The Revolution

Chapter 1

Note: Grammar updated 071424

opened his eyes and was immediately assaulted by the needles of the sun. Little did Jackie Hodgeson know that today would be the last day of normalcy that he would ever know. Of course, in the weeks and months following there would obviously be the requisite "The signs were there moments," where all the red flags of the past several years would come rushing into his head, but as his therapist had always said, "there are things that can be changed, and things that can't."
As he sat up in his sparsely decorated room that was rented for a price that left little room in the budget for things such as actual decorations, he looked around and internally gauged how much he was going to regret the alcohol he consumed the night prior. After doing his morning self assessment, he came to the conclusion that he needed only two pain pills instead of three or (heaven forbid) four that usually followed the painful waking up ritual.
The shrill ringing of his alarm, sounded twice as loud as it usually did, causing Jackie to curse audibly at his stupidity as to hit "snooze" instead of "dismiss." The sudden silence of the alarm's dismissal fell quickly and heavily over the room. Jackie decided to up the dosage of his pain meds. The second pill was particularly hard to swallow, his morning acid reflux threatening to empty his stomach.
The first crisis of the day dealt with, Jackie swung his feet over the side of the small bed and immediately knocked over a pile of cans of various cheap (both in price and in alcohol content) forms of malt liquor. Today is already turning out to be a peach, Jackie thought to himself, coldly.
A sharp growl from his guts cut through the fatigue and brought Jackie back to the task at hand. Gotta find some food and get to work.
Jackie looked over at the clock hanging on the wall above the single burner electric hotplate and suddenly realized that he was already late for work, no time for food, but that meant he would have to buy some food. Hopefully he had enough money for that, another meal at the Cafe was another hour of wages wasted.

Jackie lived in a kind of dormitory, floor upon floor of single rooms with nowhere near enough communal bathing areas dotted among the living quarters. Jackie had lived on the third floor for a couple of years after a friend at a former job had found an opening. Real estate was limited in the city and to find a spot in a neighborhood that had enough amenities within walking distance was a fair trade off for s lack of space he thought.
As a financial data analyst, Jackie's life was numbers, long complicated strings of numbers that he had almost learned to see as strings connecting the financial world rather than dry spreadsheets of stock movements. There were times when Jackie thought he saw those strings on the periphery of his vision, like the occasional floating cloud in his vision. There were other analysts, dotted here and there, but as far as Jackie knew, none of them really knew each other.
Jackie worked most days down at the Beverage Bar in the lobby of the building, as it had the only really reliable network connection within a mile, and more than that was just too far for Jackie to wrap his head around, just some little wiggle in the back of his mind that the inconvenience would just be too much to bear.
To Jackie's intense dismay, a sign on the door of the Beverage Bar read, "Metanet connection down, hard currency only," meaning not only would he not be working from the building, but since all he had was his credit chip, no food either. Time for plan B.

The one bright spot of the long walk to the next best metanet connection was that the day was one of those cool spring mornings where Jackie had to admit to himself that Gaia was actually rather beautiful. The crisp, cool air felt exhilarating in his lungs and the song of the birds sounded sweet over the sound of Flux engines during traffic hour. If it weren't for the bit of fatigue still clouding his consciousness, he may have noticed that the traffic was light.
"It's strange," Jackie had once remarked to his therapist, "in a city where we're packed in like sardines, it's surprisingly lonely." The therapist looked down at her pad and scribbled something, only half listening.
Jackie was born on a small farm on the East side of the state, a couple of his brothers showed an aptitude for growing things and had stayed and taken over, but Jackie had always had his eye on the big city. He wanted to go somewhere up north, but his professional path had taken him to a city not far from home and had through the process of a couple of years created a rut for himself that while efficient and spartan, was not really what Jackie would call fulfilling.