We took the longer way back from the supermarket to avoid some armed cameras that Little Vi seemed mortally scared of. There was something extremely world-shattering about this tiny human, and even just walking around with her made me question everything I’d known for all my life even more than the Nirvana Ecstasy had done. Not only did she look at everything completely different from what I’d always known, but she also constantly noticed things I didn’t even see, and at times she panicked because of very regular everyday stuff. I hadn’t fully realised before how much The City was a completely different world for those outside of the fund-system than for those who had lived inside of it all their lives. Most of my life I hadn’t even know such a thing was a possibility because the whole system was so all-pervasive in both my daily life and my worldview that I wouldn’t be able to imagine something outside of it. But now the kid I was walking around with had grown up a world far outside of the territory of the Almighty Fundchip that dictated so much of our world. Every single innocent remark she made could be an occasion to shake the box I had been locked up in most of my life in even more.

In silence we walked through Q13 street. She had become rather tired and so she had finally stopped talking, so I was left to my own thoughts again, instead of having to answer an endless series of questions about even the most evident details of life in The City.

The weather was turning to grey again, with a light mist that blurred away the world around us and made everything like look like a ghost of reality. We turned at the corner from Q13 street into Z7821 street when suddenly she grabbed my hand, looking alarmed at something further in the street. “Stop!”, she hissed. I stopped without understanding what was happening, and peeked around. There were several shady non-people and one sleepy policebot in Z7821 street, but nothing particularly alarming. “Why?” I finally asked. ‘The killerbot!” She pointed in the direction of the policebot, and seemed a bit shaky. I looked again at the old android, but I didn’t see anything that would warrant her reaction. “That’s not a killerbot, Vi, it’s just a standard police robot. They’re not dangerous! I walk past them all the time” I said naively. She let go of my hand. Shaking her head in disbelief and staring at me in horror. “Maybe not for the fundslaves, but they hunt the free people down and take them away whenever they can.” She finally said, shivering all over. “People I kne have been taken by them!”

I looked better. It had a vaguely humanoid shape, and was indeed armed with a lot of weapons, including a built-in bullet rifle, stun gun, precision flamethrower and circuit-blocking waves. It was true that if it wanted, it could kill or disable any human or synthetic lifeform in just seconds, but it certainly didn’t look like hunting anything down right now as it stood there rather passively, and I had never heard of a policebot attacking anyone. They had always been more like a street ornament than anything else, and some of them had been standing on the same spot for as long as I could remember.

She grabbed my hand again to stop me from going further. “Stay away and let’s go now that we still can. A killerbot is no problem if they just see us, but if they scan you you’re toast. Little Vi has learnt these things. If you don’t have the right chip on you they attack and take you away. Xando always says distance is most important. More than 10 meter distance is the rule.” I nodded, and understood her point. 10 meters was the distance at which it was possible to scan someone's fundchip wirelessly if you had the right equipment. The Nirvana Ecstacy had nothing like that, but it wouldn’t be unrealistic to assume that if there was anyone at all who was armed with a hypersensitive fundchip-scanner, it would be a policebot like this one, passive or not. “We take the other street. The thing is still filming in passive mode and hasn’t had the chance to scan me or you.” I said. Suddenly it dawned on me that association with the fundless alone might be a dangerous thing, and that hypersensitive fundchip-scanners could be everywhere. Just walking around with this kid might be risk… If I didn’t watch myself I could found myself in immense trouble. What happened with traitors of The City? Certain criminals got deleted and blocked from the fund-system. Would that be the risk for me too now? Was merely hanging around with the fundless enough be become fundless yourself? With the whole ‘all you see on your screenphone is adverts for the thanatorium’ scenario and all? The idea alone horrified me.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“So the fundless only use streets without cameras or policebots?” I asked her. “We never take streets with killerbots or filming machines; it’s something you learn as a small kid. Very important. It’s very strange to know you people don’t do that.” I tried to understand the enormous scope of that small detail of their life: cameras and policebots were quite common in The City. It meant that a lot of places were off-limits for them. “You can attack them if you have a scan-blocker. The tribe of Xando had one. But Xando said killing killerbots is a bad idea. It attracts more of them. And it gets attention from the fundslaves and their scary leaders.”

I turned the corner to prez Emon’s 123th plaza when I heard a weird sound, as if some kind of otherworldly monster shrieked at me. I froze, but it was just the raven again. “I love these birds.” Said Little Vi, as if the flying black animal that stared at me with intelligent eyes was the most normal thing in the world. “I’ve only seen it for the first time just before we met you.” She looked at me. “They say the fundslaves kill the animals whenever they meet them.” “No, no-one I know has ever killed any animals. The government has eradicated them all, centuries ago. We don’t even believe in them. Seeing one was a big shock to me, as if I was suddenly transported into a n ancient movie.” “We’ve always been their friends. The free people know where the birds nest, and they feed them. We used to hide them, but now there are free animals too. There’s more pigeons than ever, and the raven is new. There’s even been little brown ones. And mice.” “So you say that the fundless have been bringing in animals?” She nodded no. “Most of the new animals must have come by themselves. The free people have white pigeons and chicken birds, and rabbits. Not ravens and mice. These are wilderness animals from the outsider world. There must be a hole in the wall somewhere.”

The bird looked at me as if I were the stranger, let out another otherworldly shriek and opened her wings. It disappeared into the mist a dark ghost from a past that shouldn’t even exist.