“As the wintery clock struck eleven, you harkened the light whilst I harkened the deadened.” These were very strange words to come out of a little girl’s mouth, but they parted from the mismatched lip-buds of a young girl roughly his own age, and on the self-same flyer train he was taking to the Northerly Gardened Apartments. She happened to be seated exactly next to Elias.
At a first glimpse, he merely saw a little piece of skirt hem and a sliver of leg and lightly-coloured shoe. Yet, as soon as he saw that her yellow cotton dress didn’t quite veil winged limbs and that she had an oddly inhuman slant to her chin and cheek, he glanced away. Knowing she must be from outside Vandalier to have been horribly, genetically altered like that.
He thought she might be deformed. Another failed experiment from the decidedly un-brilliant minds of Unified Grounds but, when he glanced up, she was actually as finely-featured as they come: except for being a little pale and dainty and having a decidedly unfashionable and out-of-date fringe and over-the-face, ribbony tresses that curled and coiled in startling dark-blue. One lip flowered red, and the other budded white.
She penned the strange sentence she just uttered, alongside her name, Forlornidae Anthelid Cloverly, on a silvery graphite screen with exquisite ivy patterns snaking across its borders.
“I just had my DNA tested and, as long suspected, it turns out I am descended from the beast dolls, the companion brides,” she announced suddenly and proudly to looks of disgust, pity, and discomfort. She really seemed to be addressing Elias though. She looked upon Elias with the dazzlingly-bewildered gaze of someone who has just seen the grounds open up to reveal heaven or all the worms suddenly turn into swans.
The girl seemed to understand that the people nearby were reacting to her with much hesitation and a general balk, but she defended herself. Raising up a hand that he realized, sickened, was made of many flesh-petals: ones that appalling, disgustingly, in his eyes, were moulting like the leaves after spring’s faltering. He wondered if they would become as bare as the trees and bushes did in the rainy haze of a summer aftermath. Distracted, his mind shivered away from the sweet yet snowy steps of a prolonged winter that seemed everlasting and into an earlier time of heat and summery billows.
The child raised this hand-thing that belonged more to a lily than a human, in slender, light, and long-fingered protest.
“We were the most rigorously and even brutally-tested of the genetically-engineered beings outside of Vandalier. Unlike humans, we had enough animal DNA to be considered disposable and our forms took to the engineering better than the human-based chimeras. They could experiment on us with little abandon so perfecting us was easier. You know some of us had human-like intelligence despite the fact we weren’t supposed to,” she whispered this into Elias’s ear, still brightly, beamingly-proud.
“Personally, I think animals are brighter anyway: a chimera bride came up with the chemical detection test used in safe housing. Her husband who made the locks didn’t share her contribution with the world, but her son did.” She paused, finally. Then another stream of rapidly-fired words hailed forth.
“A contemporary of hers was the first to go to a human school. I was always raised as a human-based chimera. My departed parents were human-based but my great-grandfather owned a chimera-bride before he married and kept her on as a servitor out of kindness and many women are infertile. Companion chimeras have better fertility. So, they may have used one to conceive a child. A lot of people used to do that in secret.”
Elias had heard some things about the barbaric treatment of the companion chimeras, but he was not entirely sure what their purpose in Unified Grounds had been. Had they been made to provide love? Companionship? (He thought perhaps both). His vague impression was that they played the role of missing family, friends, or even a lover for the lonely, disabled, and romantically misfortunate. Companions’ tailor-made for, what his mother had called, “socially-unsuccessful and/or mentally-anguished humans.”
The companions had “human speech” she told him but were “engineered with the loyalty and minds of something more akin to animals, and bodies that were frequently smaller and with a more animal-like base.”
The girl whispered to Elias again, “The man who pioneered controlled evolution had a young bride that was said to be of exquisite composure; one that even the light most faired would fail to whitely-beautify. It is said in my home that the loveliest chimera brides and beasts and engineered women were modelled on his dead wife Sibyl Farling. My grandmother was the most successful representation of her image and people back home have commented before on how I look just, eerily like her. At least when wearing my holo. Though really, most chimera brides have no gene malformations to correct at all. Whenever they did, they…they were forgone.” She sniffled, chilled, cold.
In the light and strange whirlwind of turning thought, she changed the subject to ask:
“Is it true that, the breathing spirit gene that connects you all together and to the overseeing machine Monovalent (so that he may constantly repair and rebuild the Nano-mits and artificial DNA in your bodies to keep you healthful and immortal) is indeed a virus?”
“First, they’re called Nanonits, not mits. Mits are something you use to catch a ball in sport and secondly, well sort of. It is not a literal virus just inspired by one somewhat, and it shares some of their properties,” Elias said. “Besides,” he added “nowadays we usually call them Nanomaids not Nanonits. That term has fallen out of favour.”
“So”, Elias did not quite know how to bring this up without being wholly impolite. “Does that mean you’re not wearing one of the holographic masks we made for you…That’s really you?”
“You know it is not Vandalier exclusively that makes the holos right? We do make some of our own. Judging people based on appearance is awful you know. I don’t know why, considering how civilised and great you guys are supposed to be, you do it, but yes, it is me.”
“Were you ever allowed to remove it?”
“No, where I’m from the reasons why you shouldn’t ever take off your holo are made very clear and besides why pay more than a little mind to such inconsequential things? In some places however, you’re allowed to alter your mask in any way you like. I personally think that’s completely hypocritical to the idea of equality and valuing the spirit over all else.”
“I don’t get that either, I thought you had to be equal?” He said this trying to ignore the sight of pale plants that were growing and flowing out of her light limbs, and not merely her hands.
Well, the idea is that everyone gets a holo that evens out all serious irregularities so they can at least start on equal footing but at least in some places you can alter it for the right price. Change it as you wish.” Or so she answered.
“Where I came from, in the innermost part of Height Mallows, we don’t see the point in dwelling on the kind of vanities that caused people to judge and shun each other in the first place.”
“That’s why the Fairness for All Forms Act was brought in in the first place and Vandalier never seems to grasp that fact properly. It was to stop hatred and violence and discrimination based on appearance. It was no different than any other vile discrimination. There was so much of it too: after the engineering fallout. No-one wanted to hire those whose beautifications or enhancements of themselves or their children, went wrong.”
“Old-World Companies said they were too gross to look at and scared customers away. We had to bring in laws to prevent such discrimination. The masks got rid of the temptation to discriminate in such a manner in the first place. Our companies now are much better; looking out more for the needs of the people and not just for profit.”
“It’s not simply people though, is it? Aren’t the plants and flowers where you’re from also malformed…?”
“We prefer the term chimera to person and take a look for yourself: they let me bring a rare, relatively untouched flower with me when I moved here. It is only modestly hybridized.”
She reached a teeny, inhuman hand down and began rifling around in her white and delicately-stringed bag as outside, everything rested under moulted sunlight. Rays softly struck gold upon a strange amass of uneven petals she pulled out; the outlaying colours of this waterlily were black and rose-blue making it appear bloodied and bruised. At its mid, its shade was a deathly greenish-fallow.
No harmony or rhyme was lambing it, but the smell was oddly-wonderful like Old-World maple, flowery sugar-pine. Seeing his fascination, she smiled, and it lifted a last layer of sadness from the wild wood wells of her eyes: took down and felled a sorrow he hadn’t even noticed was there before.
“You can keep it: I am allowed to return occasionally so I’ll just pick another one.
“They’ll grow back,” she reassured him, “just like the ones on my hand. I know you were looking at it: the petals shed periodically but don’t worry they always return. It is said, that when a person is visited by a great sorrow the flowers will fall from their form far more rapidly than usual; in a great rush. For that reason, we leave our petals scattered forlornly on the graves of loved ones as a sign of grievance and loss. “
“Is that true though?” Elias inquired while his slightly-freckled nose twitched.
“Well, I’ve never noticed it. Maybe I’m just heartless.”
A panting woman got up from her train seat and passed by. Suddenly her face shifted from ivory to dead-white and her hair from red to gold. Her eyes enlarged and light fell into the frost of her lips. Ones now deadly-pale.
Forlorn seemed displeased. “Another one with a holo-changer.” She murmured.
Elias was just now realising she was another one of Forlorn’s kind. Two Olden Valers in one day, that was not a common sight.
The chimera child, Forlorn, frowned once more and glanced up. “This is my stop” she said, suddenly turning to the window and as she stood her blue velvet hat blew off revealing horns. Not black and overly-pointed like those of the devil but like snowy antlers. A forest of autumnal leaves in them entwined.
Revolted but curious, he glanced away and when he dared looked back even the last ghostly hint of her had departed.
He saw she’d left inside the train a pretty, luminously-glowing pamphlet of some sort with the tagline Murveil’s halos and a slogan penned upon it.
Forgo the bloodless similarities of generic holos and keep your dear and unique soul: creating a different but equal beauty for all is our motto: make the outside as sweet as the consciousness beneath.
Those were the alterable holos she was talking about, he realised. Wait - did she say she was a doll - his father had mentioned them before; in yet another fight with his mother that he was not supposed to listen in on and concerning whether they should be giving aid to the Unified Grounds or not.
“Olden Valers brought this upon themselves Vola: we banned unnecessary genetic engineering, and they didn’t and look where they ended up; so many of them are summered dead. They are plagued by a sickly and dying population that are fortunate to make it to adulthood, let alone thirty. They found out the perils of extreme vanity too late and then, in typical fashion took things way too far after realising how much of a mess they were in, by banning even the showing of one’s unique face as a capital offence.”
“It is NOT a capital offense. In even the strictest places the most you might get is a short imprisonment: it is the social shunning that is most egregious. A little like walking unclothed all the time and refusing to dress: they may not arrest you or punish you particularly severely, but you won’t find anywhere to work or be allowed to shop or be delivered to, or even be interacted with by most civilians.”
“It was an exaggeration for effect, Vola. To be honest, I can’t even look at them. Don’t get me started on the ones like hyper-repelling, human-dolls with their stiff, limp, puppet-arms made of the “flexible” ralphene they engineered, that sometimes didn’t function properly and then became anything but fluid. You know, it got worse with each passing generation as the DNA fragmented and malfunctioned more poorly with each cellular divide.” His father had lowered his uncomfortably high head and shifted but did not see Elias standing near; golden-haired and open-mouthed.
“You would not be saying any of this sweet, caring stuff about them, implying they’re simply misunderstood if you watched any documentary that showed their eyes, Vola. They were meant to mirror the dazzlingly-fair irises found on a true doll, but many merely ended up sightless and blind as a real doll’s eyes.” His father had glanced over but could not meet his mother’s gaze as it had gone astray.
“I’ve read countless medical journals from both Unified Grounds and Vandalier that document their ailments and genetic follies. That chronicle the desperate quest for solutions to fix, or at least alleviate, the symptoms of mass tumours and failing organs and painful, spasming tails designed with poorly-constructed hybrid and artificial tissue.” His father had finished his tirade.
“We can engineer them to be like us, Lute.”
“No, Vola, we can’t. They come from a primitive alien culture, one that will end up taking us down the same path as them. I am willing to take the children, maybe but that is it.”
Somewhere else far-away, in one of Unified Grounds brightest spots, where the rainbow flowers were evened, and the hills were of a greener verve - but the songful tunes of the whale and bird and toad people were woefully-distant- stood a boy from the gated sect of Heights Mallow in the Guilow Province.
A boy slender, soft of gait and a little self-indulgent. He was also rather arrogant, (or so some there might say) of stride. He had a wily, budding voice that many considered magical. He, Mollify, would not hesitate to tell you that his music teacher, a man of some high-esteem himself, considered Mollify to be his most promising, genetically-enhanced musician.
Mollify’s young breath rose and his head crumpled. There formed a frown on his face as he was feeling a little hot underneath a brightly-shining holo.
He was balancing a rather large, silver cleaver above his hand. One that’s reflection did his face and all his nearest surroundings mirror, yet with such a significant blur so that he could not remove the holo to check his soft, teddy bear ears for any splitting, dark, brown-golden fuzz or his scarce, boyish beauty, admire.
People in the neighbourhood would have been startled and horrified to see this sweet-seeming youth grinning like an insane, white, jack-o-lantern at his image: all without a trace of fear of what might lie underneath the holo. Then again, that dark cloud had dissipated the day another young child had violently torn Mollify’s holo off, or at least the affixed and surprisingly razor-thin, metallic-sheet cover part of it, when they were alone together. Then the other boy had, after a heartbeat of shock, gasped strangely.
This littler Mollify, an amass of tangled toes and thorny limbs buried deep in the infertile dirt and split ends that haired the deadened grass, had gazed upward. He remembered how he had tried to simply raise himself upright; only to have accidently glimpsed his impossibly-even face reflected, just slightly, in the nearby drinking glass that had fallen to the ground and been left there during the rough-housing play.
In that moment, and as he heard the other child’s labouring struggle for breath and realised how quick and effortless the perfect flight and flow of air into the branchial passages of his own violet lungs was, all the unease and deep concern he had and the need to avoid reflective surfaces and what few mirrors there were, subsided. This facial-revelation had been his ticket to finer things; to addictive wonder and secretive admiration.
He glanced once more at the sharp weapon he brandished, not to prepare a meal as his android servants would most certainly do that, but because it reminded him of the childhood game and dare, Piercer’s Childhood Challenge. You were either a limp-wristed, yellow-bellied, pansy-coward or a stiff and joyless bore if you did not try it at least once.
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He had done it before as it was easy enough. Considering all one needed to do was attempt the flesh of their own skin to pierce and try to gauge just how effective the various substances they had put in people’s skin to make it armoured and stronger, were.
Most, Mollify included in this number, would be unable to make even a dent but the percentage of people who actually inherited this armoured protection to its full extant and effectiveness, did vary. One girl, Allery, almost died from the game a few years back.
She was from the girl’s institute across the road. He had played the game with her and a small, be-winged, quick-footed girl who he also strongly suspected did not need her holo to be beautiful, named Forlorn, and several other children.
After seeing the hearty volumes of blood parting from the girl’s flesh rushing out like they had been plucked from the wounded dews of the biblical Red Sea and seeing that young Allery’s steadily-darkening arm now had a coat made up of more blood than any of them had ever witnessed before: upon hearing her like a little-beast howling, Forlorn and many of the others had become too afraid to ever again attempt the Piercer’s Childhood Challenge .
Though Mollify thought this just a little cowardly on Forlorn’s part. Felt that she had betrayed a former wildness: purposely picked the beige dress and then settled down under the shade of the lavender because its cast was soft and light; safe and sweet. Not to mention bland. She was overly-cautious: the roses were too red; the sun too vibrant and the moon too dark, for her taste.
After all, had he not witnessed her complete the task successfully with a number of sharp objects and dangerous things, a trillion times before?
The best aspect of the game in his opinion, was that you could get away with it so very well. It was quite the difficult task for any elders to even attempt to cease its practice as their own armoured skin had degraded. They could, and did, get badly injured trying to wrestle deadly knives from more effectively-armoured, young hands.
Due to the armour’s biodegradation and loss, their elders were only able to merely threaten and shout frantically at him and the other sordid youths engaging in the skin-testing practice. Eventually they did however race over, wearing those long hand-protectors, that he’d heard (much to his amusement) they had begun to manufacture on-mass. Simply to deal with this issue.
This disintegration tended to happen over time and chimeras usually lost most of the effectiveness of the armour eventually.
He knew why too: the cells were susceptible to immuno-attack. Upon this thought dwelt the young lad Mollify, taking perhaps a tad too much amusement in it.
He heard a noise and vainly, albeit thoughtlessly, adjusted a fair lock that had strayed and checked for any stain upon the soft silk of his forest-and-blue shirt. He turned his attention finally to the numerous folds and coils of dark, linen pants. The sound turned out to be nothing; fast-fleeting footsteps on a nearby street-path. He remembered that they learnt in biology how, despite the early promise from many studies that they could in fact engineer a perfect, uncomplicated, flawless, armoured skin that no blade could maim, and no bullet could sully, this turned out to be simply not the case.
So very many chimeric bodies faltered and failed and attacked themselves. They would not recognise these artificial cells and treated them like foreign invaders.
Everything lessened the effect of the cellular armours: from a chimera’s own misfiring DNA to unique hybrid diseases and even a bacterium that evolved to consume it. Causing anything from mild to mass biodegradation.
He was fairly certain but not assured, that scientists had claimed there were also certain destabilising environmental factors; ones that caused it to further break-down and lose its toughness over time. Often ending up weaker than it would have been if it had been left unaltered and even tearing constantly.
Though as a chimeric successful his chance of lacking the armours was low and his chance of its stamina and vibrancy holding, was high.
He did, however, remember looking down at his armours in class. Even now he did glance at his pale, long-fingered hand a hint nervously before again (lightly and brightly) smiling.
Forlorn, in contrast, had when she first such information heard, shivered with a fleshly drooping of hand-and-foot-plants, flattened ears, and stopped wings. Despite also living where the lighter winds fared and pollution didn’t choke the air from your throat and the most serious of genetic malformations didn’t douse the fire from your feet (and being in general an unlikely candidate for the degradation) she had nevertheless, near-succumbed to the most fearful of tears and a terror trembling-eyed.
The next day Gladius took the flyer-train with Elias and once again the snowy-footed chimera child was there. Once again, she had donned her little white shoes and blue-lidded hat. However, this time her dress had a pale-trim and was rich and rose-coloured with a black bow. These more vibrant colours brought out a bizarre fire; emphasizing a slick of red trapped within sooty lashes. Ones that though of appreciable length, had seemed at least shade-wise, to be quite regular and unremarkable. She gazed up through these brimstone lashes. Gladius, who was dressed darkly and a little formally himself for his first job, was staring at her but not in quite the manner Elias would have expected. His expression was almost sweet yet really strange. It made Elias think of a phrase he had come across occasionally in old stories and films and writing; a soppy look.
“Have I said how much I love your spirit trains? They can go as high as planes and move matter through solid objects, I can’t believe it. We have nothing like that back home. It’s fey, it’s magic.”
Gladius’s face took on a more classic, imperious expression that Elias knew quite well.
“Well not really,” he said. “Despite the name, they are not fey or mystical or airy (at least like a fairy) at all. They work using the Faerytilled method and are made from a perfected version of Emanuel’s stringvae’s; a lab-made and stringy, stretchy, liquid-like material that is more gaseous than solid. In this form it is able to stretch and expand over long distances and travel at hyper speeds and pass through anything: a protective bubble inside the inner compartment of the string or spirit train protects us from being similarly altered…”
I know it is not truly mystic; the details are interesting though thank-you.”
‘It only took me twenty minutes to reach the other side of Vandalier yesterday.” She continued.
“Faster ones take ten, five or even three.” Gladius said.
She looked at him and quite dearly so, but her gaze shifted, and it was once again Elias she bestowed with the same heavenly look one would give a person that could turn the blackest worms into the whitest swans.
Elias who was all but oblivious, at least momentarily, to the stare turned to his brother.
“Is it true? I simply cannot believe it is true. Are you really going to working for Hebel?”
“Yes of course it is true and please stop asking me. You are annoyingly-incessant. ‘Gladius is it true, Gladius say it’s so.’ ‘Tell me yet again, how you’re actually working for Hebel.’ You’re like a broken spirit-line sending the same stupid thought- messages over and over.”
“I can hear some of your thoughts; read some electrical outputs and impulses but not all of them,” the chimera girl piped in.
“No, you can’t.” Gladius sneered. “Only people in Vandalier can communicate via the spirit-line: you don’t even have the breathing gene in your DNA. “
“Yes, but I am a telepath; one of the successful ones (at least somewhat) and I can transfer feelings.”
“That’s an idiotic and far more importantly dangerous, ability. We could theoretically achieve that feat ourselves easily but it’s far too corruptible. You can mind control and even torture innocent people that way. God, Olden-Valers are so barbaric.”
The young girl flinched, modestly hurt and a little angered.
“Hey, Gladius that’s too far: that’s horrible, don’t say a thing like that.”
“I apologise.” The adolescent’s face showed he did indeed feel genuine regret even if he were perhaps a little loath to admit it.
“Still, it is a very foolhardy thing to engineer in anyone.”
Gladius knew that while he was working for a company under the supervision of Hebel, there was a less than scarce chance of actually meeting the man.
He was at least for now, whilst he was furthering his training, relegated to being a lowly Hebel-line monitor. There to check in (not on the mainframe as only a few highly-trained specialist could do that) but on the split Nanos; the little roaming parts of Monovalent. The parts that checked for issues or possible disaster in uninhabited areas. The kind of places where Monovalent could not merely use the spirit gene that breathed beautifully its light into all of them to see through their eyes. A gene that left all their minds and bodies branched together and flowering open to him. Granting him all-access.
Such an undertaking allowed Monovalent to see directly through the highly advanced, spirit-line eyes of every human imbued with the breathing gene. To watch over them and repair any damage to their infinite bodies by flooding them with wonderful new Nanomaids and cells that were highly-controlled by him so they would always be perfect and never alter or mutate unless instructed to do so. Gladius had studied Monovalent and the Hebel spirit-line’s wonders and abilities and agonised over every detail of how they worked a thousand times: he loved little, but he adored everything about Monovalent and his excitement at getting to help keep him working was grand. Keeping Monovalent in great form, even a small part, was an honour rich and genuine.
The people nearby looked at Forlorn less and less every time she caught the train with them; something she did in the first light of the afternoon and each and every time he and Gladius witnessed her there, Elias insisted that they sat with her.
Fellow passengers once flummoxed curiosity over Forlorn’s appearance was, if not fully sated, somewhat reduced. Though it could still be noted that every time she was to raise even a single, spry, palely-flowered finger (sometimes so quickly that it blurred and become more akin to dust’s tiniest whitest speck) there was at least one curious eye that followed its movement.
Forlorn, however, did not cease her own glancing at any of them and her face settled particularly and daily on one young woman: who seated herself just a smidgeon away from all the other passengers and wore a little gray-gold ring. One that looked like it had been snapped in half: perhaps purposely. The repairing was quite crude and considering how easily-accessible the technology and means to re-perfect it was, she could only assume it must have been left that way of the wearer’s volition: it appeared deliberate.
Unless she was so impoverished that she could not afford the means to replace or rejuvenate the jewel but no-one within the walls of Vandalier was that poor or she was fairly-certain this was the case. After-all they had universal housing and education and medical facilities and a somewhat socialist base. Besides such poverty would be rather incongruent with her overall appearance: the sad-eyed lady was, after all, both brightly and beautifully dressed and had perfectly-curled and coiffed hair.
Forlorn asked Elias about it. It was during perhaps their fifth train-ride together.
“Things are sometimes left broken if the heart of them is broken.”
Her inhuman eyes’ lashes and lids slid about. She blinked in confusion.
Well, if he has been unfaithful or left her until he redeems himself, she’ll keep the ring broken. If he doesn’t soon make good on his marital promises and the marriage forever splinters, then the ring’s material will be recycled and re-made into something useful.”
“I like that. It’s very poetical,” Forlorn smiled.
“Poetical, really…” Gladius sniggered.
“What’s her name?” Gladius asked Elias gesturing toward the chimera child, the one that felt she was but a simple holo-d girl from Heights Mallows but to the boys was some strange little invader (albeit a sweet one) from the rotting heart of Olden Vale.
“I can’t pronounce…Forlorn-eh-day, I think.”
“I go by Forlorn.”
“Yes, that’s right, she does. I have been calling her that. For ages now. You just haven’t been paying us any mind, Gladius.”
Elias noted uncomfortably that she used her tufted tail, fanned out, to sit upon. It looked very soft as if someone had mixed fox and human hair with a hint of the fluff on a moth’s wing. He wondered what it might be like to touch something so sweetly-alien, and yet the horror of asking something so rude and overly-intimate stopped him doing so, well before the words even half-formed on his lips.
“Though my Nam has always called me Folly.” As Forlorn spoke, she met Elias’s gaze.
‘Since Dae is from a dead language, Latin, I understand people are unsure if it’s pronounced dee or die or day.”
“Nam? Oh, do you mean a nanny?” Elias queried.
“No, what is that?”
“It means a kind of non-paternal carer. Or so I would assume,” Gladius said.
“Oh, then yes, that is what I mean. Except she cares for me at a school or did.”
“Oh, you mean a teacher?” Gladius shifted an uncomfortably-lounging leg, one placed into pants so dark they created a double shadow. He picked at a crisp, caramelised lock of hair half-heartedly. He detested his hair. Thought it beyond boring and pedestrian but Elias loved it. He thought it resembled the leaves of the elderly maple infused with a spindle of sugar. Hair, where the palely-spun sunlight creeps in the gold and the shade blackens it down to dust.
“No, this was after teaching hours,” Forlorn replied with a light frown. “She mostly looked after us at night as I recall.”
“So, you’re in boarding education? You live during the term in educational placement and then go home in the holidays?” Elias leapt up a little; smiling with a sweet curiosity
“No, it is our home. No-one there has any outside family. Most children’s parents have passed away due to genetic-disintegration. “
“You’re an orphan. I’m so sorry.” Elias’s eyes further greying, turned to cumbersome clouds that reddened painfully and near-wept their rainy tears for her.
“Why are you apologising for such a common thing? I mean I haven’t won the lottery either but no-one’s consoling me over that. I only know one person whose parents are both living and her mother isn’t long for this world. Lord take her breath and rest her soul in eternal peace.”
“You believe in God?”
“It is just an expression. There’re a few scattered remnants of once really populous, religious orders and a couple of churches near my home and other ones here and there, in Unified Grounds but I don’t know of any regular people who believe now.
“We stopped using it. That phrase I mean. I’ve heard it before though: through old film and texts,” Elias said.
“Well, I like it: it conveys our helplessness to a higher power. I don’t know if that power is actually just a force of a nature, but it conveys our haplessness quite well.”
“We’re not hapless,” Elias said.
“No, we’re not,” Gladius further countered.
“In fact, we can alter our genetic make-up at any time to adapt better to any changes in our environment or to help us survive colonizing other planets, we have controlled evolution. Monovalent can rewrite the ANV-DNA in our bodies into something new and improved while keeping our mind intact.”
“We could have all-new alien capabilities such as breathless bodies that could travel between the stars or transform ourselves into one of your lab-made and hybrid bodies with all their plant and beast abilities. Only thanks to Monovalent’s cell guidance ours wouldn’t fail and malfunction and would be 100 percent successful.”
Forlorn tapped a flowered foot.
“Yes, but such drastic alterations have only been tested and worked in simulations in your country, I heard, and will you always be in control? What if something goes wrong with the process? You never know what will happen.”
“We do.” Gladius spoke and noted the dark languor of Forlorn’s one visible eye under the felt hat that had fallen down to fringe most of the left half of her little face.
“That’s what science and controlled evolution is. Finding out all about the most important force in your life and first understanding and then decoding it and finally, harnessing it: learning its properties so you might best utilise them and shaping yourself to conquer it.”
“After all the breathing gene went from a computer test simulation to reality in thirty years and most of that was societal implantation: getting government approval and public support and general safety guarding.”
“DNA is life and we’ve mastered and conquered it: your people tried to control mere parts of it and failed.”
Forlorn frowned lightly. “I guess I don’t trust any knowledge or technology that much to believe it is infallible and that my interpretations could not be upheavelled. I could see myself coming to the realisation that my beliefs and know-how were misplaced and being confronted by the finding that the strangest of things were truth but then I’m just a barbarian.”
“It does not sound like you quite get the scientific process…” Gladius interjected. Perhaps taking a little too much delight in him being, quite likely, right. Or at the very least a convincing arguer.
Elias smiled at her with rueful tenderness; he would always be the white wine to his brother’s red: he would ever feel the need to be the Riesling with its liquid gold so that he might counter his brother’s dry, stone-crumble.
“The Lord God is a bogeyman. It is the puppets you should fear,” Gladius told her.
“Really, they’re here too?”
“The puppets are a myth.” When Elias spoke, his usually-modulated voice was high and nervous and with a rapidly-rising pitch.
“Not where I’m from. Though we have two kinds of puppets; the ones who allow themselves to be controlled willingly and those who are controlled unwillingly.”
“The puppets don’t exist in Vandalier, Elias, I was being facetious ever-gullible brother. What has happened is parents and people who heard about their existence in Olden Vale, told stories about them to frighten children.”
The older boy’s usually-pleasant face was now more smirk than lad.
“The Hebel spirit-line is impenetrable but Olden Valers are connected via a cruder electronic network called the electronic veil it is also what projects the masks onto their faces and bodies and even crude sensations so you can’t feel their sick and malformed bodies, it makes them feel normal. Unfortunately, the mind often reacts in an ill and nauseated way to the holos' attempt to alter their vision and senses.”
Forlorn touched her blue head unconsciously.
“So, a chip is installed into all infants at birth that rectifies this, Gladius furthered. “It is also hackable and can be used to take control of the central nervous system and essentially turn human bodies into a puppet to do your bidding. Innocent civilians make the best shields,” Gladius’s smile lit his face ghoulishly.
“I thought the masks were wooden or clay or painted on.”
“How primitive do you think we are Elias? You do know it wasn’t a native of Vandalier but Twiloe who was born, bred and lived his entire life upon the mighty shores of Olden Vale before its fall who came up with a workable model to create controlled evolution right?” She paused; soft tongue clicking.
“Your people just took CE on a different path, a more successful route for now but you never know whence it might start to fail or run amok: you have never really experimented with it beyond the breathing gene.”
“Oh hollyhock, not this again. We invented controlled evolution, we invented controlled evolution. See! We’re just as good with technology and innovation as Vandalier. No, you came up with the crude blueprints and we refined and perfected them.”
“Fine.” She threw a petaled hand so that it brushed her feline ear in half-concession.
“You know Gladius it sounds like you have read up on us. You must really enjoy reading up on things. I do too.”
“You know the puppets are not the scariest thing we have to offer. Dally also used to tell me stories about how video footage would be shown of people who had been captured by the terroristic demaskers and had their holos violently torn off to reveal their faces to everyone while the demaskers would tell them to embrace their natural beauty.”
Gladius rolled a dim, greenly-gray eye slightly; perhaps hoping for something slightly gorier and more offensive.
“Fine, it might not sound completely horrific to you but you have no idea what that’s like for us. It’s far more shameful than nudity and for many, it’s worse than death. In fact, some rumours say people have perished from the shock of it. Dally had nightmares about it happening to her for years before she took off her own holo for the first time at nineteen and actually saw her face.”
“Wow, they really did that,” Elias gasped.
“It was never proven to be true. The demaskers claimed it was propaganda and that it was against their philosophy as they were fighting for people to have more freedom from masks and to choose how they looked and what to do with their own bodies. It’s easy enough to fake with the right tech skills.”
“Well Elias and I have to go Forlorn,” Gladius said.
“Bye Folly,” Elias called. His hand waved, and hers rose to meet and match his, in a flurry of white and flowers.
