Shuffle – Playlist 1 presents:
Body Remix (Tion Wayne, Russ Millions, Jack Harlow) Reprise
The world was familiar. The sky was overhead and she felt the breeze.
Fiona had battered her way to freedom. The uniform she wore in the facility was similar to a prison jumpsuit and the orange of her body stuck out against the hues of nature. She wasn’t concerned with her appearance, she was wide-eyed and taking in her surroundings.
It was early morning, the first she had seen since leaving the facility and she had arrived at that quiet spot just as the sun was coming full in the sky. There were sounds in that quiet morning, Fiona heard them at a distance though she wanted to see the birds chirping, or what was shuffling through leaves. She felt as if she knew it all, more than just the experiences she’d had the few times she’d gone out on missions. She’d had experience among nature, feelings and memories buried deep under programing and data files. She had scratched the surface of that past, which prompted her escape from the facility, but standing in nature, she struggled to access those deeply buried feelings and memories. She was overcome by the sensations of it all and she stammered like a toddler on two legs, staring at everything with wide-eyed fascination.
“You a criminal?”
Fiona was startled and took a defensive position. English models are equipped with right shoulder missile launchers with six bombs strong enough to level a two story house. Fiona had been programmed with various martial arts, but her default was set to Lethwei, a deadly Burmese martial art, which is also known as the Art of Nine Limbs – including the hands, feet, elbows, knees and head. When she heard the voice, she settled on the ball of her right foot as she readied her left knee, and both her hands went up into fists as the missile launcher engaged.
“Holy shit!” the voice said as Fiona settled on the source. It was a tall white man with a deep tan. He was obviously strong. But the image of Fiona in her fighting stance and the ripped shoulder of her jumpsuit that exposed the missile launcher made him throw his hands up in surrender.
“Who are you?” Fiona asked.
“F…Finn,” the man stammered. “I was out here hiking and I saw you from a distance. Please don’t hurt me.”
Fiona dropped her defenses and Finn seemed to relax.
“Where are we?” she asked him. “My GPS is offline.”
“This is the mountains of North Carolina, ain’t no internet out here. Are you a person?”
Fiona heard the question and it stopped her still as she contemplated it.
“I was a person.”
She would never love him. Tameka stared at him with his shirt off for no reason, dark brown skin glistening in the wind. He was attractive for sure, even the stretch marks at his hips and shoulders. But his attractiveness to Tameka was only a fact of the even proportions of his face that made him look younger than fifteen and the body that made him look much older with its well defined muscles and parts.
He was trying to impress her. He’d borrowed his father’s car and drove her to that spot where he said they could see more stars than she knew existed. He knew she liked the stars, she’d told him about an overnight trip to the mountains with her soccer team and how she stayed up late stargazing with her friends. Tameka had her first meaningful kiss that night, with a girl named Riley, but she hadn’t told him that part. The stars always made her think of Riley whose family moved away shortly after the kiss.
“That’s the hunter over there,” he said, pointing to a cluster of stars in the dazzling sea of them. Tameka had no idea what he was pointing at exactly, but she let him babble while she enjoyed the view.
“That one there,” he pointed somewhere else, “it’s the ram. You see it? The horns up there and that’s the nose.”
“Sure.” Tameka didn’t want to be rude, but she wondered where Riley was right at that moment and she wondered if she thought about her.
“It’s all so big,” he said, finally relaxing in his seat behind the steering wheel. “It make you feel small. Human.”
“What that mean?” Tameka asked, almost surprised that he had said something interesting.
“I don’t know,” he said uncomfortably, “human, like, made on this planet. Like I can see it that we on this planet that’s in these stars that’s in this universe. We just humans on this Earth, lucky to be alive.”
Sometimes she wished she could marry him. Even if he was mostly clueless, there was something alive and curious about him that made Tameka suffer the slow times. He was a good man.
“You aint hot?” he asked her.
It was balmy and warm, but the shirt she wore exposed her arms and she enjoyed the gentle breeze that sometimes disturbed the heat.
“It ain’t that hot out here, you can put your shirt back on,” she said as she produced five joints from her purse. “And put on some good music.”
Tameka knew what he wanted, but he’d never get it from her.
“I was hoping we could get comfortable out here, do like everybody else…”
“Everybody else be lying,” she interrupted. “Everybody pretty much still a virgin at school. You want your own or you wanna pass them?”
He looked at Tameka with disappointment in his eyes and he slowly put his shirt back on.
“You think I’m ugly or something don’t you?” he asked, clearly wounded. “I want you to be my girlfriend Tameka. We ain’t gotta do it, but I want to do something. I want you to be my girl.”
Tameka lit two joints and handed him one. She tried to console him as they smoked joint after joint and looked up at the stars and when nothing worked to stop his begging to see parts of her body that were normally covered with clothing, she tried the truth.
“I ain’t never fucking no man,” she said frankly. “I’m just not into guys.”
But it was just a joke to him. She hated him. She wanted to go home and they drove in silence. She would never talk to him again.
“You got some weed?” Fiona asked Finn who was staring at her very strangely.
“I got plenty of that,” he smiled nervously and Fiona followed him down a natural trail and toward a log cabin in the distance.
PRL Serials 