The Second Archives

On Hold Feature: L.E.A.P. Chapter One: Tears and Terrors

Glad you came back for chapter one! Hopefully this one will be longer, I thought the prologue would make two or three pages (at least) but apparently I was mistaken. Google docs leads you astray, I suppose. (It was two or three or more Google docs pages) So I will not make that mistake again this chapter. *Changes font size* There. That should make my goals more realistic.

Well, welcome back! Hope you enjoy!

For those of you who don’t want to go back and see what date it was last chapter, it was January 8, 2110.

Read on!

---/I/---

---January 9, 2110---

The boy lies in his grey bed, a rather rare commodity in these dire days, crying. His chest heaves, as he sobs uncontrollably. The day before, he had been like a robot - walking up to his house, getting the key out from the secret hiding place. Unlocking the door. He had mechanically walked in.

He had mechanically closed the door, locked it, and staggered to the small bedroom his entire family once shared. The apartment was small - a tiny pantry, a bedroom, and a kitchen/dining room they used for everything else. As well, of course, as a dinky washroom.

It wasn’t deluxe, but it was the best his family could get. They had moved out of a slightly smaller apartment when their baby was born, later telling their son it was because they knew they had needed more room, even though their prior house would have been good enough. It was about five years after the move that his father had caught xilece. It had quickly infiltrated his system, killing him in less than a week. Everything bad had happened after the move.

Maybe if they hadn't moved, his parents wouldn't be dead. His dad wouldn't have died, his mom likely would have lived. Maybe they could have lived as one small, happy, family.

Underneath the boy's sobs, he mumbled things. Words, incoherent sentences, telling himself that it was his fault, or it was his parents' fault, or it was the fault of the man who had killed his mom, or it was the mega-corporation Xero's fault, or it was the fault of someone -anyone- who could possibly be blamed for his parents' untimely deaths.

He could just stay there, for days, weeks even, crying. His body shuddering and tears falling consistently, without end. Nobody cared where he was, few people even knew the boy existed. He would only be a part of society after he turned sixteen, at the age he would be employed at one of Xero's multiple, never-ending jobs.

Until then, though, he would be looked after by his parents, and Xero would supply him with one XeroCredit per week. That single credit would go towards supplying food for his family, or possibly something else – but he'd have to save it up for a while to have enough to have that happen. A day's worth of food ration was one XeroCredit, but more or less everything else would cost much more. The bed he was sitting in, sobbing, for example, would have been hundreds of XeroCredits. He was lucky, very lucky.

But he also was well aware that people would come. When a house seemed abandoned, people would come. Homeless people, who would claim the house as their own and violently ward off others, and people who would just take anything they could, anything that wasn't impossible to move.

Wealth was possession. In the totalitarian government known as Xero, it was impossible for someone to gain enough money to become powerful – XeroCredits were accredited to someone's XeroCredit account, and Xero could take away wealth as easily as it could give the gift of credits. Besides that, there was always power by controlling the government, but it was nearly impossible to get a high ranking within the mysterious company.

The boy, Theodore, was aroused from his sobbing, his rambling thoughts, by a sound. Whether it simply the wind, or a rabid animal, clawing at the window, his tear-streaked head came up, his body straightened, and he immediately became silent, what his parents had always taught him to do if he was in danger. Silence was surprise, silence was an advantage.