My name, well I can’t recall my real name very well, and I’ve had so many different identities since I last used that name that it no longer matters. For the last few years I have been going by Thorpe, Thorpe Winterborne.
Let’s start around the beginning: I was born in a small suburb within sight of Chitown. Yep, that’s right, right in the heart of the Coalition. Most of my youth was spent like any normal kid, playing all the rough and tumble games, sneaking smokes and booze when the old man wasn’t looking…and paying a dear price with my ass when he caught us.
I had always been a lot more athletic, and smarter than the other kids in the neighborhood, and the C.S. must have had some eyes and ears in the area, because one day the “recruiters” for the Coalition Youth academy were at my front door to take me there. Talk about a shock, I was excited and terrified all at the same time.
After a few years of education and training I began to realize I was not being prepared to be just some run of the mill Glitterboy, or robot pilot, my education was going beyond that. I was learning a lot of covert skills, as well as combative ones, which meant I was going to be an operative infiltrating all those DB lovers hideouts, or maybe even going as far as Tolkien and Lazlo. To top it all off, I was good, to the point of out doing my class in most every area of study, and I knew it.
Around the time I was 16, we had a short break in our studies so I decided to take a quick trip home to see my folks. Things weren’t going as well as I had hoped, dad was out of work, and mom was putting in long hours as a motel clerk. Evidently when I was taken, dad hit the bottle hard, which wound up costing him his job due to numerous occurrences of brown bottle flu. My opinion is that it scared the hell out of him when the CS boys showed up for me, and he thought they were after him. I’ll have to ask him some time why he should have such concerns. Needless to say my visit was unpleasant, and short. I think it was around this time that I started to drink; they say it gets passed along through each generation. Nowadays I can’t seem to get going in the morning without a little nip.
Not too many years later, I received my assignment: Tolkien. Boy what an opportunity, free travel and the chance to deliver a little human vengeance on all the DB scum and their sympathizers.
My time spent in Tolkien was quite productive at first, with the occasional catastrophic system crash at a local bank or police station, to “dealing” with a couple of individuals who were getting too loud in their opposition of the CS.
Within the next year or so, I began to get a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. As it turns out, I was realizing that most of the DB’s I was encountering were not bad individuals; they were just people thrust into an alien situation and trying to make the best of it.
Evidently there must be spies spying on the spies, because while out on the town one night, a small group of thugs jumped me. They claimed I was to be taken back or killed due to faulty programming. I had heard stories about people who get re-programmed; most often they wind up a vegetable, or dead. That was it, I knew I had to disappear, and quick. After an hour or so of ensuring that I had lost them, I went back to my place, packed some essentials, and was gone by dawn.
There had been stories around town about some old holy site out west, I figured I could put my self off as a pilgrim, and maybe even ingratiate my self to the towns people enough, so that they would not mind if I stayed a while.
As I write this, I am sitting inside the Arcology in Newton, surrounded by refugees, and some little kid just wiped his hands off on my pant leg…little bastard.