Seyoura Phalcon was her name. Tall, slender and rather beatiful if one
bothered looking past those cold, blue eyes. Her hair was unkempt,
in wild disarray, showing the amount of attention it had been receiving.
For Seyoura had more important things on her mind. Like where the cops
were, and more immediatly, who this stranger was that had lifted her up
out of view of her persuers.

She looked at him, staring face to face with the man, in the narrow 
crawlspace in the vents above the shopping mall where someone had
first spotted her. He was the mechanic she had noted earlier in the
day, tall and incredibly thin, his head shaven except for a crest of
spiky blond hair, the front part flopped down over washed-out blue eyes.
Black pants, bare-chested underneath a black leather jacket, the left
sleeve torn off to display his augmented arm.

While Seyoura got her breath back, the mechanic pulled the rope up and
placed the grill back in place, the elongated multijointed digits of his
prosthetic hand blurring over the fastenings.

"I guess I ought to thank you, " Seyoura said, catching her breath back.
"No thanks needed. At least, not yet. We're not out of the woods just yet,"
replied the stranger in a rock steady voice. "Let's get going."

"Are you sure the cops aren't following us?" asked Seyoura, wondering 
whether this guy was as clued-up as he made himself out to be, for she 
could look after herself.

"Honey, I'm the centre of the biggest piece of interactive artwork you can
imagine, and I want to give you at least a peek of it. Don't worry about
the cops, I'm keeping an eye on them."

He gestured with his augmented arm, a weirdly balletic movement and Seyoura
noticed a little rat-sized machine, bristling with sensors fore and aft, 
clinging to the ribber steel of the roof of the duct. He was plugged into
a half dozen like it, or so he liked to claim anyway. They started moving.

The little rat-machine followed them as they moved with the dumb persistance
of a pet animal as they went down the dark tunnel, its clawed sensors 
ticking and scratching overhead. Seyoura felt a kind of dreamy floating
detachment, as if she was plugged into a saga instead of real life. Stories
of people living in these ducts filtered through to her mind from outside
sounded fantastic yet credible.

"On Earth we say free as air, but out here breathing time is calculated down
to the last Rand and cent. So its a seriously radical thing, being a 
'freebreather'."

"You sound like you aprove," commented Seyoura.

"Sure, not that I didn't have a choice, y'know. But yeah, its ideologically
correct as far as I'm concerned. Urbis is super-artificial, everything man
made and regulated. Ever plant in the city has a machine code, you know that?
No wilderness, no randomness. That's what my machines are for, easpecially
the predators. Put some adrenaline surge into the routines, some of them
unpredictably. We've three levels in our brains, we should use them all."

The talk was strange, half slang, half artistic theory, switching from a
`Badlands' drawl to almost no accent and back again. It was as if he were
trying to convert her to some obscure faith. She said, at random, "Predators?"
and remembered the one that had jumped the cop.

"Thats what we're going to see. Hear that noise ahead? It's started. I 
started it when I picked you up, just for you."

Suzy had to run to keep up with the mans eager lope. Light and noise grew
in intensity. They came out onto a narrow balcony, squeezed beside the 
humming multigridded maw of an air recirculator. Three floors below was a
vast circular floor. People at at clusters of cafe tables, wandered like 
grazing-animals between market stalls. They were at the same level as the
pulsating fountains' peaks which spurted from sprawling freeform pools.

The man gestured, pointing to the far side of the floor, up above everyone
else. Seyoura barely glimpsed it, an elusive star of light in the middle
air far across the plaza. It drifted down lazy as a snowflake, kissed the
blue water of a pool - and promptly exploded into a vast bank of white foam
that spewed across the entire surface of the pool in a moment, was sucked
into the fountains and spattered sky-high. Faint shrieks, mostly of laughter,
as people scrambled out of the way of foam spilling over the banks of the 
pool, spreading its white tide across the plaza's multi-coloured tiles. Other
pools were erupting in banks of froth too and the air was sunddenly full of
drifting foam, like a blizzard of sticky snow.

"Little machine, no bigger than your hand. Catalytic, " was the comment
passed by her friend, as he touched Seyoura's arm and pointed.

There Seyoura saw a human-sized metal spider skitter out of one of the other
tunnels that punctured the rim of the plaza. People scattered before it.
It pounced, caught and cradled its victim and squirted her with symbolic
blood, dropped her and went after new prey. There were other spiders in the
plaza now, sending colliding wavefronts of panicy people, tangling and
untangling amongst foamy pools, sliding and slipping, swallowed by 
burgeoning banks of bubbles. He started to rattle on about some kind of art
theory.

"This is art?" Seyoura questioned, uncertain whether or not to trust this 
madman. At least he seemed friendly enough up until now.

"Sure. I call it `Urban Terrorism'. Back in the twentieth century when
technology was spreading like ghostweed through every layer of society,
individuals found out they had the power to hold entire cities to ransom,
if he or she was fanatical and cunning enough. You had every kinda of 
splinter group resorting to violently aimless protest, from groups which
believed that animals had the same civil rights as humans to tiny
religious sects who figured it was better to blow infidels to bits than to
waste time converting them. Of course, that wasn't really art. For one 
thing, they never bothered signing their work."

She questioned whether the cops would be looking for them yet, and for a
reply, received and indication towards those that were trying to atend to
the chaos caused so far, totally ignoring Seyoura and him, obviously more
worried about whether or not the tourists were happy or not than anything
else. No one believed anything could go wrong.

"Come, " he motioned towards a capsule on its way to the Space Administration
Complex. They rode without seeing a redskin and then dived back to the service
levels again. The prosthetic hand came into use again, the lock being undone
by it. They put on pressure suits and cycled through the airlock into the
tunnels that threaded beyond beneath the spacefield itself. Finally they
took a shaft to the surface and rose immediatly next a delta-shaped lifting
surface flaring out from a wasp-waisted body. The nose was sculpted to
accomodate air breathing ducts for the engine, for this was a new breed of
ship, designed for atmostpheric as well as space flight. Even with a dozen
fat chemical boosters on, this was still the most beatiful thing Seyoura had
seen in a long time.

"Come, lets go."

--------------------------------------------------------A. Thomas - 7A: Dk

Worked out from the idea of a background similar to that of the movie
"Blade Runner" where the healthy and rich moved to another world besides
that of Earth where everything was nigh perfect. 

Idea for Seyoura: A character played by me during a role-playing session.
The unknown: a generic netrunner taken from the game CyberPunk by Steve
             Jackson Games.