Copyright ©1999, Tracey Harnack. All rights reserved.  No part of this story may be re-posted in part or in full without written permission from me. It's characters are used without permission, no infringement is intended.
Disclaimer: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict is copyright 1998, Tribune Entertainment Co.
Rating: PG

        Augur kicked the base of his computer. Hard.
        "Hey, watch whatcha doin’!" His holographic computer interface yelled in an atrocious Brooklyn accent. HoloLili was a waitress today, and a rather irate one at that. "I ain’t indestructible, ya know."
        "Off." Augur said sharply. He had had a lousy day. Actually, he had had a lousy week. He hated losing friends. Brought up unpleasant memories better left buried. He had genuinely liked and respected William Boone. Okay, true, Boone hadn’t been the most imaginative person, and his sense of irony was flatline, and maybe had been slightly dull by Augur’s standards, but he had been a good person and Augur would miss him.
        To top it all off, an alien kid was snoring away on his couch. Liam "Kincaid" was some strange sort of hybrid from Beckett, Ha’gel, and Sandoval. He still wasn’t sure how he had been convinced to take him home, but he had and there he was. At 48 hours old, the kid looked like an adult and had a triple helix DNA structure. Fascinating.
        Augur shook his head. Not two days old and already he had saved Da’an, been appointed his new protector, gotten an identity (with a little help from Augur), and had managed to seriously annoy Jonathan Doors by bringing a Taelon to Resistance headquarters. Upstart. Sure, he was nice, but he was going to have to get the kid an apartment. Immediately.
        His reverie was broken by the grating voice of HoloLili.
        "Do ya want your nightly news report, or dontcha?" She asked impatiently.
        "I said, off!" He yelled. "And find another personality."
        She made a face and winked out. Augur growled. He had designed his computer interface to look like Lili Marquette because he liked her. A lot. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel the same way. He hoped fervently that the real Lili would never find out about his little holographic fantasy.
        Augur stomped into his room and plopped down on the bed. He knew sooner or later things would get better, but right now it looked bleak. Not to mention, he had just been outbid on a valuable piece of artwork for his collection. Oh, the buyer had been anonymous, but Augur knew it was Doors. Eventually he would get it from the Resistance leader in exchange for some service or other, but it irked him that he had been beaten at anything.
        He had really wanted that painting, too. Kati would’ve loved it. Actually, Lili looked a lot like her. Acted a bit like her too, if memory served.
        Augur groaned and rolled over on his side. Why did it have to always come back to Kati? Every time he thought she was out of his mind, something would happen that reminded him of her. She’s gone now, he told himself. I just want to forget her.
        Oh no you don’t, A little voice in the back of his head said.
        He closed his eyes as the memories came flooding back.

        A sixteen-year-old boy sat miserably under a tarp and stared out at the rain. He had been on the run for two years and he was sick of it. When he was eleven, his father had died for a hopeless cause. For three years he had been the man of the house until his mother had been hit by a car. With no relatives, social services had come for him and his little brother. He had escaped using his natural talents for computer reprogramming to alter the records to say he had been one of the boys killed in the fire that had destroyed half of the boys’ home a week after he arrived. He had seen a chance and jumped at it. They were now looking for a boy named Daniel Harken who had died of third degree burns. He snorted. The government was so stupid, they all believed whatever their precious paper work told them. Common sense was a foreign word to them.
        His baby brother had been adopted by a nice family and had probably forgotten all about his other family and older sibling.
        The boy had done fine until he had tapped in to the wrong system to get money. They had done some digging and now he was wanted for a whole boatload of misdemeanors. He had made sure it wouldn’t happen again, but the police were extremely persistent, if not too bright.
        A drop of water from a hole in the tarp hit him right between the eyes and rolled of the tip of his nose. He let out a string of words that most sailors would’ve found useful. He really needed a job, a place to go, and most of all, access to a really good computer.
        The boy waited for the rain to let up. He looked Asian, but his father had been Jamaican and his mother had been French-Vietnamese. After sulking for an hour or so, it stopped pouring and he went out to explore the city. Maybe San Francisco wasn’t such a good idea, he reflected. Didn’t it rain all the time? He walked around the city for awhile and took a shortcut through an alley.
        Half way through he caught a glimpse of a foot sticking out from underneath a cardboard box. Curious, he went closer. He didn’t want anyone to see him, but what if the person was hurt? He was hardly a humanitarian, but his dad had managed to instill some morality in his wayward son. Besides, the authorities wouldn’t be looking for him in California. At least, not yet, anyway.
        He poked the foot with his toe. It withdrew inside the box and the next thing he knew, a young girl with a broken handled, but nonetheless sharp, knife was coming at him like a blur. She knocked him to the ground with considerable force for her small size and held the blade to his throat. She stared viciously at him with dark eyes.
        He judged that the best course of action was to stay silent.
        "Give me your money." She said. She was breathing fast and was obviously scared, but the knife-edge was steady. There was no doubt in his mind that she knew how to use it and was ready and willing to kill him.
        He swallowed. "I don’t have any money." He tried to say it calmly, but it came out as a squeak.
        The girl looked at him suspiciously. "Why did you touch me?" She asked.
        "I-I wanted to make sure you were okay." He stammered.
        She glared. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.
        "I’m a street rat, like you." He managed with more confidence. "I’m not gonna hurt you."
        "Of course you’re not. I’ve got the knife. But what if I let you up?"
        "Well, um, I figure that you’re faster than me anyway." He answered, praying that she would just let him go and not kill him. Who would know if she did? Who would care? San Francisco was definitely not a good idea. Maybe the boys’ home hadn’t been so bad.
        To his great surprise, the girl nodded curtly and let him up. He scrambled to his feet and backed up until he hit the wall. She still had the knife out.
        He got a good look at her for the first time. She was very dirty, but then so was he. Her dark brown her was cut quite short and her face was severe. Part of that was from hunger and part was it’s natural shape. He noted that her manner of speech was not your ordinary street talk, but much more refined. It clashed with her appearance and the knife. She was very small, but obviously strong and agile. He judged her to be about twelve, maybe a little older. He figured he should say something.
        "What’s your name?" he asked.
        "Call me Kati. You?"
        He thought. Once he had a real name, identity, life. Those were gone. So was the person he used to be. There was nothing of him left in the name he had been given at birth.
        "Call me Augur." He said firmly. It was the first thing that came to mind.
        She looked at him oddly. "A diviner?" She asked.
        "What?" He said.
        "That’s what Augur means."
        "Yeah, I know, but how do you?"
        "I just do."
        Augur considered the possibilities. Maybe she could help him.
        "Hey, you look like you’re alone. You wanna stick together for a bit?"
        "Why should I? I do just fine on my own."
        "Well, you might be able to get a decent night’s sleep, for one thing."
        "With an adolescent male sleeping next to me?" Kati had a point, at least, the way she saw it.
        "Look, I won’t do anything, you can sleep with your knife out. Please. I don’t know anything ‘round here." Augur allowed some of his desperation to creep into his voice.
        She assessed him. "Okay. Let’s go." She set out swiftly.
        "Whoa. Where you going?"
        "There’s a warehouse about a mile from here. It’s better than here." Kati started again and Augur had to run to keep up with her. She didn’t say much. She led him through a complex series of twists and turns to on of the docks. He followed her through a broken window in the side of a building and found himself surrounded by all sorts of fishing gear and machines that obviously belonged on sea going vessel. And they all smelled like dead fish.
        Augur wrinkled his nose and swore.
        "If you hate it that much then go sleep on the street." Kati told him.
        They settled in a corner. He tried to put his arm around her and she twisted it almost out of its socket. He wisely came to the conclusion that they were better off simply next to each other.
        Kati put her back up against the wall and grasped her knife firmly in her left hand and closed her eyes. He knew that she would awaken instantly at any sound. Augur curled up on the concrete and went to sleep.

        Over the next three months Kati and Augur grew to trust each other. They worked well as a team. She was a thief who could talk her way out of or in to just about anything, and he was a hacker who might as well have been born at a computer. Soon, they were able to get off the streets and into a small apartment. Augur learned that Kati had been dumped by her mother when she was six and had been alone ever since. Oddly enough, whenever she had spare time, she went to the public library. She loved culture and literature and art and history, spending hours just reading. She had grown up in the slums, but she was more cultured than the average person. He also discovered that she actually very pretty, once she got cleaned up.
Augur had a passion for science and, of course, technology. She helped him cultivate that, bringing him books about quantum physics, probabilities, and mathematics. She didn’t know much about those subjects, except in the most elementary of ways, but she wanted him to be able to learn what he wanted. They were an odd couple that was for sure. Neither belonged in the lowest class and both were brilliant in their own way. Sometimes she was his little sister, sometimes his mother, and always his business partner and best friend.
        About half a year after they joined up, Kati got wind of an open house at the art museum.
        "We’re going." She told him with finality.
        "Uh uh. You’re going. I’m staying here. I have stuff to do. What do you see in a bunch of old drawings, anyway?" Augur never understood the allure of art.
        "No, you are coming with me. You could use some culture. The rent is paid, and so are the bills. We have enough food, and you need a break." Kati was firm. She was, without a doubt, the most stubborn person he had ever seen. And she was barely 13.
        Augur sighed. When she made up her mind… "Okay, fine. I’ll go. Happy?"
        "Good." She said. "Now get your jacket and we’ll go."
        She dragged him from one exhibit to another. She paused in front of a painting that, to Augur, looked like strangely colored kidney stones scattered on a hill.
        "What, is that?" he asked.
        She looked at him askance. "That, as you so quaintly put it, is a very famous painting by Salvador Dali. It’s called Accommodations of Desire, and it was completed in 1929."
        "Who? What?" She’d lost him.
        Kati sighed. "Salvador Dali was a very famous surrealist during the early 20^th century. He had a fascination for time and many of his works included clocks in them. In fact, Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland inspired what is commonly considered his most famous painting. In addition to being a painter, he was also a sculptor and a jewelry maker, and he worked on two films. This used to be in a private collection, but the owner bequeathed it here when she died."
        Augur stared at his companion in amazement. "Oh." Was all he could say. "I’m afraid I don’t get it."
        "That’s because you haven’t looked at it yet." She explained, at though he were a little child rather than four years her senior.
        "What do you mean I haven’t looked at it. I’ve been staring at it for five minutes." He said, annoyed.
        "Exactly. You’ve been staring at it, but you haven’t seen it. Look at the colors, the shading, the whole feeling of the painting." He stared at her blankly. "Just look at it, okay." She said, sharply
        He did, and after awhile he realized that the painting could convey feelings. Death, hostility, sorrow, wasteland. It wasn’t just paint splattered on a canvas, it was emotions. So this was what was meant by art, he thought. It could actually say something.
        "See?" she said.
        "Wow." Augur had had no idea.
        Kati guided him over to a bench and they sat. She told him all about the different styles of painting and sculpture, the periods, the meanings, the textures. He listened, and most surprising of all, he enjoyed it. When she was done, he actually wanted to know more. In four hours this amazing girl had instilled in him a love of art.

        After three more months, they had saved up enough for a really good computer. Kati had wanted to simply take one, but Augur had convinced her that that was the best way to call attention to themselves. Once they got the computer, life improved greatly. With a really good system, Augur could manage just about anything.
        One day he came home from a long walk along the beach with a determined set to his jaw. He found Kati on the couch reading. She put her book down when she saw him come in.
        "What is it?" she asked softly.
        "I’m going to erase our identities." He said.
        "What?!?!"
        "I’m going to get rid of every trace of the boy I was, the man I am now, and you. We’ll never have existed. We’ll disappear completely."
        She jumped to her feet. "Augur! You can’t just pull a stunt like this on me! I’ve made a few friends. We know people, we know our way around. We can’t just pull up and leave. We have business contacts."
        "Calm down." He said. She looked like she was about to attack him. "Now, just listen. I figured out how to do it, and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. On the ‘net people know me as Mage, around the town I’m Jason Gardener. They know you as Katie Williamson. If we leave here, sever all our ties, delete all records of anything that we’ve done, all photos, everything, we can resurface as different people with no records. We won’t exist. We can do anything. If we’re careful, they won’t be able to find us, trace us, or catch us. We’ll just be Augur and Kati, and we can become anything. We can trade, sell, buy, and no one will know who’s behind it. All they’ll know is the names. No pictures, no way of identifying us. They’ll never remember those two slum kids from ‘Cisco, and if they do, they’d never guess it’s us. We can be powerful. Successful. We can be more than street rats." He looked at his friend intently.
        She glared for a moment, and he decided she needed more convincing.
        "I can access any system in the world, and you are a very good talker. I can find the things people need or want, and you can convince them to buy or sell. It’ll be perfect."
        She thought about it for a minute. "Where will we go?" she asked.
        "Anywhere! How about Washington D.C.? There’s so many opportunities there, and plenty of people."
        Kati bit her lip. "Okay, do it."
        "Great!" He said. "We won’t regret this."
        Her expression said that they’d better not.
        That night Augur found every reference to them that existed and deleted it. Their names and aliases were magically erased from invoices, tax records, and citizenship papers. Credits card statements, leases, and even medical documents vanished. Sales records, Augur’s driver’s license, and their FBI files had disappeared by dawn. When Kati woke up the next morning, he was still working. At about eight, he pulled up their birth certificates.
        "Kati, come here." He called.
        "Are you done?" she asked
        "Almost. This is it. One touch and we’re gone."
        She gulped. "Go ahead." She said bravely. Augur realized how frightening it was to be facing oblivion. Of course, he wasn’t planning on staying a nobody for long, but still…
        He hit a key and the forms vanished from the screen. "That’s it." He said. "That’s the last. It’s just us now, kiddo." He put his arm around Kati. This time, unlike that eventful night two years ago when she had almost torn it off, she let him. She’d mellowed a bit (just a bit), but she was still the same old obstinate, often vicious, energy filled Kati.
        They stood in silence for a moment while they assimilated the knowledge that they were no longer part of the world. Then, without a word, they got together their personal items, all the money they could get their hands on (Augur wisely had withdrawn a sizable amount of cash on credit before getting rid of their identities), and left the apartment. By the time anyone noticed they were gone, they’d be across the country. Any computer search on them would come up utterly blank. Oh, the people would remember them, for a little while, but they wouldn’t be able to trace them. He was rather pleased with his achievement.
        They brought two bus tickets with cash and were careful to stay extremely inconspicuous for the whole journey. When they reached the capital, they rented an apartment from a guy who didn’t need names, just money in advance. It was all a sort of game to them. Kati played the global stock market for money, while Augur got their names established.
        He had a knack for finding rare things, and soon people came looking for him, rather than the other way around, and Kati was amazing with negotiations. No one knew they doing were doing business with a fifteen-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old boy. One day he ran breathlessly into her room.
        "Kati, I am pleased to announce that you and I are officially millionaires!" He grinned at her. She let out a whoop of joy and hugged him tightly.
        "Finally! We’re somebodies, now!" She said.
        Three days later Augur brought a warehouse anonymously. He had offered enough money that the owner hadn’t really cared who he was selling to. They set up shop inside with state-of-the-art computers, and some very nice stuff. Business boomed, and soon they were world famous.
        "Augur!" Kati said warningly. "I’m not keeping my eyes closed for much longer."
        "Just one more minute." He said. "Almost ready. There. Perfect. You can open your eyes now."
        She did so. Kati’s jaw hit the floor. She squeaked. Augur grinned. This was even better than he’d hoped.
        "Do you know what that is?" She asked.
        "Well, I should hope so. I paid a bundle for it." Augur answered, sarcastically.
        "That-that’s, Pablo Picasso’s self portrait. Picasso!" She was practically incoherent.
        "That’s right." He informed her. "It’s yours. Happy Day-you-dragged-me-to-the-museum-and-changed-my-perspective-on-life!" He winked.
        She stayed up late just looking at it and fell asleep on the couch. When she awoke it was almost noon and Augur was just coming in. She stared at him. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes. She opened her mouth.
        Like the new haircut?" He asked slyly.
        She got up. "Haircut? I don’t see any hair."
        Augur turned his head, revealing a black ponytail in the back. "Hair. See?"
        She walked over to him and lightly touched his head. She raised her eyebrows.
        "You like it?" He asked.
        "Maybe." She said. "It sort of makes you look…"
        "What? Older? Younger? Smarter?"
        "Like a hacker." She decided. "You’re hoping to impress Kwai Ling, aren’t you?"
        "However did you guess? Come on, what say we head over to Flat Planet for dinner?"
        "Great. Let me get my jacket." Kati disappeared in to her room and returned a moment later with said jacket. They hung out at the Flat Planet Café a lot. It was a great place to do business, pick up tips, and the food was great. Not to mention, no one ever asked questions.
        Over the next year, life was wonderful. Augur and Kati eventually brought the Flat Planet (anonymously, of course), and Augur hired Kwai Ling as the new manager. Unfortunately, she never found out who had given her the job, so Augur never did get in her good graces. After awhile his infatuation faded anyway. Their art collection grew and they were able to be extremely picky about which jobs they chose to take. Soon, most were too small for their attention.
        Then, one day about four months before the Taelons first made contact with Earth, Kati went out for a walk. She never came back. Hit by a car, and she was gone. Just like that. She was seventeen. Augur had never been so close to anyone in his life and he took it hard. He just stopped caring about people for awhile. Money and art were the only two things that mattered.
        When Jonathan Doors, and old associate and sometime rival called him to help with his Resistance against the Companions, Augur had hesitated. A hopeless cause. He’d sworn that he’d never to get involved after what happened to his father. He told himself that he wasn’t doing it for the cause, he was doing it for the money and because he loved making Doors depend on him. Lately, though, he realized that he was actually starting to care about the cause and that frightened him.
        Augur remembered the day he’d first met Lili in Resistance headquarters. For an instant, he had thought she was Kati. The Marine was a little older than she would’ve been, but they looked so much alike. Augur had never thought of Kati in any way other than his best friend and sister, but he found himself immediately attracted to Captain Marquette. So far she had done everything possible to discourage him, but he knew she’d come around someday.
        It was almost morning. Another day. Augur got up slowly, hardly able to believe the whole night had passed. He still missed Kati, but he realized that she had left him something that he would never lose, an appreciation for beauty, in any form. He owed everything to her, and he’d never forget that.
        He heard Liam stir on the couch. Time to go back to reality, he thought. People die, things happen, and life goes on. He had a feeling that this next year would hold many surprises.