The reporter stood on the streets, massive lines of people behind him. Heavily armored cops watched the lines, keeping the order. Some Cops were speaking with the people, looking at ID cards, scanning the cards, directing the line.

The reporter watched the scene for a moment then turned to his camera man.

"Okay, Jake," he said. "Let’s get this bullshit done so I can go home."

"You remember the pitch they gave you?"

"I got it all up here," he said tapping his head. "Let’s just record this report then get the hell out of here. I’m tired of pretending to be some stupid guerrilla reporter. I’ve got a bunch of zoning reports I need to get in tomorrow so the directors can all finalize the grids for L.A."

"I hear ya," Jake said as he turned on the camera. "It’s all you."

"Wait," the reporter said. "I hear some choppers coming. Let’s try to time this for when they fly over. It’ll look good and really send the message home, don’t you think?"

"I think you’re getting the bug for this."

"Fuck off."

The Jake held up his hand and the reporter stood still, plastering his best imitation of happiness across his face. Then Jake pointed to him.

"I’ve been registered, have you?" asked the camera. "If not, time is running out." Just then the helicopters flew overhead as they patrolled the skies. Jake gave the thumbs up for the timing. "A year ago the corporate states agreed to their new boundaries and formed the multicorporate subsidiary, Global Uni-Ventures, which will act as the management council for all corp states, and now a final deadline for registering for legal citizen status has been set. This process, called The Register, is simple and painless."

He turned to the lines of people behind him and held his hand out. Jake turned the camera and slowly zoomed in on them.

"Just come to one of the more than one hundred thousand registration centers world wide and after scanning and recording each person’s retina a new, unique record is created in the G.U.V.’s database."

Jake zoomed in on one of the people in line as they leaned into a small disc. The registrant didn’t press all the way but held their eye over the center and then a light started flashing. For a second the light held solid then went out altogether. One of the officials at the table said something to the registrant, handing him small plastic stick.

"The monetary incentive for registering," the reporter continued, "is 150,000 credits of the new global currency, each credit equal to the old US dollar, helped get many people to register early."

Jake slowly zoomed out as the registrant walked away from the table and brought the reporter back into view.

"But human nature can not be bought and many still have waited until the last possible moment. G.U.V. has reiterated the seriousness of having legal citizen status and are urging everyone to come to the closest registration center before the deadline ran out at the end of this month. Have you registered yet? ¬"

He pointed to his eye and made his smile even larger, if that was possible.

"I have."

He held for a moment while Jake counted up on three fingers.

"That’s it," Jake said. "Good job. If you keep this up you’re going to get a new posting as Communications Director."

The reporter rolled his eyes.

"Okay, let’s get the hell out of here."

Jake slipped the tiny camera into his pocket and the two of them headed down the street away from the registration line. Some shouting from the cops watching the line drew the reporter’s attention. He looked over his shoulder and saw the cops jostling people into a straight line and yelling at them to move along.

As he turned his head back he barely had time to brace himself as a tall, lanky youth with shaggy hair knocked into him. The youth was engaged in some heated discussion with another grungy teen who was slightly shorter and they hadn’t seemed to notice they’d almost knocked him on his ass.

"I don’t know if this new organization is going to fix the people, Jake," he said as he watched the two teens go.

Dayton glanced over his shoulder, having heard the reporter and the glare he gave the man sent him on his way.

Dayton grabed Mongoose and stopped him.

"I’m telling you, Mongoos," Dayton said quietly but urgently, "if you do this we’ll never see each other again."

"Unless you do it too. Come on. Everybody is starting fresh."

Dayton tilted his head and looked at Mongoose, his eyes stern.

"This is isn’t starting fresh," he admonished his friend. "This whole thing has been engineered to--"

"So what?" Mongoose said, throwing his hands up, tired of all the doomsday talk Dayton inherited from his father. "It’s no worse than it was. Besides, $150,000, or credits or whatever they are now... my folks never saw that kind of money in three years pay, combined. Not that I ever paid attention."

"Then you should know better than me that what this Register is is nothing more than these guys at the top--"

Mongoose crossed his arms and shook his head.

"Here we go again."

Dayton stood rigid at that comment, confounded at Mongoose’s continued disbelief at what was really going on.

"What?" Mongoose asked. "So, your dad’s work may have been, in a roundabout way, involved in Ragnarok. But this whole rich-against-the-rest-of-us conspiracy thing is getting old."

"He fucking died because of it!"

Dayton glared at Mongoose. Dayton was skinny but he had an intensity in him that scared even Mongoose, and everybody who ever met him agreed that Mongoose was the craziest, most fearless person they’d ever met.

Dayton saw that he was towering over Mongoose, and relaxed a bit. He glanced down the street and saw a couple of the cops watching the registration line looking their way. He put his arm around Mongoose’s shoulder and they slowly started towards the registration area again.

As soon as the cops turned back to watch the line and yell at the herd to keep moving, Dayton shoved Mongoose into an alley and jumped in after him.

"Jesus, Mongoose, think for yourself for a minute. Forget everything you’ve been told, forget the stupid money."

He put his hand on Mongoose’s shoulders. Not angry anymore, but he was holding Mongoose in place.

"Do you honestly think ten years from now your life will be any better than it was before all this?"

Mongoose looked away, considering Dayton’s words. He breathed deeply and Dayton knew his argument was starting to wear down Mongoose’s resolve. His friend looked up, eyes still questioning.

"G.U.V. is going to kill us like they say if we don’t register."

"That isn’t any different than these past couple of years."

"What the hell will we do?" Mongoose asked.

"We’ll be fine," Dayton said, smiling. Dayton’s temper and that smile were the only things that ever made Mongoose nervous. The temper scared him. The smile usually meant something good in the end. Getting to the end was generally a ride through hell, though. "We’ll wake the world up."

"That’s Chief talking," Mongoose said.

"Chief’s on the right path but he doesn’t have the vision. It won’t be easy, but then neither is registering."

Mongoose started pacing, rubbing his head. As Dayton watched him, he thought about Mongoose’s comment about Dayton parroting Chief.

They’d stumbled on Chief and his little band of moles about a week after Dayton’s world had been massacred. Mongoose was hardly ever home anyway and figured his parents wouldn’t notice and Dayton now had nowhere to go. They’d survived surprising well for a couple of tech-head teens who had never had to support themselves. Still, it was clear they weren’t going to last very long.

They were trying to plan how to break into warehouse to find food when a large, fuzzy man called to them.

"You boys think you’re gonna survive this little scheme?"

They bolted at the sound of his voice without even looking and within a few stepped realized they were surrounded. It wasn’t more than six or seven people but they all had guns.

"You should come with us," the burly man said. Dayton thought he looked like Sasquatch in survivalist gear and would have laughed if he weren’t so afraid he was about to die.

"Go with you where?" he asked. From the corner of his eye he saw Mongoose look at him. They’d been friends for so long Dayton even knew the expression: eyes open wide while the rest of his facial muscles seemed to be tensing and pulling outward from the center in all directions.

"We got a whole lotta folks like you all tucked away, working together to get through this thing. You’ll be safe, as long as you pull your weight."

It was an easy choice. It was clear they weren’t going to survive any other way so they’d joined with Chief and their gathering of refugees under the city.

When Dayton and Mongoose first joined Chief and his band there were only about thirty of them, living in the sewers and subway lines of Los Angeles. They’d managed to block off sections of the tunnels so there were only a few entrances, all easy to guard.

Now, almost six months later the range of tunnels and sewers had to be expanded to accommodate the nearly one thousand men, women and children. Chief managed to keep things organized and created a good structure for their little community and he was a fair man so everybody listened to him.

Especially Dayton.

Chief was not unlike his father. He didn’t have the technical mind of his father but he was thoughtful and studied information in the same way. He also had much to say about the current situation in the world and the direction things were going.

Eventually, Chief and his people weren’t just refugees trying to survive they were an actual force. They were also on the radar of the rebuilding security forces above ground. Chief was a persuasive man and Dayton liked much about his vision of the future. However, Dayton was beginning to think Chief’s vision wasn’t big enough. There were others, like Mongoose now pacing in front of him, who were tempted by the supposedly easier path of just registering and being swallowed by the new society.

Mongoose finally turned back to Dayton. He smirked and walked away from the registration line. Dayton followed him, walking quickly.

"You’re right about Chief," Mongoose said not looking at his friend. He didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Dayton was usually right. He never rubbed it in your face but being wrong as often as Mongoose was something he never got used to. "He doesn’t have the heart."

"His heart is in the right place."

"No, I mean his heart could blow any time," Mongoose said "He’s an old guy. Who else would look after all those people? I can’t let them depend on you without me covering your ass."

"You won’t regret this," Dayton said ignoring the jibe. "Now come on, I’ve got a couple leads I need your help with."

Mongoose stared at him.

"With all this going on?"

Dayton quickly ran down the street and ducked into another alley. Mongoose followed him and after a few turned and twists through streets that Mongoose still had trouble remembering Dayton stopped at a manhole cover.

He pulled a small bar from the inside of his jacket and shoved it into one of the small holes through the lid, angled it and pried the cover up just a bit.

"Grab the edge," Dayton grunted.

Mongoose slid his fingers under and together they pulled the cover off enough to slide it over and leave it half covering the hole into the bowels of the city.

"Go down," Dayton said.

Mongoose dropped into the hole cut through the city streets and started down the handholds buried in the side of the concrete lined tube. Dayton looked around quickly then started down himself. After his head had descended below the level of the street he poked the rod through a hole in the cover and dragged it back across.

After Dayton stepped onto the floor of the utility access tunnel he looked at Mongoose.

"This is it," he said. "This is really the last chance you have to go back to the masses."

Mongoose shrugged.

"I’m in the shit now," he said. "I’m serious when I said who would look after you."

"Asked," Dayton replied.

"What?"

"When you asked," Dayton said. "It may have been a rhetorical question, but it was a question none the less."

Dayton then turned and walked down the tunnel, nearly black at night save for the lights strung every hundred feet, power leached from the grid brought back online many months earlier.

Mongoose followed him.

"Always the technicalities," Mongoose said. "I’m getting tired of that."

"It’s the details that matter."

They walked in silence for a long time, Dayton guiding them through the maze of tunnels. Finally, they turned a corner and there was a steel door that Dayton yanked open. It creaked loudly as he forced it open and they stepped through. Dayton pulled hard to slam it shut and he heard the click of the latch closing on the other side.

Dayton tromped through the tunnel with Mongoose chasing after.

"You know, I get the whole revenge thing but you really think you’re going to find who-"

"The more I look the more I’ll find and someday I’ll know who they are," Dayton said matter of factly.

Mongoose shrugged and kept following. Dayton had a surety about him that was contagious. As long as Mongoose had known Dayton whatever he set his mind to was accomplished. He’d never seen Dayton fail. Not in the way most people thought of failure. Dayton, on the other hand, only succeeded ten percent of the time. But what Dayton considered a failure was something he was later proclaim a lesson. He’d brood on the minor set-back he faced for a little while. Sooner or later he’d emerge from it with new vigor and insight into what went wrong and he’d go after his goal again. Sometimes it took many failures for Dayton to finally proclaim victory.

When he did that, it was usually against all other’s expectation and only served to prove that Dayton had been right all along.

Mongoose came to accept Dayton’s obsessions as unavoidable.

They walked into an open chamber in the sewer. The whole thing had been outfitted as living quarters for what was about two hundred people, refugees from the world above. Some of the refugees cooked over fired. Others had gear covering them from head to toe. Armed to the teeth.

A girl of about eighteen huddled in a corner fiddling with a holocaster, the signal coming in and out. As Dayton and Mongoose walked into the area she smiled adoringly.

"Paul!" she yelled to him. "Can you help me with this again."

Dayton turned when he heard his name and smiled when he saw her. She was average in height and slender but from Dayton’s perspective was growing into curves in all the right places. Her face was round and skin slightly darkened from the mix of Asian and white American parents that had brought her into the world. Her eyes were large but still had that ever so slight downward curve of Asian-mixed blood. And dark. Some of the darkest eyes Dayton had ever gazed into. And he had spent many discussion gazing into them, barely paying attention to what her mouth was saying. Her lips were full but not thick or fat and they always seemed moist, which is probably why he was able to notice her mouth was even there while she rattled on about circuits and tapping into the signals coming from above.

Mongoose shouldered him, acting as if he were bumping into his friend as he continued past.

"Jenny says jump you just jump and hope it’s high enough."

"Shut up, asshole," Dayton said without looking away from Jenny. "Sure, Jenny."

As he moved towards her a large, older man grabbed his arm.

"You get it?"

The burly mass of Chief suddenly filled Dayton’s view and he stopped in his tracks. Dayton was not afraid of Chief but rather in awe of the man. He’d filled the role of father on many occasions and in many was better than the father who sired him. His real father had prepared him for the situation the world was in but hadn’t prepared him to survive in it.

Chief had done that over the past year.

Dayton held up a small metallic stick, about the size of a baby’s finger. Chief took it.

"What the hell took so long?"

"I got it. Alright?"

He stared Chief in the eyes for just a moment, then when he knew he was pushing the limit, Dayton moved around him and went to Jenny.

Mongoose stood beside Chief.

"I’d kick that kid’s ass if he wasn’t so damn good. What the hell was the hold up?"

"He was poking around some more for the guys who killed his folks, Chief," Mongoose replied. He decided not to tell the big man that his friend was also keeping him from joining the Registration.

"Why the hell do you all call me Chief?"

"You said none of us should use our real names, and... you talk, we listen, we’re all still here. Makes sense... Chief."

Chief sighed, reigned.

"Yeah, well, next time I send you out to stalk some goods make sure he listens. We can’t afford to lose him while he’s playing detective."

Chief walked off and Mongoose turned back to watch Dayton kneel next to Jenny. He shook his head then went over to grab a bite of what the cooks had conjured for the night’s meal.

"Where you been Jenny?" Dayton asked as she handed him the holocaster.

He fiddled with the holocaster. She handed him a tool and as he grabbed it he noticed a metal disk the size of a quarter with a small jack insert in the middle of her palm.

"This is why you’ve been out the last week, Jenny?" Dayton said, gritting his teeth.

She yanked away her hand, at first shyly. Then she sucked in her breath and looked him square in the eyes. Dayton felt the resolve settle over her. She’d never been this way before and it tempered his anger at her new implant.

"I’m Chameleon now, Paul," she said firmly. "I finally got the upgrade I’ve been talking about."

"Retro wiring your body is not an upgrade," he said, just as firmly.

"You never give Mongoose crap about all his mods."

"He’s hardly human anymore with all his mods so why should I care? But Jenny, you--"

"You’re like brothers," she said, her fired starting to wane. She looked to her feet but just as quickly shot her eye back up to his. She gathered new strength. "I know you hate him modding too. But we need an edge. We’re not all as good as you at stalking."

Dayton considered all this and had to take a deep breath.

It was true, what she said. Mongoose had been indulging in mods for years. Mods started as mostly cosmetic enhancements. It had been around for decades really. In the late twentieth century women started getting implants in their breasts. Well, really, if Dayton thought about it coloring hair had been the beginning. But with technology came other enhancements. Breasts first then eventually eye colors then finger nails. The nanotechnology behind it allowed men and women to change eye color, then nail color, with touch sensors that could either modify based on body temperature or actively with a quick tap.

This led to people wanting more and more to the point that the art of enhancements had become a science and new muscles to give greater strength to paraplegics drifted into the mainstream and memory chips planting knowledge into the heads of vapid socialites became the rage.

This is what Dayton’s father had meant when he was shoving him out the window just before the slaughter. All this vanity modification would someday lead to people trying to correct genetics by modding their bodies.

His father felt it was a gateway to allowing implants that would someday give the ultimate control to the corporations.

"Let them plant a chip and someday a signal will control everything about you," his father would say.

Dayton still clung to this despite seeing enough evidence to the contrary. There was plenty of black market modding going on that there was no way it was all controlled.

Chief had even rescued, against Dayton’s protests, some of the doctors who performed the mods. Chief had argued that their quickly growing group needed some qualified medical people to attend. If it happened that they also knew how to mod people, and that somehow had a side benefit of helping their cause against the corps, who was he to argue.

Dayton tried to argue anyway but eventually learned it is best to live by example. Even if nobody ever followed his example.

He’d held out hope for Jenny though.

She put her hand on his cheek, forcing his eyes to hers. As he looked at her he saw her tender and warm gaze. She kisses him deeply, he powerless to resist.

"I love you too," she said. "I knew you’d understand why I needed to do this."

He didn’t, but at the same time he did.

She turned her attention back to the holocaster.

"And I’m Chameleon now," she said softly. "Please call me that, not Jenny."

He looked into her eyes and saw a huge chunk of who he had fallen in love with drifting away. Something in him told him to remember this moment though he didn’t know why.

Just then yelling broke their attention and everybody jumped, grabbing whatever weapons they had close. From one of the tunnels leading into the area a small group of refugees burst in, a couple of the men in the group carrying bodies on their shoulders.

Chief, as always the first, ran to them and questioned one of the group members as the bodies were laid on the ground. Chameleon screamed when she saw the face of one of the bodies.

"Daddy!"

She ran to the body and threw herself on it, screaming through her tears. Some of the women in the group grabbed her, trying their best to comfort her but she didn’t even know they were there, her grip on the dead body of her father stronger than theirs on her.

Dayton watched Chameleon cling to her dead father, jaw tensing. Throat swallowing hard. The rims of his eyes turned red and filled with tears as he focused on the anguished girl.

He’d known her and her father a short time. He’d liked her father. A lot. He’d fallen in love with her.

The scene reminded him of his own loss. Through his love of Jenny, now Chameleon, he’d found only more loss at the hands of the corporation, who he was sure was behind it all.

The holocaster in his hand whirred to life and suddenly grabbed a signal from the outside world. He glanced at it as the three-dimensional image, shaped as a ball hovering above the disc, flickered to life.

He recognized the face of the reporter who he had bumped into maybe a couple of hours ago.

"...and now that the Register has passed the world seems to be calming and perhaps the board members’ promises will be fulfilled, and life can go back to the way it was."

Dayton hurled the holocaster against the wall, smashing it to a thousand pieces, and stormed off deeper into one of the tunnels.