~ Welcome to Quills ~

Another thing that society had created other than greed and its hunger for more power, socially, and politically speaking, was science. The Spyralans loved science and they dawdled in it like a pig rolling around in mud. The Comet’s Eye was an example of such a passion for something. Electromagnetic fields were like Jesus Christ to them. 
Even religion had been ridden of as Spyral had concluded that since religion had caused such uproar in the past, given by historical events such as Jihad being declared on the west in the 2000 era and of course, the Crusades. Religion, following it or even using Jesus’ Christ name as a form of blasphemy in a sentence was considered a large form of exile material. 
Religion was juvenile and it caused ethical and social instability, just what Spyral didn’t need.
But science was a religion to the people of Spyral Incorporated Limited, wither they would be willing to admit to and be exiled for it, was another matter altogether. There was not a single day that science was not mentioned or not spoken of.
Of course, there were moments in those days where people sat back and started to sing forbidden nursery rhymes on the job. Nursery rhymes had been affected by Spyral’s political correctness. They were the material of the Old World and material of the Old World was strictly forbidden for the sake of social instability. But they had been replaced with new nursery rhymes; they were called crib rhymes, which were modified versions of the original ones and replaced with other names.
“Over the hills and far away, for ten long years he’ll count the days…something, something, something, for prison life for him there’ll be,” sung Sarah, as she sat against her chair at the very top of the Spyral headquarters, with her boots on top of the desk in front of her and she was staring aimlessly into mid air, knowing there were laws to make, change, and delete. A woman’s job was never done around this place. Moondance was the crib rhyme that Sarah was singing. “I’m so bored. Someone give me something to do rather than to do work.” It was her lazy day today. “Just because I inherited Spyral doesn’t mean I cannot be bored with my job.”
Spyral was a family owned corporation and it was a family run corporation. Originally back in 2008, three years before the Japanese came back with a blasting tonne of power, (also two years before World War Three broke out) Spyral was a small business on the sidewalk downtown in what was now considered to be Old New York City. What Spyral had done when they had gotten to such a huge political and social status thanks to a couple of smart moves that Sarah’s father had made, they ripped down the Statue of Liberty as a sign of defiance against the French and showed the French that after the French had attacked California during World War Three, they showed the French they weren’t friends anymore. They simply replaced the Statue of Liberty with a statue of a dove, mounted on a Greek column, to show that Spyral was caring and peaceful and at the bottom of the statue it read; 
We share because we care – Spyral Incorporated Limited. 
The future was an awful place to live in and Sarah just couldn’t see how dreadful a place her father had created. She was too busy singing crib rhymes anyway.
“Got a minute?” asked Brad, as he popped his head through the door, wondering what Sarah was doing other than singing crib rhymes, because half the people could hear her singing in the corridor and they thought it was mildly amusing that the head of the Los Angeles headquarters was too busy singing rather than to do something proactive. Sarah stopped singing and looked to Brad. She nodded. “Good.” He walked in and gave Sarah a bunch of folders. “Today’s exiled.”
“Oh, so today it is a fistful of papers now? What happened with yesterdays? Did the guards and spies not catch any of these idiots who try and defy Spyral and myself?” asked Sarah, as she slammed them down on the desk, not bothering to look at them.
“What’s on today’s agenda?” asked Brad, as he shrugged.
“Ah…sleep,” suggested Sarah, as Brad noticed what she was wearing today.
“You’re looking fine today, as always,” Brad complimented, as Sarah smiled and got off her backside and stood up in the corner of her office and spun around in her long pleated black skirt. “Nice skirt, but always got good taste in those corset tops of yours.” Sarah stopped and faced him and smiled, as she looked down to her black and red corset top, that had laces down up at the front.
“It is not one of my best ones,” replied Sarah, sounding a bit disappointed. She looked to Brad, as she just thought of a great way to amuse herself. “Brad. Can I have the keys to the Eye again? I do not know where I put my key.”
“I still have it, that’s why you couldn’t find it,” laughed Brad, as he pulled out a stack of keys that had two or more Vampire Bat key-rings on it. He smiled as he threw them over to Sarah and Sarah caught them, as she smiled, as she walked out of her office with Brad. She closed the door and stopped to see what Brad was doing. “Can I come?”
“Sure thing,” answered Sarah, as Brad smiled again and trailed along beside her as she walked down the stairs for a couple of minutes. “Over the hills and far away…” She started to sing again as Brad snorted with laughter. “What? What is so funny?”
“You’re singing something that’s not even aimed at your age group,” answered Brad. “Sorry.” Brad went back to his straight face as he was failing greatly. Sarah opened the seventh door of the seventh floor and went in search of what was called the Creek Mary’s Blood the key that opened the first entrance to the Comet’s Eye.
She pressed the seventh brick, on the seventh line seven times. The brick shook itself and ejected itself onto the floor. She picked up the brick, to see a red velvet inner coating and in the middle of it, was a silver key that had a rare ruby placed at the end of it. She smiled as she separated the key from the brick and replaced the brick in the empty slot. She turned around and opened the wooden door with the key. The door opened without any tricks being done. She turned the brass handle and let Brad come through with her. Now she was in a room that was only lite by two lamps in the middle of the room on an antique-brown table. 
“Here, let me do that honours,” offered Brad, as Brad knew this room too well. He walked over to the lamp, turned the lamp with a white shade off, pulled the shade off it, unscrewed the light bulb and pulled out another antique key that had a rare yellow amethyst stuck in the end of it, just like the rare ruby one that Sarah still had in her hands. This one was called Firestarter. He turned to Sarah. “Love this key. It glows like crazy when exposed to minimal oxygen, that’s why there’s no tungsten in this bulb. How clever is that?”
“Very,” answered Sarah, impressed by Brad’s scientific intelligence. “Next room, please.”
“Ah yes, was just getting to that,” smiled Brad, as he walked over to the steel door and clicked it open. “Boss first.” Sarah smiled as she accepted Brad’s invitation to walk through to the room which had a small ball in a cubic compression chamber glowing it and stared at it with amazement. “It’s always nice to see it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” answered Sarah, as she had always been amazed by the Eye’s ever-changing colours. Spyral had been doing experiments on it. The Comet’s Eye changed colours synthetically, it had emotions. “How is the progress with the project going?”
Lunar Strain was the project that she was talking about. Spyral had come to a conclusion that instead of destroying memories and wasting valuable dynamite, because they were starting to get low on it after all these number of years of using it, that they could feed the memories to the Comet’s Eye. There were organisms living in it that made it change emotions. Red for anger and a mixture of blue and green for when it was relaxed, it amazed Sarah to the point of just grabbing the cubic compression chamber and hugging it, but she didn’t.
“Good, we’re running some tests on other things before we start evaporating the memories and feeding it with them,” answered Brad, as Sarah noticed that the Eye had gone a slight shade of pink. She smiled.
“It is shy or embarrassed or maybe both; it knows I am here,” noticed Sarah, as she turned around to see Brad by her side. “You put Ivna into it and I will personally exile everyone on this project, you understand me?” Brad nodded, as he agreed to his direct orders, as Sarah stood up, with her eyes back on being glued onto the spherical multi-emotional and multi-coloured ball compressed in its clear compression chamber. It was still the shade of pink that it was before she had turned around to speak to her associate. “I love this future I am living in.”

Mel was back again, at the same Chinese eat-in store, at the same bar stool where she had exchanged conversation with the chef, Viking, on the side of the busy road. She was hungry and she hadn’t bought any noodles from the markets, so she felt a bit down about it. Someone in her case, feeling such emotions would’ve taken Ivna as a way to stop feeling the way she did. Mel wasn’t like that at all. She opposed conformity and praised individualism…secretly. That’s why she hated this world; everything had come down to everything that was so wrong about this world. She had moved to the City of the Angels with her father when she was little, until she reached her teens, that when her life had been changed dramatically. She had come from breathing in freedom and democracy like natural air, to breathing in suppression and chaos like a poisonous gas, ready to suffocate her. She waited until she saw Viking appear opposite the counter after the steam from the food that he was cooking disappeared.
“Hey Viking, chuck us some combination noodles while you’re slaving over that hot stove of yours, why don’t you?” asked Mel, raising her voice a little bit and gaining unwanted attention from by passers and the people that were sitting beside her. She ignored them.
Viking looked at her strangely, as though he had just seen something spectacular. Even the neon lights behind Mel weren’t enough to amaze him let alone have any diverse effect on him.
“Is that all you eat noodles?” asked Viking.
“And also the stuff that comes with them, like whatever good meats I can get nowadays would be nice,” answered Mel. “You don’t happen to have real meat do you?” Viking shook his head. “You disappoint me.” 
“Here have some combination Chow Mien; it’s on special if you hadn’t cared to take notice of the board right above you,” offered Viking, as he stepped out of Mel’s view and reappeared with a bowl in his hands. He opened a large pot that the meal that Viking was shouting her and started dishing her meal up. “Where did you head off to before?”
“None of your business,” retorted Mel, as Mel had only gone to the markets to see if there were any specials on. There was none this time around. Viking disappeared out of sight and reappeared but closer to Mel on the direct opposite end of where she was sitting. Viking placed the bowl down and handed her the utensils she needed to eat the meal with. “What are you doing here still?”
“About to get off shift,” answered Viking, turning around to see that the other chef had come in. “In fact, I’m off now.” Viking turned around and threw his now apron on the bench in front of Mel. “Thank God for that.” 
He had said it. 
People gasped, they stopped walking past to stare at him. He had forgotten there was no God and that religion was banned. Damnation for eternity. 
“Did he just say what I thought he just said?” asked one of the old women sitting next to Mel to her friend that looked shocked. “He said blasphemy, he said that G-o-d existed.”
“But religion doesn’t exist Margaret, remember that?” asked the other, senile as the first woman. “So how does that work out?”
“Crap,” Viking managed to say, as the shock of him just breaking one of the banned words on the list was slowly starting to fade away. It was more like run for your life now than anything and running for ones life wasn’t advised, put attempts were still permitted.
When people in this society, this society that had been overruled by a spoilt Tsarina, who came down on harsh on people about breaking rules, there was not a single way to escape, as breaking rules was like bees being drawn to honey. Guards were programmed to automatically respond to rule breakers and they would automatically appear exactly ten feet from where the crime had been committed.
“Time to start running?” suggested Mel, as she shoved Viking’s last meal preparation for his shift down her throat.
“Yeah,” answered Viking, as he went pale and saw the Spyral guards’ holograms starting to fade in. The normal procedure would be that it took the guards approximately ten seconds to appear as solid, other than that, they weren’t very quick at solidifying themselves from holograms to humans.
“Good luck, see you in hell, because I know I’m going to end up in the real place soon,” smiled Mel, sarcastically and lowering her head back down and shoving more food down her throat with the chopsticks.
Viking turned around and started to run through the back of his kitchen, narrowly missing pots and pans, and narrowly running into walls as well. He ran out the back and looked either way. To his left, nothing. To his right, the guards hadn’t even solidified enough to even move, he was safe. But he knew he wasn’t safe for long. He was going to attempt fate and try to outrun the guards; he knew it was achieving the impossible. He ran down an alleyway, where there was a linked-wire gate at the end of it. He stopped for a second and thought to himself that he could climb over it and somehow lose the guards.
The guards, when solidified were strong beasts aimed with bulky muscles, a Taser in each hand and a very good sense in direction. GPRS systems programmed were programmed in as their basic hardware needs and were killing machines when set loose. They wore the royal S of the Spyral Corporation on their left hand side embodied in gold, while on a back drop of a red velvet uniform. The kind of material that had been genetically tampered with and was made stronger to make the uniforms last longer on them, as they also wore heavy black boots that could be heard from metres away.
He continued his desperate flight for life, as he ran up to the gate and started to climb up the gate, pulling his weight up as he went. Trying to co-ordinate his hands and legs without feeling a little bit weak in both limbs. He reached the top finally, after a heart-racing seconds and swung himself over the top.
“Viking, over here!” came a strong whisper that sounded too much like Melissa’s. Viking turned around to see Mel crouched behind a trashcan.
“What?” asked Viking, a bit short on breath. “I don’t have time to chat. I’m going to be eaten alive soon.”
“I’m not here to gossip,” defended Mel. “Decided you needed some escape routes. Go straight down this alleyway, two lefts and you’re at the junkyard. Their GPRS systems are allergic to any type of metal. They self-explode when they are near a heap of metal. Trust me, I know.”
“But I’m still on their wanted list anyway,” retorted Viking.
“Just go, take my advice.... and just go!” urged Mel, knowing the feeling on being on Sypral’s most wanted list too well.
Viking nodded and was out of Mel’s sight within seconds. He reached the end of the alleyway, like Mel had told him to do, took a left into the next alleyway, as he was still running like there was no tomorrow, in which that’s what he feared, that there was going to be no tomorrow for him because he was going to be dead by that stage if he was caught by these Spyral guards. He also realised another thing as he looked back behind him, the guards were right behind him, and they had taken a shortcut and was gaining on him fast. He looked ahead as he could hear the stamping of their running. 
If the Olympics were still around, these guys would be considered gold medallists, Viking thought to himself, faintly smirking at his own remark. He looked ahead, the next left was coming up, just if he could pick up his pace a bit more, he would be a bit happier. The left was coming up…and so were the guards, as he looked back, to see that he was a few feet from them, as they pulled out their weapons, ready to attack.
Finally, the left had come up and he took an immediate turn into one of the many entries of the junkyard, and run straight for a hiding spot near the fence that was smothered in red graffiti that rebellious teenagers got away with at one stage of this society and its orders. He didn’t see a piece of shiny metal sticking out and cut his shoulder on it, as he jumped into the spot and crouched down in it, as he realised what he had done. The cut was so forceful it had ripped his uniform open on his shoulder and what was once grey and white; it was now a dark shade of red, saturated with his own blood.
He could hear it. They had reached the entry of the junkyard, they were frozen. Viking looked to see what was happening. He had never seen a Spyral guard explode before.
They started to shake uncontrollably, they came out with weird robotic noises, and they started to what seemed to be, rust on them. The GPRS was failing and once that failed it brought the whole guard down to nothing but a pile of dirt. A spark could be seen coming out of the first guard, and then another out of the second. And in a matter of minutes there were about a hundred or so sparks coming out of them each. They were still talking their weird language and shaking as they there were having epilepsy fits. This went on for another five seconds until; there was just two huge explosions that made a shower of metal and what seemed to be sparkling fairy dust in the sky. Gravity pulled the pieces back down to Earth as Viking carefully came out of his hiding spot, holding his wounded shoulder in one hand. He saw nothing but two piles of dirt, exactly where the guards had been standing. 
Viking realised now that he was now on the list of the wanted people that Spyral perceived as a social disturbance and had to be taken off as soon as possible. He didn’t know how he would do it though. He shrugged the thought off thinking that now his opinion had changed of Spyral and its operations completely. Now, in the Old World, as they used to call it, he was a wanted criminal.

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