Chapter One: Getting Up
Chapter Two: Where I Live
Chapter Three: The Walk
Chapter Four: School
Chapter Five: Introducing my Friends, the Merry Pranksters!
Chapter Six: Walking to Mom's
Chapter Seven: Mom’s House
Chapter Eight: It Began on Constitution Hill
Chapter Nine: Attack of the Awknerds!
Chapter Ten: No Awknerds Were Harmed
Chapter Eleven: The Breaking Shadstorm
Chapter Twelve: Where I Envy Grilled Cheese
Chapter Thirteen: Doom! Doom! Doom! Where I Want to go to School! The End Must be Nigh!
Chapter Fourteen: The Game is a Foot
Chapter Fifteen: Uncomfortable Revelations!
Chapter Sixteen: WAITAMINUTE!
Chapter Seventeen: The Healing Power of Popcorn
Chapter Eighteen: The Lessons Learned Before Maven
Chapter Nineteen: No Haven From Maven
Chapter Twenty: Meeting Maven
Chapter Twenty-One: And Then I was Roasted Alive and Served Up With a Worm
Chapter Twenty-Two: That Which has Been Set in Motion…
Most kids in Jefferson had a hiding place, a fort or a hideout. Except they were not exceptionally hidden. Quite the opposite. The adults had made rules about our hideouts, forts and secret bases. Once we were ten, we were allowed to build them outside of Shadwell and its gates. They had to be known to the adults and they had to be within 1 1/2 kilometers - less than a mile for you Earther Americans! - from town.
The Merry Pranksters built a treehouse. Sorta. There were trees, or things at least that stand tall and have branches and things that are approximately leaves on Jefferson. We called them trees. We had found a star tree when we were ten and built in the middle of the branches where normally the flower grows. Our tree was too old to flower, but the five radially symmetric main branches made for a perfect place for our fort.
Over the last couple years, especially during summer, we added to our secret base. We had a dry moat: standing water on Jefferson was an invitation for taxitos! And, therefore, extraordinarily STUPID! And, yes, we did put in sufficient drainage to make sure there would never be any standing water. We also added a wall and a draw bridge. The main room was up 6 meters above the ground - What is 6 meters?! 20 feet! You're going to make me start muttering here! - and the trunk had a spiral stair case around. We even had built it with a solar powered air blower to pressurize the room: air blowing out would keep the taxitos from getting in. The blower was powered by the solar tiles we'd designed in Maker Class. It also acted as an air conditioner.
After the robopocalypse, many things become far, far easier to do. So long as people had access to them. We, on the frontier of humanity on an alien world, definitely did. I didn't and don't know if kids on Earth had access to automated manufacturing, but on Jefferson, anyone over the age of ten had full access. If a kid screwed up and made tons of junk, it was recycled and the kid's access restricted. We had never made that mistake. Some kids had. Poor Johnie S. T. Walker was still smarting from that mistake two years later.
All of this and the emergency beacon in it - just in case something went wrong and our boosters could not reach back to town - were known to the adults. And, yes, of course, it's location!
What the adults didn't know about were all the nooks and crannies we'd left in the inner most of the two walls. The wall was very thick: you got away with it when you have bots to build it! And in spots there were small chambers for hiding things in. The nooks were hidden by being made to be the same as the rest of the wall. Tap it twice in the right spot and the nook opened.
Over the next couple days, we hid food, extra clothes and a couple backpacks.
What the other Merry Pranksters didn't know was I had made another nook that I only knew about. It also had a faraday cage around it. This is a wire mesh prevents radio waves from getting out. Inside that cage were five clean boosters. These were ones our parents did not have access to and could not be able to track. They were not registered to us. We needed them.
Had we not had them, our little prank and adventure would have ended as soon as it started. The parents, Marines and BII/Bees would have just tracked our boosters and found us nickety split.
We couldn't have that!
I knew some day, some time, I was going to need those clean boosters to do...something. That day seemed to have come.
Sooo...
On the morning of the day, I knew I needed to add the cherry to the plan.
I walked up to Aitan and asked for a favor.
He was thrilled.
All I did was ask him to keep an eye on Maven and her Derplicates. If he saw anything weird, he was to go tell an adult. I said I had a feeling something was going to happen and given all the bad blood between Maven and the Merry Pranksters, I didn't want to get involved. And someone might say we were involved then.
Aitan had went pasty white at the thought of spying on Maven. This is Maven we're talking about. Aitan was not on her hit list, but he saw what happened to the derplicates. Any rational male of any age would have found that horrifying.
However, at the chance to do me a favor, a favor he might call in, a favor that might lead to...yetch. Let me gag for a moment. Okay. Wiped my mouth clean. Rinsed it out. My stomach needs new contents.
Don't worry. Aitan was not going to betray me to the grown ups. He was not going to get Derplicated by Maven: she was DEFINITELY NOT interested in Aitan.
After he agreed and agreed to leave me and the Merry Pranksters out of it, I gave Aitan a hug. I think I made his year.
The package was in place, Maven was going to make an attempt at the sodium, Aitan was in waiting and my friends were gathered for lunch. We were set. We were ready.
I had just taken a bite of my lunch...and then...an alarm sounded.