Novo Rogue 1.2 - Prime Rogue Riding the Artery Sky Train

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Novo Rogue 1.2 - Prime Rogue Riding the Artery Sky Train

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Series 1, Entry 2

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That fucking package. I didn’t want to know what was inside of it but, truly, I did. I pulled my hood down close to my brow, hoping no one would recognize me, and scanned my biochip to enter the lift that would bring me the several thousand meters between the ground and the sky train platform. The smells of the District below me dissipated as I entered the aseptic air of a Council project. “We Welcome You to the District 9 Southeast Sky Train. Keep the Artery Clean – Be Respectful of your Fellow Dwellers.” There was a salient paradox between the robotized AI that was telling us to keep the place clean and the doom-preacher, decked from head-to-toe in Black with a White collar, who was loudly expounding on the prophecies of Creation, and how the Space Realm had lost its way. “Six Creators – Six Elements” – all that bullshit they’d indoctrinated into us in our digi-civics courses It truly felt like this doom-preacher was doing nothing more than spreading the malign vice that led to this shitshow of a place emerging in the first place. Power corrupts. Abso-fucking-lutely. The Council was corrupt. The Creators, figments of our collective imagination, were corrupt. Fuck, I was the poster boy for corruption. Just as I had slung sea-spawn dope to kids on the shorelines of the Water District, I was now delivering a really dense but light package across the artery – guess what? It was probably dope. Traveling down the artery was never a pleasant experience. The air might be clean, but the atmosphere wasn’t. Aside from doom-preachers, VR smut peddlers were promising us various phallic enhancements while the gangland pimps were promising us vices of whatever gender, race and age we desired. That didn’t interest me. I had always hustled but I stayed clear of the prozzies. I didn’t mess with women and children, and while I dug carnal pleasures outside of VR, I had never once paid for my pleasures. As I had these deep thoughts about the Council, the “Creators” and these pimps, preachers and hustlers, the dog whined. I was eating Council slop from a communal fountain while she was getting real meat, and she still wanted more. But she deserved it – all of it. Ever since I had left the Water Realm, we had become inseparable. When I found her, she was shivering in what they used to call a sewer where the real dope fiends shot up stims in Water District 3. I brought her home with me in spite of my uncle, gave her some food, and she never left my side since. I called her Rogue because I was transferring my own vices onto her – that’s what the Council neurodoc told me when they were evaluating my competency to stand trial in the Water Realm. But that’s another story – one I don’t really want to even think about. Long story short, she was basically the only thing, scratch that, friend, that stayed with me after I was exiled. The train arrived and I stepped onto it. As it left the station, I could barely make out the blue-and-reds that were surrounding Ahmed’s bodega. I’d have to circle back – not just for dog food but also to ask my friend what had happened. But, for now, I would roll at 750 clicks an hour, the speed was apparently down from the usual 1,500 because of enviro-saboteurs from the Earth Realm. It was probably an inside job. Who could ever know? Seemed like the damned Councils wanted to take the flavor out of everything but war. I almost joined the security force back in the day, before I came to the Space Realm, but like with so many other things in my life, the piss test put an end to that pipedream. District 13, 2,100 kilometers away, was going to be a three-hour ride – joy.