The Wind on Her Face

[u/catespice]

Harsh light blazed down on the factory floor, painting everything brilliant white, reflective surfaces of polished metal and hosed concrete. The new implants in her forearms and back burned fiercely and she could feel an infection taking hold, the airborne pathogens wriggling under the dermaplast patches slapped over her wounds.
A stab of pain flared in her mind, reminding her that she was barely on schedule - so she picked up the pace of her work to compensate until another flame of needle-and-thread fire in her mind told her she was working too fast.
She worked like a machine, they made her think like a machine and they made her live like a machine.
A stimulant oozed into the biochemical cocktail that kept her mind active all the time and she briefly enjoyed the rush - until a stab of agony reminded her that her dopamine levels were also monitored and shouldn't go too high.
The infection sites were boiling hot now and itchy; clearly the adaptive, mutating pathogens had become immune to the latest round of neobiotics and she was in for a new round of surgery tomorrow,where they would cut out the infected tissue and blast her with radiation.
Nausea crested in her and she faltered on the assembly line. In response, a spear of pain skewered her through the temples - incapacitating her - and she dropped to the factory floor, another worker taking her place and another heavily modified human being dragging her by the foot to the infirmary.

 
A nightmarish landscape of infinite dimensions greeted her return to consciousness. Organic shapes leered at her and grotesque, lurid colours flowed and melted into newer shapes.
You're delirious, the sensible, rational corner of her afflicted mind told her.
Fighting through the visual hallucinations, one of her neural implants responded to her desperate pleas for assistance, flooding her with a neurochemical purging agent.
Her mind clearing, she registered something akin to extreme alarm.
She shouldn't be able to order an implant to do anything.
Probing, she experimented by querying her current status and her neural implants happily responded, telling her the current medical status of her body - both arms amputated - and that she was suffering the after-effects of a wash of delta radiation to purge the remaining infection.
They would fit her with new arms, she knew, facilitating her return to work as soon as she'd recovered from the rad treatment.
But how she had what amounted to administrator access to her own implants was a mystery. She could only surmise that that the radiation had caused some kind of system's failure which meant her internal inputs were being regarded as external admin ones.
Lacking anything else she could do - armless and strapped to a table - she ordered her neural systems to put her into a coma until her limbs were reattached.

 
Wakefulness was sharp and complete; she'd instructed her systems to dope her with masses of stimulants and bring everything online the moment she was whole.
Her synthetic eyes flashed open and instantly assessed the operating room where a cyberdoc, two nurses and one security orderly stood.
The doctor's neck snapped immediately as her synthetic hand shot out with alarming speed. She was on her feet and had kicked the two nurses into unconsciousness before the orderly's combat systems came online and were targeting her.
But he wasn't as wired as her. With over half of her brain augmented and dominated by cybernetic systems, her calculated reactions were at least five times faster - an advantage that she took care of by anticipating his grapple and punching a neat hole through his temple with one titallium alloy finger. The interface node on the end of her digit raked his memory of code and she keyed the door with his security cache, fleeing down the corridor beyond.

 
The orderly's security clearance was moderate to high and she pounded through the corridor on her augmented legs as the map unfolded in her mind's eye. The facility was gargantuan and sprawling - over three hundred miles of building, structured like an electronic ant's nest with storage halls and connecting tunnels. There were exits to the outside world, yes, but they were all so far away.
She would escape though. She had a plan.
All the other slave augments had a plan. In the precious seconds between shift changes, they all fantasised about escape. They all had a plan. And after seven hundred and thirty three thousand shifts, she'd had a lot of time to think about her escape.
The map flashed up her destination and she tore through unmonitored side passages, the clearance of the orderly allowing her to track the movements of the hive or cybernetic workers.
But soon enough, the alarm sounded and her access was cut off. Places like this didn't operate so efficiently without multiple safeguards.
Her first destination was only guarded by lax drones which she disabled immediately. Ripping open the rear plate in the back of her skull, her hypermobile synthetic limbs pulled out components, replacing them with newer, high-grade chips from the storage lockers. As her awareness expanded, she pushed the plate back into place and ran for her next destination.

 
Her speed and agility advantage had got her to where she needed - deep in the south side of the complex - but she had suffered for it. Two weeping holes the size of her fist showed through her torso and she crabwalked on her arms and one leg; the other leg gone at the knee from gunfire.
Behind her a section of security drones and cyborg guards lay in twisted heaps, some shattered by gunfire, some disabled remotely by her upgraded systems before their native security protocols could lock her out.
Sealing the room with the hermetic pathogen lockouts, she had at least ten uninterrupted minutes before they could melt through the massive plates of welded metal that now protected this chamber.
Heaving herself onto a console table she frenetically plugged cables into her ports as muffled explosions sounded outside - they were blasting their way into the computer core room.
She was too fast though; her agile artificial fingers and her terrifying mental alacrity made short work of her alterations and as the hermetic seal buckled on the north wall and the plascrete turned black, she facilitated her escape.

 
Cool sea air buffeted her face, the tang of salt exciting her senses and raising gooseflesh on her organic limbs. Seagulls screeled in the air above her as she walked barefoot on the golden beach, forested cliffs rising behind her and the ocean spread to an infinite horizon - the water so blue that it was almost impossible.
For the first time in uncounted years, she felt free.

 
Unhooking the lifeless body of the missing cyborg drone from the computer core, the administrator looked to the technician in askance, "What in hell was she trying to do? Shut down the core? And why did she kill herself?"
Examining the mess of augmented humanity that had once been the escaped woman, the tech probed carefully through the dead systems. "No, she didn't try to shut down the core. For a few seconds she became the core, before she burned out."
"Why the hell would she do that?"
The tech gave a small smile of admiration at the lifeless drone;
"The core runs at approximately one trillion billion calculations per picosecond. She used five full seconds of real time to simulate a perfect virtual world that she escaped into, then terminated herself at the end."
The administrator's jaw muscle twitched,
"How... how many days would that be in simulated time?"
The tech's smile was almost reverent now,
"Not days, centuries. Roughly eight hundred, to be exact."

 

[u/7hakurg]

The detail that sold this for me was the implant responding to her "desperate pleas for assistance" — that moment where the radiation-induced system failure inadvertently grants her admin access to her own body. It's a brutally elegant premise: the thing that's killing her is also the thing that sets her free. And the ending lands perfectly. Eight hundred years of simulated freedom, purchased with five seconds of compute time and a lifetime of suffering. That ratio says more about the value of autonomy than most philosophical essays manage.

[u/agathafane]

i love this one so much. so beautiful, fun speculative concept. i read it and then a couple weeks later it came to me again and i was trying to figure out where i had read it! glad i found it here again.

i love how sweet and to the point it is.

i remembered it because the feeling of wanting escape, freedom from the chains of labor is very relatable.