She played the disturbing file multiple times; every time it bothered her more but she had to make sure she did not miss something. Finally, she stopped listening and rubbed her temples, as distant memories of some - thing awful she suppressed long ago began to stir. THE SILVER SPIDER After hearing about the mantis attack, Mildred suddenly felt a cold shiver, a memory, long buried, rushed out of her deep subconscious. She let her mind wander, as she had trained herself to do in these moments. She pressed her eyes hard, pinched her nose and tried to shake off of slight nausea but had no luck. She went over to a nearby locker and after entering her code, retrieved a device that looked like a set of clear glasses, what they called a “thought-crawler” or “brain bug” commonly used for interrogations. She grabbed it because it would help her see her own memories better and put it over her eyes like a pair of clumsy glasses, pulling snug against the temples. Then she took a gulp of bitter ersatz to steady her nerves -- they had learned from past experience that ersatz for some reason aided the memory effort when using this contraption, although it remained an unpleasant experience. She closed her eyes, took a couple deep breaths, resisted briefly and stopped fighting the murky memory from years ago pushing at the edge of her mind’s eye and activated the “thought-crawler” which hummed rhythmi- cally. Then through a wobbly fish-eye lens which slowly cleared from mist to focus -- she saw a dark night scene, the smell of saltwater strong in the air. She stood in her gel armor suit near a log bunker mostly buried in the sand - - she remembered it was meant to be just a basic shelter, part of the beach HQ area. She saw all of this not far from the beach with waves crashing in the background when a large (perhaps 3 meters across) glinting, silverish ball rolled into view – absolutely cartoonish yet impossibly real. Someone popped a parachute flare in time to see metallic legs pop out of the ball and it moved quickly like a spider chasing prey on four legs. She
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