She awoke slowly, dim orange light from the emergency lighting seemed intense as her eyes grew accustomed to her surroundings. Her right arm was numb, she had fallen on it cutting off circulation. She rolled over now feeling the sharp cold of the cement floor which was accentuated by the lonely sound of the wind occasionally picking up and fading away every few moments. As she rolled, the motion sensors turned on the floodlights, causing her to groan as the incredibly bright light overwhelmed her.
How many days this time?
She needed water, badly. Even snow would do at this point, anything. The feeling was returning to her arm in the form of tension and needles. Standing now with a stumble into the nearest wall, she started making for her cell shuffling at first but picking up speed. There was a heated slab to rest upon, and hopefully, fresh water, if the solar panels weren't completely covered in snow. The lights turning on and off as she slowly made her way to her cell were a good sign. She wasn't in the mood for getting suited up to go outside again.
She entered the cavernous cell block, her section a group of five hundred, the patter of her quick slippered steps was the only sound aside from the wind. Up two flights of stairs to number 388, and she was home. She did the best she could with what she had to make the place more comfortable. There was a small end table, lamp, and tablet she took from the warden's office. The walls were adorned with spare blankets as if they were miraculous tapestries from an old museum. Covering the stainless steel sink was a small piece of wood, on which sat her personal terminal, cobbled together from spare Controller parts.
Slowly lying down on the heated slab meant for sleep, her breathing began to slow as her body warmed up and the tension from her chills subsided. She reached down to grab her water bottle and emptied it ravenously.
Need more.
There were no jackets or cold gear aside from the suits needed to go outside, she had only a few identical uniforms left that weren't tattered in rags. Feeling particularly cold still, she layered what she had on top of what she was wearing already.
Maybe a storm outside?
After wrapping a shirt around her head, she walked back downstairs with her two empty water bottles and headed for a deeper section of the prison where the water was still running. As she walked she felt a cold breeze which stopped her in her tracks. This section of the prison was so disconnected with the outside world that it shocked her to feel the air moving. The wind outside could be heard whistling loudly, something she had ignored since she woke up. Now that she was focusing she knew it was different from the average ambient noise.
Finding the direction that the wind was coming from was difficult. It wound about the halls in strange ways. In the end, she followed the cold and followed it right for the collapsed wall which was the cause of the cold wind reaching the depths of her fortress prison. Several boulders broke through in an apparent landslide that must have occurred while she slept. It was bitterly cold outside, and the wind was rushing inside in its ever forward march toward equilibrium, this would eventually make all of the prison a similar temperature to the outside world. An outside world that had been covered in snow for decades.
The collapsed wall left a hole more than a dozen meters high, double that in width. This was impossible to repair by herself, even if she had the necessary knowledge for structural engineering or materials. The cold shook her out of shock and she turned on her heels and started to run back toward the center of the prison. The complex was vast, but she had to assume the cold would overtake her if she didn't immediately try to stop it.
The collapsed wall was in a bad place, fairly central. There were a few large vault-like doors in key locations she could close and possibly keep portions of the prison a reasonable temperature. She rounded a corner and came upon the first of the doors. They were meant to shut down parts of the prison in case of an emergency, like a riot, but allow for Controllers to move freely to other sections. She would have to close four of the six doors to keep one wing of the complex safe. Unfortunately, her room was directly connected to the collapsed wall with no vault doors in between, so she would be moving no matter what.
She did some mental math to figure out the best place to hide from the cold, still running as fast as she could. Things like running water would be short-lived as those pipes were centrally located and in direct connection to the collapse. This wasn't an impossible thing to get around, but it would get old quickly having to collect ice and snow, then process it for safe drinking. It would take up a larger chunk of every day, and having to open up to the outside world that often would put a strain on the heating system... the heating system, it would have to be shut down in all sections except the one she moved to, otherwise it would overload the solar array and batteries, which were running at about twenty percent capacity as it was. The more she ran over possible scenarios in her heard, the more she slowed her pace until she stopped and stood still for some time lost in thought.
She cursed quietly to herself as if someone was listening and judging her actions. A puff of condensation from her breath floated away on the breeze. She spun around, and after a false start from forgetting where she was, turned around again to head toward the security office. She had no idea how much time she had before the entire prison was below freezing temperatures, but it wasn't something she was willing to gamble with. It was time to gather supplies and escape out into the frozen tundra. It was time to head East and find her previous home.
As she leapt up the stairs to the central security section she passed the Controller husks she had toyed with thirty or so years ago, rounded a corner which lead to a hallway made up of several airlock-like gates. The gates had all been opened up when the last of the Controllers stopped responding and the prisoners, or political refugees as they would call themselves, took over the prison. Most tried to escape, most of those came back nearly dead from exposure to the elements with tales of wolves and bears. It didn't take long for life here to break down into primal animalism. A tribal war flared up but didn't last long, not from Kate's perspective, there's only so much fighting you can do if you're starving. The last of the unenhanced died over fifty years ago. The three remaining enhanced became two after a terrible accident, and Kate's best friend Pera took her life in a despondent depression eighteen years ago or so. Kate had been completely alone among the dead since, too afraid to face what the Midwestern former United States had become... too afraid to know that her copy was still running, if it was still running.
Forty six million and change per year...
She closed her eyes, searching through her brain trying to find arithmetic. Maybe over five billion years at this point. She was thinking about this to herself while she was gathering up batteries and an A.R.D., a small automated drone that would relay details about the area like a scout. The prison had no projectile weapons, but the Controllers had attachments to electrocute people as needed. With a little wiring and a few batteries she could get one to work that would easily take down a bear within arms reach - an admittedly dangerous place to be.
What would you do with five billion years?
There were several full-body suits good for outdoor survival. They were all bright Safety Orange, not good for hiding, but it's all there is. Given some water and a power source, it could keep a normal person warm in extreme conditions as long as that power source remained. She wasn't a normal person, not any more. Her nanites kept her comfortable enough so she wouldn't need to waste valuable power on keeping warm aside from just wearing the suit. She took an extra pair of boots, they were bulky and took up most of the rucksack, but she'd rather have them and not need them than the other way around.
Five billion years...
The Appalachians are about fifteen-hundred kilometers. There should be plenty of water between here and there, but that's a really long way. Impossibly long. There would have to be some people somewhere between here and there and she wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
Maybe head South?
Heading South would find people eventually as the glaciers faded away and humans could survive without much trouble. It would take a lot longer, and she would have to rely on strangers for help. This was something that gave her more anxiety than striking out into a vast frozen wasteland. She had been alone for so long she wasn't sure she remembered how to hold a conversation with people calling themselves adults when they had been alive a mere fraction of her nearly four hundred years
No, get there right away, it had been far too long.
Somewhere in the place she used to call Kentucky was an ancient coal mine. Hidden deep inside was a somewhat recent excavation where she and a small group of like-minded engineers created a copy of her consciousness, quite accidentally as the it was the second attempt and they were positive it wasn't going to work.
It seemed to be a happy accident for a short moment. By the time they realized their error her copy had experienced over twelve hundred years inside the simulation, just over fourteen minutes passed in the real world. Before they figured out what to do Controllers showed up to collect everyone in violent fashion. Black bags, Y-gel, then prison for one hundred and sixteen years. She could have left over fifty years ago, but she was paralyzed with what she might find. A copy of herself trapped inside an infinite simulation billions of years old from its point of view, or something worse, whatever a billions of years old digital consciousness could come up with.