shiver (FEATURED) | ✓

ooo

evanna

❨ ²⁰ ʸᵉᵃʳˢ ˡᵃᵗᵉʳ ❩

I REMEMBER THE flicker of age-old traditions associated with snow and winter: joyful, warm, humane.

But they're all dead now, along with the cultures that sowed them and kept them alive. Ah, the brilliance of rebirth.

▿

I can see it all in my mind, like a disturbing, horrific nightmare, one that you can't wake up from, one that leaves you drenched in sweat in the middle of the night, so when you finally open your eyes you're choking, gasping for air, clawing at your throat in terror.

I watch, in my sleep, as the world is turned to ice. Everything is frozen, everything is fragile, everything is clear and bright and new. But with all soothing, calm things comes danger.

Flames, licking at the hearth, with a soft glow, powerful enough to turn your body into a blistering, molten, charred mess. Ice, cool and beautiful, prominent enough to kill you slowly, but surely, like a confident murderer, one that checks twice that their victims are truly and thoroughly dead. A voice, comforting, deceiving, full of lies, lies, lies.

They play it to me like a projection in the sky of my mind, a film, a morbid recording of death, of disease, disaster, with people screaming, running to safety, trampling over each other in an attempt to survive it all.

Selfishness. Human beings are selfish, and that is their biggest flaw of all. Am I selfish? Yes, but it helps me to survive, but in the case of humans, it just exponentially amplifies all of their unnecessary problems.

Have you pictured it all, yet? The whole, entire world covered in snow. Lamplights flickering on and off before giving in to the cold, dying, just like the majority of the human race. Buildings caved in; rubble strewn across the streets; cold limbs browned with frozen blood, sticking out grotesquely from underneath collapsed skyscrapers. Some would call it art. I call it good riddance.

They had been too late, couldn't open the doors to escape, windows frozen shut, facades wet and slippery, or iced over enough to rip the upper layer of skin off as a hand is finally wrenched free, leaving it with dark red patches. The ice is blotted with blood. Power lines crackle. Savour the sight of the sparks the wires emit before the system explodes; it's the last of real fire you'll be seeing for quite a while. That is, if you don't die first and go to wherever you think you'll go, depending on wether you believe in that sort of thing or not. I don't.

A twitch.

Subtle— but there, a tiny twitch of muscle, my finger, at my fingertips, at my— am I waking up? It feels like an unfathomable process for me, waking up, because my subconscious is already so alive in my physically dormant state, and there are restraints to waking up, there might be problems. In my mind I stand, I move, I watch people die and don't help them, because I have no humanitarian force propelling me towards compassion and philanthropy.

Have you ever been to Prague before? Probably not. It was completely decimated when an nuclear bomb was detonated inside its central concert hall in 2022. Well, that's what I know, that's what they've implanted into my mind. They've implanted lots of things into my mind: lots of little, important things, and it feels so good, knowing everything.

That's where we are today, you and I, because if you live, then it's most likely that you're in Tetrahmon, their glass fortress which they erected upon the snowed-over rubble of Prague.

You might be somewhat relieved to know that about three million of your kind survived the storm- and every single one of those three million people form the average population of Prague. Obviously, you're still dying of age and all that, but Prague's population is held around a stable, fixed number, with their Population and Management and Love Bureaus, where each child is created and then put through the education system, given to certain, trustworthy people to be taken care of.

I know that three million compared to the eight billion you once were is quite a disappointment as a percentage, but honestly, don't act like you weren't expecting it. Humans are fragile, weak, are they not? One small collision and already blood capillaries burst underneath your skin and you're left with something called a bruise. Does that hurt? I wouldn't know.

Now, those are just the basics, but your physical abilities and range of thinking most certainly do very, very little to impress me. Thank goodness that's clear now.

I'm in an isolated hospital ward, waiting for something, but I don't know what that something is. The walls around me are painted a pure white and the air I breathe in is sickeningly sterile. I lie there, tied to a sickbed, unable to move. I'm barely breathing, but I'm still alive and as much as I want to, I can't shut myself off, I can't shut it down, I can't make myself go blank, because I'm processing so much information at once, compacting the data, all of it, storing it into my hard drive.

You are a machine:_

           your life is a routine:_

                   your brain constantly

                 processing

                                           information.

I want to scream, but my mouth feels sewn shut. Whenever I move my lips, I feel a chafing tug that reminds me to stay still to not say anything until the stitches come out and my mouth heals, has a filter, so I only say what's right to say and discard what's wrong to say. It's difficult to concentrate on anything.

I've forgotten how to block the very thrum, that cacophony of life, out of my ears.

People will avoid me.

They're afraid of me; I can smell their fear, I can almost hold it in my cupped palms; it hangs so thick in the air around them, like a blanket of dark viscosity. I'm considered a threat to their 'safety.' I'm different, and people don't like those who stand out.

They won't like me, I can sense it, and in a place like Tetrahmon, being threatening will never get you anywhere. But I'm not in so much danger, no. No, no, no, I just have to be very, very careful.

One false move, and I'll have lost everything.

Unlike you lot, I know how to take off a Tetrahmon blindfold. I can think. That's why they believe I'm a threat. Of course, there are some other factors contributing to it, but people fear whatever is unknown to them.

You're probably wondering, by now, who I am. My name is Evanna Frior. I was created before the storm; I survived- but I'm not human. I'm a genetic experiment.