The stolen Vaporette groaned underneath me, as I pushed it to its limit, racing down one canal after another, taking turns at random.  A quick glance over my shoulder told me I’d lost my pursuers.  The maze of Old Studio Town had swallowed me up.   

   The overtaxed machine almost sighed with relief, as it slowed down to a stop beneath a bridge, while I referred to the map on the Pewter.  A small arrow showed my position among the labyrinth of crisscrossing canals.  The two closest safe houses were back downtown – there was no way I was going back there.  I decided to head towards the red dot out on Fonda Beach instead.

   I abandoned the water bike at a busy pier and grabbed a ferry bus to the coast.  It was still early enough that the commuters were blurry eyed and mostly ignored me.  As they got the latest downloads from Network, their eyes were all on their own Pewters, too engrossed in the latest gossip to pay me any mind.  And those who did look my way must have mistaken me for a vagrant, in my wretched state.  They quickly turned away from me, perhaps fearing that I would beg a ducat or two from them.

   The beach was quiet at that time of day, and I struck out down its expanse shunning the shore road.  The uneven sand was painful to walk along with my injured leg, but at least there was little chance that anyone would be there to recognize me.  Two miles down, I found a small cottage hidden behind a bluff that the map identified as the safe house.

   Its door was locked but the Pewter was programmed to open it – I didn’t even need to use one of the special Pragues.  There were only three small rooms easily identifiable by their prominent furniture: one had a couch, one had a bed, and one had a stove.  The place had a weather-beaten rustic look to it.

   In the kitchen, I found enough canned rations to last a year.  At the sight of it, hunger came out of nowhere and punched me in the gut.  I realized that the last thing I’d eaten was some crab puffs at the party.  It was hard to believe that it had only been twelve hours before.  It felt like a lifetime ago.

   I poured a can of beans out onto a plate, where they sat in a cold clump.  I flopped down on the couch with my meager dinner, and thought to myself: my problems don’t amount to a hill of beans.  I would have laughed, if I had anything to laugh about.

   After eating, exhaustion took over, and I passed out on the couch, sinking into a deep but restless sleep.  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I woke myself up calling out for Liz.

   The next few weeks were occupied with thoughts of getting out of New Hollywood.  Groucho’s Exigency Plan involved using a false identity to get on a hover barge that would take me to the territories, and it was never going to work.

Groucho’s Pewter was nothing like my own.  It was stripped down to its bare utility, and there were blocks built into it, so I could never fully interface with Network.  But I was able to see the public news feeds, as well as the secret communiqués the Executive were sending about me.

   I learned that I was the most wanted criminal that New Hollywood had ever known.  The aeroport, the stations, and all of the major ports were under Executive surveillance twenty-four hours a day.  Nobody got in or out without being searched.  The Pewter in my hand may have been full of secret agent Pragues, but there wasn’t a single one that would get me past that gauntlet.

   On clear nights, I would take walks along the beach.  Alone with my thoughts, I would listen to the surf and look up at the stars.  Frequently these walks ended on the top of a hill that overlooked a private marina.  Looking down at the lights, I started hatching a plan to steal a boat.  I hadn’t piloted one since I was a kid, but they say it’s one of those things you never forget.  I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to head south, where I could seek refuge in Tucson, or one of the other port cities of the pirate coast.

   One evening, I even scouted out the marina.  The Pragues let me get past the gate and avoid the sentinel android’s patrol route without any problem.  I found the perfect boat for the trip: a Kurosawa Clipper.  With its sleek silver hull, it would be able to cover the distance quickly on just one tank of fuel.  I almost jumped in and took it right then and there, but I decided to go back and get supplies before making the voyage.

   It was lucky I hesitated.  Soon afterwards, I started seeing the reports of the mass arrests.

   Poachers were being hauled off to jail by the dozen.  Normally, the authorities turned a blind eye to them, but in the wake of my manhunt, they were being picked up the moment that they left the channels to go to their fishing spots.  Even celebrities weren’t immune.  In one high profile case, actor Ranaldi Pleasant was hauled in for questioning, after his yacht broke down and drifted across the boundary line of the Welles Lagoon.

   If I had left that night, I would have certainly been picked up in their dragnet.  The only hope I would ever have of leaving would be to wait until they gave up looking for me.  The little cabin may have been a lonely spot, but there were worse places to wait.

   I watch the summer turn to autumn from the porch, the fresh sea air and the call of the gulls my only companions.  Some days, I would just sit there and watch the waves on the beach, until the sun sank beneath the horizon.  Often my thoughts brooded over Liz.

   I wondered if I should have married her when I had the chance.  Would it have changed anything?  Would it at least have given me a few years of happiness before everything came crashing down?  Or would I only have put her in danger?  My only solace was that at least as things stood, she was safe, even if all hope of a future with her was gone.

   Other days were more productive.  As I worked out the neuro-pathways of Groucho’s Pewter, I went over every byte of it: searched every chamber, opened every Prague – although the purpose of most of them stayed a mystery.

   Eventually there was no putting it off, and I finally entered the chamber with the padlock symbol on the door.  Inside was the information on destruction of the hover barge.  There were a few memos on the incident that hinted that the truth was different from what had been reported.  But mostly the evidence showed how the vid had been doctored.

   I’d seen the official one a dozen times or more.  In that one, a PGA stealth sloop emerged from the waves and torpedoed the passenger vessel.  On Groucho’s version, the sloop was nowhere to be seen.  Instead, a military Payara jet fired a missile at the barge as it rocketed past.

   If nothing else, I now knew Groucho had been on the up and up.

   He had also been compiling evidence against the Directors.  He had vids of them on several occasions.  Almost all of them took place in some colossal meeting room.  It was a vaulting stone room that looked like something straight out of the dark times of the Great Intermission.

   In one, the Directors were meeting with some Executives.  The Directors were issuing a series of commands to the senior officials, and at one point even reprimanding an Exec for some failure.  The bizarreness of the scene was undeniable: you never saw Executives taking orders from what appeared to be a regular citizen.  And you never saw them act so meek and ingratiating under any circumstance.

   I stopped watching these vids after I came across one that was so gruesome I cannot even bring myself to describe its contents.  Groucho had mentioned that the Directors had committed crimes, but I never imagined anything like what was in that vid.  I had always thought of New Hollywood as a safe place.  Sure things happened out in the territories or down in the marshes, but there hadn’t been a violent crime downtown in years.  I just wasn’t capable of understanding the savagery I witnessed.

   To clear my head, I went for a walk along the shore.  Unlike other nights, I took no pleasure in the exercise, and I forgot my usual caution.  I looked up from my dark mood to see an elderly couple out for a moonlit stroll.  They were heading straight for me, but it was too late to avoid them without turning around and running away.

   The two of them seemed very in love walking hand-in-hand, cooing to each other words that we’re lost in the wind.  Seeing them, a sadness tugged within me adding to my earlier despair.

   They neared and I noticed the man wore no icon.  He didn’t appear to have been faced; at least, I was unable to tell who he was.  I guessed that he must be a non-believer.  But then as the gap between as narrowed, I was able to see the face on the icon the woman wore, and it hit me.  The man had his face changed in his youth, but he was now unrecognizable because unlike him, James Dean had never gotten old.

   I passed them trying to act normal.  I nodded and said, “Good evening.”

   The woman said, “Lovely night.”  And then they were behind me.

   It all seemed very normal and even friendly.  The human contact even helped me shed some of the horror of the torture vid.  But I knew they had recognized me.  I saw it in their eyes.  Just as I had riddled out where I had seen him before, they had figured me out too.  It wouldn’t be long before they were contacting the authorities.

   I grabbed my few possessions from the cottage and left Fonda Beach, heading out to the next nearest dot on Groucho’s map.

   The Hotel Splendido provided plenty of comfort but was far too busy to allow for nightly walks.  Once I reached the safety of my room, I locked myself in, living off of room service and the view from my window.  Most days I sat there staring at the people bustling around the Bergman Port.  I watch them, while drinking the exquisite gin they delivered up from the bar downstairs.

   It was on the third day I noticed a man in a room across the canal staring back at me.  I stayed away from the window after that.  But the next night, curiosity got the better of me, and I dared a peek, only to see him training a pair of binoculars at my room.

   The next place was not nearly so nice.  It was a low rent apartment building out by the salt flats.  I slipped in during the dead of night and lived there like a ghost.  I never left, or looked out the window, or made any noises I could help.  Yet, somehow the neighbors grew suspicious.

   Perhaps despite all my caution, someone had seen a light on or heard footsteps.  Or maybe, I still screamed in my sleep.  After living there less than a week, someone knocked on the door in the middle of the day.

   I reached for the gun but otherwise stayed still.  When I was sure they must have gone, I checked the hallway through the peephole.  It looked empty, but I swear I could hear someone breathing on the other side of the door.  Whoever it was must have been hiding in a blind spot off to one side.

   It happened again the next day exactly like the first time, right down to the breathing.  I got in the habit of listening at the door.  Sometimes the breathing came back without any knocking.  Someone was waiting for me to open that door. 

   That night, I slipped out using the fire ladder.  There was only one place left on the map, and it was in the seediest area of New Hollywood: Heston Ward.

   The Swanson rooming house was my last stop – the end of the road.  And it sure felt like it.  For weeks, I didn’t see the sun.  The windows were too covered in grime to let any in.  Not that there was much to see.  All there was outside my squalid room was causeways, stilt-houses, and the endless putrid swamp.

   The smell from the bog permeated every inch of my room like an illness.  Day after day, I lay in my bed in a deep malaise, feeling sorry for myself and thinking about what I’d lost.  I had nowhere else to go, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the Execs found me.

   Then one night, I awoke to find myself looking up at Elvis Presley and Boris Karloff.