Tevun-Krus #49 - Best of 2K17

Distortion of a Changed Planet - @SarahWeaver6 - Dystopian

Distortion of a Changed Planet

A Dystopian Story by SarahWeaver6

Dr. Richard Melville

Sometimes in life, one makes promises they are unable to keep. And no amount of sorrow in the world can bring someone back you truly love.

When I saw the face of my brain dead beloved, I only felt shame and regret. I didn't have many regrets, they called me Dr. Richard Melville, and I wasn't suppose to have any. She was in a permanent cryogenic sleep until one day when I could find a cure for her illness. Despite all the technology of this colony, I don't understand why they can't repair a brain.

I had met Eve before we had set out for this planet. I had been conscripted as a student technician back on Earth in 2010 A.D., do to my ability to work on robotic dogs. I admired the girl, who looked great in clogs. Yet as an artificial human, her options were limited by the clothes that the lab gave her to wear. Before she had jumped off the tallest point of The Satanic Temple, she had remarked about how she had always wanted to have a kid, but do the nature of her birth, did not have this ability. That was then, and this is now. I messed one of my men on the status of the macro-canon, however they were still working out deployment bugs in order to fire off the electro-magnetic biological weapon, that would be blown up in the stratosphere.

The thing about bombs, our original planet was compromised by two many nukes. But perhaps, if timed right, a nuke could properly explode with enough force to properly rotate the planet, and ideally not out of orbit. Keep in mind my expertise wasn't in bombs, it was in small pet robotics, what I really always wanted to do was working personal pets for children. There was something about the way children smiled, that always made me happy. I couldn't take it away from the world. Before Adam had betrayed us, sparking the planet scale civil war, me and Eve had talked about the possibility of adopting a child, and having a relationship in secret. Yet after her death I had given up on this possibility, and I became more of a recluse.

Momentary bliss.

Then a hiss of pain.

As the bombs dropped on the Southern colonies, my hope in my life faded nightly. I was in the prison of my flesh. And in this flesh I called home, I dined upon the rats crawling the desert floor. The flavor that some may abhor, the disease of the flesh. I didn't care if the disease would eventually kill me, I simply needed something to eat as meals ready to eat were horrible fare.

I remained in the labs, while others fought in the fields. I oversaw genetically engineered specimens under going the Trials Of The Seven Deadly sins: it cleansed the body of emotions tied to sins of flesh and desire. In this cave of my own creation, built by my team, I ordered a man who simply would not shut up about military secrets to have his mouth sewn shut. With his name Jared, he became Jabber Knit Jared. He still ate out of the side of his mouth, but communicated by slamming his metallic tray which he ate food on, against the cell bars in order to tap out specific words.

Communicating in Zero Liability, as the administrator I wanted to know what the current status was on the men's advance. I put together both the questions and the answers, deciphering their contents then purging the intelligence.

Over time I oversaw multiple tasks: communications, bread and circus machines for the proletarian, and monitoring the Trials Of The Seven Sins. In this trial men and women genetically modified for immunity to certain diseases, had each of the seven deadly sins cleansed from their moral compass. Doing exactly what we told them, they were trained as communicators on the fields, willing to do anything so long as it doesn't disobey a direct order from a commanding officer, or chief scientist.

Yet for me, I wanted to be with Eve.

I wanted to be with her in death.

At night I dreamed about the many children that developed diseases in a world without electricity. Taunted by their anguished screams, nightmarish dreams. With my own personal reality tearing at the seems, I dreamed about all the children of the world converging on me as if to tear me apart, as I hopped from one reality to the next to escape the chase. In my darkest hours, I longed to bleed to death, the only option to end my own existence. On this desert planet I call home, beyond where the cattle may roam, this was the life. The life where life was cheap, the age of conscription in the armed service becoming younger and younger as the generations of planetary colonial further on in years.

I used hair removal cream do to hair loss, and yet I only began to lose my hair on my second century of being alive. I considered getting modified to regrow my hair, although I was unsure of what effect it would have on my brain. Part of me liked the fact that I have feelings, to understand the fullest amount of anguish of people far to young to die experienced at their moment of suffering.

Yet this benefit at times had a cost that I disliked, it burned at me to my very soul. Being me, being everyone. Feeling everything at once, as I watched the smiling angels pass through the light. Goodnight smiles, goodnight dreamless nights. Hello to a new world, covered in night. No matter how long you see children have their heads taken off by Guillotine Gun, it always gets you in the end. Emotionally, sometimes almost literally. Children that could have gone on to have a perfectly normal Freshman year, dying by the firing of an angular blade gun.

I could have relaxed if there was no more war, I could have gone home and had a beer in my bunker. Yet this was not realistic. I was a technician, an inspector, a man kept alive through periodic cryogenics.

I shouldn't have had these feelings.

And yet I did. That was how it was.

A remorseful genocidal maniac.

I was relayed the information that my troops stormed the Southern Colonies. There was a young girl I met earlier, with shoulder length black hair, and a flowery white dress. I smiled at her, and her to me.

I wanted to take her away to paradise. Be on some planet free.

I thought of her struggle, as she worked with the local hospital in order to help clean the bodies of those that were infected by the disease. Devised as a hybrid of cancer and classified sexually transmitted diseases, it bypassed the immune system in the same way a root kit infected an operating system in previous centuries. The mouth a kind of back door to the central nervous system and the lungs. Momentary derealization, psychotic breaks, the mind is burnt; the body turned into a crisped steak covered in flies in a matter of days, the individual slowly being eaten alive.

I still wonder where this girl is. I wanted to apologies to her for helping in these experiments. I wished there was something that I could do, and yet there was nothing at all. Nothing, nothing at all.

Riding in a space ship, I watched their fall.

Kidnapped by the lunar command, blamed for human atrocities, yet kept alive as a slave to mine their colony. My world at war destroyed as a threat to the galaxy as a whole. The world of my fallen Queen.

I cried, wished I died.

I left the girl I liked behind.

I wanted to be with her into the light.

I am Silhouette Man. The prison command wants me to look for a missing operative they left behind on the planet. I have a bad feeling about this mission, but it's not like I have a choice. I am silent, as if I don't have a voice. I am wandering in the dark, looking fro my life's spark.

I look for the MK 731 man.

That's a painful hit. What planet am I on?

Am I home? I am driving from a military base with a vague command about searching for a missing operative. I see a girl standing in the world, with hair over her face. The face of anger and sorrow.

As if she had a grudge.

A distortion of a changed planet.