Once downstairs and out of the building, Lucas kept a brisk pace for two blocks to the nearest subway station and after a half dozen stops, found himself at Harlem Mining Co.
A hundred years ago, when the outside world was accessible, no one would have ever considered building a mine in the middle of the city. But as the need for resources became critical, that was precisely what happened. Now, there were hundreds of meandering tunnels going down thousands of feet under the city, making any cross-section of the Manhattan underground look like Swiss cheese.
Lucas entered the building and took the elevator down to its lowest level. Once there, he clocked himself in and made a pit stop by his locker to gear up. As much as Lucas would have liked to, he wasn’t permitted to bring home the company issued mining laser, a gun connected by wires to a large battery that was worn like a backpack.
Once equipped, Lucas grabbed a mining cart and led it down one of the tunnels.
“Hey, Lucas Maxwell,” yelled the foreman from his station.
“Yeah,” Lucas innocently yelled back, even though he had a good idea what was going on.
“What the hell are you doing here?” said the foreman.
“Just spending another day delving through dark tunnels like a MTA mole-rat,” Lucas replied, waving his mining laser.
“It looks like you’re asking to shoot yourself in the foot,” the foreman frowned. “But more importantly, it looks like you forgot today’s the day you need to be sequenced.”
“Ahh, come on. I’m already geared up. I’ll go another time. I’m nineteen, it’s not like I’m going to fail,” Lucas tried.
“No can do. You know that the regulations are quite clear. Everyone has to do their annual sequencing. No delays for any reason. You don’t want us to get in trouble with HOPE, do you?” said the foreman as he waved Lucas to hurry and leave. “Just report upstairs to Health Services and get it over with.”
‘There goes a good part of my day,’ Lucas grimaced as he began to run the numbers on how much this would cost him. ‘If I’m lucky I’ll only lose around two hours, but the real problem is that by the time I return all the other miners working this shift will have arrived. All the best tunnels will be occupied. Expect thirty percent less there. Plus the two hours. I think I will probably only earn half of normal today.’
Losing half a day’s wage may seem like a small sum, but Lucas had other obligations than saving for hunting gear, so he’d really be losing a week or more in that regard.
Lucas returned the mining gear and spent the next few minutes riding the elevator back up to the surface. From there, he had to switch to a different lift before taking it to the fifth floor, where Harlem Mining Co. had its own health care facilities.
Like any doctor’s visit, Lucas went through the standard procedure. He checked in with the receptionist, before having to wait fifteen minutes for a nurse to invite him back into a patient room. There, the nurse took a sample of his blood and said that the doctor would be back ‘in a bit’ with the results.
When she left, the nurse locked the door behind her. This too was standard procedure. Sometimes people who suspected they would fail freaked out as their results neared.
Lucas knew that with his nineteen years there was next to no chance he’d fail, but as he sat in the small, completely silent room, he couldn’t help but feel a bit anxious. He knew what happened to those who failed. He knew that if it happened to him, he wouldn’t be going back home.
Lucas waited. Nothing happened but the atmosphere still grew tenser with each moment. By the time two hours passed, Lucas started to feel something was wrong, so he went to the door.
Lucas set his ear against it and heard a surprisingly large number of footsteps. The doctor’s office had been nearly deserted when he’d followed the nurse into the room. Now, it sounded like dozens of people were rushing down the hall past his door.
Lucas could also hear the faint chatter of people talking. It began too quiet for him to make out, but it wasn’t long before the conversation suddenly grew a lot louder.
“What do you mean by the total permutations have exceeded the permitted value?” a man bellowed.
“Well, you see…,” said a woman.
“And what are HOPE officers doing here?”
HOPE stood for Humanity’s Office of Peculiarity Extermination. It was one of the city’s law enforcement branches, and its primary function was to oversee the DNA sequencing of all Manhattanites and handle any related complications that cropped up.
“We had to call them under the circumstances,” the woman continued. “As I have said, you have….”
“Have exceeded the permitted value. Don’t give me that shit.”
Lucas heard a loud thud followed by a series of groans. He knew it was probably breaking some silly rule or law, but given the situation, he couldn’t help himself. Lucas reached into his pocket for a pen and used a straightened spring to pick the lock. It didn’t take Lucas long. This wouldn’t be the first time he went somewhere he shouldn’t.
Lucas opened the door. In the hall was a bizarre collection of people. A heavily muscled silver-haired man in his late fifties held a middle-aged woman in a plain white lab coat against a wall. Behind them was the nurse who’d taken Lucas’ blood. She was cowering in a corner, clutching her arm, which was bent at an unnatural angle. Finally, there was a pair of HOPE officers, clearly identifiable by their pitch-black uniforms and bright red badges emblazoned with a raised fist. The officers had drawn their Tasers but neither fired. They didn’t want to risk what could happen if they zapped the silver-haired man while he had his hands around the doctor’s throat.
While holding the doctor in one hand, the muscular silver-haired man swiped down with his other hand. Buttons popped and tumbled to the floor as the silver-haired man tore open his shirt, revealing an absurdly, almost bestial, hairy chest.
“See. See. I’m normal. See, I’m completely fine. I’m not a goddamn spitter. I’m normal,” the man repeated several times as he pounded on his chest. With each iteration, the man grew more frantic and consequently less normal. Sweat poured down the man’s entire body, his skin turned bright red, and his muscles swelled to even more Herculean proportions.
The man’s grip on the doctor tightened as he used the other hand to tilt her head and force the doctor’s eyes to meet his.
“See, I’m fine. Now tell HOPE they can go away,” said the man.
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell them to go. Please. Just let me go. You’re hurting me,” the doctor croaked, using up the last of the air in her lungs.
“No,” the silver-haired man refused, pulling the doctor towards him before thrusting her back out, pounding her halfway through the wall with his freakish strength. “I won’t be tricked. I’m not some stupid animal.”
The doctor’s eyes rolled back and a trickle of blood from the back of her head ran down the wall.
“Stop.”
“Let her go.”
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The officers could no longer hold back. Both fired their Tasers. Their aim was perfect and the prongs of the Tasers struck the silver-haired man dead center. An audible hum of electricity filled the air as tens of thousands of volts coursed through the man.
“Argh. What do you think you’re doing? I told you that I’m fine. That I’m normal,” the silver-haired man grunted, remaining upright and in control even though any normal man would have been on the ground convulsing.
The silver-haired man started pulling out the Taser prongs while they were still pulsating with electricity.
“This is unit seven. We have a raging tough-type on the fifth floor of Harlem Mining. Requesting backup,” called one of the officers into a radio that was clipped to his chest.
The silver-haired man became incensed by this. He gave up on trying to reason with the HOPE officers and once he finished removing all the Taser prongs, casually chucked the doctor into them before running away.
By the time the officers untangled themselves, the silver-haired man was gone. He’d run straight through several interior walls as if they were made of paper before bashing through a concrete exterior wall and leaving the building.
“This is unit seven. Subject has escaped. Last seen heading west from our position. Advise all responders to be on guard. Recommend setting up a perimeter three blocks around this position,” one of the HOPE officers reported into the radio while the other checked on the doctor.
“She’s still breathing,” the officer reported to his partner before his eyes quickly switched back to scanning the area. The silver-haired man had gone, but there was nothing to stop him from coming back. It was then that one of the officers spotted Lucas poking his head out of his room.
“Hey, kid. What are you doing here?” the HOPE officer asked.
“I was waiting for my results when I heard the noise and decided to take a look,” Lucas said innocently.
“You shouldn’t be watching this. Go back inside. We have everything handled here,” said the officer, even though the silver-haired man was still running wild. HOPE existed to maintain order and as vital as corralling those who failed the sequencing was, keeping incidents like the one that had just occurred from the public was equally important.
“I’ll do just that,” a terrified Lucas replied before shutting himself back in his room.
Once there, Lucas moved to the center of the room. After seeing such a scene, Lucas didn’t trust the walls around him. They could do nothing to protect him from the silver-haired man, the silver-haired SPTer.
It all started a hundred years ago. Systemic Pharmaceutical Technologies was a bioengineering firm working on the cutting edge of viral gene insertion. Their masterpiece was a virus called SPT-017, an unassuming name for what would bring about the end of human dominance. With this virus, Systematic Pharmaceutical could modify any living organism. SPT-017 would slither into any nucleus and insert a programmable line of code anywhere in the DNA, allowing genetic manipulation with a level of precision that would have seemed out of science fiction only a decade before.
The virus was first developed to treat all form of human genetic diseases, but it wasn’t long before Systemic Pharmaceutical Technologies branched out into everything from engineering super crops that internally produced pesticides to trees that grew into the shape of a house. It was the beginning of a grand age where anything and everything was possible, or at least it was until everything went wrong.
March 25, 2077 was a typical day in Seattle, WA. Drab and overcast, but in a way that made it warmer than it would have been otherwise. Like any day, things wore out and broke down, accidents happened. This one though involved a gas leak at Systematic Pharmaceutical’s central lab, where SPT-017 was supposed to be securely stored away from the world.
No one was hurt and except for a few number-crunching executives and shareholders, no one was worried about the damage caused by the small explosion. No one realized that SPT-017 survived the fire and escaped.
In the next few months, the virus spread, infecting everything from giant pandas to the common cockroach, continually mutating everything it touched.
Historically, evolution was a slow process where a minor mutation or two between parent and child augments a species over hundreds of generations, but SPT-017 changed all that. No longer did mutation take generations. Now plants and animals evolved rapidly and continuously throughout their lives.
Over the previous 20,000 years, mankind relied on advancing technology to outpace nature’s ability to adapt and reign supreme over the wild. With the release of SPT-017, that advantage vanished.
Within a month, people noticed a severe uptick in animal attacks. Within a year, millions were dead and many times more were displaced as people moved closer together to fall under the protection of the armies raised to face this unprecedented threat. Animals and plants continued to get stronger and smarter. The superiority of human technology and weaponry faded. Within a decade, the human population fell from 10 billion to a mere 100 million. Those few that remained were carefully tucked away behind fortified walls in a handful of large cities around the world.
Not much had changed since then. Humanity was still on the defensive. It still regularly clashed with a variety of beasts mutated by SPT-017 and remained cloistered behind high walls.
SPTers, or ‘spitters’ as they were more colloquially called, were humans heavily mutated by SPT-017. Yes, not only did the virus change plants and animals, but people changed as well. In fact, all humans were infected by SPT-017. It’s just that it wasn’t a problem so long as the virus didn’t change them much.
SPTers could possess a wide variety of abilities from enhanced strength to more acute senses to more bizarre animal or plant characteristics. Unfortunately, having one’s body change throughout their lifetime wreaked havoc on the human psyche. All SPTers descended into insanity and if left unchecked would bring devastation.
To prevent this, everyone underwent yearly screenings where their entire genome was sequenced and compared to a sample taken at birth. Once a certain number of mutations were detected, a person would be labeled a SPTer and HOPE would take them away.
So long as the mutants came quietly, HOPE would allow SPTers to say their final goodbyes to their loved ones before giving them a quick and painless death. If they didn’t, HOPE would ruthlessly hunt them down and kill them. It may be cruel, but this was the way humanity survived.
There was no way around this fate. So long as you lived long enough, the mutations would pile up until there were enough to fail the test. Over the decades, mankind found certain drugs to slow down the process. However, such medicines were too rare and therefore expensive for the vast majority to use. Instead, ordinary folks only had less direct methods.
The virus worked to adapt people to be better suited for their environment. By regularly changing your environment, you could limit the damage. For that reason, many people didn’t specialize in a single career. They spent a few years working in the mines. Then before mutations for night vision or echolocation developed, switched to working in the fields, harvesting crops. Then before mutations granting green skin and chloroplasts for photosynthesis appeared, changed careers again to a menial office job.
Another way to slow the process was to refrain from overexerting yourself. In scenarios where the body was pushed to its limits, the virus worked faster. It was for this reason that the plants and animals had mutated so quickly. In the wild, dangerous situations forced everything to the edge.
Still, even with these methods, the process could only be slowed so much. It was next to unheard of for someone to reach seventy before they failed their sequencing.
Lucas spent another four hours waiting in the patient room, his mind busily reviewing all that he had seen, his heart considering whether that was how his father was when he suddenly became a SPTer and wondering if that was to be how Lucas himself would meet his end, hopefully on a day far into the future.
Eventually, the scene was cleaned up and another doctor was brought in to provide Lucas with his results. Even though Lucas knew that at his age it was next to impossible for him to fail, he couldn’t help but be nervous after what he’d witnessed.
“Sorry you had to wait so long and sorry you had to see all that,” said the new doctor, a middle-aged man with thick glasses.
“Will the other doctor be okay?” Lucas asked.
“Of course. Katherine has been sent to intensive care, but they expect a full recovery. You should also know that HOPE apprehended the SPTer, so you don’t have to worry about anything,” said the doctor.
Lucas wasn’t sure he believed the doctor. Regardless of the real outcome, the doctor would have said the same thing. Covering such instances up was a regular thing in this society. Lucas would never see this sort of event reported in the newspaper or on television. The only place where it might show up was in forums on the net. Lucas had seen many such posts but had always chalked them up to trolls with too much time on their hands. Now, Lucas was reconsidering his stance towards them.
“Now we’d better get back to the reason you came here,” the doctor continued. “I have the results for your sequencing. Your mutations currently stand at 22 percent of the maximum allowance. So while you are nowhere near a problematic level, I should warn you that it’s still somewhat high for someone your age. I also see from your results several mutations known to be precursors for the development of night vision and high CO2 tolerance.”
The mines were poorly ventilated so high CO2 tolerance was a common mutation for people who worked too long in the mines.
“Again, I’d say these precursors are appearing surprisingly quickly, but I see from your records that you’ve selected the pay by yield option...”
Like his own mother, the doctor proceeded to lecture Lucas on the effect overexertion was having on his sequencing results.
“I understand doctor,” Lucas reluctantly nodded once the doctor finished. “But I don’t plan on being a miner much longer anyway.”
If Lucas kept working the way he had been, he’d have enough to buy a set of starter hunter gear in another 6 to 8 months. Lucas knew the risks, knew the toll when he started this path, but there was no other way for him to make his dreams of seeing, visiting the wider world come true. Lucas refused to let go of his dreams. Sometimes they felt like all he had.