I have a stringent amount of rules to help me navigate, and survive this hell of a city; a set of rules that I follow to fly under the radar whenever I can. You see, the neuro-chips inside your body only alert authorities about you in one of two specific situations:

1) You are publicly seen doing a crime, reported by the public and the government officials look you up manually in their systems to track you and your history.

2) You automatically alert their systems when your health vitals are low, as in you're actually in danger and need immediate help.

Yes, the government can watch us on cameras pretty much everywhere we go, if they're specifically looking for us. Otherwise we're just another cog in their machine wandering the streets in our daily mundane lives.

Majority of society are so absent-minded to this totalitarian system that they've developed a mindset of 'what happens in the background isn't my problem' and I don't blame them. There aren't many people in this world who actively have a political opinion let alone have the courage to stand up alone and do something about it; they just get sedated and that's goodbye to them. Your opinions are suppressed here, for anyone who still has an original thought left.

I personally have made myself a mental map of a bunch of vantage points in my area that cameras can't see me. You can tell because a tiny tiny blue light will show under the camera lens. You can tell where they are if you actually take a moment to look around. One place there aren't any is the thin gap between my apartment and my neighbour Thiago's apartment. He's an elderly Portuguese man who lives with his cat Sofia. She's old, she hates being touched and she's a bitch to everyone but him.

There's no logical reason that there's a small gap between my building and his, I guess it was something to do with the exhaust pipes from the restaurant we live above. But if I climb out of my bedroom window and squeeze through one of the power generators, I have a nice view of the city. It's cool to lie there and know that nobody can see you even if they tried, smelling the spices and exotic aromas from below.

I ended up buying an outdoor rug from a flea market on one of the lower city levels to put out there and added some comfy cushions. My brothers go out there sometimes but I usually tell them to piss off. In summer when it gets hot Thiago will make me a 'piragua' and pass it to me through his window. It's kind of like a slushy but he calls it a piragua.

I spend a lot of my time out there when I'm not working. My job sucks. I work in a law firm where men in suits tell more men in suits that they're more important than the other men in suits and then those men in suits laugh and agree. They swap their business cards amongst each other faster than they swap sexually transmitted diseases with Sub-Zero prostitutes. I usually bail early on those work events.

I went to law school just to be an associate who sits at a desk and follows a man in a suit around the office all day doing the important paperwork he's supposed to do whilst he shags his hot paralegal. What a fun life I have.

Thiago is a funny dude. When my family moved next door several years ago, I read his name on some ill delivered food and pronounced his name with a 'th' sound like how it was spelt. Being an old guy who hates technology, he had inputted the wrong address to the food delivery system. He proceeded to hit me with a twisted up hand towel and tell me that kids these days weren't being educated well enough.

"Do I call you Thom? No, because you are Tom. You are a boy not a finger. 'Tee-ah-go', listen to me again. Thiago," he said wiggling his thumb at me. He then opened the small takeaway container and picked through the noodles with his fingers to find a piece of chicken for Sofia. Seven years on and Thiago still hasn't fixed his address in the food delivery app, and seven years on I've always delivered his takeaway food to him and said his name properly.

Rule #15: Listen to old people tell stories about when they grew up. It's nice to hear about what life was like before this fucking hell was made.

I like visiting Thiago because his house feels 'vintage' compared to everyone else's. He insists on cleaning himself and not upgrading his house to get self-cleaning systems. He only uses modern technology when he feels like it; like ordering takeout. He also has paper back books on a floor to ceiling shelf that he sometimes lets me borrow. Books are kind of uncommon to find nowadays, so his large collection really is a marvel to look at. Thiago is way too rich to be living in these levels but he likes living here.

We live in a sector of the city where the upper middle class citizens reside but not as pompous and debaucherous as other upper middle class areas can be. It's hard to explain the hierarchy of the city, my family and I are well off for money but we still work hard to do so.

Our sector is a really 'exotic' looking area because the wealthy people built our levels of the buildings to look and feel like old school Moroccan buildings or maybe it was Greek buildings... I actually don't know. Maybe it's Rustic Italian buildings... Either way, our area is pretty unique because it doesn't look like a bunch of grey buildings. I could probably Google what 'aesthetic' our sector is but it's nice, trust me.

I have two brothers which is insane to most people. In 2053 the government enforced a one kid maximum per couple unless you applied for more. Accidental pregnancies were terminated by law. The application process was tedious and quite frankly just judgemental to go through but after my parents had me they needed another.

Mum fell pregnant with twins a few years after I was born, which people saw as some fucking miracle. Nine months later Sam and Harry were born and they've been a pain in my ass ever since. I kid, we get along quite well unless they touch my stuff or eat my food.

To apply for 'extra' kids, the examining officers had to look at your family income, your family IQ, your suburb, your physical abilities, you know the whole run down of your neuro chips. They looked for any allegies or other 'genetic disabilities' to assign a point score fo your hypothetical child. Seriously. A food allergy was a deduction of points from your god damn application. The government wanted any additional children to be the best of the best.

Because of that archaic law, the second (or third) child was deemed the cream of the crop in life. People considered them more deserving of life because their lives were literally determined to be worthy enough to exist. It didn't mean I was neglected or anything growing up but the twins definitely had special treatment.

Fuck, a fly just hit me in the eye.
Jesus Christ, sometimes I swear these bugs are programmed to be glitchy on purpose. They simulate what bugs naturally did when they were alive, they bite, they sting, they crawl through your garbage. They're just not natural.

I think I saw a real butterfly once in fifth grade, I could tell because I accidentally stepped on it and it actually died. Nobody believed me though. It was pretty whilst it was alive. Maybe I killed the last one. Fuck! What if I was the one who made butterflies extinct? Fuck.

The sunsets in the city are really disappointing the further down in the city you go, I don't think Sub-Zero even gets sunlight anymore. From where I'm sitting on the alleyway roof, I can't see the sky unless I look directly up, but I can see the light reflect along the walls. It makes the different 'streets' really pretty.

They're kind of streets I guess, its really just a large gap between buildings that cars can pass through and that pedestrian paths are built along. You know, the hovering ones. Ugh, it sounds gross to even say that out loud. I don't mean to be a wanker, but yes, my sector is rich enough that grounded cars can't really get here. The closest freeway is miles away. Most people have to park their old cars and catch an Uber to our sector.

Today everything is a bright orange, a real stunner of a sunset. You're showing off today Haz.

My best friend Harrison passed away last year. Sometimes I talk to him aloud. I don't normally believe in that type of shit but it makes me feel like he's still here with me. He entered Solus with some of his work colleagues and after he was eliminated I never saw him again. The government officials told his family that he went on vacation after Solus finished and drowned in one of the oceans after drinking. They even brought back his 'body' for the funeral.

I think it's a load of fucking bullshit. I can guarantee if I were to cut open that body it would be a hollow cadaver. It definitely wasn't the real Haz at that ceremony. People thought it hit me really hard because I didn't cry at the funeral. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fucking wreck without him but that funeral felt so wrong. It felt fake.

I have my suspicions about Solus. Something just doesn't add up. I don't understand how so many people die coincidentally after being eliminated and people fucking believe it. Sometimes it's a week after being eliminated, sometimes it's a year. But they all seem to die.

And you might be thinking: Hang on a second Tom, how do they die a whole year after being eliminated? Well I'm glad you have a brain capable of curiosity; that's rare these days. My personal conspiracy theory is that the government kills everyone who is eliminated from Solus and replaces them with a replica robot long enough to not raise suspicions with their families, then they kill the robot of natural causes. In this era, a young person dying is more common than you think.

It's cheaper to build a robot to be exactly like them than to actually keep a human being alive in this world. A real person wastes too many resources. I think it's a form of population control, killing people without 'killing people' you know? Because so many people enter Solus and you only ever end up seeing like a hundred people rotate on the streams because there's that many people who don't rank high enough.

I told this to mum once and she just hugged me and started crying. She said that my imagination was a wild thing and that I was creating this theory out of a place of grieving over Harrison. She might be right, but I highly doubt it.

Solus is a fucked up game and yet millions of people around the world watch their continents players entertain them year after year.

But I still watch it.