Volume 3: A Shot in the Dark
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A peculiar thing happened to me on the way home that evening. I had left the Club after my shift via the staff door as usual. It was already dark although the low-level street lighting - managed by the PA to balance visibility with energy use - made it easy enough to see where I was going. I had just reached the end of the alleyway from the back door when a man stepped out of the shadows. He was tall and broad-shouldered and rather unusually dressed in some formal dark suit over some kind of stiff white shirt buttoned to the neck. I could see very little of his face under the matching wide-brimmed dark hat. "Hello," he called. I stopped and turned to face the stranger. I admit it is not entirely unknown for me to be accosted by strangers in dark alleys, and sometime it could be real fun - I remembered an explosive encounter with a tiny Asian woman in this very alleyway a month or two back - but I had a bad feeling about this man. I was not sure why, but somehow it seemed as if he was internally torn: wanting me desperately in a sexual way while something else - guilt, perhaps? - was holding him back. I deployed the body language and visual cues that would have politely informed almost anyone that I was not interested in an encounter with a stranger this evening. To my surprise, he entirely ignored my signals and walked right up to me, putting his hand on my arm and looked as if he was preparing to make a grab for my tits. "I want you to come with me," he said brusquely. He was creepy, really strange. It was almost as if he imagined there was nothing which would prevent him using force, overpowering me and dragging me away against my will. "No!" I said, a little louder than I had probably intended, just to make my feelings entirely clear. Before he had moved more than a centimeter, the automation swung into action, a flurry of activity really only visible as a grey blur in the air. A second later, the PA left him lying, breathless but unharmed, on the paving ten meters away. As I walked on, it occurred to me that he looked surprised, shocked, perhaps even horrified at what had just happened. It was almost as if he had never seen the policing action of the pervasive automation at work before.
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Part 4