The Martian Era
In the new age of humans, the world we once knew has finally reached its end. Without air, our species sought refuge on Mars. It is the closest planet to Earth in its attributes. Overtime, we adapted to the new environment as expected. Our bodies have developed to need less oxygen and nutrients than before. We require a different amount of gravity for stability. In a way, we’re photosynthetic and that provides our skin with more protection from the sun, which is believed to only have 34,000 years left. After a few decades, we discovered a new source of nearly renewable energy in the soil called Marrenium. It could be used to power almost anything. We only can’t use it to power the Exomarrenium, which is the name of the solar-powered extraction machine.
The technological advancements we’ve made since we came to Mars have been vast and great; the most infamous since the era of invention. Our scientific discoveries are just as amazing, greater even than those from the beginnings of our studies into the field of health. Still, the most incredible of these was that made by Caesar Vaal and Sergio Reva, who proved and made it possible to live on this previously uninhabitable planet so many of us now call home.
The year is 6382 and the human race has greatly changed over the mere 2,000 years since what we now call The Bomb Gene Test. One example is our generation of people so genetically advanced we seem like something out of a movie or a comic, even in appearance, is normal to everybody except the Undermen. The few of us who weren’t affected by this experiment were infected by the cure, unless of course you were involved with engaging it. These people are the Undermen, an underground society of scientists and prisoners born to them but not related by anything other than blood.
This failed attempt at bettering our lives caused irreversible mutations that were passed onto the children of these superhumans who are only recently being accepted by some of the Undermen society because of their many good deeds and minor, contained revolts amongst themselves and law enforcement from the past, which resulted in little to no casualties each time.
The cause of this new-aged discrimination is marrenium. When people had neem used to test its effects on us, the corrupt scientists of that era were careless with the very small population we had and performed a mass experiment within the distracted crowd of people trying to get much needed supplies for living on Mars. It fed into the rest of the growing economy, sparing no one who wasn’t immune, thus creating The Bomb Gene Experiment. It was called such for its grossly adverse consequences like from the Nagasaki bombing in World War II and the Chernobyl incident of 1986. The contents of this substance gave the affected people inhuman abilities of varying quality.
To cause a change in DNA, pillars of a quickly vilified, untrusted community once idolized for saving humanity tainted us even more by using animal and plant DNA to alter the effects, or at least weaken them. For most, it did weaken them, but as they didn’t yet know the signs of infection, any unaffected people became mutants with various pre-existing conditions that were worsened by their new bodies. If you had a disease, disorder or condition involving your lungs, blood or skin, you were one of these people. The people with two of these either slipped into comas or died. Anyone with three would quickly be dead.
After the chaos mostly subsided, the leaders of our ever-changing world were killing us as quickly as we were killing them in retaliation. For the first time in history, a war was fully won by the public. Much blood was shed in the Mars War and a new order was put in place with a brand new, mostly inexperienced and uncorrupted government. Though the first century of the Martian Era had been brutal and grim, our society was and is thriving with life and acceptance, at least as much as it can.
Not everything is picture perfect, however. With societal tensions and fragile emotions, nothing could ever truly be. We have villains, who are people that use their powers selfishly, and weaker criminals. Most people don’t care to understand their society, but it’s very similar to that of the saviors we call heroes. The only difference between the two is which side they fight on and the obvious, which is the legality.
In order to contain the changes of our world, we turned to discriminately embracing these abilities. Our leaders relied on the knowledge given to us by creative, diplomatic minds of the past who shared solutions to problems no one knew would arise. After careful deliberation and conducting many scenarios, experts researched many films involving inhuman abilities. This led to new laws, licenses and schools to accommodate these changes.
Even with these many dominant, hereditary mutant genetic modifications, there are still a very small number of people now considered abnormal. All of them are the children of scientists. I am one of these select few: a living science experiment to the people who created me for the sole purpose of taking down the majority race and returning to our former selves whom only a very small amount of people still remember and only vaguely understand their ideals. Though it was all I’ve known, it inspired me to be better than them, enraged me to know how little they could care for their own flesh and blood and gave me a good sense of what I believe to be right and wrong in this entirely different, fresh and ever-changing environment. It’s made me the man I am today. For only that, I am grateful to them, though I owe them nothing for the pain and suffering they have caused me.
