Chapter Three

It's mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack, not rationality.

Beatrix Kiddo (Kill Bill, Vol. 1)

February 19, 2014, Manticore Base, Wyoming.

My twelve year-old self hung off the face of the cliff by one hand jammed into a narrow crack in the rock. My other hand was searching for just the right sized chock to stuff in the crack above me. I did have a line to a piton slightly below me, but it was none too secure, and I had no partner that night, so I was rushing just a little bit. It was a fairly dark night, there were clouds scudding across the moon, causing even those of us with enhanced night vision to be unable to see as clearly as usual. The other side of the gorge was shadowed and fuzzy, and that meant that if anyone on the other side were awake, they probably couldn't see me, which I was counting on.

I had found a trespasser earlier in the day, and I had carefully prepared him for this nights adventure. I was finally seeing the fruition of years of planning: an escape from Manticore with a little leeway if everything went well. A couple of days head start was all I needed to disappear from Lydecker's vision. My plan was a little hard on the trespassing hiker, but standing orders were to terminate all unauthorized persons on discovery. The fact that most of the time, if none of the guards or Lydecker was around, we would just point such lost individuals the way out, and explain in no uncertain terms that if they didn't leave instantly they would be executed on sight, had no bearing on the matter. We had never been told that it's wrong to kill people, just the opposite in fact. But we still came to that conclusion on our own. But still, compared to norms, we could and did kill if we thought there was a good enough reason, like avoiding KP or cleaning the heads or some other undesirable activity.

That hiker gave up his life so I could get started on my quest to be free. I thought it was good trade at the time, although as the years went by that particular death weighed more and more heavily on me.

So my plan, such as it was, was to toss the corpse into the river, accompanied by an artistic warbling scream, and to leave a very carefully arranged cliff-clinging campsite that showed signs of rock failure around a piton or two, thus supposedly dumping me down into the rocky river in my sleep. I knew very well that none of my preparations would fool Colonel Lydecker for long. He knew our abilities better than we did, and I didn't think that he would believe for one instant that I had been so foolish as to depend on even one, much less two, incorrectly placed pitons. But I also knew that he was in Washington DC for a week of meetings, and that most, if not all, of his ordinary soldiers were freaked out by X-5s and even more by X-6s and would not think to question anything, until Lydecker got back.

And I also knew that I couldn't get away with trying to arrange equipment failure. Manticore equipment started out with the best available, and then our various in-house artisans made it better. Thus, equipment failure was something we learned about in classrooms, not in the field.

So after I finally got myself secured to the cliff face, I pulled on the nylon line that had the hiker tied to it, and caught him as he tumbled down from the top of the cliff. I untied him and tossed him into the deepest part of the very fast moving river, eighty meters below, hoping that it would get sucked under the ice a few hundred meters downstream, and wouldn't come out for a klick or two of a very rocky passage. Thus, the corpse would be beaten to near unrecognizability, at least until they could do DNA sampling back at the lab.

I was worried that I couldn't take all my gear with me, but I had to leave enough to make it look like I hadn't taken any. But I did have the hiker's gear, although it was of low quality compared to what I was used to using. I climbed up the cliff, removing my pitons and chocks and scuffing out any marks and scrapes. Then it was just a simple matter of running about a hundred kilometers with a thirty kilogram backpack over rough terrain: easy for a twelve year old X-6. By dawn I was at a carefully selected highway, with my thumb out. My luck held, I got a ride from a trucker within minutes. The next day I had made it as far as Denver, four more days and I was in Seattle. I don't know why I felt like stopping there, I just did. I managed to work my way into one of the many programs that various organizations had for orphaned teenagers, and since I never let on that I knew forty-three distinctly different ways to kill people with my bare hands, as well as one hundred sixteen ways to disable attackers, they didn't think I was out of the ordinary. From then to now I lived for art, immersed myself in art, studied: art techniques, methods of art, history of art, artistic styles, art fashions, psychology of art, art of seeing, physics of light as it applied to paint, chemistry of paint, computers, printing, digital art, graphic art... etc. I did it all, and plan to continue until I die.

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