Anon: Chapter Two- A Rusty Gate

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Summary

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Chancellor Hammond and his wife were both uploaded to the blockchain when they were born. They enjoyed the privileges of transacting on the decentralized ledger all their lives.

Kate, however, had no such privilege. There were many like her, found in different types of enslavement and poverty. Because they could not transact on the blockchain, very little was available to them, and nothing they did was recorded. So...it didn't happen. They were essentially nonexistent. They were ANON.

The social and economic climate grew more tense with each year, and a revolution was just around the corner. The Anons would fail unless something unusual altered the inevitable. Kate found herself in the home of one of the most powerful men in the New World. And she had an unusual plan....

Chapter Two- A Rusty Gate

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Kate drew her breath as she waited for Mrs. Hammond to make a decision. The noble women had the luxury of foregoing the inconvenience of a pregnancy and childbirth because they could afford to hire a surrogate. But most of them refrained from using their own eggs if they could find a better candidate to match up with the genetics they hoped for. It would be far more effective to engineer from a mostly-done canvas than to genetically engineer from scratch.

Some preferred to start from scratch, artificially inseminating their own fertilized egg into their surrogate. It was considered more impressive if one could claim the child was their own, despite the pregnancy not being so. Others, though, preferred to use the clever young eggs of the surrogate herself, then lie about the child’s pedigree. Although surrogacy itself was considered the norm of the upper crust, surrogates who were also egg donors were a hush-hush. And if the children born of the surrogate began to look like the surrogate, this would not do. So in these cases, the slave was usually kept in fairly strict hiding for the duration of their servitude, so no one could make out the resemblance.

Kate had not actually come from the legal surrogate market. She was a Silk Road trade. And she knew it. Her family knew it too. Technically she had been kidnapped. But she didn’t put up much of a fight. She recognized the black vehicle. She knew what her destination would likely be when they threw her in the back with the other girls. A life as a nobleman’s surrogate slave was better than any she could have worked out on the fringes of society, where she was raped freely and not compensated for it.

A special passport was made for her once she arrived and was placed on the official surrogate market. Her paperwork had been fabricated by an insider, and her DDP (Disease, Defects, and Pedigree) inspection had been concocted as well.

The rich were willing to pay for their little secrets. Problem was, there was no way for them to have the product inspected by their own professionals, or it would show up on the Blockchain. This was the case for Mr. Hammond, who had to take the market insider’s word for it.

As Kate sat next to the other girls in the back of the vehicle, she looked around at their sad, vacant faces, and wondered if they knew what she knew. She remembered the day her life was transformed. Her brother Doabie had taken her hand and shielded her eyes as they briskly walked down the dark, filthy alley of Trademark Square.

They would not want to draw attention to themselves by running, but they did not want to be easy targets by walking too slowly either. Kate tried to keep up. Her brother’s legs were a lot longer and stronger than hers. She already missed her mother and the life she would leave behind. She tried not to think of their mother who was dying in bed with Tuberculosis, or the sunken face she leaned over to kiss when she said goodbye for the last time. She hated to leave her mother in such a state, but Doabie promised he would take care of her to the end. They told Kate they would be better off knowing she had a better position in life.

It was still unknown if Kate had contracted the TB, and the unpredictable heart palpitations were also a concern. She pressed her hand over her chest and prayed Doabie could find a way to help her mother, and erase her own identity as well. She needed a cleaner pedigree if she was ever to get out of this place.

The scrounging and begging of the indigent, and the mischief of the low-life slowly began to subside as Kate and Doabie approached the end of the long alleyway. When they reached the last few feet of the ragged street, a tall apartment building towered above them to the front, and a pile of rubble 15 feet high greeted them on the left. The only way to go was right. Doabie took a quick glance over each shoulder, then pulled Kate sharply to the left, behind the corner of the last building. He crouched down and brought her with him, while he fixed his eyes onto hers and smashed his forefinger to his lips in a shushing motion. There was barely enough room for them to fit behind the wall before they were right on top of the rubble.

“What now?” Kate mouthed. They were panting from the brisk walk.

Doabie looked up. Suddenly, he reached for a piece of rebar jutting out of a large, jagged piece of concrete, about seven feet up. He wedged his feet onto a wooden crate and pushed himself up. He then worked his way up each slat like a ladder, and turned around to wave at Kate to follow him. They both quietly scrambled up the rubble wall, careful not to create noise or cause any of the debris to spill down and cause a commotion. Scaling down the other side of the rubble, they reached a point where the only way down was to jump about seven feet to the ground. It took some nerve, but Doabie showed her how to absorb the jump with a tumble and roll at the end.

Once down, they snuck through a half-rusted gate made of iron -- like the stuff they used to use in the old days when engineers built skyscrapers and car engines. Once through the gate, they found themselves wedged snugly between two tall buildings, with about six inches to spare on each side of them. Kate’s eyes widened. She felt her breath increase rapidly. Her grip tightened on her brother’s arm.

The dingy walls on each side of them hadn’t seen daylight in eons. Both walls shot up for several stories. Dust, leaves, spiderwebs, and debris filled the skinny avenue between the sister buildings. The wall of rubble behind them was impossible to climb back up. There were no doors or escape routes now. There was really no way out. What had Doabie gotten them into!

“Don’t be afraid, Katie. I’ve been here before,” Doabie said softly. There’s a door just up the way, past those pipes on the wall. See?”

Kate saw the side of a little iron door built right into the wall behind the pipes, and her grip loosened. She couldn’t tell if the building was made of real brick and mortar, or just a synthetic facade designed to look like antique brick from the early 2000’s, but it brought a strange feeling of comfort, seeing something that looked man-made, rather than bot-made.

“Dr. Ryder is the best around. I promise. Everything you have heard about him is a vicious rumor created by the Chainers to discourage Anons from changing over. This guy is very careful and precise. He is kind. And he has great numbing agents. So you won’t feel a thing. But he will deliver you out of this life, Katie. And everything else will fall away. It won’t matter after this.”

“I’m having my doubts, Doab. How will he be able to pull it off? I still have to heal from the tattoo removal, and then on top of that, get a new one in it’s place. I’ve had this since I was three. It’s part of me now.”

“You’ll see,” he whispered. Then approached the metal door.

He knocked on the door with a rhythm that felt familiar to his little sister. A few moments later, Kate looked at him beneath a pair of slightly raised eyebrows. “Really, Doab? London Bridges?”

Doabie shrugged his shoulders, and the next moment the two of them heard a soft click of metal hardware within the door, and it opened on its own.

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ANON:CHAPTER ONE- A HOT BATH