Slowdown

(Contains: Swearing, mentions of drugs, police violence, blood and death)

The near future.

At 10:22 am, time stopped.

Phillip knew this because of the klaxon blaring in the station. He'd just managed to recover from the last "expedition" as that fucking moron in the top bunk liked to call it.

It wasn't the mortal danger of the indentured servitude that got to Phillip. No, he could handle having years taken off his life on a bureaucratic whim, throwing up blood once and a while, the joint aches, and even the hallucinations! What he couldn't handle were the other members that he'd been stuck with. Day in and day out, he dreamed of the scenario where one of them got their foot stuck in a crack or their suit ruptured, letting the full toll of the technologically induced state silence them. It was only half-jokingly of course. No one actually deserved that.

He'd only seen it once before, and that had been enough. He'd been a large fellow, Sam, as Phil remembered the name. Sam had forgotten to check the air above him for shrapnel in a frozen rock slide, and a piece of stone had ruptured the face plate of his suit. It was the stuff of nightmares that came next, his body hollowing out into a dusty residue, like a lobster thrown into a pot with the air pockets screaming. The eye-popping horror of accidents was never discussed among co-workers.

"Rise and shine!" Came the shrill sing-song above him. He screamed inside his brain: "Every day?! You have to do this routine every fucking day?!" Then he rolled out of bed. Amy, his unbearably annoying bunk mate, made eye-contact with him all while he struggled on his work boots, the alarm finally stopping as Fitz, the similarly annoying driver hit the button to acknowledge it.

Amy didn't miss a beat, trying to get everyone's attention like she was still in middle school, despite being 50 years old:

"Ooo boy! Another day on the job, the old grind eh!? What happened this time, was it another slide, construction accident, pile-up? You know, me and Phillip were talking about the fact that there hasn't-"

"Bomb at a protest site looks like. Angry folks." Fitz spoke, scratching his neck. That got everyone quiet, except Amy, who couldn't read the room.

"Oh shit, Phil, you ok? You don't think-"

"Let's get the job done." He bit out at her, hoping she'd finally shut up. She didn't, but stopped talking at him at least. Instead, she wandered over and started chatting with any number of people that were still tolerant enough of her.

He pulled the boots on, laces tight like noose on his ankle. He swallowed. Then the under jacket, thick scratchy material that was already damp with sweat. His whole body was coated with the modified canvas, and that wasn't the actual protective suit! "Who else is on shift?" He asked to the room. Amy replied with another sing-song: "me!" while two others called back. Wilson and Sarah. Reliable enough of a crew to get it done.

Fitz, disregarding personal space, slapped Phillip on the back. "Don't worry, not like we can be late to it!" He shrugged his shoulders at Phil before sitting back in the command chair, the pressurized pylons of the car already revving up. Soon they would disembark from the shielded station and be at the accident site.

Into the Coffin-Suits Phillip and the others went. The plated shielding and triple tempered glass was the yesterday of cutting technology. Yet it was good enough for a pack of 'criminals' who lived only because it was cheaper for them to save lives rather than any actual trained professional.

Phillip looked to the other crew members for the job. Sarah had talked about escaping poverty enough that he knew she was essentially a debtor escaping the streets: a common story nowadays on every farm, slaughterhouse, or fire station on Earth. Wilson was the victim of his own short temper, but he wasn't a bad person. Just angry. Phillip understood that.

Amy though? One too many long, meandering speeches about escaping the government and how wonderful ketamine therapy was gave him all he needed to fill the dots there. He groaned as she turned on her comms, demanding that he answer. "Cmon' Philly-willy! I know you can hear me!"

He sealed the helmet, the electronic display coming up to track integrity, vitals, and communication. "Check." he said into the mic, half-heartedly. The person-to-person radio had to be on the full time you were inside the suit, and there were no channels for listening to music or anything. Which meant hours upon days of being subjected to Amy's constant stream of thought.

Arrival at the site was rough. The carriage had been designed for dangerous jobs and was able to move above cars in the frozen road, and maneuvering it was a bumpy, awful affair. They managed, Fitz giggling and shooting them looks as they bucked and heaved in the stopped world.

Phillip stepped out onto the tarmac first as they locked down the site with their machine. He was home, in a twisted sense of thinking.

After cycling the airlock, he was met with the muted, almost monochrome world of time-stop. The sounds of sand-blasting hit his ears like chimes as oxygen particulate peppered his suit. He went slow, as anything beyond walking caused physical damage to your body while in the effect. Like moving through deadly, cutting water.

In the police parking lot, hundreds of people stood proud, with signs held high and mouths open to roar at their attackers. The police, covered head to toe, beat on them with batons and shields: pinning a few to the pavement as they screamed. A photograph of violence that any journalist should have drooled over.

"Old memories Philly-willy, hmm? Well I mean, aside from that-" Amy was right behind him, spoiling the quiet moment as she pointed to the blooming explosion set to consume the roiling crowd. He saw the epicenter, the blast zone outlined by the rippling dome of a shock wave as air rushed to meet fire. The beginnings of a disaster, soon to be averted.

"No, pretty normal." He finally answered. "Cops used to fire on us all the time. Gas bombs mostly." He hoped the sobering tidbit of reality would stifle her, but she just whistled.

"Yep, I figured as much, you know my cousin was in the riots up in-"

"Let's cut the chatter, day's not getting any longer." He walked forward into the crowd, picking out a protestor to drag away.

Stopped time had been a discovery that sounded more useful than it actually was. Inducing such a state of reality had a cost to it that made it far less practical than assumed, but it was still utilized in the event of natural or otherwise made disasters to save peoples lives. What better way to rescue people than to be shifted away from danger before they knew it was happening?

He wasn't too informed on the inner workings of it. He knew there was a triggering system of some sort; some minor two second precognition that took an entire cities' worth of energy to use. Enough time for an AI to know the casualty rates; and this system had flagged the explosion here as one to be stopped.

Not that it was 100% effective. At the epicenter, several of the protestors were already consumed: cut in half, shredded, or even melted by the nascent blast. The team would have to work through a lot of the embroiled people to reach them though.

Wilson snorted. "Idiots must have fumbled the detonator." Phil made no comment, but felt anger at the derision over people's deaths.

He felt himself already beginning to heat up as Amy kept talking through the process, lifting and untangling the statues of people. They needed to be careful to the extreme, they did not want to inflict trauma on their charges. That would open themselves up to civil suits by the affected parties (as the state was not liable for the incarcerated's mistakes).

Phil refused to move a single cop before the protestors though. He let the others work on them while he saved the real people that needed it. His bias came from a life of a career protestor, watching his friends and colleagues get thrown away by everyone for the sake of convenience. In a way, this job was the perfect trap for him; forcing him to save people as a part of enslavement by the very institutions he had fought against.

"You know any of these popsicles, Phil?" Amy called out.

He wanted to say no. He wanted to, but he was having trouble telling. In the frozen light, it was hard to tell anyone apart. Were these people a part of the groups he'd worked with? He pulled another man away, stopping a baton from breaking his nose further, blood frozen in the air like rain. His suit beeped. The integrity was holding up, but they'd need a break soon. The photons in the frozen atmosphere could still cut you, even through the suits they wore.

It took two days to move everyone. The vehicle was a good enough base that they could handle another two days on top of it. The supplies were lasting good enough! By then though, they had reached the epicenter, the last few unlucky people who they had to decide on saving, or whether it mattered.

Amy was talking again. "But I swear to God, the best part about it is the change in perspective that the high gives you, while supervised of course-"

She droned on about drugs while Phil stared in horror.

There, at the very center, shielding people from the blast was Dan, an old friend. He could tell from the sweater the man wore, the pins attached to it. A gift from Phil. There was no mistaking that.

He had worked with him at soup kitchens on the weekends and holidays, a good man. Suffered from bowel cancer, and had gone into remission. Only to have this happen to him.

He was dead, no way to save him. Frozen in the instant he was bisected through the stomach. Even if he tried to move him away: sticking his hands into the stilled fire would kill them both.

The others caught on that he was crying, but not Amy. She. kept. talking. "It's like you're floating, but then not floating, if that makes sense-"

Until Phil spotted a shard in the air. Shrapnel. But not just any shrapnel. Letters and font covered the piece, 'Property of ________ Police Dept.'

"Amy. Shut the fuck up." He spoke into the comms. She hitched her voice a second, but then kept going.

"Oh, sorry, am I droning on? I didn't mean to, you know I-"

He ignored her. His suit flashed a minor warning as he held the piece in his hands. The shard was among twenty others from the explosion, too much foreign material to be misplaced.

The cops had set the bomb. They were going to kill all these people? Why? He shook his head, realizing why. Because they could. Who was going to investigate the wreckage, make the call on who actually set the device? A step up for them, but who was going to stop them? He trembled.

Sarah spotted what he was holding. "Oh shit..."

Before long, even Amy was quiet. "We're taking this with us." Phil spoke. "They can't get away with this."

"Cmon man, for all we know its just a piece from the cops' gear..." Wilson shrugged. It was wishful thingking. The explosion was well away from any of the black-clad officers, to where only the objectors were dying.

Phil angrily bit the air. "No. They did this on purpose. They did things like this all the time back in the day, firing tear gas canisters directly into people's heads, then claiming innocence when they died from skull fracture days later." He shook the shard like a throat. "They planned this. Its going to be a crackdown like never before. We can't let them do this."

Sarah cut in then. "It's a job, ok Phil! No one will believe us anyways. We're criminals, remember? You have to let this go-"

"No!" He barked again, turning back to march towards the temporary station.

The two blocked his way. "We're not asking Phil." Wilson said, an edge to his voice.

"What are you doing?" He growled at them. Wilson spoke again. "I'm not letting you drag us all into this dog shit, we have lives too, you know."

"I want to see my son again, and that isn't going to happen if you make us go through an investigation where nothing gets done. Except us getting punished, wages docked even!" Sarah spoke, crossing her arms.

He couldn't believe this. "So what then? We ignore this? Let it pass us by? What about those people there?! You gonna let them die for nothing!?"

"We saved enough of them already asshole, fuck you!" Wilson jabbed him with a finger, his tamper tantrum worsening as Phil bit back.

"Fucking cowards, no wonder this shit we're doing has to be us!"

He felt the push, the sudden yelp by Wilson as he realized what he did. Phil hit the ground, and there was a crack. His oxygen tank ruptured, and immediately convulsed off his back, crumpling into nothing as the matter disintegrated.

The suit had an emergency supply good for almost thirty seconds. Phil felt those seconds tick down as he stood himself up. The faster he moved in the time stop, the more deadly the photon rays would cut into him. The other two were already running away, pushing Amy along with them as Phil screamed a curse.

He hazarded a look back. Dan was still there, frozen in resolute hope that his sacrifice had been worth it.

Phil ran. The sandy particles around him tore at his lungs. A wetness filled his veins as he felt them tearing. He ran harder, the entrance still 30 meters away. The others were behind him, watching him shred his body to pieces in desperation. Air spilled from the fractured suit, his panic fueling every aching step.

He stumbled, feeling despair hit him as his knees hit pavement. This was it. This was where he die-

Something pulled him up, hoisting him along. Amy, incoherently babbling something about her cousins as she hauled him back onto the tarmac. Her own mask cloaked with blood as she spat words out, her panic mingling with his. She'd caught up to him, sprinting to save his life.

The airlock sealed, flashed, then cycled. He spat blood again, and hit the emergency release on the wall. Fitz saw the trigger pull and pulled the plug on the effect in turn.

Instantly, the world shifted and rumbled as time restarted, color filling the air; the blasting echo of Dan's death hitting Phil as his ears bled. Red misted his breath as Amy squeezed his hand. The other two were still outside, but they'd get off easier than they had.

"We're gonna get you a doctor soon, ok! We're gonna get you-"

He pressed the shard of plastic into her hands. "Sorry-" He sputtered. "Should be a medic in the crowd we just saved..."

"You're gonna be ok!" She said aloud, trying hard not to panic, talking him through it. Talking them both through it.

"Didn't really like you till now..." He joked. Judging by the look on her face, it was bad.

He wanted things to stop, to slow, to actually tell this lady about how he felt, how he hated her; but that it wasn't her fault, not really. He was bitter, too bitter from a life fighting evil in the mundane. Too bitter to be nice or say good things to anyone.

So instead, he let her talk, nodding and really listening as she did, his only request that she never let go of that piece of plastic. That she fight them like he had. The only thing that mattered.

The moment dragged on, and on, and on, and on...