This is the best study of my main character, the one that I think most accurately captures who she thinks she is.
The roadway sparkles and flows with light, a jeweled strand across the dark landscape. Cylee sat far up on a hill, the fresh, wild wind blowing her hair back.
She used to live in this place, this quiet, dark, outdoor world. Back before Pacifica, before the war…
The strings of lights eventually merge into the cities, connecting the nets of lights that represent civilization, mankind’s crowning jewels shining in the dark. And once you’re caught in that net it can feel like there’s nothing else, no other way to live. You can learn to depend on the Network, constant wireless streams of information flowing into and out of you at all times. You can learn to read the streets as you read the trees, feel the way the social wind is blowing just as you used to know how to read the fitful pre-dawn breezes.
And, in truth, Cylee was caught by that net. If she stayed out here for a few days or weeks her Spine would shut down and go from being an Augmentation to being thirty pounds of stiff dead metal. She’d be essentially blinded and deafened, her limbs left to their own strength. Even now she was half blind, her Spine out of range of the Network and therefore unable to give her the kind of information that made up the background noise of her daily life. Granted, she could still see every living, warm blooded thing that moved in the darkness, every rabbit, every bat, every bird was a blip on her augmented vision, their insane heart rates pounding like miniature thunder in her ears.
But she used to track them unaided. Used to be able to sense the movement of creatures that were string to remain hidden. She could feel the twitch in the grass that didn’t quite match the way the wind was moving. And she would raise her bow quietly, wait for the next movement…and…with a soft twang she would have breakfast.
Out of a sense of irony and frustration she considered raising her flechette thrower and pinning that rabbit to the ground, letting her Spine handle the fine details of getting her hand in the right position, but she stopped, realized she didn’t need the meat, and shouldn’t waste it. Pacifica had made her a perfect soldier, but it hadn’t entirely removed the true hunter she had been.