AMBER CITY

Midnight on a flight, headed toward Amber City; shadows crawling along the wing slip through the porthole and lay their long, cool black fingers over my face. Sensors beyond the walls picked up the impossible; a lone soul on radar, squatting, moving among the ruins.
The City was shut down 100 years ago, maybe more. Time just slowed down one day, out of nowhere. People were frozen in their tracks.
A remarkable phenomenon, if you think about it. It spread outward slowly, languidly, and with calm purpose from a single point. The closer you ventured to the epicenter of this almost peaceful problem, the slower you moved. Tying anchor lines to rescue crews for extraction was one thing. But nothing could get them in to the heart of the Matter. One guy got the bright idea of catapulting them in, but “The Soup”, as we named it, failed to recognize the laws of gravity, and we had to leave those silly bastards there, suspended in space with useless tethers affixed to their backs like orphaned silkworms. No reasonable amount of pulling could bring them back without ripping them clean in two, like ticks under the skin.
Finally, the government walled it up tight, surrounded the whole fucking city in Foamcrete and dropped a Cleaner on it. Now I've got to go in and find out what's still alive, and what has strength to move in the amber.
I check my gear and stand in the door, waiting for the Word, which, like all useful information in this day and age, comes in the form of light; that constant and universal language. I leapt into the arms of the night, and savor this madman elevator headed to the ground floor.
My skin is covered in 9-G foam, a full-body suit compound built from Near-Frictionless Carbon, and I'm humping a 40-pound PMI (Passive Magnetic Inhibitor) on my back. The Soup can’t stop what The Soup can’t touch. The pad on my forearm controls the power output of the PMI, and lets me control my descent above the city; hard-linked to the control center through a megawatt bounce transmitter, guaranteed to cut The Soup like a needle in your eye.
What seems like hours later, I touch down at a predestined location that will get me to my extraction point in about an hour, allowing for Soup speed. It’s like a human diorama in here, with hundreds, maybe thousands of people on what looks like a permanent smoke break. None of them have aged a minute.
I can feel the power levels in the suit rising to compensate against The Soup, and the burn in every muscle in my body. Just as I get my bearings and prepare to move out, I feel a dull whine outside the suit, and sudden pressure in my right shoulder. I look down, but I don't believe what I'm seeing. An honest-to-fuck antique bullet, vibrating against the ballistic fabric of my suit like a lovesick insect, struggling for a way in. It must have been fired about a half-hour ago, and either a million-to-one shot has just paid off, or someone knew where I would be.
I went limp, falling backwards, hoping gravity would give me a way to escape the projectile. I moved slowly, struggling with one hand to reach the control on my arm pad to boost my suit’s field strength. My eyes riveted on the glistening cone of lead, I could see the rim of the hollow point.
I was panting with exhaustion trying to move. I gave one final lunge backward, my breath rattling in my ears in contrast to the high pitch whine of my nervous system.
Seconds passed. I was nearly clear of the bullet's path. I twisted a little further. I could actually see the folds of the suit nudging it along, like a polite, almost subliminal suggestion.
"Nothing to see here," I thought. "Move along."
The round was revolving in real time. I could hear the brush of the metal burrs catching on the ballistic nylon of the suit. The tail end of the projectile began to rise, and the nose followed. Finally, it crested my suit like a solid plasma sunrise, and headed off on a new course to piss off someone else.
But I knew it wouldn’t stop. It would just go on until it found something new to dig into, somewhere in this city of 65,000 people frozen in time. Somewhere, in a few hours, maybe a few weeks, unless that bullet fell to earth in its battle with gravity, it would burrow into another human. A bullet fired from a gun from their own future would seek them out, slowly carving a tunnel through their entrails, rearranging the internal furniture to suit its own needs, causing blunt force trauma well into the next century.
I felt bad for a minute, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I had to find out who pulled the trigger. The real bitch of it was, they exist almost a half-hour in the future.