Chapter One
1
Feeding can be painful sometimes. That’s just the way things go. Everything hurts once in a while.
Up there in that giant universe outside the Sphere, God must’ve thought, Well, humans might be made in my image, but that doesn’t mean I can’t let them forget they’re still animals!
Beings like God don’t really screw with us humans much anymore. Mother Nature saw what we did to her precious earth, and was just like, you just screwed yourselves over, stupid things. And I thought you were supposed to be the smartest living beings on earth.
Really, it’s true. No denying it. After the Combustion, Earth just became one giant land of toxic waste and chemicals and radiation.
We gained something from it, though; liberation. For a while, at least. Earth’s leaders were killed in a massive nuclear explosion, killing them when they were meeting for International Stability Day. A load of bull, if you ask me.
Borders were destroyed, and people flocked to other parts of the world, because anywhere else was obviously better. But all of Earth was destroyed, except for one place;
Akshayaa. Home.
Originally called The United States of America, Akshayaa was the only place to survive because the leader, Logan Halper (what a ridiculous name), had isolated the country from the affairs of the rest of the earth. He was afraid of what “could” happen, not the present day that he was living in.
Good for the future generations of humans that he did. If Halper hadn’t, he would’ve gone to that meeting and left the Shield down. Humanity would’ve been destroyed.
Who knows? Maybe it would’ve been better if humans hadn’t survived. There would still be water and plants and wild animals and trees. Oh, how I would love to see a real tree! Trees still exist, but like most things, are in a protection program. They bottle the air and hand it out in rations.
Not that we need oxygen. Only people who are both of Original status need constant air. Bio status use the air for pets, mostly. But I still think a tree would brighten up the landscape from the offset gray-orange soil and the clay-mixed-with-steel dullness of all our houses. But I still think our current land is okay-looking. It’s home, and home is pretty.
I may have never been out of my capsule, but I, and all other soldiers, no matter what side of the war they were on, knew that this was home, and they would never leave. It’s what started the Colors.
This information was inserted into our heads as soon as we were materialized. At first, just a cell. Then we grow, until we are fully formed.
Stage Three is where I am at. The last stage. Stage Three is when my appendages become hands and feet and I start growing hair on my head and... other places. We come out of our pods fully grown.
We can have children, but most die young, so making grown humans is much simpler. Science has come a long way since ISD.
My hair is just a little peach fuzz on the top of my head. I judge I have one or two days left until I can leave. The full cycle is one month to make a human. There’s another reason why I think they chose to start biomechanically producing humans; ninety percent faster, and with a lower kill rate.
The irony. People think that original is better, but when it comes to people, fake is king. Literally. Our leader, Azter, is the first biomechanically produced human who has been chosen as Leader. Although he wasn’t chosen; he was obligated to rule.
Most leaders are at least fifty percent Original status. The people who first started making Bios assumed that is the Leader wasn’t at least fifty percent, it would corrupt the system.
Not that the system is perfect. It’s far from perfect, and everyone knows it.
But our Lord Azter was made for ruling. It was the purpose of his creation, like mine is to be a hardcore killing machine. A soldier. A spy.
He was made from the DNA of all the world’s greatest leaders; Abraham Lincoln, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. You get the picture.
But did I get to be made from some cool badass killers, If I’m supposed to be so great at fighting?
Nope. Just the spawn of an average housewife.
Yup, there’s some real killing potential there. I was a fluke in the system, made from the DNA of a nobody.
Well, at least my little housewife’s body was easy to find, unlike whatever had to be left of Genghis Khan. Mine wasn’t stolen, either. They thought the body was a famous fighter’s, but the grave was robbed, and the body was replaced with another. At least I’m not ninety-five percent stolen goods. I mean, they really destroyed those graves...
Not that Lord Azter isn’t a good Leader. He’s better than good; Lord Azter is all the good traits of those bodies, stolen or not, with all the bad or undesired traits done away with. Muted. Destroyed.
Kind of like how our planet was.
