Adam

A story loosely based off of the tale of Moses with a sci-fi twist to it.

Adam

 

            The boy was standing in line--a line that stretched for what seemed like miles. However, he was nearing the front of it. At the front a man in white was scanning people with a small hand-held CAT scan device. It was a device that would divine your future. If the machine shut down and gave off a reading, you would move on to live a happy, wealthy life. If the machine let out a shrill alarm…your life was forfeit. It was the sound that told you that you weren’t good enough--that you were not of the new, evolved, species.

            When his turn came he swallowed nervously, stepping in front of the man with the scanner. As the wand passed over him he heard the shriek of the alarm and his heart stopped for a moment. He didn’t have much time to think as he was pushed towards a line of others like him. It was a line being led onto a truck that would send them to the work camps; that was where they put the “monkeys”--the less evolved people.

            Everyone called him “boy” because he had such a young face, though he was almost thirty years old now. There were many of them crammed into the back of the military truck, and beside him he was shocked to see a man of at least sixty years. What use would he be in a work camp? That was the last thought he had before the truck began to move.

            This whole thing was easily traced back to the discovery of the Adam Cells. The perfect cell, found dormant in the uncinate fasciculus--a white matter tract in the brain that served an unknown function. The cells were pumping energy into the other neurons of the brain, causing the mind to evolve. The Adam cells allowed the other brain cells to operate on higher levels, unlocking the potential the human brain could not access beforehand.

            Those with more Adam Cells began to notice effects on their bodies, the higher count of cells you had the more proficient your body became. People gained heightened reflexes, senses, learning capability and in extremely rare cases those with abnormal amounts of the evolutionary cell began to have telepathic ability.

            Society began to grade people by the amount of these cells that they had--the more cells you had, the higher class you were placed in. Those who were found to have no Adam Cells ended up in the back of trucks headed to work camps across the country, building cities for the “ascended” as they called themselves.

            The truck entered the camp, the gates closing in behind them, there was no escaping this place. The graves of those who had tried lined the outside of the camp to deter people who were thinking of doing the same. As the truck rolled to a stop the boy heard a man slam the passenger door and walk towards the back of the truck.

            The soldier opened the canvas flaps that closed off the back of the truck; his gun in hand and at the ready. The eyes of the soldier were a bright green--almost luminescent--a sign that the man was a higher class ascended man. The synapses in the brain of a high class ascended flashed so much more often than the regular human brain that the irises of the eye began to give off a glow from the amount of electrical signals being sent at any given time.

            The boy got off of the truck with the rest of them, following the trail of slaves to their sleeping quarters: a beat up military warehouse. They were all assigned bunks according to the people they were sitting beside on the truck, the boy having been placed with the old man who had sat beside him.

            As the boy was lead to his bunk the old man trailed behind him, shambling as though he was having troubles merely lifting his feet from the ground. There was a chest at the foot of each bed, containing the supplies they would need for their work: shovels, work clothes, and gloves. Men and women alike were forced to strip down and change into the work clothes as soon as they were all assigned to their bunks. Then the soldier collected their street clothes, dumping them into a large cylinder in the center of the room and lighting them on fire.

            “Listen up you monkey scum,” the soldier growled as the flames ate through the last piece of home any of them had left. “From now on the number on your work uniform is your name, and this is your home. If I hear anyone speak of home outside of these walls, or even whisper the name you used to have, you will be made an example of.” They knew the importance of someone’s name. Take their identity and take their will to fight.

            As the man spoke the old man’s eyes didn’t leave the fire. It was like it was surrounding their clothes, but the flame didn’t seem to burn them for the longest time.

            The man gave them a brief of their job; they would be the main team digging the foundation of the largest segregated city the world will have ever seen. It would be a monument to the ascended race, a city that would house the highest class of ascended beings. A city built on the blood and sweat of the slaves they had imprisoned.

            As sleep closed in on the boy, he could hear the old man tossing in turning beneath him, groaning in his sleep. He looked down to his badge: E-2:22, this was his name now. The last thought that passed through his mind as he lay there was one of hope--of freedom. One had to hold on to these things if they were to survive in a place like this.

            “Hold still Mr. Shepherd. The CAT scan will take a little while, so just try not to move around too much.”

            The boy didn’t move as he lay in the machine. He had been diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his brain, and they were doing some scans to see how effective his first run of radiation therapy had been.

            As he lay there the machine began to buzz, the sound making him nervous. Then, in a blast of light, the machine turned off. The doctors ran into the room to find the boy unconscious, his blue eyes giving off a bright blue glow. They took him to a different room, keeping him asleep with gas and began to try another scan, this time with a top-line hand-held scanner that had just been developed for quick and general brain scans in hospitals. Less precise than the larger CAT scan machines, but effective none-the-less.

            Upon the scan results the doctors were perplexed. The brain’s neurons were sending signals faster and more efficiently than they had ever seen in a human brain. They kept him there and investigated for hours, discovering the perfect cell hidden in the white matter. The Adam Cell had been activated by the specific form of x-ray that had hit it when the CAT scan was mapping the brain. Upon activation the Adam Cells exploded into life with an electrical surge; the activation in this particular man was enough to shut down a huge CAT scan machine. The average person with the evolutionary cell would only be able to power down one of the hand-held scanners they were now using.

            The boy awoke with a start, the dreams had plagued him throughout the night, and it felt like he had been awake the entire time. He had never had such vivid dreams. Some of the other workers were already getting ready, grabbing their tools from their chests and heading outside. The soldier who had brought them in stood at the front door, calling for them to hurry up.

            “N-21:9, E-2:22, get your asses out of bed now!” the soldier bellowed.

            The boy had already gotten out of bed, but the old man was still struggling with himself to get up. The boy climbed off his bunk and knelt beside the elderly man, helping him to his feet. Again, he wondered what the man’s purpose could possibly be here.

            “Thank you boy,” the old man said with a smile.

            “No problem N-21:9,” the boy said with a nod as he opened their chest and handed him a shovel and a pair of gloves.

            They walked together outside, keeping quiet until they were well clear of the guard in their bunks. But as they were taken to where they would begin to dig the foundation of this great city they talked in hushed tones. Neither of them spoke of their pasts, but they spoke of their dreams, they talked of the beauty of the outside world, it made it easier to bear their reality inside these walls.

            As the days went on, they seemed to blend into each other. The days were spent working and talking with the old man, the nights plagued by endless nightmares of hospitals and tests. He told the old man of his nightmares, and when he did the man seemed to grow quiet.

            “Hospitals have always scared the daylights out of me,” he had explained, his voice shaky with his age.

            The boy couldn’t figure out how this man was carrying his weight as well as the rest of the workers, he was in great shape for his age. He must have been a worker in the past, all those years lost to the sands of time. A soldier approached them as they worked, and immediately they both fell silent.

            “N-21:9. The specialist that was supposed to arrive for your check-up was delayed until tomorrow, so don’t bother leaving work early,” he scoffed, spitting on the ground in front of them and walking away, chuckling to himself.

            The old man looked pensively as he stood there and he laughed. “I had forgotten anyways,” he whispered with another laugh, and the boy laughed with him. The man reminded him of a father he had never had.

            As the sun began to lower and the work day neared its end the boy noticed the old man slowing down, breathing more heavily as he shoveled the earth aside. And as the boy was going to ask him if he was okay, the man clutched his chest and fell to the ground. The boy grabbed him and shook him, calling out to him but with no response.

            It took him less than two minutes to run across the camp with the man over his shoulder, jogging into the medical tents. The soldiers were close behind, seeing him running and chasing after him.

            “What is the meaning of this?” one of the soldiers growled.

            “He collapsed while digging, I think his heart might have stopped,” the boy answered.

            The doctors took over from there, taking the old man from him and putting him on a table. They opened up the man’s eyes, flashing a light to see if there was any response, but the first thing they noticed was the implants. There was a thick film over the eyes, almost like a contact lens. They took tweezers and peeled them back. As the lenses were removed, the man’s eyes shone a brilliant blue.

            “Sweet god,” the doctor whispered as he looked him over.

            “An ascended?” the second chipped in.

            A man burst through the door wearing a black suit, fury etched across his face.

            “What is the meaning of this?” the man roared. “There were specific instructions not to touch this man under any circumstance!”

            “He was going to die!” the doctor retorted.

            “Step aside,” the man in black snapped, pulling a pistol from beneath his jacket. “It’s a shame; the man was our prime test subject for the anti-Adam Cell serum.”

            “No!” the boy cried, lurching forward and grabbing the man’s arm, pulling it to the side as he pulled the trigger, the bullet whizzing inches past the old man’s head.

            The man turned and his fist connected hard with the side of the boy’s face, sending him soaring across the room, and as the boy flew through the air the man pulled the trigger twice, the bullets sent with incredible accuracy. The first buried through the boy’s heart and the second between his eyes. By the time the boy hit the floor he was dead.

            The sound of gunfire rang through the room, and as it did the man in black turned again, his luminescent eyes focused on the old man, but when he turned to fire the old man was standing before him, his eyes emitting a visible light in the air. The man in black went to pull the trigger but found he could not move his hands.

            “Mr. Shepherd, come on now. We can talk about this,” he said, his eyes brimming with fear.

            “You took everything from me,” the old man growled. He could remember now.

            He felt his lower back where the scars were, he could feel the vial beneath his skin, it was what the specialist had come to replace. It was a serum that nullified the effects of the Adam Cells. It had been nearly twenty years since they had discovered the Adam Cells in his brain, twenty years of tests to prepare for the last two years when they released the information to the public.

            They had erased his memory, and kept him alive only to test the serum. Even his family had their memories erased to keep them from asking questions for all those years. His own son hadn’t even remembered who he was this entire time.

            “Somebody shoot this old man!” the man in black screamed, but the guards that had entered the tent were already on the floor. Their brains had been hacked into and powered off by the monster that stood before them.

            The man in black cried for mercy as his brain too shut down and he hit the floor. The old man walked to the fallen boy and a tear streaked his face, the blue light from his eyes bathing the fallen form of his son.

            “I’m sorry for the nightmares,” he whispered.

            Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. The LORD your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, and in the desert.

            The biblical quote echoed in the minds of those for miles, and as he left the medical tent the slaves banded behind him. They marched for the cities of the ascended"to free their people bound by the corruption of class. Ascended and slaves alike came together behind him, and those who opposed their cause fell.

            The revolution had begun.