Incarnates

"Why does the world have to hate me?" The question lingered in my head for what seemed like hours was only a few minutes. "I didn't ask to be like this," yet to everyone else, this is my fault. The world was afraid of the unknown which mean that what the humans don't know, they feared and when they feared something they sought to destroy it, destroy me.  It was a tale told time and time again not from people telling stories but through history repeating itself.  What they called my kind, Incarnates, spewed out of the humans mouths as if it were a vile curse word.  The word was poison to whoever spoke the word.  Some humans actually spit after saying it which doesn't make it any better.  They would see us walking on the street, minding our own business, and think we were dangerous.  They think that we threaten the course of the pure human race.  We didn't ask to be born different.  We didn't have a say in how our genetics were constructed.  We are just trying to live our lives as normal as we possibly could.

            It all started 100 years ago, when the entire world was crippled due to a virus.  The retrovirus A-606 was what they called it.  It was highly contagious and in some cases deadly.  It wiped out almost two-thirds of the world's population bringing down entire governments.  Some countries are still trying to rebuild themselves.  The World Health Organization, WHO, was slow in conveying the urgency of the virus which brought deaths in parts of the world with advanced modern medicine.  Even to this day, the United Nations, UN, haven't come to accept that Incarnates are people as well.  In their briefings they call us "the infected".  The Center for Disease Control, CDC, in my own country hasn't collaborated with the US government to identify the Incarnates as actual people.  The US government, what is left of it, hasn't brought any legislation to protect those of my kind.  Because of the aggressiveness of the virus, the United Nations assumed control of the planet.  Each country had their own government that governed the land but they all reported and took orders from the United Nations.

            What made this virus "unique" was its ability to cross mutate between different species, meaning that animals where able to carry the virus. Plus, A-606 was lysogenic, meaning that it would imbed its DNA from its previous host into the new host when it was transmitted.  Studies showed that there where some animals that were infected by the virus but showed no signs or symptoms of the virus.  The virus' cellular make up contained bits and pieces of the DNA from every carrier its been on.  What struck odd to scientist was when they found that the virus was cannibalizing itself. When an infected cell died it was absorbed by another infected cell. The genetic material left behind by the dead cell was absorbed and combined with the new cell mutating the new cells cellular construct.  The behavior of the virus was something the world had never seen.  It would store multiple genes from multiple organisms into the host causing certain mutations. Contracting the virus was a death sentence, one would live about a week from the time of exposure, however like the animals, there were a few that never showed symptoms, "the lucky ones" as the phrase went. We assumed that maybe they were just immune to the virus, others thought that maybe it was the mother natures reducing the population due to all the harm we did to the environment.  Literal cults and religions were created from that belief.

            The virus infested the earth for two decades.  Because of the mutations that the virus caused changed our entire lives.  It didn't matter if your infected or not because the world was changing in a way that we never saw coming.  After twenty years of wreaking havoc and getting time to understand the virus the world spent another ten years reconstructing society.  The A-606 Reconstruction of Society Act of 2020, ROSA, was the nail in the coffin that buried the world as we new it.  The United Nations forced all of its participating countries to enforce the Reconstruction Act.  The Act divided the world into factions: the infected, who had been in contact with the virus and survived or never developed the symptoms and the other were the clean, who found ways of avoiding any contact with the virus and coincidently were mostly all super wealthy people who had the time and money to self quarantine on their private islands and boats.