Flash Memory

I stared at the ceiling. I couldn't sleep. The bench/cot…thing I was lying on was built of brushed steel and the padding was torn up. The holding cell wasn't much better—the front wall was constructed entirely out of reinforced glass, and the sterile, off-white concrete bricks burned at my eyes, even with my oculars tuning a lot of it out. I had taken to examining the cracks and flaking in the paint to try to pass the time.

I was alone in the cell. Normally I would have preferred it that way, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that, somehow, that just made it worse. I missed my Scavenger allies. I missed Acrylic, even in his angry, amnesiac state. I missed Fetus—I had only just met her but I had seen her put through the wringer.

My thoughts kept returning to the memory chip. So much of a man's being in a half-inch square of silicon, and I ditched it.

And as I marveled at the wealth of data I had unceremoniously buried, there was a bright blue flash, and I was enveloped in a blizzard of safety glass.