New Elysium was a paradise.
The planet was one of those rare blue-and-green jewels, scattered so scarcely onto the velvet cushion that was outer space that few could deny feeling a sense of awe when they came across one. Plant life, clean water, a breathable atmosphere – it was a perfect little world, even without any terraforming. Some might have found it ironic that a world so close to the natural, original habitat of the human species had become the last safe resort of those who were so distinct from humans, so different, that some even considered their mere existence a crime against nature.
Unnatural.
Enhanced.
Augmented.
And yet they were just human.
The people of New Elysium were smiling, reveling in every day they got to live in freedom and peace, far away from Neo-Tokyo and the atrocious madness that was the Purge. The children of New Elysium were laughing, spending their days in joyful innocence, and without worries about hunger or pain.
But underneath the smiles and laughter, there was pain and grief. Many preferred to forget, but just as many could not. They would always remember those whom they had lost, and those whom they had left behind. There were those who had witnessed unspeakable horror, and had to turn away and run to save themselves. And there were those who had suffered themselves, and barely made it to New Elysium alive. Most of them carried their scars deep within, but few of them carried marks on the outside, too.
The girl was one of the latter kind.
She was walking along the streets of New Elysium alone, as usual. She had not been allowed to stay with her uncle, and he was busy with work, so she did not get to see him often. And the other children did not like her all that much. Her teachers and the caregivers at the orphan ward kept telling her she was supposed to talk to the others more. But what was there to say? They were happy, and the only words she would have had would have just made them sad. So she kept quiet.
She rubbed a hand over her temple, where a tingling sensation crept up from time to time. It was as if something was poking against her skin from underneath it with a tiny but dull needle. It was not exactly painful, but unpleasant. She had not brought it up with the doctors during one of the checkups. She felt like she had no words to describe the sensation. So she kept quiet.
There was no visible scar, Doctor Harper and Doctor Doron had made sure of that. Her only friend, Dex, had once explained to her how the eye augment worked. She knew that there were no wires under her skin, they were all deep inside her skull. And yet that tickling was there occasionally, not behind her eye, but next to it. She could have asked Dex about it, but he was so busy these days. She was only distracting him, and he was usually too polite to tell her if she was annoying him or getting in the way. So she kept quiet.
The tingling was different this time. It increased in intensity, and then seemed to spread over to her eye. She stopped in her tracks, blinking a few times as she tried to focus her sight again. She looked up to where the sun set over the flat, white rooftops of New Elysium. It tinged the sky in vibrant hues of pink and orange, and made the clouds look like purple candy floss. But the colors quickly began to blur into a whirling flurry, and the rays of light from the setting sun pierced her eye painfully.
With a wince of pain, she closed her eye entirely, and pressed her hand against her temple. By now, it felt as if something was crawling and shifting under her skin, pressing against the bones of her skull from behind her face.
The light of the sun was still there, penetrating through the reconstructed skin of her eyelid and stimulating the photosensitive membrane at the back of the augment. Red and orange speckles flitted across the dark red canopy that was the backside of her eyelid, flickering and shifting in an enigmatic dance that was too fast for her gaze to follow. The shapes almost seemed like letters to her. Illegible and foreign, they were always shifting out of sight, but still seemed to carry a deeper meaning. A message, like a greeting from the sun itself.
New Elysium's sun was not like the harsh star that had burned her organic retinas, back when she was barely old enough to talk, on a planet far away from here. Curiosity stirred within her, and she wondered about the words that the sun was trying to write out for her, so she opened her eye again.
You...
Before her, the streets of New Elysium had disappeared. Instead, she found herself on the surface of a desolate planet. The ground below her feet was scorched and flat, extending all the way to the horizon without a landmark anywhere in sight. Overhead, the sky was of a deep, indigo blue and dotted with white clouds that passed across it at a rapid pace. Trailing behind them soon came dusk, and then the night. As if the world was pulling a black blanket over itself, suddenly everything was plunged in darkness, and the moonless night was illuminated by a million brilliant stars, flitting by like shooting stars as the planet continued its rotation.
You... you are...
The night passed as quickly as the day, and so did the next day and another night. The days turned into nothing but brief flickers of light, alternating with the darkness at the speed of her galloping heartbeat. As time raced on, the landscape began to change. A downpour drenched the dry and cracked ground, and soon a river crawled across the plane, its serpentine path widening and narrowing rhythmically like the pulse in her veins. Grass shot up, rich and green, and then suddenly dotted with myriads of colorful flowers that sprang up all around her. Trees began to grow, reaching their branches high into the indigo sky. And then, a fire lit up the darkness of the night, as a blazing star descended from above.
You are...
A voice whispered, but from where it came, she could not tell. It was everywhere, and nowhere. She tried to turn around and look for its source, but she could not move.
Who are you?
I am...
Her breath hitched, and for a split second, she thought that she saw – not just something, but everything. But it was too brief for her to comprehend, too much for her to process, and her head was spinning, faster and faster, until it felt like a planet that escaped its trajectory and was hurled off into the darkness of space. There was no light in that infinite black. Not even the stars, and no sun to write those glowing glyphs against the back of her eyelid.
And then, she saw the eyes of a woman, wide with surprise – one as dark and dangerous as the emptiness of space, and the other gray, just like her own, and glistening with unshed tears.
You are mine.
She could feel a deep and profound sense of terror creep up from within her, and had the sudden urge to scream. But she knew that the screams wouldn't stop the pain. It hadn't stopped the people in gray uniforms who had gouged out her second set of eyes any more than it had stopped the sun itself as its hazardous rays had burned through her first. It never mattered when she screamed. It was a waste of breath. So she remained quiet.
"Juni! Juni!"
A voice called out her name, but it wasn't the voice that had whispered to her. She opened her eyes, and was back in the streets of New Elysium. Day had turned to night, and overhead, the stars were glistening, still and seemingly unmoving. She looked up, and spotted the familiar, brilliant light of Ehring Station orbiting overhead. But the Aphelion was gone.
"Juni! Snap out of it!" an irritated voice demanded.
She lowered her gaze and found herself faced with Dex, wearing a panicked expression. The tall boy had to kneel before her to be closer to her eye level. He had grabbed her shoulders and was shaking her lightly.
"What...?" she asked, confused.
"We have to go," Dex got up to his feet and patted the dust from his pants.
"Go where?" she asked sheepishly.
He didn't need to answer her question, because an earsplitting noise resounded all around them – a colony wide alarm. A mixture of confusion and fear had her paralyzed, so Dex grabbed her hand and pulled her along. She had to hurry her steps to keep up with him as he led her back in the direction the main building of the colony, which housed the hospital, the orphan ward and several other facilities, such as the bunkers. That was where she had been told to go to if she ever heard the alarm.
"I was looking for you, you were supposed to be back home an hour ago!" Dex chided her as he dragged her along. "Why didn't you run back home as soon as you heard the alarms?"
"An hour?" she muttered, "But I was just on my way... I didn't hear..."
"Everybody was worried," Dex added, missing her quiet remark.
She knew that that wasn't true. The caregivers had probably only noticed that she was missing at the headcount after dinner, probably not even then. Probably only when the alarms started and everyone had gone to the bunkers.
She cast an uneasy glance at Dex' face from the side, to gauge how angry he was with her. He wore a frown on his face, his lips were pressed together in a thin line and a there was a deep furrow between his brows. She didn't dare to ask why he, of all people, had been sent to look for her.
He looked to the side, and when he found her staring at him, his expression softened ever so slightly, but it didn't help with that uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
"Hey, Are you okay?" he asked, "Don't worry, I'm sure we'll be safe in the bunkers."
"I'm alright," she said, and looked away quickly.
The eye was working normally again, she could see the ground before her feet and the lights of the main building up ahead. She wanted to tell him about the eye acting up, and the weird daydream. But he had something else on his mind, she knew him well enough to tell. So she remained quiet.
You are mine. I am yours.
She shook her head in an attempt to make the voice go away. She was nobody's, and she had nothing. She didn't belong anywhere, not even here, on New Elysium, where the adults smiled and the children laughed, and everyone had a task and a purpose and was part of something bigger. Something whole.
You have a purpose, the voice purred.
And for a split second, she saw it all again. Slower this time, but still too fast to understand, as if somebody was flicking through a stack of images rapidly. She caught only a glimpse.
A purpose? She wondered.
Yes, the voice whispered.
Find it, and kill it.
_______
Hey there! Thanks for sticking around until after the credits roll and checking out this little 'after credits' scene :)
I'm curious to hear what you think... especially those of you who have not yet checked out New Elysium 2. So what do you think this is about?