The earth has been ravaged by war, famine, disease, and devastating storms. In less than a decade, the population has dwindled from six billion to less than 42,000. There is no law or order. The grid is gone. Everyone is struggling to survive. My name is T1/4GO10, and I am what you would call a computer, albeit a very unique, special one, helping those who find me to survive in this harsh world. Strange things have been happening lately, according to my last user, who has carried me with her through the streets, in and out of abandoned places and fights, and all over the place in general. She calls herself Frost, Zoe, Shadow, Amelia Fade, Katelyn Hyde, Jordan Foster, Jade, Shay-Ann (Shay), Mickey, Venice, and a whole slew of other names, depending on what groups she is in or nearby. Personally, if a computer can say personally, I think her name should be Frost, that being the name by which she was first introduced to me. Judging from what she has said to me and what I have heard her say to her fellow humans, I have pieced together her adventures and made a program for organizing and wording them correctly. I believe I have also found a good place to start, as well. Ahem, In the ruins of the once thriving small city of New Weston…

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

In the ruins of the once thriving small city of New Weston, a girl called Frost stood on the top of an old skyscraper. She knew the gang wouldn't follow her up, because they were all too big and heavy and didn't know where the weak spots were. She was balancing on a support beam, on what used to be the forty first floor, in the middle of a windstorm, carrying a small sack full of stolen items.

There was a group of about seven burly teenagers circling below, on the closest intact floor to the top. She had been stealing from them for days, and this was the first time they had noticed. She reached the other end of the support beam and sat on the edge of the small platform where she had been keeping her few belongings for her brief stay in New Weston.

She had stolen a few new belongings, including a big black satchel that likely used to be for schoolbooks, and which now held some of her more essential items. Once she was settled on the edge, Frost took inventory of what she had stolen. So far, there were: one box of protein bars(made especially for women. No wonder they were unopened), an oldish looking loaf of bread (almost expired, but of course she'd eat it anyway), five cooked rats (very plentiful in the cities), a partially used box of matches (an epic win), and a few bottles of water (some filled, some not, but she'd need all of them soon).

There was one small thing that she couldn't quite place, a black rectangular thing on a thin string necklace. It was about the size of her thumb, and it looked like there might be a lid on one end. She had no idea what it could be or why someone would make a necklace out of it, but it looked important, so she kept it anyway. She had no idea how important it really was.

Of course, Frost wasn't thinking about the importance of small mysterious objects just then. She was thinking about how to evade the gang members and get out of New Weston unnoticed and not pursued. There had been a number of times when she had moved off to a new location only to find the enemies she had made in the previous one still mad and chasing her. She had even been caught once, but luckily, one of her captors had thought she was his long-lost cousin and decided to let her go. There were moments when she had considered just settling down and joining or starting a group of like-minded survivors, but those moments were small and usually laughed at by their thinker. Frost devoured about a third of the bread loaf, calling it lunch, then got all her stuff ready for a quick getaway.

She took out a pocket knife and carved her logo into a softer patch of metal. It was a bird (some sort of raptor, like an eagle or a hawk, though she never gave it a definite species) perched on a line that curved to form an eye with the planet earth in place of the pupil and iris. Above that, she carved a snowflake, to show that her name was Frost when she had dwelled there. Under it, she made a tiny stick figure with a big realistic shadow, to show that her next name would be Shadow. To the left of it she carved her previous city, Frankfort, and to the right she put her new direction, south.

She didn't know why she did it, as it made her easier to track, but she figured that if she ever wanted someone to find her, say, a friend, though those were rare, she'd tell them to look for her marks. What she didn't know was that she was already being followed.

She waited for an hour or so, then checked below to see if anyone was there. There wasn't a soul in sight, but she knew these types. They wouldn't give up so easily. There were most likely guards posted everywhere, as well as clever ambushes set strategically around the building. She would have to get away on the rooftops.

She backed as far as was reasonable, and started running. With this boost, she made it all the way to the next skyscraper, this one shorter and much more intact than the previous one. She did this three more times, once landing on the very edge and teetering, but pitching herself forward at the last moment to land on her stomach. When she reached the last one, breathing hard, she turned to look behind her. Nothing. She found the stairwell of the ten-story building she was now on, and dashed down, only tripping twice.

She was on the outskirts of the city now, and could see the overgrown forest just past an alley between what used to be some kind of motel and an unrecognizable building covered in ivy. She started toward it cautiously, looking all around her to make sure no one was there, then ran into the trees, stopping just inside to look back at New Weston. There was a hill close by, and she would go there to check her compass for south.

Frost actually had three compasses, to make sure her bearings were correct. She would find, or make, a flat surface, set them all side by side, and see which two faced north and which one didn't. She had noticed this phenomenon once, after throwing out a supposedly bad compass for a newer one, only to have the new one point east instead of north. She had looked for the old compass, and found that they pointed in different directions. She had gone, found a trader, and bartered for a third compass. One of her three unfailingly pointed the wrong way, but it was a different one each time. She started her trek southward.

A few days of walking, climbing, running, and hunting morphed into a few weeks, and she decided that she would find something very high, climb it, and scan the countryside for some city ruins or one of those trader camps where she could get some more food. She had been living off of roasted squirrels for a while, and her body was screaming for something other than meat.

Frost climbed up a hill, then up the tallest tree on the hill. She looked out over the horizon, then swept her gaze around the land closer by. She spotted what looked like a settlement of some kind partially hidden by another hill. She vaulted down the tree and set off to the buildings.

When she reached the closest one, she noticed that there was no sign of life anywhere near. It was kinda creepy, but it was shelter, and she had noticed that it was going to rain soon. She still had time to pick and choose the best one to stay in, though. She peered trough the doorway of the first one she came to. It was wet in one corner, and the roof was caving in. Nope. Most of the others were also in various stages of dilapidation. She went back to one of the better ones she had seen.

It was a larger, and had six rooms. One smelled terrible, and was clearly once the restroom. Another's roof had caved in completely, another was full of filing cabinets that she couldn't open, and another was just concrete walls and ceiling, empty. One was large, and the wall where the door would have been was mostly gone. The last one, the one she wanted to stay in, was pretty much empty. There was a big, blank, black box in one corner, and a large metal bookcase in the other. The metal case was nailed to the wall, but she wasn't sure what kept the box where it was. Maybe it was just so heavy it couldn't be moved. She planned to sleep in this room, and light a fire in the one without a wall. She also planned to find out why the black box was there.

After the fire was lit and her bedroll was laid out, Frost tried to move the box. She pulled at it, but couldn't get a good enough grip. She tried fitting her crowbar (yes, she carried a crowbar in her backpack) in between it and the wall, and when that didn't work, she tried fitting a piece of paper between it and the wall to see how close it was to the wall. It was pretty much glued to the wall, she found.

Giving up, she got ready for bed. This consisted of running her worn out toothbrush over her teeth viciously until they weren't fuzzy feeling anymore, taking her jacket off to fold up as a pillow, and taking off her survival necklaces, as she couldn't sleep wearing them. In the absence of anything better to put them on, she reached over and plopped them onto the black box. When she set down the one with the mysterious black rectangle on the end, the black box started beeping.

2: Chapter II

She sat up and looked at it. A tiny blue light was flashing on the side of it, and a section on the top seemed to be lighting up. She watched as what seemed to be a touch screen appeared. Words came onto it:

T1/4GO10 – Please input password: ____________________

Password input detected: **************

Password accepted.

Logging in.

T1/4GO10 – What procedure do you wish to perform?

Please insert pin drive.

Unknown request: Please insert pin drive.

T1/4GO10 – What procedure do you wish to perform?

Please insert the pin drive.

Unknown request: Please insert the pin drive.

Open the pin drive plug-in option.

Please insert the pin drive.

Frost heard a whirring noise, and a USB plug in thingy popped out the side of the black box. More words came:

Pin drive plug-in opened. Unknown request: Please insert the pin drive.

T1/4GO10 – What procedure do you wish to perform?

She tried to think of what it could mean. Clearly there were two things in the computer (she decided that the black box was a computer), one that was the actual computer, and the other that was called 'T1/4GO10'. The second one kept saying to insert a pin drive, but the computer didn't recognize the request. The second one seemed to know that telling it to open the pin drive plug-in would make the USB thing appear, though, so it probably knew that telling it to plug in the pin drive wouldn't work. Why tell it to, then?

Maybe it was talking to a program that it thought was there, but was gone now? No, didn't computers automatically know what was and wasn't there? Maybe it was talking to something outside the computer. Maybe . . . was it talking to her?

Her attention was drawn back to the screen when she saw:

Open user keyboard.

User keyboard opened.

T1/4GO10 – What procedure do you wish to perform?

A touch screen keyboard came up underneath the text that was already there. Frost considered just leaving then and camping out in a different building instead of doing the crazy idea that had come into her head, but dismissed the inclination. She put her hands above the keyboard and slowly typed in:

Are you talking to me?

Yes. Please insert the pin drive.

Unknown requests: Are you talking to me? And: Yes. And: Please insert the pin drive.

User1, T1/4GO10 – What procedure do you wish to perform?

Frost considered what it could mean. The term 'pin drive' was familiar to her, it brought up an image of a laptop with a purple thing plugged into the side. Wait . . . the little black rectangle? It did look like it had a lid.

She took it off the necklace it had been on, and pulled on the end that looked like a lid. It popped right off, revealing that it was a perfect match to the USB plug-in thing. She slowly reached over and inserted the rectangle.

Thank you. Please wait while I deal with this stupid machine.

Unknown requests: Thank you. And: Please wait while I deal with this stupid machine.

User1, T1/4GO10 – What procedure do you wish to perform?

Open desktop. Close user keyboard. Close current page.

Closing keyboard. Closing current page. Opening desktop.

Frost's keyboard disappeared, as did the screen where the computer had been talking. In its place came a background picture of a big green bird with red on the edges sitting in a rainforest. Little file shortcuts popped up on the left side, and a little bar appeared along the bottom of the screen. Speakers came out of the black box in a similar fashion to the USB plug.

A computerized male voice came from the speakers, “Hello, User One, I am T1/4GO10. Could you tell me your real name? Just calling you User One gets so boring.”

Frost was stunned, but managed to stutter out, “I-I'm Frost.”

“Good to meet you, Frost. Why are you here? You clearly aren't one of the scientists who used to work here.”

“I'm camping for the night in this building. Are you . . . the computer?” Frost had vague memories of technology from a long time ago, but couldn't remember if computers were supposed to be self-aware.

“No, I am not the computer. I am T1/4GO10. The computerized being contained in the pin drive you brought with you. You may shorten my name however you like, since humans typically have trouble addressing me with the entire thing.”

“Um, I'll call you T1, I guess.”

“I've been called that before, by plenty of different people. Tell me, most humans have a hard time adjusting to how self-aware I act. Why don't you?”

“I – um, are you not supposed to be self-aware? Because, I can't really remember if computers shouldn't talk on their own.”

“I see. I am aware that the world is in a crisis currently, governments are gone and the population is miniscule compared to it's size when the Earth prospered. How old were you when this began, and how old are you now?”

“I wasn't born when it started, but all the really bad stuff hit when I was, like, three or four.” a crash of thunder from outside alerted Frost to just how bad the storm was that she was sheltering from.

“So you must be sixteen or seventeen now, if I am correct?”

“Yeah, I think I'm sixteen. Why are you asking?”

“I am a collector of information, and I like to know things about my users. Would you like me to give a scientist's theory on how these things happened?”

“I reckon I wouldn't understand a word of it,”

“Very well, then, I shall withhold the explanation until further notice. Based off of my observations of my other users, you should be sleeping right now, Frost.”

“But I don't want to sleep right now.”

“Too bad, as a human would say. To encourage your sleep, I am shutting down until the morning.”

“What? No! Don't shut off! Come back, T1!” Frost yelled at the black box. The screen turned off, and the speakers went back in. The USB also sank into the blank surface, taking the pin drive with it.

With a frustrated sigh, she sat back and glared at it. For one last effort, she banged a fist on it's top, and when that didn't do anything, she went back to her 'bed' and laid down. She didn't suspect she'd be able to fall asleep very quickly, but had underestimated how tired she was. She drifted off in moments.