Ch. 2

Pushing against one of the brick walls, Evan vaulted over the trash piles yet to be collected. Most were empty everything machine ration containers, some were bits and scraps of clothing. Not as many bugged out pictaged adults though, they were too large to fit in the gap. The streets were for them, the alleys for the kids and underlords.

The FEC wouldn't publically do anything about the underlords, much less acknowledge their existence, so they were free to run things as they deemed fit. In other words, while the FEC ruled on the surface, it was only over a shaky, spider-weby network of underlords across the Growth Zones and the kids they had run for them. Evan had been approached by one of the network to join up the year before.

He was so caught up in his thoughts, Evan almost ran into Zeke running horizontally to him.

"Woah, watchit." Zeke hopped back on one foot, mimicking Evans movements as they both skidded to a stop just before colliding and probably hurting each other. "Oh, Ev. Where ya been man?" There was a ping on Evan's message controller. He opened the pictage to see an old GiF of a black and white cartoon cat smiling widely with a puff of yellow feathers popping out of its mouth at the end before repeating.

"Where'd you find this one?" Evan asked, ignoring the first question.

"Old Josie showed it to me. She said it's from cartoon when she was a kid about a house cat always trying to eat this skinny yellow bird. I thought it was a good one for a 'hi' message."

"Definitely. Can I steal it?"

"Sure, I already showed Harris and Corky. Hey so what about it?"

Evan saved the clip to his boards then brought the pictage down. "How about what?"

"Well you know, you going to the old guy still?" Zeke nodded to the downed pictage, his was still up and running, rainbow colors changing rapidly to whatever Zeke wanted to see in the world. Which was apparently close to true since he could actually see Evan. Which was a strangely uncomfortable feeling.

Evan shrugged. "You know. Gotta do what you gotta do."

"True, true." Zeke nodded sagely, a claim he could not keep up seeing as he was only a couple months older than Evan. Although maybe sage-ness would be achieved in the few months separating him from being fourteen? "Anyway," Zeke continued, "Just remember you have to let Rabbit know what's what eventually. Rabbit needs to tell Mongol, and Mongol need to his boss and so on. You know how weird adults are. Anys, keep me posted, chill?"

"Yeah, keep ya posted." Evan gave a half wave, watching Zeke continue his running path down the opposite alleyway.

Just one of many reasons why. Evan thought sometimes he might be able to get away with avoiding the big messes he felt deep, deep down were coming. But most of the time he felt like he was standing chin-deep in toxic water that would kill him with one swallow, like the convo with Zeke just then. Filled up with maybe mistakes and possible give aways. If he wasn't careful he felt like he would fall. Not a good feeling, that.

Taking a quick left, he could still feel the hidden eyes on him from other passageways. The feeling of if he looked he could see them, even though he knew he wouldn't. The underlords spies and kids were too good by now to get caught.

When the underlords had first set up shop, before the Growth Zones, that hadn't always been the case. He could vaguely remember packs of older kids running around and gathering information by being annoying. Adults would complain about them all the time. Now those same adults were all tuned into pictages and some of the kids that had grown up were too.

He dodged around the crumpled form of someone under a dinted, crumpled cardboard box and continued on. From what he knew, underlords didn't use pictages as much as the people on the street. They tended to shun the technology, preferring to remain hidden from the FEC and any tracking devices that might be imbedded in the digital visors. Probably likely, seeing as how many people talked bout being tracked, at least when they did talk.

He knew that they monitored what was shown to each person depending on what they wanted to see and what the real world was. A lot of the adults preferred to see only the artificial world that was provided to them by the monitors. The kids though, they tended to do whatever they wanted to. Some of them would be plugged in all the time, like the adults. Others would have the pictages up, but have the illusion transparent, allow it so they could see the real world with an overlay of the fake one in the corners. They could access the monitors, but didn't need to rely on them to change the world around them. Then there was the third, almost non-existent faction.

"Boy!" The gruff voice came out of the darkness, causing Evan to skid to a stop and look in its direction and raise an eyebrow.

"Don't be so obvious you idiot. When you're obvious they can find you easier."

"They're not going to find me."

"Don't be an idiot."

"Fine." Evan didn't bother hiding the annoyance in his voice. "They're not going to find me because the monitor's signals are disrupted by the tall brick walls making the alley in between a temporary dead zone that the signals can get to only every five minutes. If I time it correctly I can run through the city completely undetected so long as I am totally off line and logged down."

There was a grunt of approval from the shadows. "So the idiot's a parrot too. Come on, maybe you can learn new phrases."

Evan kept the retort back as he followed Johnathan Elis down the alley. It was time for after school courses with old man Elis.