Glitch

Boot-Up 1.2

Boot Up 1.2

When the first Awakened showed up some thirty years ago most people thought it was one big practical joke. It didn't help that the words floating above an Awakened's head can't be captured on camera.

The first reported Awakened in North America was a twelve year old girl who got the unfortunate Nutritionist class. Rather lame, all things said and done. Still, she grew to be quite famous, even more so when they finally let her actually cook something.

Bread that could restore a person's health, meatloaf that buffed stats and food that otherwise tasted (reportedly, I was never rich enough to buy anything Awakened-made) pretty damned good. It wasn't so much that the girl was a talented chef that was impressive, no, it was that she could literally make cancer-curing toast.

Her stuff sold like hotcakes, pardon the pun.

Of course, it took all of a minute before the authorities jumped on that, but by then the news was out and more and more Awakened were popping up across the world. There was some fuss over protecting the Awakened who were all pretty much between the ages of ten and twenty. There was more fuss when, maybe a month after the little Nutritionist girl became famous, some paparazzi got a little too handsy with her and she reacted by using one of her Skills on national television.

Seeing a twelve year old be grabbed by a man only for him to literally Bake to a nice brown crisp was something of a shock. I mostly thought it was funny the way his face slackened before he caught fire.

That's when the lobbyists and politicians finally got the leeway they needed in North America to start an association called the NAAA, or the North American Awakened Association.

They were the ruling body, supporters, and trainers of anyone that awakened. Part social services, part policing force, part scientific research group, they did as any governmental association would and muddled in things best left unmuddled. The bigger corps got their slice of pie too, but they were generally pretty fair to Awakened. They didn't want to alienate the new one percent.

The trek back home was pretty long. Usually I'd have boarded a tram over to Residential Block Oh-Oh-Four, the super building where I lived, but the damned things were always packed to the gills. The words floating above my head would make me stand out like a whore in one of those hyper-Christian enclaves. I'd probably get jumped just as quickly too.

So when I snuck out of the alleyway those three assholes had left me in, I pulled out my phone and Uber'd a self-driving car to the nearest intersection. It was going to cost me, but at least I made it to my block in relative peace.

Residential Block Oh-Oh-Four was nothing to write home about. Twenty flours of housing units stretched over nearly a square kilometer. An optimised nest of corridors, living spaces, mini-shopping centres and even a small park, all surrounded by a few thousand shoe-box apartments.

It was the kind of shithole no one wanted to live in, but it was affordable on a student's budget and relatively clean. The corp that ran the place had this whole spiel about safety and security, which meant that drug pushers were pretty discrete and the block had its own security force that patrolled at all hours.

I slid into one of the side entrances, nodding a greeting to one of the girls smoking by the entrance. I probably looked like shit with my bruised nose and the slouched way I was walking to keep the pressure off of my ribs. Inside, it smelled like sweat, antibacterial spray and pot smoke, basically the smell I'd started to associate with home.

There were elevator wells at each corner of the block where restaurants and shops tried to grab your attention before you made your way back up to your apartment. It was possible, easy even, to live your entire life in a single block. That was, if you were willing to stomach junk food every day.