Save Our Souls

Prologue

I am dying.
Yes. My acceptance of the unavoidable is almost my surrender as if I am waving a white flag above my head.
Waiting.
The time until your death, demise, downfall, is always just one long wait, as if time itself is death and is merely playing with us, as a child would play with their toys.
Fear.
Am I scared? Do I feel fear of the Unknown? I would be incredibly stupid if I did not admit to my fear as then I would be lying to you, my one listener in the void of darkness. The darkness which will soon succumb me and pull me down.
Together.
That so predictable urge for people so young. Surely you would want a heroic death. Or die in the arms of a lover, like the classic Romeo and Juliet love tale. All these seem very selfish to me. It isn't how you go that matters, but instead how you care for the ones who will suffer when you leave. Funerals are the gathering of people who will miss you and then comfort one another, offering support. In the end, the people who are most affected by death are those who live with the memory and the pain of losing someone to death.
Memory and Pain. Two of the most significant consequences of death that the living must face. The memories of the loved one and the constant reminders that they see in everyday life. The pain of the gap in their life and how unbearable it is to not see the person ever again. They usually coincide, for example a memory can be preserved in a photograph and whenever you see it, the pain of all the memories is too great. Yet still we are all expected to move on with our grief, and get over it.
So now my acceptance of death almost seems selfish. As if I am going to lay down my life without a care in the world or with any thought of what may happen if I am gone.
Fight?
Just because I accepted that I am dying, it doesn't mean that I am just going to hand over my life. What a pointless waste. Everyone is dying anyway: each second of life brings you closer to your final day, final minute, final seconds.
Why not use this gift of acceptance and start doing something. Protect the ones I love, say goodby properly, even evade my own death?
When I said I was dying, it was true, I am dying. But it is not a disease or a sickness. I am dying because I am running out of time. It seems that unlike so many others before me who have passed, my life has been cut short, on purpose. A gang of murderers would love to kill me. Why? At the age of sixteen it seems that my life has led me to the path of a hidden world, one where backstabbers hide on every corner, where lies spread in every conversation, where trust is just a five letter word with no meaning at all.
London, 2076: save your souls.
The words are printed everywhere, on every board, poster, mobile, computer, building, home.
Nothing is private anymore. Everyone is linked to one network through your computer, laptop, tablet and mobile. All your data is stored on this one network that was supposedly the most secure network ever created with thousands of codes, passwords and security levels to trip up the most confident hacker. Everybody's secrets are kept safe, uploaded onto a network. Even when you die, you are uploaded to a computer drive, where you're whole life on the computer and mobile phone is stored: all documents, web search history etc. A footprint of the person who once lived. For what purpose, no one knows. We all just agreed to it, being able to keep all information safe from one another was a temptation too irresistible.
It was all safe until one day, someone decided to lock down the system, hack into it, experiment, breaching the security that had been put into place. That was the day the whole world went into chaos. Every single person could have there secrets discovered.
If you are wondering now who that person was, well it was me. And now at sixteen years old, my life just beginning, I now have a death sentence out on my head by the government. And all the public want me dead too. For breaching the security, there is no trust in anyone, no trust at all. If a sixteen year old could break in and see whatever they liked about anyone, why couldn't anyone else? The people had lost faith in the government and in each other. It was every man and woman for themselves.
But some people want to find me, hunt me down, make me tell them how I broke into the most complicated and powerful hard drive in the world, that contained everything you wanted to know about anything. Power. That's all they want, and are willing to kill in order to get it. To kill me.
So I am on the run. Never stopping, with only one companion, Tilly, my dog. Not the best duo ever, but only in stories do heroes exist. In real life you are lumbered with your own problems and expected to figure them out. That's what I've got to do anyway, otherwise I won't be around for much longer. For now I'm just going to keep running, not looking back but looking forwards.

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Hi,
Thanks for reading!
This is just a small introduction to the story and please comment your opinions on whether it's good, bad, needs improving etc. All comments are very welcome and appreciated and hopefully I'll update soon with the first chapter, if it's worth continuing.
Sophia