1 Prologue

Gray clouds cover an even grayer city street as rain descends. Armed guards patrolling. harassing. raiding. It's been decades but, a few of the elders remember a time before people feared where they walked or stayed awake not knowing if they, too, would be abducted in the dead of night like their neighbors and friends. They alluded to a time very foreign to now. One where you felt safe in the presence of police, a supposed precursor to the guards now that were dedicated to keeping the peace. They never talk openly about the old ways out of fear of being imprisoned or worse because, it's seen as treason.

An armed guard kicks open a door and enters a rundown house and, after a few minutes, kicks a man through the doorway landing face first into a grimmy puddle towards the middle of the street. It only takes a minute to figure out what for. He was muttering to himself. The guards take to calling them basket cases but, the official term is incoherent. It didn't matter if they were men, women, or children. the results were always the same; you'd be arrested and taken to what the guards called "the Fixer", a facility they bring all the incoherents, and that's where you'd stay. Indefinitely.