At the time I made an appearance, every mass of land on Earth was already deemed a war zone, and civilian casualties outnumbered the militaries. I only knew of the beauty that the Earth once beheld through the vivid tales from my father and uncle, as told to them by their father, and through the occasional picture I stumbled upon. My childhood was not all pretty pictures and captivating stories, though.
Instead of playing with my cousins or getting an education as I grew up, I was being taught to hunt, skin, and prepare game. I knew the best way to boil and filter dirty water to make it drinkable, and how to tell edible leaves and berries apart from the poisonous ones. I had basic medical knowledge and I knew how to clean and dress a wound to keep infection away. I had some skill in stealth and could move without being seen if I chose. I learned to use weapons so I could fight as good as a grown man and most importantly, I know how to salt and store meat for travel so it wouldn’t spoil and leave me hungry.
I was taught how to survive.
Even though I was grateful for my upbringing and thankful for the family I had, I knew I was all alone on a dying planet with nothing but my thoughts for company without them. Now and then, I’d come across other travellers, and I’d trade with them and even have an intelligent conversation here and there; but people, in general, were not to be trusted.
Most of the men and women I met would either try to rob me, capture and sell me, enslave me, rape me, or kill me. ‘Try’ being the keyword. I had never killed another person—I came close more than a few times—but I had maimed quite a few. I had never felt an ounce of guilt for the things I’d done, though, because I was left with no choice. It was maimed or be maimed. Kill or be killed. Survival was all that mattered … no matter what you had to do.
Humanity had died long before the Earth began to.
Focus, Nova.
I climbed the stairs of a long-abandoned building a few hundred metres away from the WBO and made sure to keep all noise to a minimum. Even though I did my best to go undetected, I knew my safety measures would prove futile if any augs were nearby. Augmented humans were the ultimate security system. The truly amplified augs had all their senses upgraded. If they detected me and wanted to find me and kill me, they would do so without breaking a sweat. There was no stopping an aug that wanted to kill. The Great World War that took place eleven years ago proved that.
I was twelve when it began.
I was in the woods with my four male older cousins—Jarek, who was twenty, Tala, who was eighteen, Zee, who was sixteen, and Sammy, who was twelve like me (only, he was a few months older). His mother—like mine and like a lot of women who birthed children without medical care during the ongoing war—had died in childbirth, too. We were hunting deer and brought down a hundred-pound buck that had us grinning from ear to ear. Most days, we’d catch rabbits, badgers, and whatever else we could snag in our traps, but a buck as big as the one we brought down was a rare thing indeed. To make matters even better, it was my arrow that pierced the creature’s left eye and ensured our family would be eating well for the next two weeks. It also gave me bragging rights that I was definitely going to cash in on. In a family of primarily males, bragging rights were a big deal.
Not long after we brought down the buck, we heard screaming.
With all thoughts of our prized buck instantly forgotten, we readied our weapons, and together, the five of us ran from the woods. Ten long minutes later, after the heart-wrenching screaming had stopped, we entered the clearing where we were staying. It was a survivalist camp and just one of many we’d come across over the years. But instead of children playing, women cleaning cloth on washing boards and preparing meals, or the men patrolling the camp’s border and weapon training in the practice ring, they were all lying dead amongst pools of blood and dismembered limbs.
I spotted my uncle first. I saw his trademark brown cap that he loved clutched in his bloodied hand, and when I scanned my eyes up to his face, I couldn’t stop the scream that tore free from my throat. His eyes had been gouged from their sockets, and his mouth was wide open as if he was silently screaming, even in death. My cousins tried desperately to shield both Sammy and me from the massacre before us. Sammy was the first one to break from our group, ignoring our protesting as he ran towards his father.
We all screamed in horror when a motionless blood-covered body on the ground suddenly stood, and like an android, it turned and grabbed Sammy by the throat and lifted him from the ground like he weighed nothing. With shaking hands, I scrambled for my bow that I had let fall when we entered the camp. I drew an arrow from my quiver and aimed it at the woman who was strangling my cousin.
I sucked in a breath, and a scream died in my throat when she twisted her hand, the hand that was around Sammy’s throat, and a loud crunching sound echoed throughout the deathly silent clearing as she broke my cousin’s neck. I promptly dropped my bow and arrow and puked all over the ground. I turned back in time to watch her release Sammy and to see his lifeless body drop to the ground with a thud. My screams became audible and rose even louder when Jarek and Tala both rushed forward, armed with their daggers, and speared the woman to the ground.
At first, they tried to restrain her, but she was hell-bent on trying to kill them, so with no choice, they began to stab her in her chest and her stomach … but she acted like she couldn’t feel it. Only then did I notice the flesh of her right arm hanging off, and I saw the mechanics underneath it. I screamed at my cousins that she was augmented. It was hard to tell an augmented person from a human, and we had never had any reason to fear them … until that day.
Zee and I were wrapped in each other’s embrace, and we roared when arms came around us. We struggled and fought against the hold until we heard the voice of the owner. It was my father. I was so relieved he wasn’t amongst the bodies that I was almost sick again. Through our sobbing, we had rapidly told him what happened. How we heard the screams, how we found the camp, how an aug had killed everyone, including Uncle Joe and Sammy. Without needing more information, my father cocked his aged gun and aided Jarek and Tala in killing the crazed woman.
Augs were a hell of a lot stronger than us humans, but they could die.
I thought it was the end of it, that the nightmare was over, but it had only just started. All the commotion had attracted two more people to the clearing, and I knew they were augs straight away. It wasn’t only how they looked on the outside, but the dead look in their eyes gave them away too. My cousins and father fought them off, but Jarek and Tala were gravely injured during the fight, and though I tried my best to stop the bleeding, they were beyond help. Tala had winked at me before he took his last breath, and Jarek told me to take care of Zee and my father. I promised him I would. Both Zee and I were like robots following their deaths; we heeded my father’s orders without speaking, and we were numb whilst doing so.
My father managed to find a working handheld radio on a dead body of a patrolling member of the camp, and together, we held our breaths and listened to a broadcast from the watchmen who informed us that augmented humans were to be shot and killed on sight by civilians and military personnel alike. The collective chip embedded in every augmented human’s brain—a chip required to deliver frequent updates to an augmented person’s upgrades—had been targeted by a terrorist group. The code for every augmented human had somehow been rewritten, and it had turned the augmented humans into a mindless, savage army.