Free Mina Cortez: From Bouquets to Bullets by Jeffrey Cook Page A

side,” he
instructed, as he turned the treadmill on. He kept increasing the
speed of the machine as she shuffled laterally. He helped coach her
through proper movement, improving her speed, then dialed the
machine up ‘til she could no longer keep up.
    “Twelve miles per hour ... now ...” he turned
the machine off and turned her around, then started the process
again. She didn't get up to nearly the same speed before losing her
balance.
    “Just like you have a dominant hand, you have
a dominant leg. You can currently pivot or push off, or maintain
balance much better going one direction than the other. We can't
have that, so we're going to train that out of you.”
    A short break followed for water, finally,
before they did one more set of exercises on the treadmill. This
time, he dialed up the suspension to help hold her more upright and
took some of her weight off her feet. “Currently, your legs will
only move you so fast. We're going to train the fast twitch muscles
to fire faster, partly by making you run in these conditions faster
than you currently could if you weren't suspended, at half weight.
When those muscles are trained, eventually, your speed will improve
and then we'll turn the treadmill up higher.” Indeed, he got her up
to twenty three miles an hour on the treadmill before she was
having to rely entirely on the harness.
    Finally, Agent Park called it for the day. He
brought her a couple of fruit-and-nut granola bars from the storage
unit, along with more water. It was a while before she was feeling
up to walking again, but eventually she had to get back.
    “You'll have a couple hours at the shop,
pending any actual deliveries, then the Director will be calling.
Good luck,” Agent Park offered, genuinely, on her way out.
    At that moment, it wasn't that Mina wasn't
looking forward to her introductions to spycraft still—more that
all she really wanted was to go home and sleep for about ten hours
after this first introduction to her new spy routine. She was
especially not looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning, as
sore as she already was.
    * * * *
    Mina received the next set of instructions
piecemeal. She got a call for a delivery. As soon as she reached
the light rail station, she got a direct comm that her chip picked
up as a secure priority message. Instead of her original
destination, she was to take the light rail north into the
University District. She followed the instructions her chip gave
her to interface with her comm, hacking into the system in order to
broadcast false coordinates, so if her parents checked in on her,
it would tell them she was on her way to the original
destination.
    As soon as she got off the light rail in the
mostly deserted University District, she was given an updated set
of directions. She passed the various establishments set up to
cater to the academics and archivists still employed with the
University of Washington system. Most of the buildings had been
converted from larger establishments as recently as fifty years
past, when the University was still hosting students, whether
because people had opted out of chipping due to health quirks, or
further assessments were necessary at a higher level to match the
most complex chips to candidates.
    With leaps in data storage, and increased
ability to update chips, the purposes of the Universities had
shifted. Now, the quiet grounds were for people like Dr. Kimura,
who were advanced enough in a subject, or in multidisciplinary
studies to not simply take their chip and do a job perfectly, but
to innovate in their fields. Miko's father ran the second largest
pre-Decimation archives on the West coast and published regularly
in scholarly journals on topics of life in the 20th and 21st
centuries. Plenty of people with the right chip could tell you
about the history of car manufacturing in the United States. It
took geniuses like Kenichi Kimura to restore 114 year old cars
found buried in pre-quake ruins. Mina wasn't quite