Eduardo1970
Chicago, 2162.
Thirty-one years after the Mainframe fell. Thirty-one years after a ten-year-old girl walked out of a trading floor carrying a dead man's device and the weight of something no child should have had to do.
The world did not rebuild itself the way the survivors hoped it would. Chicago is still Chicago - broken, violent, alive in the stubborn way that cities survive when they probably shouldn't. The gangs control the sectors. The Hybrids still walk the streets at night, executing an instruction that has no destination. There is no government. There is no order. There is only endurance.
Carrie Webb is forty-one years old. She lives alone in a cabin by a lake in Wisconsin, far from the city that made her and broke her and asked too much of her before she was old enough to understand what was being asked. She grows her own food. She filters her own water. She splits her own wood.
She has the C.L.A.W. on her wrist - the same device that Eddie Marsh built in a rented apartment in Austin, that Stevie carried for twenty years, that she inherited on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade the day she lost the only person, besides her dead father, who had ever chosen to protect her.
For thirty-one years, it has been enough.
Until now.