Falling, falling

***CONTENT WARNING***THIS IS A TRANSCRIPT OF A DREAM AND HAS NOT BEEN SANITIZED FOR CONTENT, GRAMMAR, ETC.

I call a car service. A hovercar arrives, Harry Connick is the pilot. We take an express tube across the bridge into the city - I am feeling the Golden Gate Bridge, but an entry into lower Manhattan. He is laughing and driving very fast. I think about it being the fastest hovercar ride I'd ever had - and it charged to my company card.

He drops me off at a small German bakery, wooden floors and glass display cases. Jessica is there already, picking out sweets. She has numerous to recommend. We go to the register to pay and she reminds me that she used to work there - we could work for a little while in exchange for the baked goods. She will funnel the workers to the register and I will process them before they are paid. It is like a welfare line - who are you, what have you done today, how much do we owe you, etc. A man comes up, said it had been a hard day. The bakery goes quiet and someone whispers, 'Fin's here. The finman is here.' I turn to look - he looks like Mark Wahlburg in Four Brothers - slick back hair, goatee, older.

He tosses his guns on the table. I asked someone what the finman did, but I never received and answer. Fin sighed, drew a smoke and started picking dirt from the barrels. I looked at him and was transported into his reality.

I was dressed in military gear. I had a large gun, an orange safety vest on and a pair of thin white cables hanging from my helmet to a battery pack in my vest. Unplugging it would immediately cause cardiac arrest - it was like a life support monitoring system, but also a power supply for the body. I stood next to my partner - she cartwheeled toward me, did a flip in the air and landed so that our uniforms interlocking systems locked into place. I faced one way, she another, side-by-side. When one moved the other automatically did a corresponding movement to provide instant cover fire. It was like the interlocking mechanism caused mirror image movements in the partner, yet both were individuals who could initiate any action. It's just that the power pack and the interlock caused each to have the ability to pick up additional automatic motions.

We walked onto the battlefield - it was a test environment. There were people watching from all sides. She shot her weapon, I laid down cover. We moved like a 4-armed goddess of war. Suddenly everything went quiet and hazy, slow motion. I looked around and saw my white cables disconnected from both pack and helmet - I should have been dead. I looked at the crowd, at my partner - who was not as close as she had been a moment before. I saw my orange safety vest drift across the ground, dragging up a thin layer of dry dirt. Down at the cables again, at the vert again - then at the ground, which was coming up quickly. I stood back and watched myself slowly fall to the ground, almost lay down - puzzling over the cables, the safety vest, the ground. My eyes shifted as my head hit the ground, jarred by the impact I could still make out the vest blowing toward a tumbleweed. My eyes shut with the slowest speed.