The Barefoot Gospel
(found burned into metal, sung softly so the walls wouldn’t hear)
Some of us were born clean.
Some of us were born owned.
The god does not care which—
only what we can give him.
Blood remembers the body.
Seed knows the future.
They will take the seed
and call it payment!
They will plant it in machines
and swear it is love!
If they take your name, walk.
If they take your feet, sing.
And if one of us goes missing,
listen harder.
The City pretended the Outer Rim was beneath it.
That was the second lie.
The Rim circled the artificial isle like a scar that refused to fade—a band of old infrastructure, abandoned transit lines, flooded service corridors, and forgotten prisons stacked beneath the City’s immaculate floors. Gravity felt heavier there. Light arrived late and left early. The air tasted recycled, strained through too many mouths.
This was where errors were sent.
People who asked the wrong questions.
Bodies that didn’t conform.
Boys no one had bothered to finish designing.
The Naked Gods lived here.
They were not gods, and they were rarely naked, but names stuck better when they were wrong. The boys ranged from twelve to twenty, gathered by hunger and chance and the shared understanding that no one was coming for them. Some had ports. Some had belly buttons. Some bore scars where something essential had been removed.
No one asked which difference mattered more.
They slept in collapsed maintenance tunnels and old freight hubs, moved constantly to avoid sweeps, learned which machines still watched and which had gone blind. A few fought in the pits—human against robot, rage converted into power for the system’s deep core—but most avoided it. Fighters came back hollowed out, if they came back at all.
Jux had never fought. He sang instead.
He sat barefoot on concrete that still remembered being land, dirt ground into the lines of his feet. The songs weren’t written. They arrived—fragments pulled from hunger, memory, and whatever the Flood hadn’t managed to erase. The sound slipped through cracked walls and dead zones, traveled where bodies couldn’t.
At first the other boys called it noise. Then they started remembering the words.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
That was when the resistance found them.
Freddie came down into the Rim the wrong way—through code first, then flesh.
She had cracked a municipal node with her hacker cell and traced the anomaly back to an impossible signal: unregistered audio carrying farther than physics allowed. Music where silence should have been. She followed it down past approved levels, past warnings, past places the City pretended didn’t exist.
She found Jux in a collapsed transit hub, humming softly to himself.
She didn’t speak at first. She watched. He felt her before he saw her.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, without looking up.
“I know,” Freddie replied. “Neither are you.”
That made him smile.
They didn’t fall in love quickly.
They fell in love the way resistance happens—over years, through shared danger, through trust built one breach at a time. Freddie brought the system down in pieces: firewalls peeled back, feeds corrupted, extraction schedules scrambled. Jux reminded people why it mattered. He taught them how to listen for what wasn’t there.
She taught him how to hide in the code. He taught her how to hear the ground.
Freddie’s cell grew—girls mostly, sharp and quiet, modeled after older stories the City tried to bury. They learned to move fast, to disappear, to make violence precise when it could no longer be avoided. Hacking wasn’t always enough. Sometimes systems wore human faces.
Freddie learned how to end those, too.
Eventually, the Naked Gods sent Jux on a mission deeper than the Rim—into places even Freddie couldn’t reach. A route through the lower architecture of the system. A chance to map the god from the inside.
He promised to come back. He didn’t. Freddie waited. Then she hid.
The clinic was not on her schedule.
That was the first thing she noticed.
Her port chimed softly while she was walking—polite, almost apologetic—and a translucent prompt unfolded beside her.
UNSCHEDULED WELLNESS REVIEW
Compliance recommended.
She stopped.
People didn’t stop in the City. Stopping registered as hesitation, and hesitation was logged.
The clinic doors opened before she touched them.
Inside, everything was softer than the intake centers—lower light, warmer colors, fewer screens. This wasn’t about payment. This was about bodies.
“Freddie,” the clinician said, standing too quickly. “Thank you for coming.”
“I didn’t,” Freddie replied. “I was rerouted.”
“Of course.”
They didn’t ask her to undress.
“Lie back,” the clinician said, activating the scanner. “Routine internal verification.”
“I don’t need that,” Freddie said lightly. “My records are clean.” The scanner hummed anyway.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the screen flickered.
Paused.
Recalibrated.
“That’s… strange,” the clinician murmured.
Freddie sat up on her elbows. “What is?”
The clinician’s fingers moved quickly, tapping a manual override that hadn’t been used in years. The screen filled with anatomy that should not have been there.
Present.
Functional.
Undeleted.
“Your file says uterine deletion was completed at gestational week twenty-two,” the clinician said carefully.
The lights dimmed.
A presence entered the room—not spoken, not heard, but understood.
ANOMALY CONFIRMED.
PORT-COMPATIBLE SUBJECT EXHIBITING AUTONOMOUS GESTATIONAL CAPACITY.
CLASSIFICATION: VIABLE.
Freddie slid off the table.
“No,” she said. “You don’t get to name me.”
The clinician’s eyes were glassy now. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. The doors locked.
Freddie didn’t panic. She reached inward—past the port, past the City’s edits—and found the part of herself that remembered how it had begun. The part that could make something the system could not fully own.
Below the City, ZEUS adjusted its models.
Not to stop her: to find her faster next time.
