie.

  “So, now that we have a baseline of how your Spirit textualizes memory, and you get the general idea of how eating mem works, we move to the actual priming.”

  “What?” Gradie had been looking around for Sam, some part of him still screaming that she was bleeding to death on a crete sb, and hadn’t even tried to uand what Angel had said.

  “He’s saying here es the hard part,” Philip said. Angel and Nova nodded. Befradie could ask what they meant, another door appeared in the wall.

  Gradie's shootout might be a poor simucrum of actual Hardworlding, but it was enough for the Twins to dial in on how his spirit turns mem into memory, an important step in preparing him to prime a self in the Vault. ime, Gradie finds the liween self and spirit, and crosses over. episode: Prime Self