Chapter 1
“Where are we going?” Alfia asked.
“Benny sent out an arrest warrant for the two of us. Pictures and everything. We need to dye your hair, it’s too noticeable,” Nate answered, “So we’re going to go to a place to get some hair dye and then we’re going to find a place to hide until we have to move.”
They were walking through the streets of the city: a trolley required an IdentityChip scan to have it stop at your station and that would leave a trail to follow.
“You make it sound like we’re going to steal the dye.”
“Do you have any cash?”
She shook her head.
“Then how else do you suggest we get it? If we use your card, it will put a blip on the radar that the CyberSupport has out for us. So yes, we’re going to steal the hair dye. We’re going to be stealing a lot more than that, so I suggest you get used to the idea.”
Nate was grasping tightly to her hand as though he were afraid if he let go, she would slip away from him forever. He seemed to be lost in thought, a fact confirmed when Alfia had to say his name a few times in order to get his attention.
“Nate?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re cutting off the blood flow to my fingers,” she said gently.
He seemed to snap out of whatever trance he was in and immediately loosened his grip on her hand, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. What’s going on in your head, anyways?”
“A lot of things. First thing’s first, though, we need to get that hair dye.”
Nate ended up getting it. He got two bottles of brown dye because he said it would probably take a lot of it to cover up all of that mint blue color. They then quickly went into a bathroom in one of the subway stations. That proved how far away from the City they were. The subways were in all the of the suburbs of the major cities in the country, trolleys had been added because they took less electricity and were easier to hail and time. It helped with the busy day to day life of those who lived in the city. The underground made Alfia a little on edge, but she trusted Nate. He had her sit on the disgusting toilet of the bathroom and started to cut her hair. They had agreed that a few inches below the shoulders was a good length to cut it, though she was loathe to cut it at all. However she soon discovered that Nate had cut it a little shorter than they had discussed, but there was nothing she could do about it now that it was already done. Nate had her shake her hair out thoroughly before beginning to put the dye in it. They let the dye sit in her hair for a good half an hour for good measure before daring to rinse it out. It was supposed to be permanent, but with her, they never knew so they weren’t taking any chances. Alfia let herself be bent over the edge of the filthy sink of the subway station bathroom as Nate rinsed the hair dye out of her now-short strands. When it was done, they dried her hair and determined that a change in wardrobe was necessary. Nate’s clothes were exactly what they would be looking for and Alfia was only wearing the shirt that he had leant her. Nate made her learn a special knock before slipping out of the bathroom they had invaded and went to get them both some new clothes. By “get”, Alfia knew he meant “steal”, but he was right. They couldn’t really do anything else. It was the only way to stay below the radar. She sat against the wall of the bathroom, having set paper towels out on it beforehand, and let herself get lost in thought. She forbid herself to think of Jax or Benny- especially Benny’s final moments.
It didn't work. She still heard Benny screaming at her that she should be grateful for all that he had done for her. She still saw the blade cutting through the flesh of his throat, heard the thud as his body fell to the cement floor of the facility, saw the blood pool around the body of her best friend. She shook herself and the images disappeared.
She thought about the information Benny had given her before he had died. He had detested Cyborgs enough to commit genocide against an entire race of humans. Most of the human population had at least one thing inside them that was CyberTech. She knew that for a fact. After being tired of growing up different, she had done the research. It was mind-blowing to think that one of the people she thought actually understood what it was like to be different-the one person she had trusted most- ended up being the one to betray her. That’s the thing about betrayal, she thought bitterly, it never comes from someone you don’t know. She jumped when the knock came at the door. After waiting a few moments to see if it matched the one she and Nate had invented, she got to her feet and opened the door. Nate tossed her a backpack as he came inside and unzipped his own. They turned their backs toward each other and got dressed in their newly acquired items of clothing.
“I’ve had a thought,” Alfia said while they were changing.
“Shoot,” Nate answered.
“Well, they’re looking for me and I don’t have any distinguishing marks. What if we put one on me? Throw them off the trail?”
“Like a tattoo?” He asked.
“Yeah.”
Nate thought about it, “That’s smart, Al. But It’ll be obvious how new it is for a couple weeks.”
“Maybe on a normal human, but I heal fast, remember?”
“Oh yeah. I forgot.”
She gave a little giggle, pulling her hair out from under the top and jacket Nate had gotten for her. Her outfit was way out of her comfort zone. She usually wore cutsie stuff that was light and obviously feminine. These clothes were a far cry from that. She had black jeans that hugged her slightly and black boots to match with a charcoal grey top and a black jacket whose sleeves were able to be rolled up to the elbow.
“Maybe a few of them. Just to make sure,” she said as an afterthought, “You decent?”
“Mostly,” came the usual sarcastic reply.
She rolled her eyes and turned around to face him, finding him threading his arms through the sleeves of his shirt before pulling it on.
He gave her a sly grin, “What if I was ‘mostly’ decent the other side?”
She rolled her eyes again and made a face of disgust, “Then I would have turned back around,” she said as though it should have been obvious, which -to her at least- it should have been.
He chuckled at her reaction, “Put your shoes on, we need to move.”
She made a sound of annoyance, but did as she was told. It wasn’t very logical to go running around without any shoes on anyways.
“Next stop, the closest tattoo parlour with a competent tattoo artist,” Nate said as he did up the laces on his own shoes.
Alfia looked into the grimy mirror at her new reflection. She wouldn’t have recognized herself if she didn’t know herself. The brown worked wonders as far as disguise went. As did the shorter hair. Her brown eyes didn’t look as out of place and they had a more earthy tone to them than before.
“I don’t know if I ever told you,” Her blonde companion said behind her, leaning against the wall to keep balance as he finished tying his shoes..
“Told me what?”
He straightened and walked towards her to whisper in her ear, “I’ve got a thing for brunettes,” before slipping out of the bathroom they had been hiding in.
She laughed and followed after him.
They ended up spending hours in the tattoo parlour. Alfia wanted to be thorough. She got tattoos on her side, shoulder, leg, wrist and arm. The one on her side was a dancer. The one on her shoulder was a sort of vine with her favorite flower-forgetmenot- spotted along it. The one on her leg was a little diddle her mother used to say: “each day is a gift and not a given right” with a little wreath around it. The one on her wrist was a little infinity sign with a feather in it because she thought it was pretty, and the one on her arm was on the opposite arm as the one with the tattoo on her wrist was a three-quarter sleeve of all her favorite animals- wolf, elephant, tiger, and lion. She imagined it should have hurt a lot more than it did, but all it did was ache. She hadn’t felt proper pain after the accident she had had with her parents and after she was done recovering from her injuries. She still felt pain, but it was always dull, sometimes to the point of her not even realizing that that was what it was. She still held Nate’s hand, though. She had to at least act like it hurt more her as much as it would hurt everyone else.
“You’ve got a lot of scars, girly,” the tattoo artist said, probably a means to distract her from pain that wasn’t even there.
“Done a lot of stupid things,” she said in return. It was true, just not in any way related to why or how she got her scars.
The man with the tattoo gun pressed against her skin nodded, “Who hasn’t?”
She let out a small laugh, “I dunno. When’s this going to be done?”
“Give it time, girly. Unless you want a sloppy mark on you for the rest of your life,” he chided.
Alfia waited impatiently for him to be done, growing bored quickly, but staying still.
“You okay?” Nate asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Really? ’Cuz you’re squeezing the crap out of my hand, sweetheart.”
She gave him a look, “I’m fine, but I’d be more fine if you’d stop asking me if I was okay.”
“Fair enough.”
“And done!” The artist exclaimed what felt like an eternity later.
Alfia looked down at her arm and stared at it, “It’s fantastic!”
“Thank you. And because of that, you don’t have to pay a dime.”
She stared at him, “Really?”
“Well it’s really because I know you kids are in a tough spot, but we’re gonna go with that,” he winked.
She smiled, standing and giving him a kiss on the cheek, “Thank you.”
“No problem. Here. It’s how to take care of them until they heal.” He handed her a paper.
“Thank you so much.”
He shrugged, “Don’t mention it. Good luck.”
“We’ll need it.” Nate grabbed Alfia’s hand and lead her through the city to a little restaurant that would give away the leftover food for free.
They ate what they were given and Alfia used the opportunity to use the free Web access to work on the Virus again. The Creator might have been dead, but the Virus wasn’t and it needed to be stopped before it killed more people. It was still the number one story on the news. People were still dying once an hour, but Alfia was no closer to figuring out how to stop it. She had tried reconfiguring the code to make it reform itself instead of killing itself, but she had only managed to keep it frozen for just a few seconds before it would continue to delete itself. For someone as skilled in Coding as she was, it was infuriating not to be able to figure it out. She knew she could do it, she just needed time- something that was in short supply.
Nate tapped her arm and pointed to a screen across the restaurant, “Allie, look.”
She did and her jaw almost dropped.
“-Sources say that the Creator of this Virus that has been killing people with CyberTech in them is none other than Alfia May, an eighteen year old Pre-Med student at Opsierone University with what was a promising future in the medical field.” Her picture from the University's yearbook came up. Alfia watched the report in shock, “Her records show that she has quite a substantial amount of CyberTech in her, comprising of more than 60% of her body, as a result of several severe and extensive injuries when she and her parents got into a car accident when she was only six years old. Both of her parents died in the accident, but it’s been said that she had far more trauma than was usual from something of that nature. Now we have a psychologist here to talk with us about why May might have turned to killing her own kind. Doctor Simons, what can you tell us about Miss May?”
An older woman with greying blonde hair and cool grey eyes was sitting in a chair beside the news anchor as the camera view zoomed out from his youthful face.
“Well, Andy, considering the circumstances surrounding her need for the Tech, it is very possible that Alfia could have developed severe depression and a serious hate for the Tech inside her and anyone else in the world. That hate could have festered until she finally figured out a way to rid herself of it and rid others of it, too,” Dr. Simons explained.
“Do you think that she intended the Virus to be fatal to all those who would come into contact with it?” Andy the anchorman asked.
She shrugged, the shoulders of her business suit bunching up slightly, and the wrinkles from the action staying in place, a sign of very synthetic material and high financial class, “There’s no way to tell, I’d have to talk to her in person.”
“Thank you for your time, Doctor,” the camera moved back to being solely on Andy and zoomed back in on his face, “You heard it here first, folks. Alfia May is a very disturbed child who needs professional help. If you see her, please call-” he proceeded to rattle off a number and then continue to talk about how unhinged and dangerous she was, but Alfia had stood and was storming out of the little restaurant, furious.
“Hey, Al,” Nate tried to catch up to her, but she slipped out of his grasp, “Al, what are you doing?”
By now she was in the middle of the courtyard of the shopping plaza they were in. She stopped storming away and started pacing furiously, chewing on her thumb, “Thinking. Shut up.”
Nate stood and watched her pace, folding his arms across his chest, having learned by now that talking when she was like this was unwise. He stood for a while before his feet started to hurt and he grew tired of standing, so he sat on the grass as the shadows of the night grew longer and the few stars that could be seen in the city grew brighter and then dimmer as morning came. He was laying back n the grass with his arm across his eyes, dozing a little when he heard a new sound after hours of the only sound being Alfia's footsteps back and forth in the grass. He sat up and looked around quickly only to find Alfia was kneeling on the sidewalk, leaning over it and writing on it with something. He stood up and stretched lazily before meandering over to where she was scribbling like her life depended on it. He looked over her shoulder at what she was writing and found she had a dying stick of chalk in her hand and white marks all over the sidewalk. He knelt beside her to look over her work and saw that there was chalk all over her clothes, hair, and face and chuckled a little.
“What are you working on, Al?”
She ran a hand through her hair to move it out of the way and to vent a little bit of the stress she was feeling, “The Virus. If I work out how to stop it, I can save lives and clear my name.”
“Where’d you get the chalk?”
“Hacked into the security system of a little art shop and grabbed a couple of packs of it. I’ve already gone through one, I might grab another before we go, though.”
He looked down the line of her work and saw quite a few places where the chalk was smeared and then written over. He then looked at her hands and saw that different parts of them were raw. He assumed that when one hand cramped, she would simply switch over to writing with the other one and continue her work. She had done it several times before when she was working on her school work.
“You think you can take a mental picture of it? It’s almost daylight, we need to get going before someone comes out here and recognizes you.”
She nodded, “Just a second.”
Alfia rubbed a part of the equation she was writing and the skin on the side of her hand finally tore and left a streak of blood in its wake.
“Okay, now we definitely need to go.” Nae grabbed her arm and the chalk she hadn’t used yet and hauled her to her feet, marching her out of the little plaza.
Alfia let him drag her after him, grabbing a random shirt off of a rack that they passed and tearing it into strips to wrap her hand with, shoving the leftover pieces in her back pocket. It was odd, she thought, how quickly she adapted to life as a fugitive. She shrugged, thinking that if she could adapt to living life as a Cyborg with a little minor PTSD and anxiety, she could pretty much adapt to anything life threw at her. They went back to the subway bathroom they had occupied earlier and Alfia went back to work. Slowly, but surely, the smooth cement walls of the bathroom began to be filled with the equations she was using to work out the Virus. Nate was in the corner napping when he was suddenly roused by Alfia’s exclamation of “Of course! How could I be so stupid?!”
“You’re many things, Al, but stupid isn’t one of them. What did you get?”
“I was looking for the wrong thing! I was looking for the Base when I should have been looking for a location! Then again, I didn’t know the Creator was my best friend.” She continued to mutter to herself as she worked out where the Virus was coming from.
About a half an hour later, Alfia was frowning at the wall, tapping the chalk against her mouth with pursed lips.
“That’s your troubled look,” Nate said, “What’s up?”
“It’s in a different country, but Benny never went to a different country without me. There’s no way he could have done anything for the Virus without me knowing it while we were out of the U.S.”
“What did you go out of the country for?” He asked.
“Dance competitions, mostly- oh. I had a lot of rehearsals and they were always closed. There was plenty of time for him to do whatever he wanted." She hit her head against the wall a few times.
“Right, so we have to manage to get across the border, where are we going?” Nate asked after he stopped her from hitting her head against the wall.
“Scotland.”
“Well I guess it’s a good thing you can download languages to your mainframe.”
She laughed dryly, “Suppose so, seeing how the Scots all stopped using English as much as they used to and switched back to Gaelic two hundred years ago.”
He clapped a hand on her shoulder, “Exactly. Come on, sweetheart, you need to get some sleep.”
She groaned, but let him lead her to the corner he was sleeping at earlier. She sat next to him and rested her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her mind- which was going a million miles an hour. She focused on her breathing as a subway started to pass and before it was gone, the sound had faded from her mind and she was asleep.
