Boots

  * * *

  Through my illicit reading of the ancient texts, I have learned that once there were many cities, scattered across the continents, and that each of them was different from the others. While this is hard for the modern mind to comprehend, it is certainly the case that the City, as we know it, is not eternal.

  Rather, there used to be many cities, and space between these cities. This space was called ‘the countryside’ and was quite like some of the wilder municipal parks that can still be found in many of the Historic Districts, except that it was far larger and had far fewer pedestrian degenerates.

  Why the government should seek to hide this information I could not imagine, but I was determined to find out.

  The search required much secrecy on my part and a great deal of movement, as the GPS records of my various identities will show. But my erratic path across both hemispheres of the City was not intended, as the Screenface suggests, to enable me to act as courier to other Necro-terrorists but rather to enable me to access information points with obsolete security systems.

  On these dusty interfaces, some unused in decades, the false ID’s in my possession, and my skill as a systems analyst allowed me to access blocked data banks and even to download texts to a pornreader. And in archaic translations of lost languages I saw the truth of the Necros: the past is not the present, and by extension, the future may be different too.