Summary: A little short story exploring the implications of the dying out of the human population and the eventual takeover of mutants that was the center of the E is for Extinction storyline.
Feedback: Can be sent to eattheapple23@yahoo.com.
Rating: Well, it can't really even be PG-13, but it's not a happy story.
By Phegan
There were no playgrounds anymore. It was one of the things that had been done to better suit a modernizing population, a society that no longer had recesses or general meeting areas, one where ADD was a state of mind. Anne didn't know how they did it, faced the tension of their unstable bodies from such a young age and adapt them to contribute and work within the city that caged her.
She had never been able to find her way out of it. She had an old name and spoke the language of the old people, and there were hardly any of them left anymore. None of the old people she had spoken to in her young life had known a way out of the city. But there had to be something besides the stagnant drifting. She ate, she shat, she slept, she walked. She didn't know where the food came from. It was everywhere. It was paradise. She could survive for so long, and that was the worst part. She had to live her static life in the loneliness of the dwindling numbers of the old people, watching the others. The others did such beautiful things. They flew, they shone with bright lights, swept through the streets with great speed and agility or danced to the beat of the fire they breathed. They had learned to tell their gifts; there were soothsayers in the city that read the organs of the old people to tell the parents how to prepare their child for their powers. There was still much danger, but the others were almost all prepared for it somehow. It was the old people who had no defenses against this chaotic marvel of a world. Lonely as they lived, they rarely spent more than a conversation together. It was enough being a useless piece of contorting meat with an expiration date without having to see your reflection in another. Mostly they kept to corners and shadows and were left alone, except for by the soothsayers.
A piece of fruit came rolling to Anne's feet. She picked it up, wiped it, and tore a piece off with her teeth. Then she scuttled down an alley, and settled against a ledge to watch the cars pass above on the layers of highways that rose like a twenty-three step staircase into the electric-lit air of the city. Far above hung a gold ceiling patterned with the holograms of the others. She could feel someone watching her after a while. She turned, and saw a being made of metal and crystal shimmering in the city light. It made a radiant and unintelligible noise and gestured at her. She didn't know what it meant. The creature bowed down next to her and looked at her intensely, then held out her hand to Anne. The little girl knew to take it and do whatever the creature wanted her to do. There was no use disobeying; the others always got what they wanted.
The creature bent over Anne, and the metal and crystal that made up its body twined down to enclose her, and suddenly it drew back into its shape and they were in an arid, ceilingless place. The bodies of the others glowed far, far away in the air where the walls and ceiling should be, bright white specks screaming out light from their tiny places.
There was a voice in her head, "Those are not the others. They are not humans at all. They are giant balls of gas billions of miles away. We call them stars." Anne had never encountered the thought of such a distance as the one between the stars and earth before, and she sat down under the impact of the concept the psyche in her head showed her. "You have never seen the sky before." There was a finger underneath her chin, and she looked into a pair of ageless green eyes. "There is so much you haven't seen." Suddenly, in her head, were things that only the instincts of her atoms recognized. Trees and rivers and mountains. Precipitation. The ocean washed her into an unbearable consciousness. The sun broke over her. They were beyond the city, she felt them calling to her, a home her ancestors had known.
"You see," said the voice that belonged to the green eyes before her. "There is no use for you to be here." Anne looked around her and saw in the city the lack of the only good things she had ever seen, and only seen just now. "When I look inside you, you will become a part of it. We will send you back to the land you came from, and you will tell the history of what is to come for us." A shadow fell on the face with green eyes, the sharp outline of a crystal and metal finger.
Anne closed her eyes. There was only a moment of pain before she was running along a field, the flowers brushing her shins and the catapillars clinging to them. She was running to the mountains. She was flying over them. She was drifting over the ocean, and she could look at the sun without being blinded.
