One hundred and fifteen: Homeless Roach

"Any news yet?"

"No. We still don't know what her name is."

"Has she talked yet?"

"No. Barely responds to anything. Spends most of the time staring at nothing in particular. Wakes up screaming sometimes."

What are the results of the scans?"

"She's had some serious injuries before and some weird stuff implanted into her. There's an awesome patch up of an old pelvic injury and what looks like nerve grafting or something. The Boskies must have had her for a while and done experiments on her."

"Then we'll have to notify those government agent people - you know the ones who left a number somewhere. She'll have to go into the protection program or something. There are people looking for people like her. Apparently it's a new cutting edge technology."

"Anything else wrong with her?"

"Not that we could find, but we had to repeat some tests. Some results were a bit confusing. She won't participate in some tests, so it's hard to say."

"Good. We need the bed. I'll contact those people once I find their number to take her away."

I eyed the computer.

It was an old model pre-war computer. One could even say it was ancient. It was at least three decades out of date and did not even have an LED monitor. The old keyboard had those high clunky buttons that you had to press hard and made clunking rather than clicking noises. The mouse still had a ball in it as opposed to the current optical laser mice and probably needed cleaning from the way the staff were frequently banging it about on the table in frustration. When no one was around, I cleaned the mouse and its ball. Then I cleaned the keyboard. Years of dust and dirt and debris fell out when I turned it over a bin. Probably no one had cleaned it since it had been bought. I mean, this equipment belonged either in the trash or a museum.

"Who cleaned the keyboard?" someone said later, using the computer with surprise. "And the mouse is working again. Which genius fixed it?"

Overnight, when there were less people, I logged on using a logon and password I had spied someone using. Seriously. Weren't medical people supposed to be smart? What smart person still used 'password' for their password?

'Welcome, Dr Tamworth,' said the screen.

I caught up on the latest news and found the Boskies were holding their borders. Digging deeper, Kiran was being held in a secure facility in the next city. He looked like he and the other Bosky prisoners were safe and comfortable enough there. They must be upset that they couldn't help protect their homeland.

Then I explored the local intranet and its firewall. All of its programs were way out of date and everything really needed updating. Discovering when the next maintenance update was, I went about rewriting or updating old programs. I updated the firewall while I was at it. All the updated changes would automatically install themselves during the scheduled maintenance when the servers went offline. It was boring, simple stuff that made me feel very satisfied. There was a limit to what could be updated though, due to the age of all the hardware. If too many things were updated, the old computers would fry themselves. The hospital seriously needed new equipment.

I slept well after that. I tinkered on the computers every chance I got when the nursing staff weren't around and was gratified one night when everything went offline for maintenance.

Some government agents came to pick me up. Someone had gotten me real clothes from somewhere for the occasion. I couldn't be bothered learning their names and just followed them out of the hospital. During a moment when they were distracted, looking for the car keys, answering their phone and chatting, I took advantage of a sudden crowd passing by and melded in amongst the people.

Following the crowd, I entered a busy cafe and walked toward the toilets then out the back door. In this way, I crossed through several buildings and passed many blocks, eventually finding myself at the trainline. Heartly Train Station to be exact. Following the roads that were no longer as familiar as they had been, I walked to the home that no longer contained my family. Another family lived there now and I watched the mother gardening with her toddler in the front yard.

My tummy growled and I turned away to look for the fruit trees that used to have branches that hung over fences that I could reach. Those houses were gone. Those fences were gone too. The trees were charred stumps. The buildings were just a patch of flat land that had been scorched.

Wandering around the city, I thought I saw glimpses of Kiran's people. What remained of them, anyway. I also saw their followers. Spies spying on spies. Nothing to do with me.

Eventually, I found a dumpster at the back of a restaurant where good food had been thrown out at the end of the day. I gorged myself and then threw up. Then I ate a little more, because the feeling of having something tasty in my mouth and that filled my stomach was too good.

I slept in a recycling dumpster and woke to boxes being thrown in on top of me. At least it had been warm. Like the cockroach I had become, I scuttled about on the streets learning my way around and where the dumpsters were. Then I discovered a school being rebuilt where they were throwing away their old computers. I took the good and left the bad, hoarding them in my various shelters and hiding places around the city. I had a large roaming ground wherein I stashed things I was sure I would need one day. Scavenging bits of newer computers was a bit more difficult, but eventually I had enough parts. My own computer was built. Going by my understanding of hardware, I learned mostly by trial and error. I borrowed some building's electricity by way of an extension cable and an old dusty powerpoint. It was a good practical lesson on hardware - something I had never really bothered with in such detail before. I rigged quite a few drivers together and built my own servers a few pieces at a time. Soon I had a cobbled together computer network with various IPs that I bounced all around the world so that no one would ever find me. Then I waged war on all the injustices of the world that I could find. Not wanting the government to find me, I stayed away from touching their things. Governments could be very possessive and selfish. If you touched any of their stuff, they'd hunt you down.

The only problem with the location that I had was that when it rained heavily, the rain could get in, even with the tarps that I had scavenged and erected with string. Then the exposed computer parts would short circuit and I'd have to find replacement parts. Still, what I got out of what I had was enough. The news and gathering online support to fix the small injustices around the world was enough. My online army called themselves the Roach Army because my main online user was called Roach, but I had many other scattered names so that people wouldn't be able to link them with each other.

The area of the city I was in was relatively quiet. Every now and then the waves of battle would sweep past, but they never entered my hidden corner. After a while, things went back to the way they used to be. The Boskies went back to Boskyland, having lost too many of their people to continue their war and the city slowly revived itself once more. I heard the news that Kiran and the others were released back to Boskyland with conditions, but it was only a small ripple in the many pies I was playing with.

People who had not been here for the war entered the city. I kept my head down. The many others like me who hid in the city shadows were kicked and spat upon by the 'upright' and proper citizens. Us nameless ones had our own communities and while those around me knew me by sight, they didn't force conversation. Every now and then, we'd see police or government agents wade through our ramshackle communities hidden out of sight and drag away another one of the homeless. Some went kicking and screaming. Some tried to commit suicide. Some went quietly. Apparently the city was determined to clean us up and bring back some respectability to the broken place.

Scavenging in a dumpster one night got me chased through much of the city first by security guards and then a random people, and then police. Many of the areas and places I had once known had changed. I had to go explore and get to know the place again. I no longer had as much of a hometown advantage as I might have once had. Add to that, my health wasn't all that great. I only escaped the security guards, police and well meaning citizens by a very convoluted route that involved a great deal of hiding and moving from place to place or getting shooed away by hotels and other security guards. When I made my way slowly back home later, I discovered that many of my side hiding places were gone. My carefully stored spare parts, bits and pieces were being bagged by gloved and uniformed people.

Imagining my main base location in relation to all my other hiding places, I realised that it was no longer safe here. Sooner or later, they'd find me and this place. It was with tears and much reluctance that I dismantled my powerful computer and kept the best parts in a backpack with the disk drives and server pieces. Then early the next morning, I left. When I looked back from the top of a building later in the morning, the area was swarming with uniforms.