End Vision, page 13
Cara rose and rounded the desk. “It’s fine. It’s fine. Leave Andrew. Go fucking home. Sober up.”
“Let me get these back together for you at least…” He took a stack of papers from the floor and started to place them in a folder with Ramon Ramos written across the tab in black marker. Andrew dropped his gaze to the stack of papers he held in his hand:
Test Subject 234:
Ramon Ramos.
Tracking #: 12181943
Male.
November 6th, 1986 (31 years).
Hispanic.
Central Nervous System Disorder: Epilepsy.
Cerebral Cortex Implant (16/04/2013)
Ocular Lense (06/06/2016)
Cara snatched the papers from his hand.“No, no. It’s fine.” She sat the phone on the desk and pushed Andrew out of the way. “I’ll do it. I’m sorry I lost my temper. Go get some rest.”
Andrew backed slowly to the door. Cara had the folders back safely on her desk.
“Is there anything else I can do for you Andrew?”
“No...I don’t think so,” answered Andrew, the mug once again shaky in his hand.
“Very well,” said Cara. “Then, if you could,” she pointed to the door. “I really must take this call.”
Range of Motion
EXCLUSIVE
Warming-Up with Catie Cameron: Her Secret Pre-Run Ritual Revealed!
by: Brice Sharp
2 hours ago
Catie Cameron always begins at a slow pace. This is to warm up stiff muscles. Hitting the trail without a proper warm-up is a recipe for disaster: pulling a muscle, ripping a tendon, tweaking a bone, a joint, trying to sustain a pace that can’t be sustained. She doesn’t want to burn out before the workout is over!
The 7 Most Gorgeous Runs in the World!
Catie Cameron loves running so much because, “It can be done anywhere!” But, she admits, “I can’t run out in public like I used to...I guess that's just the price of fame.” Laughing, she adds, “But now I can run on my Runner’s Sole F65 in the privacy of my own home, and I can truly run anywhere in the world. It’s so Great! There are literally thousands of runs programmed into the treadmill, and when I wear the virtual eyewear, I’m able to run anywhere in the world without the hassle of actually having to go there. The Runner’s Sole F65 mimics actual trails exactly!”
The Best Treadmill on the Planet: Runner’s Sole F65!
“I have, like, this big warm-up routine,” says Catie. “I like to run first thing in the morning, but my muscles are always so stiff, and I was so worried about injuries.” Catie now sits in her Malibu home (one of three she keeps in the greater Los Angeles area). She wears a turquoise running suit made for her by the RunDry Company. “I just love their clothes,” says Catie. “The fabric wicks away moisture...I mean, we all sweat when we run...or at least, I know I do! So RunDry has made me this cute little outfit. It is specifically designed for my sweat ph level. It is made for my body, and that is just so important because everybody’s body is different. So this look is not just fashionable, it also keeps me dry and comfortable when I’m out on the trail.”
What To Wear: The Top Clothes for Runners!
“But what about the routine?” I ask her. We all want to know about her warm-up routine! “Let me tell you,” says Catie with a huge smile. “I probably shouldn’t. I’m putting my job in danger; all the other fit women will start showing up to take my place if they follow this routine! My personal trainer, Fabian, takes me through this process…” She looks around the room, and I feel as if she is sharing with me some very top-secret information.
Here is the warm-up routine to a Catie Camron body, outlined exclusively for you by Fabian, RunDry, and The Runner’s Sole F65, courtesy of The Celebrity Viewer:
1. Walk
“You want to ease your body into workout mode,” says Fabian. “Start by walking slowly for 3-5 minutes. This begins a range of motion training that is similar to what you are going to experience while running. It sends a message to the brain that says, ‘Hey, it's time to GO!’”
Ten Foods You Should Be Eating: Body by Fabian!
2. Add Strides
“Strides flood the muscles with blood and help you transition from walking to running,” says a RunDry representative. “Try 5 to 6 sets of 100 meter strides. Start at a comfortable jog and gradually accelerate over 50 to 60 meters before beginning to slowly decelerate. Strides should not be timed,” says the RunDry rep. “And the exact distance of each stride is not important...But don’t confuse strides with overstriding!”
Is This Implant the New Smartphone?!
3. Dynamic Stretches
“We once thought that static stretches were the way to go,” admits the Runner’s Sole representative. “But through years of tests and scientific research, we found that dynamic stretching is a much safer alternative and greatly lowers the risk of injury to the runner.”
Harassment in Hollywood: What Big Studio Execs Don’t Want You To Know!
Runner’s Sole recommends beginning with controlled leg movements. “These improve range of motion, body temperature, help loosen the muscles, and increase heart rate and blood flow,” says Fabian. “Start with a few sets of jumping jacks, forward jacks, and squat walkouts.”
Featured Run: The Grand Canyon of Texas, America’s Forgotten Wonder!
“But start slowly,” warns the Runner’s Sole rep. “Focus on your form, and as the moves get easier, pick up speed! Use small movements for the first sets and increase the range of motion as you go.” Try skipping, sidestep/shuffle, weaverstep (aka “The Grapevine”), backward jogging, butt kicks, hacky-sack, and Toy Soldier.
Sign up now for the Celebrity Viewer newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics, and more delivered straight to your inbox!
Want stories like this delivered straight to your phone? Download the Celebrity Viewer app now!
Ramon came into the office feeling tired and worried, a slow heaviness about his movements. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, at the web of redness in his eyes. His dreams, he noticed, had given him the gaunt look that bus people and men in their twenties that are really into yoga wear so well. Ramon thought that exercise was the remedy. A good run.
When the Runner’s Sole F65 was activated, it hummed like a bathroom fan while warming up. Once the humming subsided and the machine went silent, he knew it was ready to use. All of this, from activation to readiness, took two to three minutes — the perfect amount of time for Ramon to stretch out his quads, hamstrings, calves, and perform weird little twisty motions across his torso and shoulders, his arms hanging and flopping like long warm noodles.
Since his conversation with Brice two nights before, Ramon sensed he was being followed and watched. In public, he had reverted to behaving like a wild animal — tensing up at odd noises and anxiously sipping from his Nalgene bottle while scanning the open spaces before him like a deer at water. Entering Natural Market during yesterday’s grocery shopping trip, he thought he saw a mustached man standing by the organic kumquat display and staring at him. Panicked, Ramon had fled out the automatic doors. Since then, he’d remained inside his apartment, but the sensation of being stared at continued. He obsessively looked out his blinds like a man with a seven-gram-a-day coke habit. Andrew, when he’d decided to answer his phone, had been so sloppy drunk he couldn’t string together a logical thought. Even alone, sitting on his couch or lying in bed in the stale silence of his apartment, Ramon sensed a presence deep in his brain. Even now, warming up for his run, he rubbed and scratched at his temples in an off-hand attempt to get at the invisible itch inside his skull.
Ramon was stuck in a weird double bind. He needed to get away but couldn’t bring himself to leave the apartment. A run would allow him to leave the present in the only way he could: through Vision. He needed to go to a familiar place, a place that would be all his, away from prying eyes, real or imagined.
Ramon closed out the ‘Recommended Runs’ tab and searched for the Comanche Trail in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas. He needed the warm feeling of home. After choosing the trail, his sight transitioned from the small space of his apartment office into Vision.
Ramon now stood in a parking lot filled with large trucks hooked to horse trailers at the bottom of a copper-colored canyon. A landscape of browns, reds, and dull greens filled his view. Junipers, cactus, and saber-like yucca surrounded him. Ramon began at a slow pace out of the parking lot, gravel crunching under his well-fitted feet as he reached the trailhead. He followed the trail north on a slow ascent across the canyon’s eastern wall. The F65 rose and fell and twisted with the contours of the trail. To his left and below, at the canyon’s floor, the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River crept slowly north through groves of cottonwood trees. The air smelled of wet earth and animal. The steep canyon walls blocked the sharp December winds. The trail rose slowly in a single track up into a grove of rocky mountain juniper and mesquite. In the early morning light, birds sang wistfully to the new day — ladder-backed woodpeckers, northern flickers, horned larks, northern bobwhites, black-crested titmouse, bushtit, canyon wrens, Bewick’s wrens, mountain bluebirds, American robins, European starlings and cedar waxwings, spotted towhee, the occasional yelp and cackle from a wild turkey, canyon towhee, song sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, northern cardinals, western meadowlarks, house finch, pine siskin, American goldfinch, and house sparrows. Coyotes and the untamable bobcat still roamed freely here, and Ramon thought of the stories he’d been told as a child about the large cougars that once populated this canyon and fed on the abundant mule deer.
He ran freely and smoothly across the hard-packed dirt, occasionally hopping over small boulders or sidestepping through the oppressive paddles of prickly pear, willow, hackberry, and the western soapberry that constantly fought to reclaim the trail. Hoodoos appeared at the base of striped canyon walls that resembled the painted faces of Native American warriors. Or maybe it was the faces of the warriors that looked like the walls.
Ramon’s brained churned with the rhythm of his stride. He worried he was going crazy. After all, he was a test subject. The cerebral implant was an experiment; it had yet to be proven. Ramon wondered if the constant stimulus was just too much for his brain to handle, if he had reached a point of man-made schizophrenia. The blitzkrieg of images and data and pseudo-connectivity might be too much for one person to process. He desperately needed to talk to Andrew. Not drunk Andrew, but the version of Andrew that he had connected to as a child, years ago. Sane, sober, passionate Andrew could help him through his thoughts and the mania spiraling up around them.
A small hare darted across the path in front of him. The trail narrowed and began a series of short switchbacks that leveled out two-thirds of the way up the canyon’s rim and continued north beneath ancient walls that looked as flat and smooth as flint. Up close, though, small holes pockmarked their surface, and they seemed as if they might crumble into a heap if hit by a gust of wind or a hard rain.
What was even the big deal about a stupid quote in a fucking magazine? The thought crossed his mind that the article didn’t matter at all...that he was the one making a big deal about it…that nobody was following him around...that the symptoms he experienced were just a product of stress, the stimulation, constant isolation and loneliness...that what he really needed to do was to reclaim his mind...stop escaping from his thoughts and fears and anxiety through man-made mechanisms. He needed to reclaim his life from the ground up.
Ravines branched off from the wall and converged, feeding the Prairie Dog Fork with tumbleweeds, limbs, plastic bottles, and old tin cans, all of which had been washed down over time from the landscape above by a mix of rain and wind and gravity. The Comanche crossed one of the ravines now, and Ramon slowed to high-step over the dam of debris. It smelled strongly of animal. Sour. Primal. Elemental. The hair on his arms stood up. The smell had triggered some ancient mechanism deep in his being that warned him to be on guard. He studied the tangled-up mess before him. It seemed that a large limb of mesquite had washed down and got stuck in the narrow ravine. Then subsequent rains brought down smaller debris that caught on the larger piece of mesquite. The mesquite was the backbone of the accumulated mass — a mass that no longer resembled its individual parts, but was now a thing unto itself, a separate being altogether that reeked of earth, urine, and wet animal. Perhaps a coyote had made the space its home. That would explain the empty beer cans scattered around the structure. The white trash of the animal kingdom, coyotes. Dirty fuckers.
Something else was going on here, though. Ramon could feel it deep in his bones. He felt like the mesquite, broken and removed, catching and accumulating small pieces from far-branching connections to a world he could not see.
Andrew left Cara’s office in a buzzed dream. His skin did not feel like his skin. It was as if he wore someone else's skin. He rubbed his bare forearms, but it was as if he were touching arms that did not belong to him. He sat at his desk. The office hummed around him. He needed to speak to Ramon.
Andrew took out his phone and searched for Ramon’s name in his contact list. Why did Cara have a file? What was with the file?
Patrick’s head rose like a whack-a-mole over the top of the cubicle partition.
“Big day tomorrow!”
Andrew kept looking at his phone screen and did not answer.
“Whoa! Thats a lot of sweat! You sick, honey?”
Andrew looked at Patrick looking back at him.
“You feeling alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I said I’m fine!” Andrew squeezed his eyes shut.
“O.K... O.K… So what's the plan tomorrow? You want to share an Uber to the airport?”
“No.”
“Alright, Mister Grumpy. I guess I’ll just see you there. Do you want to go over the material I put together for the trip?”
Andrew opened his eyes, amazed, and stared, first, at the cubicle wall before lifting his gaze to Patrick. “Listen,” he said, “if you are going to Texas, you can’t call a grown man Mister Grumpy.”
Patrick laughed and waved his hand at Andrew.
“I’m serious. Cut it out with that shit.”
“Alright, alright...but I know a Mister Grumpy when I see one. Just saying.” Patrick looked over Andrew’s head. His eyes widened. “Shelly just walked in.”
Andrew slumped low into his chair, using the cubicle walls as a den. “What? Oh God. Is she coming over here? Does she see me?”
“I can’t tell, she isn’t looking this way now.” Patrick continued to peer down at Andrew from over the partition.
“Sit down, man,” he whispered to Patrick. “And don’t look at her. People can tell when they are being stared at.”
Patrick’s head disappeared from view.
Andrew’s heart beat rapidly. He clasped his clammy hands together and squeezed and rubbed his fingers. He’d have to make a break for it. I’ll stay low, he thought. I’ll wait until she’s at her desk and sitting down.
With trembling hands, Andrew opened the bottom drawer of his desk, grabbed the brown bag, rose slowly, and drew his line of sight toward Shelly’s desk across the room. She stood with her back to him, talking to Marion. He sat back down. Too risky. He couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t handle Shelly seeing him this way. She looked fucking great. God. If she saw him in this state...him looking like he did, and her...just the fact that she had on clean clothes and had recently bathed. That was a win for her.
“Patrick,” he whispered through the partition. “Psssttt.”
“Mr. Grumpy? Is that you?”
“Patrick, cut it out. I’m sorry...Listen. I need you to tell me when Shelly sits down, alright?”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to look at her.”
“Nevermind all that, just let me know when she sits down.”
“Fine. What are you going to do?” Patrick whispered.
“I’m going to make a break for the door.”
Patrick giggled. “Why?”
“I can’t let her see me like this.”
Patrick’s little whack-a-mole head rose back up over the top of the partition. “Good point,” he said, looking down at Andrew.
Andrew waved frantically and mouthed the words sit down.
Patrick sat down. Andrew heard him laughing quietly.
“O.K. Shelly is on the move...I repeat, the target is on the move.”
Andrew waited, clutching the bottle tightly.
“She is landed, I repeat, the target has landed.”
“Am I good to go?” whispered Andrew.
“Roger that. I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Andrew.
Crouching low at his desk, he shuffled forward. Stay low. He made a left turn across the open space between cubicles, then a hard right toward the front door. He covered the distance like a hunched little gnome, bottle of rum in his right hand, hair dripping with sticky sweat. He ignored the shocked eyes of coworkers who witnessed his escape with obvious disbelief. Upon reaching the front door, Andrew turned the handle and slipped through. The heavy oak door latched with a click behind him. He stood and trotted to the elevators. Down. Andrew danced in place. Come on...come on… The elevator opened.
The two women occupying the compartment looked at him with frightened eyes. They huddled in the back corner and clutched their clutches. Andrew stepped in. The doors shut. He released the breath he had been holding in a series of sharp plosives. Freedom.
