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Famine

This is where things get a little complicated, I fear. For those of you expecting me to arise as the valiant hero of this story, and to triumph over all obstacles that might slow me, I warn that the rest of this tale will be sadly disappointing. I allowed myself to be taken by surprise, although in hindsight, the ambush and subsequent imprisonment shouldn't have been at all surprising. I'm getting ahead of myself.

After I felt the sting on my neck, I lost the ability to crawl forward. My arms could no longer pull me ahead. I felt my head get heavier and heavier, almost like it was constantly increasing in size. I needed to lay it down, just for a moment, just for a quick rest, just before I found out who did this to me. My head brushed the floor, then I dropped.

When I awoke, I was in a bed attached to a mess of medical equipment, just as I had seen Seth and Lynette. The difference between their situations and my own is that I was tied down. I must have been sizably easier to secure than most prisoners, seeing as there were no restraints other than the massive clamps on my arms.

There were machines all around me, and finally I realized how terrifying it truly was to be in a bed such as this, surrounded by constant reminders of your own mortality. I knew what each number meant, what each blip signified, and each one reminded me that life is fragile. It wouldn't take much to disrupt all of them. A can of gasoline and a match, and all those numbers, all those readouts, all of those indications that I was still alive would zero out, and I would be gone.

The room was familiar, and I quickly came to realize it was actually the same room I had come to in after I had been broken from the prison. This was my old haunt beneath Virgil's home. The realization was frightening. Virgil had not taken kindly to my recent actions towards him. Now that he had me here, there was nothing to stop him from turning the whole thing around, from destroying what I had done here. He had to be stopped, but how?

I surveyed my surroundings once more, and saw nothing new. I was very firmly attached to this bed. Thrashing my torso about, I moved the bed about an inch to the right, but this didn't continue after the first inch. The bed itself was also be attached to the floor somehow. My plans for escape were disrupted by the sound of footsteps. It was then that I saw Seth.

At first I was confused, but honestly, I should have seen it coming. He was too much like myself. He was to brilliant, to ambitious, to bitter towards the world. In seeing the faint look of surprise in my eyes, he smirked a little bit. Far from the weak boy I had first encountered, he now wore the face of a man, one whose plan had worked exactly as he had planned.

It made sense. Chances are, Virgil and Lynette weren't actually plotting against me, and honestly would have just saved their baby, but by sending me over to stop them, he had gotten rid of Virgil, and now I was trapped. There was only one question left:

“Why?”

“Hah. I'll tell you why. You're imperfect, still human in all the wrong ways. The fact that you let my father and his consort live is the best proof of that. I've brought you here so you'll not be able to interfere, but don't worry, I'm going to complete your vision.”

“So what's going to happen to me, then?”

“You'll stay right where you are. I'll even keep you updated with how things are going. Hell, as long as your arms still work you can continue to perfect the serum.”

“Couldn't you just have told me you wanted to command?”

“It's not that simple, and you know it. Our kind needs to learn to move on without you. I'm sure you've noticed the growths. You're the only one it's happening to. It must have been some sort of mistake in your first version of the serum. Just looking at you, I can see it's speeding up. Within a year, you'll be unable to move, much less lead.”

“I can fix that. I've been working on a solution that-”

“No, no you can't. If you could have, you would have already done it.”

He was right. Despite all of my best efforts, the growth continued all over my body. My nightmares were slowly coming true.

“But you've done well, doctor. The idea you had back in the city of spreading the cure through drugs was quite ingenious. That city is eating itself from the inside. There's only one problem, these new forms, these harpies, they won't listen to us. They travel in packs, and fight amongst even each other. It was a good idea, but ultimately that model was a failure. The good news is that people are frightened. Much more than they were before. These harpies have given a whole new face to the revolution, and now those of us that are capable of speech and thought can sit back and watch as they do the work for us.”

“You realize they'll kill us too, right? If they fight each other and continue to convert the humans, we can't stop them either.”

“That's where you come in. I need you to design the next generation. Something that can fight the last one effectively, but isn't as thoroughly stupid. Unless you want all of your work to be for naught, this has to happen.”

“I guess I have no choice but to accept my new role behind the scenes then.”

“That's the attitude I was hoping you would take. All of your equipment is still in this lab, the only difference is that after I let you off that table, I'm going to lock the door behind me when I leave.”

And so began the next phase of my involvement in the revolution. True to his word, Seth did allow me to resume my work with access to everything I needed, except food. Technically, I did not need to eat, but the lack began to take it's toll quickly. With each passing day, I felt weaker, while the uncontrolled growths on my body continued to multiply.

The rest of the story, you probably already know. The fall of Pittsburg, Washington, New York, all the big cities. It's ironic that most of the human population died not in the war for their own evolution but in the fight between the separate paths of their evolution. I stayed here, continuing to perfect and recreate our abilities, and Seth went on to unite those who would be united.
The story you've just heard isn't technically a secret. He's let me stay here, and made it possible for me to communicate, though my physical form resembles nothing that should be capable of such a feat. This said, it's unlikely that many know it, as our civilization seems to be one fixated only on moving forward, without surveying how they got where they are. Every time I see pictures of the world outside this room, I muse on how tragic it is that nobody recalls what the burned out buildings once stood for.

As sad of a state as this world is in, we're still moving towards the perfection of our own existence. My own knowledge is out of date now, but I still try to contribute by giving those who seek a brief window into our past.

--

That's the story he told me. I guess it's probably relevant to his story to spell out something he alluded to. The old man wasn't even a man anymore. At least, he was no longer man-shaped. His body continued to grow outward wildly. I assume at the point where he could no longer move, someone moved his monitors and keyboards closer to him. His form eventually encased all of his tools, and the vast majority of his laboratory. I don't know how Seth allowed that mass to speak, but somehow, through some terrifying combination of medicine and machines, it did.

The laboratory itself stands as a sort of grim museum now. As he said, the past isn't terribly important to this culture now, but I guess it was Seth's way of making amends for trapping the old man in that room for so long. The outside of what used to be a fortress is now just a solitary building, about a mile outside of Charynth. Enough people live there that I guess some must occasionally venture out there. There's a plaque on the wall outside explaining that the doctor will tell his story to anyone who will listen, and detailing what cannot be brought inside. The door still creaks just as much as it did when this place was first built.

Once inside, I had to repress my need to vomit. The whole room was covered at least somewhat in his flesh. He had grown to be one with his own laboratory. I guess it's fitting, since he viewed himself as merely a tool of evolution, a part of something much bigger. All the same, it was a revolting state to see someone I once viewed as a friend in.

I approached the center of the room, walking over the flesh coated floor. Layers of skin and hair covering the tile I remembered from long ago. They shifted slightly, making a squelching noise as I placed one foot slightly in front of the other. Finally, the monstrosity could detect my presence, and it started speaking. I fought back my nausea and sat down, listening to the entire tale.

Once he was done speaking, I did what I had come here to do. I coated the whole room in gasoline, and threw a match in behind me. I never thought it would work that easily, that it was just a movie trick, but damn. If you've never watched a building burn, it's quite a site. The smell it gave off was too much. I did vomit this time. But the sight was awe-inspiring. The flames started at the door, since the building was mostly made of metal, and the door was some sort of wood. After they had engulfed the door, the flames from the doorway began to reach up towards the sky, and the entire building began to change color and bow slightly.

I bet, if he could have, that the doctor would have been screaming. If his mouth still functioned, and if the speakers which allowed him to communicate long past his time hadn't been burning, he would have been screaming like a mother****er. He would have been screaming because he had more to do, because he was so far from achieving perfection, because he thought this world still benefited from what he was doing. The pitiful thing is that he shouldn't have been screaming, because nobody had cared about what he had been doing for years. All the same, I hope that old bastard screamed.

I'm not particularly proud of the person I was before all of this started. I'm not particularly proud of the person I am now, but I like to think that I've improved. I was born into an awful lot of money. I come from a family of bankers who, through various less than savvy tactics, owned 70% of the nation's assets at one point. I wasn't interested in accruing more wealth, so I decided to enjoy what I had.

I tried on lots of different hats by the time I was twenty-five. I had attempted to make myself into a psychiatrist, a teacher, a lawyer, a hundred things, and none of them really took. At some point, I realized I didn't really have to be anything at all. I had enough money to do whatever I wanted for my entire life, and the pursuit of something that would make me truly happy could be it's own profession.

For the next three years, I lived as the good doctor characterized me: “a hedonist and a drifter”. I indulged myself in as many new experiences as I could find, often mixing and matching old ones that I had found particularly pleasurable. With enough care and intelligence, an excess of drugs and sex will have no detrimental effect on your well being, and for a while, everything was fine. Then, too stoned out of my mind to be cautious, I became a father.

For the first few years of fatherhood, all that was required was a check in the mail. The mother had agreed to stay out of my life for a rather large sum, and that seemed perfectly acceptable to me. Of course, the mother was of a similar mindset to me, and used this money seeking drugs and sex, and eventually ended up dead.

So then I truly did become a father, and it changed my way of thinking entirely. I guess most people feel it when their child is first born, but I guess my lateness can be forgiven, since I hadn't seen him until this moment. I understood then, at least slightly, why people bothered living horribly boring lives. Having a child is the ultimate act of hedonism, really. It's your attempt at clawing out a legacy, at still existing long into the future. This was only my rational thinking about the subject, which made up about thirty percent or less of how I really felt. The rest of my mind was filled with that heart-warming fondness that every parent feels for their children.

From that point forward, being a father became my profession. I did everything I could to make sure my son would have the best of everything. I read books, I bought toys, I pioneered a great number of teaching techniques when I found the ones the books offered to be less than adequate. Surely enough, Seth was an incredibly intelligent child. I could not have been more pleased with how my life was going.

I guess that when things are going well, they can never stay that way. The doctors told me the cancer would certainly kill him, although it would do it slowly and painfully. Despite my money and coaxing, there was no treatment that seemed to do anything but slow down my son's inevitable plunge towards death. That is, until that day when I happened to be watching the news, and some nut-job killer got to speak on live television.

That was the first time I saw the doctor. They had let him change out of prison garb for the press conference, and he was truly an intimidating figure. He looked like a man who was truly sure of every word he spoke. That's what made his message so powerful. When he said that there was truly a way to defeat death, I had to believe every word. At the same time, there was something horribly inhuman about him. It was like he was God, almost. He talked as though we were all ants, and he alone could see the patterns in which all of us were moving. When he issued a challenge, rewarding those who would free him, I knew it had come time to use my wealth and connections to ensure my son would outlive me.

Really, the organization of an attack on a federal prison was a lot easier than it really should be. If you can get a large enough group of people to work towards a single task, anything becomes a lot easier than it should be. With a small donation to the warden, I had the doctor transferred to a ground level cell. Figuring out how to rig a charge to blow only his wall was a little more difficult, but not much more. The real challenge was figuring out how to get away clean.

The police force was one of the few things that couldn't be bought. The force attracts a certain sort of people who believe themselves to be above bribery. The ones that can be bought tend to be at the top, but that doesn't assist in getting the foot soldiers to overlook something massive, like a jailbreak. I couldn't just shoot them all, there was too much a chance that the doctor would get caught in the crossfire. I had to somehow ensure that they would be unable to respond.

This is where the large number of people came in. I put out an ad on the internet, and on every local job listing, offering a large sum of money for an hour of work, the only requirement being that they own a car. And so, in this way, I enlisted several hundred citizens as accomplices to my crime. I sent half the money out, and promised the other half upon successful completion of their task. I instructed them to be out at the time I was going to break the doctor out, and to be driving very slowly on a specific road.

In this way, I made it physically impossible for the police to respond to the call. I paid the higher ups enough to have them delay calling in a helicopter until the last possible moment, and by this time, my own helicopter had already taken the doctor outside of city limits. They brought him back here in rough shape. His legs were beyond repair. The one thing I had overlooked was figuring out how to make sure he wasn't leaning on the wall we blew up.

The first time I talked to him, I maintained my cool. In person, he was much more frightening. I could tell he was trying to seem as vulnerable as possible, to try to get me to reveal more than he should know. The man never seemed to stop calculating. I think that was so monstrous about him. I've seen monsters who look like monsters. Hell, I helped create monsters that looked like monsters. None of those scared me to interact with as much as the doctor did.

This fright really started to bother me, because I realized that I had asked him to turn my son into whatever it was that he had become. After I had sent someone to retrieve the materials for the doctor, I had to sit down for a while to consider if this was truly the best course of action. I sat by the Seth's bed. Without the treatment, he probably wouldn't wake up again. I knew then that whatever else it would do would have to be secondary to the fact that this treatment would give my son a life.

All that ****ing explaining he did, about me, and about how I didn't really love my son after the injection. That's bull****. When Seth started screaming, and babbling, and doing things that I still don't like to think about even after everything that's happened, I never stopped loving him. Even now, in this wrecked, ****ed up world. If he were still here, I would still love him.


That's what's the most ****ed up thing about this whole situation. Humanity had two saviors, if this whole evolution thing really was salvation, but now they're both dead, and everyone is still out there killing each other. Without one of them to lead this, they ended the world in trying to save it.

[-paexaea-]

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