The City of Taxon

Michael sat on his kitchen counter, tablet in his lap expanded to its biggest laptop form.  He was pretty sure he'd worked out most of the kinks in the gadget -- well, more or less -- except for the crucial matters of breaking it, sabotaging it or trying to get it to stay off for long periods of time.  How was it even powered?  Taxon (he was resigning himself to accepting it was called that) defied the laws of physics as he knew it, like it had its own laws of sci-fi physics.  It probably did.  That unnerved him beyond belief -- he was used to being from a world where vinegar and baking soda made foam and gasoline and Coca-Cola bottle made Molotov cocktail.  Having to re-learn the basic rules of reality was like getting the muscles in his legs rearranged while he slept so he woke up not actually knowing how to walk.

But: first things first.  You broke a task up into tiny steps, and you took the steps.  Eventually you got to the end of the task.  Or it kept adding steps faster than you could keep up, but Michael Westen was Michael Westen and in his own opinion he could keep up pretty goddamned fast.

He crossed his legs next to the new range Jesse had installed and, after a moment of consideration, tapped a few icons and dialed Paul Smecker, call set to Visual.

[OOC: Call is locked to Paul, but post is open to anyone who wants to call or visit Michael for some reason]

The phone was ringing.

The room Michael was in wasn’t the Westen house in Miami. But that didn’t make sense, because the phone was ringing and he’d gotten up to get it -- his mom and Fi were still at the table, and because Jesse wasn’t home he’d said, “I’ll get it” and he’d gotten up -- the phone was ringing, and he’d walked into the kitchen to get it. The phone was ringing somewhere around the fridge. The phone was ringing, and Michael had taken a step onto a square of kitchen tile and hit by a wave of something that stole the tile out from under him, and his feet, and the world. Everything just sort of went away.

His first thought was that thing they said that some bullets and explosions traveled so fast that they killed you before you ever heard them. Where you were dead before you knew anything was killing you. That was his first thought.

His second thought was the last far-off obnoxious ring of that goddamned phone -- the very last piece of his life to fall away, but then it was silent too and he was in this room.

It was a room. That was a start. It was kind of metallic, altogether, which you didn’t see a lot and was more corporate office or SyFy than it was practical. It was round, which put him in mind of a courtroom, and he was on some kind of -- platform? -- at the center which reminded him of a courtroom too, but the rest of the room wasn’t anything like a courtroom at all -- and he was at the center of it, which he didn’t like at all. There were steps down, he could see; and he wasn’t hurting, he had his balance, he could walk. Okay. This was all in his inventory, and these were good things.


He patted himself down briefly: empty pockets, no gun, shades, probably no IEDs strapped to him: okay, this was looking more like ‘the afterlife’ than ‘extraordinary rendition,’ but as Michael Westen did not actually feel like becoming spontaneously religious, he was electing to keep his options open. Something brushed against his hip when he checked his pocket, though -- under his suit jacket and shirtsleeve. Michael unbuttoned them and rolled them up, frowning, and found that some kind of metal -- device was seamlessly grafted into the skin of his wrist.

Maybe rendition after all.

He pulled at the skin around it with his fingers. No luck. “Damn,” he said aloud, half in appreciation for whatever technology and surgery had made this take so well: a tracking bracelet? Whatever it was, it wasn’t itching and it didn’t hurt, which spoke badly for his ability to take it off. Well, first things first.

Michael took a step onto the first stair and warily spied some kind of high-tech podium -- then another step and spun around, but there was no sound or motion but his own breathing.

“Hello?” he tried.

No answer. No cameras on the walls he could see, they were pretty smooth: “Hello?” again, louder, while he looked up -- bingo, there, something on the ceiling. It looked kind of like -- not a camera. It looked like not anything Michael had heard of, either. Like everything else here, actually, it looked manufactured at the Sharper Image. “Hello,” he tried this time speaking directly into the device with a pained smile and a wave.

Nothing. Michael took the next step down, and then the next, and then gingerly to the ground, like it might explode. It didn’t. He looked around again, like someone might appear behind him, and then headed to a wall near the high-tech podium, step by careful step.

“Is anyone here?” he called out a little louder: then, with an ache of something and on an impulse, “Mom? Fi?”

Whoever had brought him here, they were long gone. He felt for his cell phone again, but didn’t expect to find it there, and he didn’t. Before long he found a wall, leaned his head back on it and tipped his shades further back on his face. He’d been a prisoner enough times before. He was used, if nothing else, to waiting for something to happen.