“You forgot to sign the transfer papers,” the man said, holding out a document to the Garcia. “Certainly,” the biot replied, entering its identification signature on the papers with a flourish. After less than a minute Nicole was outside the large house where she had been imprisoned for months. She took a deep breath of the fresh air and started to follow the Garcia down a path toward Central City.
“No,” Nicole heard Eleanor call from her pocket. “We’re not going with the biot. Go west. Toward that windmill with the light on top. And you must run. We must arrive at Max Puckett’s before dawn.”
Her prison was almost five kilometers from Max’s farm. Nicole jogged down the small road at a steady pace, urged on periodically by one of the two robots, who were keeping careful track of the time. It was not long until dawn. Unlike on the Earth, where the transition from night to day was gradual, in New Eden dawn was a sudden, discontinuous event. One moment it would be dark and then, in the next instant, the artificial sun would ignite and begin its mini-arc across the ceiling of the colony habitat.
“Twelve more minutes until light,” Joan said, as Nicole reached the bicycle path that led the final two hundred meters to the Puckett farmhouse. Nicole was nearly exhausted, but she kept running. Two separate times during her run across the farmland she had felt a dull ache in her chest. I am definitely out of shape, she thought, chastising herself for not having exercised regularly in her prison cell. 45 is as well as sixty years old, more or less.