As I breathed out, I felt the plasma knife pierce my flesh. Much like the stories that I had heard of people experiencing trauma in slow motion, here I was, about to experience the same thing. The skin under the tip of the blade began to sear the skin. It reminded me of the time I had backed into the stove’s lit flame. But the pain changed. The red holo blade was now toasting the bone as it aimed itself at the unfortunately placed organ that was about to become charred. The blood got cold as it dripped out of my body, and I could feel it trickle down my back. I got a chill. I realized there wouldn’t be much blood since the blade would cauterize the wounds as it entered. My back started to arch back as the pain of the surprise cauterization. The searing was shooting up my back into my brain with the pulsation of the blades buzzing. The pain was also falling to the heels of my feet.
Time had begun again, and remembering the specific reason I was in this situation, I chuckled once, then twice, then I started to belt out a burst of full-on uproarious laughter. “We nailed you fuckers, that’s it, the game is over ” I let out with a roar. With tears streaming down my face, I began to feel faint, and my head began to roll helplessly around. With a swift motion, the blade was yanked out of my belly. I was now arching foreword. I felt my consciousness begin to fade away. Getting sleepy. I cracked down to my knees, and my face met the ground. A crack and nothing. Out.
A giant panicked inhale, like the times you are awoken suddenly, told “hurry up, they are coming!” The weight on my eyelids seemed to fall away and shot open. The image was completely blurry. My eyelids begin to slowly return to their natural position. Breathing began to slow down, back to normal. A few rapid blinks and the image was beginning to come into focus. I felt my hands and feet, suddenly as though it was all being reattached and resynced to my body. I flexed my fingers and reached my arms out in front of me. The feeling was returning. I began to feel air rushing through my fingers. Realizing I was not hearing anything, I flexed the muscles in my face and my ears. I touched my ears with both hands. Suddenly I now felt and heard the rushing air as it was whipping by me. I blinked a few more times, but all I could see was yellow and black indistinct masses of color around and below me. I remembered my injury and reached around my back, feeling for the knife. As I did this, I felt my ass, apparently still clothed in the synthwear I had on just a few seconds ago, sliding. That childhood feeling of sliding in parks and fairs, how strange. My hands made it and discovered no holo. Weird. I blinked a few more times, and the precarious position I was in began to reveal itself to me. I could only see a misty blackness around me. For as far as my freshly focused eyes could see. “Where the hell am I?” I muttered with the voice I now realized also returned to me. I peered down. No way. What? How?
The rushing air and yellow and black all made sense. For some reason, some very strange and inexplicable reason, my ass was firmly planted on and quickly sliding down, a large bowl-shaped yellow slide. Like the ones I had gone down many, many times as a child. No ladder this time. I felt my hand moving up and down with the gentle wavy shape the wall of the slide made. Incredible. Inexplicable. Inconceivable. Insane, where the actual hell was I? And, seemingly more importantly, where was I going at this incredible speed?
I finally, after a few minutes of silent sliding, realized. “Oh, shit, I’m dead.” “Right?”
It was a seemingly absurd question, but I was also sliding down a seemingly endless Yellow slide just like I was six again. Was it really that much more odd of a question to ask?