Inhuman (OLD VERSION; UNFINISHED - SEE NEW BOOK)

Chapter 3 - Beth

By the time the morning light made its way into my apartment, I had given up on sleep and was already in the kitchen making my second cup of coffee for the day. When I couldn't sleep, I worked, and this week I'd clocked in overtime. I would normally be awake around this hour studying the latest articles published by my peers but over the past week I'd be obsessing over my results. As soon as word got out about it, I knew the entire medical community would become as obsessed as I had, and the rest of society would follow.

The medical community had been under an ever increasing pressure to find a cure, and the slightest glimpse of hope would send ripples throughout the remainder of society. Most of us in medicine had been working towards a cure since we were children, assigned studies to help boost our knowledge from an early age. Since most of us would be dead by thirty, the sooner we understood the basics, the more likely we were to succeed.

It was the same with everyone in every career path. One of the ways we had coped was to assign essential career paths at an early age. Tests were given that were designed to focus on our strengths and move us in a direction that would help everyone as a whole. The whole thing had become biased within two generations since parents started teaching their kids the knowledge they had learned. In one hundred years, we had become a sectional society where your career dictated your position in life. Since the aim of all this was to find a cure for the virus, science had ended up at the top.

My parents had been in medicine and taught me from a young age so naturally I followed in their footsteps. In a way it was considered a prestigious career over others such as agriculture, government and security as well as the grey area careers for general duties. Over the past two decades however, a growing unrest among the people had started to turn violent as people who had been assigned less glorified careers demanded access to special amenities on top of the cure we were yet to produce.

The apartment was one of the special amenities I had received. The entire building was assigned for medical students and personnel and when I was sixteen, I had been moved into it when the last resident passed away. That had been two years ago. Not much had changed since I moved in either.

The coffee machine was a personal touch as was the orchid I had cared for on the table that remained mostly covered in papers and books. There was my personal computer, text books and a few photographs that decorated the mostly white furnishings, but everything else had been here when I moved in. That was how most of the apartments were turned around, the essentials were left behind and the personal belongings were taken away.

When I had moved in, an ornate hair piece had been forgotten. It was a fine toothed comb, faux emeralds set in gold. At the tip, a dainty pearl dangled free and would dance as whoever wore it would move. I'd never used it or had a time where I would, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away either. It had belonged to someone, someone who spent their entire life looking for the same thing I was now looking for and somehow I felt connected to them. It was the same way I felt about my parents.

For the first time in months, I picked up one of the framed photos in the apartment. It was one of the only reminders I had of my parents. The photo showed three people with smiling faces, all dark haired and fair skinned, though the woman had blue eyes whereas the mans and the little girls were green. They were happy for what time they had together.

I was six when their car veered off road and into a river. My dad was thirty two and my mum twenty eight. It was news because they were people who had died of something other than the virus. If they had lived just two years more, my mother would have died first, then a year later my father. For some reason the virus attacked women five years earlier than men.

Looking at the photo now and remembering the ornate comb, I had the sudden urge to wear it in my hair. Like my mothers, it was dark and grew below my shoulders, the gold would stand out and the emerald would match my eyes. For a moment I hesitated, then laughed off the idea; I'd have to learn how to wear my hair in a way other than down or a ponytail for that to work.

Instead I went for the vision board, the latest technology that could be considered the twenty second century equivalent of a television. You could watch shows, read news, play games and all sorts on it, but when it was off, you would barely notice it was there. It appeared as a thin sheet of glass against the wall but if you wanted, you could use it for different things instead. I'd set mine to rotate pieces of art work at random to counter the white furnishings and add colour to the apartment.

Turning it on, the news appeared, a channel I almost always left on. The report changed to breaking news and I choked on my coffee as the headline blared across the screen in bold black letters.

LEADING SCIENTIST MALCOLM EDISON FOUND DEAD IN HIS APARTMENT AT AGE THIRTY-TWO.

My heart fell in my chest as the news anchor covered the story and background images of what I knew was Malcolm's apartment complex flashed across the screen. Tape covered the entrance as police held off reporters who snapped photographs and held out devices to record anything being said. A gurney was being wheeled away and on top of it, a body bag.

I felt sick as the words of the news anchor echoed in my ears. "Police are treating his death as suspicious and are asking for any witnesses to come forward...".

Without realising, I'd let go of the mug which hits the ground shattering, coffee splashing onto the couch. I could feel it pooling around my feet, but mostly I felt numb.

He had been my superior. I had spoken to him as I left work last night about how we were going to proceed with breaking the news to the rest of the world. He was one of the few people I actually trusted with the knowledge, and in the few hours that had passed since we last spoke, he had been murdered.