Quarter City

Prologue

They say when the end comes, your life flashes before your eyes.  They lied.

When the end comes your vision goes blank as everything disappears behind a blanket of white that stains your retinas. 

And the world goes mute.

The great thing is that whatever pain you felt washes away and for the first time, probably since birth, you really, truly, feel clean.

It’s like you’re born to be a target, a target for shit to be flung at, and no matter what you do during your lifetime, you can’t get the stink, the sight, or the stigma off of you. 

But in the end, in the end what happened in-between doesn’t matter.  In the end you’re clean again.

QUARTER CITY

 

Prologue:

Diego was ten when he saw his first Enhanced in Detroit; the Emerald Veil. 

It was 1977. 

She floated over the skyline, as if carried on the breeze, her body moving in waves.  Her black hair lifted up towards the sky while green cloth studded with gold fluttered everywhere around her.  Diego desperately wanted to be up there with her.  He wanted to be a name, like her.  He wanted people to recognize him… revere him… respect him.  He wanted people to be as in awe of him as he was of her. 

Diego always had a favorable relationship with electronics. 

By the age of four, he had already developed an innate ability to figure out the functions of basic things like televisions, microwaves, and the apartment’s security system. 

At six, he was allowed to disassemble malfunctioning equipment, which he could to dissect in minutes.  Upon realizing that he was putting them together again in working condition, his mother allowed him to take anything apart, from the family van to the refrigerator. 

At age nine Diego’s mother bought him his first computer system.  It wasn’t much, only what she could afford on her funeral attendant’s salary.  Diego took apart the computer before even turning it on.  Upon its reassembly, Diego was disappointed to find its performance excruciatingly slower than that which he used at school.  He understood the components, almost instinctually, just as he understood how to change them, enhance them.  However, delicate tools would be required… delicate, expensive tools his mother’s tight budget couldn’t afford. 

Diego formed an idea for collecting finances: modifying and enhancing people’s electronics for a small fee. 

At first he began quietly, at school, reconfiguring the basest of calculators and electronic notepads to perform beyond their intended functions, in exchange for the other students’ lunch money.  By the time Diego entered high school he had graduated from doing work for his peers to jobs for various people in the apartment complexes on his street.  His mother was suspicious of the electronics supply Diego was amassing, but was satisfied when he told her that what he was dabbling in was “entrepreneurial and not drugs.”

For all his understanding of electronics, he was weak in other educational studies such as mathematics, history, geography, chemistry, and biology.  His lack of creativity was exposed during art classes where he could perfectly recreate the most intricate of system diagrams but was unable to draw even a choppy replication of a dog or a barn.  As capable as he was, Diego was limited to working off the backs of others: able to enhance a design but unable to create his own.