Run
by Bailey Summers

It’s a word that resonates with me. I used to run unassisted when I was little. I guess all kids run when they’re young and happy. I can remember I used to. I used to run through the sprinklers on the lawn in the summer. I used to run with my friends in the park playing or around the bases in softball and probably from as early as I can remember up until about when I was eight years old that’s just the way it was. I was just like everyone else.

Then Dad found me dressed up in my mothers clothes. I saw one look at his face and felt fear. He growled. “There’s ain’t no way. There’s ain’t no way ma boy’s gonna be some faggit queer.” I can remember stuttering, I still fight that disorder still…”Daddy I’m not a faggit, I’m a girl! See I’m pretty.” He reached for me and I reached for him expecting a hug. He grabbed me by the front of my dress and threw me. Like you’d throw a cushion or something and I flew out the room barely missing my mom who was coming to investigate the noises. I hit the wall and hit it hard enough to break my arm and put a body or eight year old crumple in the drywall. I was crying and I heard mom scream at him. “What the fuck are you doing! He’s just a chil…” The slap echoed in our trailer. I saw Mom stagger out of the bedroom and fall down in front of me in the hall.

“Run.” Mom mumbled punch drunk her teeth bloody.

I got up and moved away scared.

“Run.” She whispered staring at me.

Daddy came out with the shotgun.

“RUN!” She screamed at me.

I started scrambling backwards and …BLAMM! I saw it, I’ll always see it. My mothers head get vaporized to pulp from a 12 gauge at a yard away. I’m sprayed by her blood, I get hit by a few stray pellets and chips of her skull piercing my flesh.

I Run.

Another BLAMM! And there’s a hole in the wall. BLAMM!, holes in the fridge. BLAMM! The TV dies but he gets part of me then too and I don’t feel it.

I Run.

Out the front doors crying, screaming incoherently. I see two cars with policemen pull onto our lawn and one of the he rushes to me and grabs me and turns to use his back and his vest to shield me.

I see my Daddy, a man I loved and yet didn’t understand become a monster. He must have been changed by his bad medicine, he started taking bottles and bottles of it after he lost his job. I had offered to help him find it and he kicked me, three times before mom got involved and in his face as she’d quietly tell me to go to my room. I’d hear sounds. I know now that she offered herself up to being his punching bag instead of me.

He looks like he might shoot.

Then just like mom, he slide the front of the shotgun under his chin…BLAMM!

It cover the white siding of our trailer.

Then I was an orphan.

Four years and three group homes later I was living in Lennox, out in this old, old area of the colony and Ark City. It used to be quite the neighborhood or district really. Irish dominated with smatterings of other whites but Irish along with Scot, Welshies, Aussies and others. It was heavily hooked into the nearby mountains for mining and processing here in the district and stuff. A big railway yard made even more jobs and hundreds of manufacturing jobs that made anything and everything under the sun. Lennox isn’t all UK Irish and stuff but a lot of diluted ones too. Think of a bit of Belfast mixed with equal parts Boston, Baltimore and New York because downtown Lennox district need it’s local finances and stuff. After the war with the Confederation of Human Colonies and us As part of the Free world’s Alliance which blockaded us there was a great colonial depression here and Lennox turned to a place like 20th century Detroit.

I was with Lucky Braddock, Selkie Keane, and Tommy Brougham and we were stealing cars. I was a good little car thief. I’d rig out a cipher to a fiber-optic crystal chip with a watch battery two bits of stiff wire and a memory stick and you could put it into a keyhole and it’d pulse out varying micro surges in sequence until it got the right pulse code used in the real key.

Then I stole that hover car, that was a supremely stupid thing to do but see then, then I had to prove just how much of a tough guy I am. The Quacks at the mind shop, or nut house said it’s from being dressed as my mom and my childhood trauma. I’ve never been able to shake the cross-dressing thing. It’s gotten me beaten badly quite a few times being queer in this district’s a death sentence. So I was put into a boy’s only group home and had to get tough, macho up. I’m patted down at the home a lot or was. I got in a fight or three everyday…a knife fight a week and got into the drugs…I was turning into my fucking father and hated, hated myself. I still never could get into booze though…dad drank. Even the group homes sucked. I never made it into real foster care. Ark City is huge, think Metropolis from DC comics. Human population is 3 billion people. Many had come here from all over…Okay enough history if you guys want to know I’ll tell you later. But my point in I was mental, considered trouble, kids like me don’t get adopted, don’t get even put into foster homes so we might have some space. No, I get to live in the group home system. Government barely funded flop houses for kids.

Any way I couldn’t control the damned hover car for shit having never driven one before and before I knew it we were getting chased by the cops. Hover cars ride on a mag-lift and with the lack of friction we’re going too fast, I don’t know how to corner in this thing and then that stupid fuck Selkie pulls a gun and started shooting at the cops. We’re punks so no fancy gun-loads for us so he’s just pissing them off and just gave them permission to fire back.

I remember the sound of the gunfire, I remember crashing the car and this feeling like I got punched in the shoulder and crashing the car. I remember going through the windshield. The smell of so much of my blood throwing me into PTSD flashbacks and I think I through up. The guys were better off except Tommy…his head was twisted at an impossible angle. I heard Selkie yell “Run!” and him and Lucky beat feet out of there…Me..I couldn’t…”I…I..Can’t move my legs..!” Two Cop Anthro-Dog’s jogged up and started to check me out. “Let me go!, Don’t fucking touch me you goddamned animals! Fuckin freaks!” Yeah I was a stupid prejudiced idiot back them. After the Droid War, About 200 years ago robotics was everywhere, in every part of life until Hackers began messing around then it became military SOP to fight with robots and wars got real popular until some well meaning hacker moron wrote an AI, a really good AI and it hacked things and it went Skynet on humanity thinking we were truly a great waste of space. After that they created Biologicals, Anthros…humans spliced and cut and spliced some more until they became humanoids, as Dad and a lot of people said abominations of god. To their credit they were still police. They saved my life.

I still ended up here in the wheelchair. Severe spinal damage, I was moved out to the Shamrocks or the nicer part of Lennox and I’ve been living in a home for special needs kids. I can’t walk so everything is harder, dressing myself is hard so dressing like the girl I am inside is out and it’s killing me inside slowly. I’ve found out in the course of “therapy” that I’m transgendered. I don’t, can’t embrace it.

I’d taken to hacking and trying to escape though my computer. I was always too smart for my own good and into figuring out how things work. If I’m thinking about something else I’m not thinking about myself. I did it to escape the reality of the group homes, I really got into it after my damage.

Lucky found me last year and he heard I was good on the keys and it wasn’t long before he got me out of there and I got a trailer out in the hills. It’s mine (Sort of), it’s private and it sucks. The one good thing is the computer he let me build. Why because I crack credit cards for him. They’re all chipped now and have layers of encryption on them, I don’t ask where they come from our remote debit pogs where you load money into a pog or fob just some handy little key chain things…yeah I’m a criminal, I do what I have do to survive.

I just got home, I’d been in a body chop shop. Cybernetics, they can’t fix my legs but they can help me do my job. I’ve got a data-jack put in. A plug in with a wiring into your spinal nerves that connects from that to you’re brain it transmit’s the signals from the computer to your brain it’s actually not that hard it’s all electricity right?

I get comfortable and thank Lucky for driving me home. He passes me a shoe box full of work. “I’ll see yeh Sunday after church and dinner at Ma’s.” Boston like accent Lucky even says ca-ar with that stretched A.

“Okay, thanks Lucky.”

“Ya sure yeh doan wanna come ova, Ma makes a mean corn-bif yanno?”

“Yeah…I’m nor good with people…families.”

“Hey, I hadda asks, you didn’t say nothin to the cops when you got caught so I owe ya.”

“Hey, I don’t rat.”

“Yeah, yer Aces Jesse.”

Now don’t get gooey on me, Lucky’s a friend, I’m trans but not into him at least. Sex has been the last thing on my mind really because I can’t feel anything from the waist down.

I reach out and power everything up and start taking discs out of these pirated programs I’ve gathered and built into my own data construct. I’ve dedicated a tower just for this. I pull on My sunglasses and reach up and press the hidden stud under the skin behind my right ear. The data jack pops open and I pull out the rewinding fiber optic cord and plug it. I press the other button and I fall into light like that star rush thing from that ancient movie classic Stargate.

I blink and check the place out in my better than CGI graphics Virtual world, My home, my island and geodesic dome loft. I look at myself reflected in the glass…I start to cry.

I’m me…five foot five, slender, small breasts, built like a gymnast or ballerina..female, finally a girl. I run my hands over my body crying harder but happier than I’ve ever been in my life…until my legs, as soon as I feel my hands on my legs they give out on me. I’m bawling and happy…I’m not sure how long I’m there acting like a lunatic touching, pinching, feeling myself.

But I call up my closet sub-routine and slip into a lovely set of gym clothes. I walk out of my dome and ontop my tropical island construct. I savor the feel of the grass then the sand of my beach. I stand there and just…wiggle my toes in the sand…

Then I..

Run.