Continued from April 26, 2005: The escape

Fear. It was Rider #555's first thought in his slow grope back to consciousness.

It was a common and prevalent sensation out on the plains. Life in the Outlands revolved around fear. For riders, any state of unconsciousness was a state of absolute vulnerability, and vulnerability was a rider's primary fear.

Fuddled and immobile, Rider #555 struggled to gather himself. He had to recover as quickly as possible. In fact, he could not believe that the Conservation had not captured him already.

Pain was the next sensation to permeate his consciousness. Searing, oppressive, choking pain. Rider #555 could especially feel the thick, white scar on the inside of his right forearm throbbing and aching. It was so deep. Rider #555 shriveled under the pain as it radiated throughout his body.

As usual, it had been instigated by the two-headed mirage of commerce and security. In the final years leading up to The Day, Conservation schills marketed RFID technology as a way to track inventory and livestock, to prevent shoplifting, and to save lives. It could reduce costs and increase revenues. It was the cure for an ailing society. In reality, it was simply another mechanism by which the Conservation consolidated its control.

In 1987, Conservation-funded TrackYu Corporation offered the first RFID-based automobile security systems. In the early 1990s, municipal animal shelters began inserting subcutaneous RFID devices in household pets. Later in the decade, GPS tracking units were fiercely peddled during the holiday shopping seasons, and car manufacturers began surreptitiously installing "black box" RFID tracking and monitoring units in all new vehicles.

By the early years of the 21st century, the citizenry had been fully inoculated against the offenses of constant surveillance and the Conservation was ready to take its next step. First, RFID devices were implanted in critical inanimates like prescription drug packaging and passports, then the focus was widened to the human sick and vulnerable with hospital patient IDs and Alzheimer patient monitoring systems -- who could argue with such nobility.

But the Conservation's real vision for the future was first announced on February 10, 2005 in a small article on page A-26 of the Sacramento Times. The relatively insignificant article noted that the Crettin School District in tiny Putter, California had made a deal with InGenComTrex Corporation of MacLean, Virginia to develop out-person RFID devices for its students, "to ease attendance taking and increase campus security."

After it was publicized, outraged parents forced the school district to quickly shut down the program, but Conservation goals had been achieved -- the ice had been broken and a sinister seed had been planted in the public consciousness. Within three years, InGenComTrex and other corporations linked to the Conservation were receiving federal funding to outfit all public schoolchildren with in-person RFID devices.

Originally inserted into the public dialogue as an experimental technology focused on making lives easier and more efficient, RFIDs soon morphed into a legal imperative. The Conservation quickly forced politicians to pass legislation requiring accused criminals to wear in-person RFID microchips, an idea endorsed by all but the liberally insane. But the thirst for power and privilege was insatiable, and daily the web spread. Soon, children under the age of 12 had to be outfitted with in-person devices, then driver's licences were incorporated into an RFID in-person device, and by the second decade of the 21st century, in-person RFID devices were required for all citizens.

It was technological overindulgence. Technology for the sake of technology. Technology for the sake of freedom. Technology for the sake of the people. Technology in place of the people. Technology as an expense to the people. Technology at the expense of the people. Technology for profit. Technology for power.

It was hard for Rider #555 to focus. Beyond the scar, the blinding sunlight fed a pounding headache. He could barely open his eyes. Something was holding him down, the bike. He . . . had . . to . . . get . . . up.

But he could not.

Returning his head to the rocky ground, Rider #555 realized that he was lying upside down on a steep slope. Something large and sharp was digging into his back. Squirming to his left to relieve the back pain, daggers of vicious agony ripped through his chest. His face felt numb and wet. He tried to lick his lips but his mouth seemed full of mud.

Instinct told him that time was critical, but he wasn't ready. Waiting for his strength to return, Rider #555 pieced together his last fleeting frames of memory.

Cuz' Jimmy, a remediation checkpoint, the black helicopter, stormtroopers.

He remembered riding out to the end of a long blufftop peninsula, hoping to find a way down. Rather than plunging straight to the surf below, the bluffs of this peninsula tumbled to the sea in eroded pyramidal fans, like massive sandstone staircases descending from the blufftops or exposed geologic matryoshkas rising up from the ocean.

On his way out, he had noticed the remnants of an old FreeRide course clinging to the seaward edges of the coastal bluffs.

FreeRiders had once been plentiful in these territories, building inventive obstacles, ramps, and jumps for the purpose of achieving massive air and gravity-defying stunts of balance and courage. Shortly after The Day, however, FreeRiders were hunted nearly to extinction by the Conservation, which disapproved of their iconoclastic life style -- FreeRiders didn't care and thus they couldn't be controlled. They lived for the experience, for the rush, for the moment. A lifetime of fringe subsistence was no threat to them.

Taking no chances that the FreeRiders might one day blossom into a potent cultural insurgency, the Conservation unleashed a merciless campaign of intimidation and remediation. At first, the FreeRiders were defiant, but the Conservation was too powerful to engage head-on. Those who continued to openly practice FreeRiding were systematically intimidated and permanently remediated.

At the same time, the Conservation realized that the FreeRiders could actually be a valuable asset in their War of Privilege. Through a religiously coordinated campaign of force and indoctrination, they converted most of the surviving FreeRiders to a trickle-down form of their own gratuitous franchise. FreeRiders became FreeRangers. They were "the battle axe of the Conservation."

Castrated versions of their former glorious ferality, FreeRangers served as agents for the Conservation in the Outlands. In exchange for their lives, some extremely limited privileges, and their self-respect, they gathered intelligence, conducted terrorist operations, and even assisted with intimidation and remediation.

A few hardcore FreeRiders survived the purges and escaped into the underground. FreeRiding was still practiced in remote quadrants of the territory, but its secrets were deeply hidden.

Barely able to catch a glimpse of the thin bead of trail, Rider #555 saw it ran steeply downhill to his right and out of sight. The trail looked like it had not been used for many years, but out at the end of the peninsula, with his back to a 50-foot plunge and the pounding surf, and in the face of overwhelming Conservation firepower, Rider #555 prioritized his options: 1) try to break through the stormtrooper line, 2) take the FreeRider trail, wherever it led.

Situational survival triage: stay in play as long as possible, stay alive as long as possible, and hope for a break.

He remembered getting a bad jump on the pedals. His right cleat had slipped off the pedal and he had wasted two revolutions getting clipped in. By the time he was at full speed, he knew the phalanx of stormtroopers strung across the trail would neutralize him long before he ever got close to breaking their ranks.

When the overgrown singletrack stitch he had seen earlier came into his peripheral vision, without hesitation, he leaned left, pulled up on the handlebars, slid the seat up into his lower abdomen, and flew off the edge of the bluff at full speed.

Coming over the edge of the blufftop, the rest of the trail came into terrifying view below him -- the barest scratch of a trail descending almost straight down a ridgeline tendril of eroded bluff into the scrub and sand below. Staying way back on the bike, rider #555 feathered his rear brake to maintain his line on the razor's edge of the cordillerita.

With the sand rushing up toward him, Rider #555 braced himself for the inevitable sickening crush of high-impact skeletal damage. He'd taken huge spills before, but never at this speed or height.

Blasting through a wall of scrub, the trail looped him slightly to the right and into a massive earthen rampart. Blindsided, Rider #555 felt himself being pulled into the air by a force stronger than any he had ever felt before. He and the bike were literally sucked into the sky by some invisible power.

He was in the air for what seemed like forever. At the apex of his majestic, arcing flight, time stood still. The Conservation stormtroopers, the gunship, the sand, rocks, and scrub far below, it was all laid out before him in ironic grandeur.

A FreeRide jump. So this was what is was all about. This is what it meant to fly, to be free, to be a FreeRider. It was exhilarating. The revelation hung a moment longer, a validating breath of life in a suffocating existence, and then he started to come down.

Clearing three consecutive ridgelines in the air, Rider #555 could see that the FreeRiders had used the far side of the fourth ridgeline as the landing area for this huge huff, thereby allowing the angle of the hill to absorb the force of impact.

He wasn't going to make the fourth ridgeline. Not even close. This was it. It was over. In 19 hundredths of a second he made his peace with the world and relaxed into blackness.

Coming up short on the near side of the fourth ridgeline had probably saved his life. Unseen to Rider #555, on the far side of the ridgeline, the trail immediately plummeted into a massive sinkhole filled with huge broken slabs of concrete and pools of polluted sludge.

Instead, he landed both wheels on the steep, nearside uphill face of the ridgeline. The forces of speed and distance seemed to implode his bike and pull him headlong into the earth. Suffering a severe concussion from this initial impact, Rider #555 was bounced into the air and backwards, landing awkwardly on a small rock outcropping perched above a steep apron of sandstone leading to a 40-foot dropoff. He now had three broken ribs.

As a final insult, the bike landed roughly on his chest and head. The 46-tooth big ring caught Rider #555 flush in the face, gauging his flesh and knocking out several teeth. The bike wedged on top of him, Rider #555 slid about 15 feet down the apron, coming to a stop unconscious, face up and head down, about 20 feet from the edge of the dropoff.

It had all happened in a matter of seconds, but it seemed like years ago in his mind.

The huge, ugly scar continued to burn. He couldn't move his arm. The pain was overwhelming. Pulling his legs up into the fetal position, Rider #555 waited for the pain to pass.

Really, he had been lucky. His DNA group had been one of the last to be fitted with the Series 2 RFID chips. Subsequent generations of RFIDs such as the Series 3 included a security feature that released liquid cyanide into the bloodstream if sensors detected tampering. Series 2 chips were designed to maim, not to kill.

When removed, Series 2 chips emitted a radioactive pulse that severely damaged the surrounding tissue and periodically flared up in torturous bouts of pain and paralysis. By Conservation reasoning, this had the dual benefit of both punishing any scofflaw who tried to remove their RFID device and protecting the rest of the citizenry by announcing the presence of a dangerous criminal. Ultimately, the Conservation reasoned, for the security of the Free World, such vermin as would tamper with Conversation policy and equipment deserved a higher punishment, the Series 3.

Before The Day, the Conservation used RFIDs to manipulate the masses and to secretly track and eliminate powerful political, social, and cultural threats. After The Day, RFID tracking provided the Conservation with both efficient global supervision of the Commoners and simplified individual intimidation and remediation.

After The Day, most Commoners with Series 2 chips had removed them. Many died. Some lived. Commoners with Series 3 chips had no real choice. They could either leave the chips in-person and live in constant fear of the Conservation, or they could remove the chips and be rid of their fear forever.

Slowly, the pain receded. A wisp of afternoon fog muted the sunlight. Awkwardly, painfully, Rider #555 crawled out from underneath the bike. From over the next ridgeline, he could hear the stormtroopers yelling to each other. The gunship was nowhere to be seen.

He was on a steep apron of sandstone that ended abruptly about 20 feet below him. There wasn't a single plant or rock or arroyo in sight. No place to hide.

Rider #555 gingerly crawled to the edge of the sandstone apron and peered over the edge. It was hard to breathe through the chest pain. Below him, the cliff ran straight down about 40 feet to a jagged mass of exposed reef. Defeated, Rider #555 went limp in despair. There were no other options. It was either stand and fight, or jump. Both were certain death.

He decided to jump. Rider #555 tried to stand, but his wolf fetish had slipped out of his jersey and had snagged on the edge of the drop-off. Quickly, he reached out to unhook himself.

It was caught on something just over the edge, just out of sight. He needed to get a better look. Hooking his feet through the bike frame and spreading his legs wide for better balance and support, Rider #555 slowly slid his head and right shoulder over the edge -- a gripping pain shot through his ribs and chest, sucking the breath right out of him. Head spinning, eyes closed, Rider #555 clutched the cool, rough stone, struggling to regain control.

After several seconds, he was ready to continue. Gripping the crumbly sandstone tightly with his left hand and elbow, Rider #555 brought his head out over the edge and around it.

At first, it was hard to see anything. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, Rider #555 was surprised to see he was perched on a stone shelf, under which dangled a blanket of sickly, oily, dark-green vines. The air felt heavy and damp. Water dripped from the underside of the ledge.

This was taking too long. He could see several stormtroopers along the ridgeline to his right. They had not yet seen him.

He tugged hard on the leather strap, but it was still snagged. He pulled harder, but still it did not come loose. Flustered and frustrated, Rider #555 gave a massive yank on the strap and it snapped. Pitched dangerously off-balance by the shift in his center of gravity, Rider #555 flailed frantically at the vine-covered cliff underneath the ledge.

For at least the third time that day, Rider #555 prepared himself for death. But again he came up lucky. His outstretched hand made contact with a thick vine and he was able to grab it. This stabilized his downward momentum, periodically. The pain in his ribs was intense. It was only a matter of time before gravity pulled him down. He needed to get a better handhold. He needed to get his entire body back on top of the clifftop ledge, not underneath it.

Desperate, Rider #555 pushed his right hand through the hanging vines, looking for solid purchase. His right leg was wrapped around the underside of the ledge, and he could feel his left leg sliding toward the edge, pulling the bike with it.

It was decision time. He could hold on for another 10 or 15 seconds and then fall, or he could make a play and either live or die right now. Now.

Scraping his left arm painfully across the ledge, Rider #555 reached down and grabbed his right wrist with his left hand. Without his left arm to hold him up, the rest of his body rolled off the edge of the cliff and into space, the bike trailing behind.

Rider #555 closed his eyes and braced for a back-shattering impact with the cliffside. Gripping the vine with his right hand and gripping his right arm with his left hand, Rider #555 was confident he could hang on through the impact, even with the downward pull of the bike, but for how long?

The impact never came. Instead, Rider #555 felt himself arcing through the vines in a pendulum swing into darkness. He was in a void. There was nothing solid around him. Vines wrapped around his head and body as he passed vertical and swung upwards. It was like he was on a giant rope swing only he was the rope and his bike was the swinger. Reaching horizontal, his hand slipped from the vine, and Rider #555 felt himself pulled backward into blackness by the centrifugal force of his swinging bike.

Rider #555 counted at least four seconds of free flight before he landed face down in a foot of thick, gloppy mud.

The stench was horrendous. Everywhere, the sound of dripping water. Thin strips of daylight strobed in through the thick waterfall of hanging vines in front of him, revealing a massive circular opening carved into the cliff. He was in a huge tunnel.

Saved again to ride another day, Rider #555 didn't know whether to laugh or cry. So he had survived today; tomorrow he would have to do it all over again. It was too much. Every second of every day was spent struggling to survive. Living wasn't worth the effort. He was tired. He didn't care anymore.

Injured, filthy, and hopeless, Rider #555 lowered his head into the cloying muck and fell sound asleep.