Prologue
As I look down at the bright city from the foredeck of our airship in the cool night air, I can’t help but wonder what life would be like, living as a regular idiot in some expensive but crappy apartment, walking to my boring desk job every day, not making enough money but somehow managing to squeak by, unaware of the horrors that plague the streets below.
Riverfalls is a beautifully dangerous city, each building resting on a hover-pad over the ground. People use hover-cars to get themselves from place to place, most people never even putting a foot down on the ground below, commonly called the Underground. The Underground is rife with crime, drugs, and people too poor to live out a comfortable life in Riverfalls, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Our airship is called The Proctor. Once, Kara Lorde, the leader of this organization told me that years and years ago, a proctor was someone involved in judgement, surveillance, or punishment, which is precisely what my group, the FireHawks are - a group of people bent on keeping Riverfalls safe from Calypso and her criminal gang.
Fifteen years ago, when I was ten, in 2052, scientists in North America discovered something groundbreaking. A new development in Cybernetics and Robotics. Hardware that could be surgically implanted in humans that gives us the ability to bend the laws of nature previously recorded by physicists. With these Robotic Enhancement Implants (REIs) humans can now move like never before, jumping great distances, running at high speeds, but not only that. We could communicate in different ways; had longer lifespans, and we were stronger physically and mentally. There was seemingly no limit to what we were now capable of accomplishing, but a woman code named Calypso had other plans. I was never sure why she named herself Calypso, either after the character from Greek mythology who tried to keep the hero Odysseus from returning home, or simply because the name has the word apocalypse in it.
She genetically engineered a highly infective virus to infect humans with. At first, the disease seemed no more severe than the common cold, but it evolved into something terrible. People started coughing up blood and slowly losing control of their bodies. It started with their fingers, then hands, arms, legs, and it eventually crept its way into their hearts, when they finally died in horrific pain.
In 2053, after many people died, including my parents, the same woman released a cure. A syringe that was injected into the blood stream and instantly cured the infected. She made loads of money and when the disease was officially eradicated, the new multi millionaire hero of the world bought out every single lab dedicated to producing REIs. She hired people to work for her, implanted them with the REIs and put them to work in the Underground, selling illegal drugs, outlawed weapons, and her new supply of REIs.
The FireHawks don’t know where she is or how to stop her. That’s where I come in. My team and I are field agents trying to bring down Calypso and the Underground.
