SpecFic Saturday/ Run Ice Run

 Hey everyone welcome to SpecFic Saturday. This  story came to me by way of  a writing prompt on my other blog and I thought I would share it here. It's a little diaspora I like to call Run Ice Run. I hope you will enjoy.

RUN ICE RUN

She stood in the doorway of an empty building, a homeless woman in over-sized dirty clothes. The shadows covered her face and kept her just out of the reach of the cameras. The woman watched the people, some nodded while others rushed passed and a few ignored her completely. They were the clogs that ran the wheel, the mindless drones plugged into a system overrun with corruption, she thought

   She was off the grid. There was no name, fingerprints, or any match for facial recog  on any file on ION. She was a ghost in their system, and although she maintained a close watch on the Watchers, Ice wasn’t a fool. She knew if they caught her, they would use her against the underground.  She will never let that happen.

They had trapped and caught Fire. She wasn’t sure if Fire was a male or female, but she knew they had him. The last telecom she received was hijacked by the governing system which caused one of her computers to crash.  After she repaired the damage, Ice realized that Fire had tagged a message inside the transmission. It was severely corrupt but she managed to get the last bits of the message.   “Run ICE!”

So she ran, not knowing where to go, or who she could trust. Fire had been her only contact with the underworld of data thieves who knew that the government was a corrupt dictatorship that used the mindless to do their well under the guise of patriotic duty against a force they claim is hell bent on changing the authority, hierarchical organization of the government with an Anarchism one.

Yet this government uses technology like chess pieces, administering tech little by little to control minds and hearts, while bending the will of its people.   The underground of mostly hackers and thieves was going to show the world of ION what this government was doing, it wasn’t a free and open society, but one rooted slavery of its people through tech.   

If what everyone knew, what the underground knew about this government as well as many others, they would go down in flames. At least that is what the underground hope would happen. Ice knew all too well that the minds of the mindless masses were an unpredictable variable. They often settled for what was more convenient than what was right.

Ice was getting concerned being out in the open like this. It had never been necessary for her to know the others. They were all smoke and mirrors, shadows fighting a cause, but now she needed their help and she had no idea who they were.   Fire once told her how to find a safe zone. “If you ever need to hide, look for places of scarcity, since that’s where we are needed the most. You’ll always find one us there.”  So she took a chance and disguised herself as a homeless woman to blend.

      “Psst.” Ice turned to see a well-dressed woman standing just outside the camera view. She looked like a clog, the trophy wife who didn’t like getting dirt under her nails.   “Water,” the woman said.  Then she turned and walked to an expensive car.  Ice watched, frowning as she jumped inside.

Was this a trap? Ice thought. She had looped the cameras signals into a continual view of the area excluding for the woman standing in this doorway. But could they have overwritten her command, she pondered?  The government had gotten clever over the years with their deceptions and devices of detections. She assumed that was how they caught a hacker of Fire rep. They must be on top of the game.

   Ice turned to look at the woman in the car. She heard about the infamous Water, who took down the whole Eastern network cribbing the government strong hold on tech. She watched on her vid how those who couldn’t avoid the top of the line tech were being issued the best of the best.  

She laughed at how the government scrambled to explain the mix up but was only blowing in the wind when the system crashed completely. It took them weeks to get it back online, by then everyone was tech out for years.

She noticed that the waiting car had its break-lights lit.  Ice knew she had only a short time to decide before the woman pulled away.  She had never trusted the Underground, not really, too many thieves and not enough hackers, for her taste.

 She was a hacker and like so many of her kind, she loved how tech worked and learning from it was her passion. Thieves were on the other hand were just that, thieves. They stole tech to sell on the black market or to tech themselves out. There were more and more thieves joining the underground and not enough hackers.

Hackers or thieves she preferred to work alone, but Fire told her many times she would have to trust or be left in the cold.  Of course she knew Fire was right, no one survived alone. No matter how good she thought she was Ice knew she couldn’t stay out in the open like this.

 She made her decision. Ice pushed a few buttons on her mini comp, waited until she heard the first sounds of tires on asphalt and ran toward the park car.

 When she hit those buttons the street lights flickered drawing everyone’s attention toward the loud sounds of car tires halting to abrupt stops.  She saw the door to the car open and hopped inside, closing the door just as the woman speeded away.

She checked her comp for any jabber on the links when she heard none she knew they had gotten away clean. Ice finally leaned back in the seat of the hover car. She had never been in a hover but had read the guides and always hoped to ride in one.

 “Welcome to the underground Ice,” said the woman. She was smiling at how Ice was looking at her tech. She smelled of lilacs and her voice chinned like a Southern Belle.

  She smiled wider as she extended a hand. "Fire told me a lot about you, I'm Water."   


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