Terra Nova

prologue

The earth you imagine isn't the one I know.

Seventy years ago, mankind reached their limits. Our greed, our nature to cause devastation won.

Oil drillings, mining, cutting down trees, nuclear development – everything led to the ice caps' meltdown. Floods hit all continents, and when they were done, the heatwave came like none other.

As if there was a drain in the earth's crust, everything, even the seven seas became dry, now barely existent.

In its aftermath, we were left with a red planet, desolated and barren, the globe forged not from water nor greens but jagged rocks and bloodied sand, nothing but dust lands.

And humanity ravaged.

From the glorious number of seven billion, by the ruthless plagues that came we've dwindled down to almost nothing.

And for those of us who survived, we're not human.

Not anymore.

I was one of the few they thought compatible with the experiment. Project Althea.

Althea, she was the mother of Meleager in Greek myth.

Soon after her son was born she was told that he would die as soon as a piece of wood that was burning on her fire was fully consumed.

She immediately extinguished the piece of wood and sealed it in a chest, but in a fit of rage many years later she took it out and set it alight, thereby killing her son. It's a contradiction to what the project was promoted to be, and yet it's not.

Althea meant healing.

But you're mistaken. We were not the lucky ones. We were not healed, we were destroyed.

They ruined me.

Since I was a little girl, they robbed me from home, which had been nothing more than the caverns of a broken, sunken city along with the other fugitives.

What little remains of our government collaborated as they thought it was necessary to find potential candidates for the ingenious genetic discovery.

They thought civilization was in a dire need of an immunity. Funny, for ages civil war had tear them apart and now the brink of our universe, the involuntary end of our time made them join forces all too willingly.

Radioactivity, sandstorms of a weather, the burning sun were all threats to the complete extinction of our civilization. They needed to make us, the survivors that is, into living bio weapons.

So they took the children (since the rest unnoticed thus not captured have already dug their graves early, it's guaranteed), the healthy ones, the fighters and reinvented them as they went kicking and screaming. Along with the rest, I was taken, but I was not a fighter. I didn't rebel.

We were cultivated, reborn you can say in underground concentration camps. In these bunkers, we're all supposed to forget our pasts, our families. We're adopted into a new life, bred into a new generation, a new gene pool.

And like the good soldier I was, I forget.

I wake up screaming.

I immediately shred the blankets off of me and started pacing, reminding myself I was no longer confined in a glass pod.

I was in my room above ground, reinstated as a guardian.

Us, the participants of the experiment, the ones successful were called Altheans. The ones that were not perished in the process, or left disabled as a result. I pity them. It wasn't correct to live like that. They're better off dead.

But of course, like the passive aggressive humanoid I was, I made no move to deliberately express my voice, my judgment. For as long as anyone's concerned, I'm not supposed to have one. Orders came. I executed them. I don't plan to change the system.

Altheans are like a manifestation of a fraction of Noah's ark. It's a metaphor. Similar yet not quite right. Because we weren't products of a holy prophecy claimed by the messiah. We were products of a struggle, a last resort which didn't care for the threshold of ethical barriers and simply ran through it as if destiny beckons so. We were martyrs.

Science brought a way to join stronger fauna's DNA into our human one. Think of it like stem cell, but instead of curing the disease, it created a new limb, a prosthetic which can reappear at will when studied, practiced.

Altheans are left with the ability to shape shift parts of their bodies or when having developed better control; to only specifically utilize the physiological features of the animals according to the amount of genetic material they were marginally exposed to during the artificial transcription process.

I was exposed to seven. The average human could only handle an average of one mutation and four at most. They couldn't handle the pain of the complete cycle, of being one with such numerous species, of becoming an arsenal.

At best regarding the anomaly, the prodigiously dangerous results, they thought I was a miracle. They're wrong. I'm an abomination. That's what all Altheans are.

And yet we were made guardians. Measured in worth, it's too noble of a calling, the title in front of my name. I feel condescending of the privilege.

Guardians watch over the border.

The New World government reconstituted the lands they thought were suited for the survivors, marked and facilitated them appropriately as a two thousand mile radius from Washington DC.

The rest were deemed non sterile and volatile, in other words, forbidden to venture about. We were tasked to maintain defense. Nothing comes in. Nothing comes out. That's the rule.

Thanks to my particular variety of genes, I'm even a captain of my own division. Just lovely.

We patrol the perimeter at sunrise. But now, I'm awake, sweating, while the standard round windows of the compound show the still dark onyx sky, red rimmed at the parts which met the soil outside. It was still dawn.

Aware of the situation that it was futile to attempt sleep as I would need hours to fall into a dreamless slumber in the first place, I sighed.

I showered quickly, finding comfort in the scarce water running down the pipes. It was one of the simpler pleasures in life I actually cherished.

I wasted no time in getting dressed in uniform. I look in the mirror. I attempt to deny admitting that I'm conflicted about what I see. Their thoughts of me. That I was important. A valued member of the Creation.

Before I could give it a second thought, I lost my battle, fleeing away from the looking glass, and out the door.

Here we go. Another day as a monster.