Kuro's Random Stuffs

[Terra Alicia Rindalin]

GENOME MANIPULATION

Once the genome had been cracked completely, the coding and the meaning, it was only a matter of time until scientists began manipulating the fabric of what made up a human. Cut it up, take it apart, examine the entrails, and then stitch it back up through the magic of scientific advancement, analyze the results, and perhaps repeat if necessary. Science is a study of repetition, of course, in that all experiments must be reproducible and succeed, or as an alternative option, fail, in the exact same way every time.

From there, it was a simple leap to understand that governments would want to take advantage of such a discovery. They wanted to design the perfect soldier, one who was better than all the rest in matters of speed, strength, agility, and ruthlessness, and it was a simple matter to design the first three. The last, however, proved to be a problem not too easily solved. Or at least, it wasn’t until after the world had already begun collapsing around its own ears into the war and chaos brought by the sharp popping of cloned guns. You see, the human mind was a storage center, a bank of knowledge; as the scientists put it, “the best supercomputer Nature had to offer”. Humans broke each other all the time externally, so why could they not do it internally as well? They were better than Nature, they could cause evolution in a day, engineer the perfect human with a mere stroke of a key. What point was there to a god anymore when they themselves had unraveled the very fabric of the universe itself? None whatsoever, and that was where morals and ethics flew out the window. It was a gradual process at first, starting with criminals who had received death sentences anyway, but eventually it escalated into an economy where you fought to survive, to avoid experimentation. And so the human mind cracked like a glass left too long in the freezer, easy prey for the computers to pluck out jeweled memories and replace them with their own carbon copies or even download information into it like an old-fashioned hard drive.

And then came the final blow, the erasing of human memories completely. The empty shells littered the streets, taken from a life they no longer wished to inhabit, but then something went wrong, horribly so. The shells got up and began attacking people. Some said they were angry about losing their minds to science, others that they were simply trying to evolve past that, but most favored the inconceivable notion that Nature was finally getting its revenge for the injustices they’d done to her. Who knows, perhaps it was some god’s last laugh at humanity for abandoning him, or her since whatever god or gods out there still haven’t revealed themselves and any enlightenment at this point in time is rather doubtful. I don’t pretend to know the secrets of the universe, and quite frankly, by this point I don’t want to. You humans have already ruined so much of the present that there isn’t much point in it anyway. Who am I you might ask? Well, I do suppose I’m rather getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s just say I’m not human and leave it at that for the current moment. I still have to explain the Riders to you.

Heh, Riders. They’re humanity’s pitiful attempts to remain on the top of the food chain that has begun to rust around them. Riders are all that’s left of the humans since most are either one of the Erased, those empty shells I was talking about earlier, who, I would like to add, are not unintelligent by any stretch of the imagination if they can manage to figure out how to work the supercomputers thoroughly enough to learn how to erase more minds and created more Erased, or one of the countless people who have retreated to cyberspace, a virtual reality of their own creation to while away the time until the Riders can fully eradicate the Erased and reclaim the planet once more. Still, I do have to admire the Riders for one thing: Even though they’re all adrenalin-junkies who live for the danger they can find on their hoverboards with their swords and bombs and all other sorts of sharp-edged weapons designed to cut and tear, they still had enough courage to stay away from the gilded prison of the computers. Other than that, there isn’t a whole lot more left to say about Riders. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

Now, back to me, little old lonely me. I’d like to say I was there from the very beginning, that I was there to watch humanity rot away their own planet and reduce it to the crumbling, crater-riddled ruin it is today, but I’m not that cocky. According to your old textbooks, modern civilization took somewhere around eight or nine thousand years to develop, several million of which pre-dated that as the world developed in order to handle the strain of what it didn’t know was coming, and I’m nowhere near that old. I have an exceptionally long life yes, but even my longevity wouldn’t have lasted quite that far. No, in fact I came into this saga pretty much after the curtain had fallen over the stage, just in time to cover my stunning entrance stage left. The tragic hero enters the scene with the sword waving; meanwhile, the damsel in distress finally falls down from her tower balcony, blue tickling her lips. Exeunt stage right.

Go on, you can laugh. It was meant to be funny. I mean, I know what this is in reality and why someone else would be reading it, but you might as well find as much humor in this as you can. There isn’t a whole lot left to chuckle about to be honest. Or at least, there isn’t unless you have a rather morbid sense of humor, which I guess I sort of have. Living around corpses, dead or otherwise, tends to lead to that sort of thing. Anyway, enough about my stint as a regular comedian. I really need to learn to stop getting off-topic, this is a serious thing I’ve penned and I only have so much paper. Yeah, paper, an odd thing to be carrying around in this day and age, especially considering how fragile it is, but I don’t trust computers. They may have created me, but I think the only real use of those things is for kick-boxing. And once again, I manage to mess up and jump ahead of myself. You know what, I’m just going to state the facts and go from there just to save you some headache.

I am Experiment number 666, code-name Lucifer Storm. My name, however, is Nero, self-given. I was created to be the perfect soldier. No, I wasn’t one of those ones mentioned earlier, the ones made by the governments. I was created to fight Erased. You see, humans figured out early on that you need more than a bullet to kill an Erased. I mean, think about it. A bullet is a small thing, and no matter how much force you put behind it, most of the time it just creates a small hole, two if you’re lucky. An Erased has a brain that doesn’t realize it’s dead because it doesn’t recognize when to stop moving unless it’s not possible for it to move anymore, and I mean physically not possible as in the very nerves and muscles have been rent apart to prevent a connection. Swords kill Erased. Bombs kill Erased. Sometimes fire does, but you have to be really lucky and hope it doesn’t go out before it consumes all the flesh. That’s why I was so valuable. My traits were human, my mind-set close enough, my DNA base Homo sapien. It is only my fingers and my speed, my strength, my reflexes that are not human.

I have diamond in my hand. It sounds funny, doesn’t it? I have diamond in my hand. It sounds like something out of a sappy romance novel where a man is presenting his love with some jewelry. Thing is, though, it’s true. The bones of my fingers, my hand, are made of diamond. The muscles are steel cords, the nerves electronics. My skin doesn’t break, my nails are laced with diamond and carbon, my chest has a compressor in it to give me the strength to tear apart human flesh with ease. I have perfect night vision. My pupils are slitted like a reptile’s. I even have a tail coming out of my arse for balancing purposes! I used to think it was on purpose I was given all these traits, some scientist’s pursuit towards the most intelligent design, but then I realized that all the scientists, every single one, decided to contribute one section of DNA, one measly sequence to bestow upon me some new feature they thought best, and then decided to slap on the term ‘human’ to engineer some sort of compulsion in me to kill Erased.

I will admit, I have killed Erased, but not out of compassion or duty, never that. I killed because I wanted to prove to the Riders that they aren’t the only ones in the world. Nothing more, nothing less. Would it be all too surprising then, with that logic, to know I’ve killed humans too? A Rider or two who threatened me for not being human, the scientists who created me for being disturbed enough to turn me into their own personal science project on how to play god, and a few humans who were already on the brink of death and would have become Erased had I not ended it for them. I’m not religious, and neither are a lot of people anymore with the thought of how the gods must be really messed up if they allowed the world to get to where it is now, but I do hope that they managed to make it to a better place.

I hope I will too. I hope I’ve written down enough so that whoever finds this will be able to take this as a warning. If not, I can’t do anything about it since I’m out of paper, and I won’t get a second try. As soon as I put this letter in the time capsule to take it back, I’m going to find a better use for my claws. If there was one flaw the scientists made with my design, it was making the skin of my neck just as vulnerable as that of a human’s. I guess it’s likely my body won’t be discovered for days. Heh, how messed up am I, staring down my execution at my own hand and I’m thinking about what will happen when the Riders find me? That is, if they find me before the animals do. I don’t care, so long as it’s the end of my road. There weren’t many loose ends to tie up, but I did it and I don’t want all my work to go to waste just because I chicken out at the last minute even if that’s not my style.

Anyway, this is the end of the road for all of us. You, me, the people out there, we’re all dead. Maybe not on the outside, but certainly within. By the time you read this, I won’t have yet lived, but by the time you read this, I’ll already be dead. Hey, do me one last thing before I go: Don’t wait up for me.