Runaway Skills

Earth, 2199. Humankind was reduced by a chemic-radioactive war. The fight for survival relies on finding skilled people, and there is a reward for them. The Treceiver was created to find those people. They were called “Skills”.

Rash Lyons likes basketball. He was playing when he was noticed by Don Hawke’s Treceiver, which burnt itself with a reading overload. Don get ready to catch Rash, but someone saw him and sounded the alarm. Don tries to pursuit, but without knowing who to pursuit, decides to retreat and try again later.

Don is in his base. He gets a new Treceiver, newer than that last one, which will point the Skill. He goes back to the center square and find lots of Skills, but no one like that of before. He returns to the basketball court, but finds nothing. He finds some Skills at a boulevard, and decides to come back there later.

Rash is working, selling camping hardware, when his boss tells him to deliver a portable stove in the east zone of the center. Rash stores it on a backpack and leaves the store.

The Treceiver blips. Don looks to the screen, and locates the Skill leaving the store. He starts walking, to not call people’s attention, waiting for an opportunity.

Rash looks around, deciding which way to go, and notices the hunter, the same of before, and decides to run away from him and start walking, through the crowd.

Don follows the Skill, and some minutes later the crowd opens up some space between him and the Skill. He quickly draws his hurl balls’ launcher and shoots to catch the Skill.

Rash hears the shot and turn back. He jumps on instinct, avoiding the hurl balls, and starts running away.

Don sees the Skill escaping, and haves no choice but pursuit him. He curses the equipment’s weight, but he can’t simply toss it.

Rash runs to an alley and climbed the fire stairs until the top.

Don loses the Skill, and changes the Treceiver filter to infra-red. He locates someone running over the buildings. He pursues him, by the street, always keeping an eye on the infra-red.

Rash notices that the hunter is still after him, and sees a junkyard. Runs there, he needed to miss that hunter.

Don follows the target, entering a junkyard. Walking carefully, he uses the infra-red to locate the Skill. He takes a glance. Rows and rows of rusty cars, buses and motorcycles. The infra-red locates a heat inside a bus . Don draws the paralyzing gun and goes check the heat. Rushing by the bus’s corridor, until he reaches the back of the bus, where the infra-red located the heat. Don gets astonished. It was a lit portable stove. Mad with the failure, he gets out the bus. But then, something pulls him. Up. A big magneto. It attracted his equipment, his bulletproof jacket, everything with him. And he was pulled up to a great height.

The hunter was harmless. Rash leaves the magneto’s controls, and goes to the stove, to recover it. He didn’t even looked up. He was free. Whistling, he plays Beethoven. That’s why they called him Rex, the King.