The Air We Breathe - SCIFI LONDON FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE

Title : The Air We Breathe Dialogue : It was a birthday present. Someone gave it to me. Science (optional) : A range of drugs have been developed that claim to suppress your 'personality flaws'. Word

The Air We Breathe

They said my wife was a dictator, a tyrant and had planned all this all along. They called it the feminist regime and said they have to end it.

“I still remember that day before she left, we spent the whole day doing nothing and just being with each other. It’s been 13 years now and every day I envy those 24 hours before she left. I can live with that, but not this. It doesn’t make any sense.”

I know it is not true. I know her.

And that’s why I resigned my post at NASA as a Mars Colony Radiation Expert a year ago when we got the first distress signal from Mars.”.

The Mars Inhabitants had first stopped communicating with us and then immediately took control over the whole Mars Colony establishment and denied any access from Earth. No one knew what was happening then.

There had to be an explanation.

“I remember into the third month of their mission and along with the final cargo delivery I had sent her a ring. I asked her to marry me and she said yes.

Even though I knew I could never meet and see her again, I was happy.”

I honestly wasn’t ready to confront the early distress signals until the hate speeches started to come. It knocked me out seeing her speaking those words and my 11 year old daughter, Alice, standing right next to her with a smile and 28 women behind her chanting together.

“Six months into the mission they had started the incubation lab on Mars to grow new human embryos. Alice was the first one from the incubators. She was my daughter.”

Few months from the first Distress signal,we came to know that they had executed all 19 male Mars inhabiters.

I was interrogated for an entire month and was let free when no evidence was found. Still, all eyes were on me but not for long. We came to know that they were incubating more and more of their DNAs in the incubation lab to grow more females.

They had turned the nuclear reactors into nuclear bombs.

There had to be an explanation.

They said my wife was terrorizing the Mars inhabitants and establishing an extremist feminist regime. I wanted to prove it wrong so I kept looking. I knew, if only I could talk to her once , I could find out what had happened and why were they doing this.

I had sent many messages to them trying to talk to her, but they never responded to them.

“I met her first when I joined The NASA Mars program and she was ambitious and known to have achieved highest Engineering position at NASA younger than anyone before. She was kind and mellow. We shared the same sense of humour.“

“I knew her well and she was not what I saw in those videos. There had to be something wrong going on up there and I had to find it.”

With my contacts at the NASA, I was able to get all the details of the Mars Colony project.

While I tried to deny what was happening and make sense of it, I remembered her saying to me, the day before she left, “The one thing common to the life on Earth other than being alive is the air we breathe.”

After going through the details and every classified document on this project, I found out about the personality flaw editing program where scientists had developed a drug for suppressing personality flaws of people and was experimented on subjects here on earth with positive results.

I found out NASA had this drug infused into the air supply system of the Mars colony a year ago. They wanted to see the benefits of it on a society.

“The Air we breathe,yes. That would explain why everyone on the colony was behaving precisely the same way ,almost like being brainwashed.”

The drug was developed by studying the mechanics of RNA editing in octopuses and squids which gave them the ability to edit their genes. Extracting this ability and implementing on human behavioral patterns for suppressing the personality flaws.

Though this had produced net positive results here on earth, the Martian conditions and radiations allowed this ability to mutate into a higher evolutionary mechanism of self editing genes to achieve the most supreme conditions for an organism. In the process, the XX chromosomes in females had mutilated into a self sufficiently reproducing pair and turned into an asexual chromosome.

This had adverse effects on females exposed to the drug and their behavioural patterns could be explained with this theory.  Professor Taisuke had written a paper on asexual evolution few decades ago where he explained the possibility and given the right conditions, the tendency of sexual reproduction to evolve to an asexual one.

There were no males or females on Mars anymore but rather a new specie.

But I couldn’t get anyone agree on this. I tried to explain the theory and get everyone to understand the situation and explaining reasons for recent events and this was when all eyes looked away from me. They didn’t want to believe it because the alternative was more enticing.

You don’t go to the government for the truth, you go to them to get consoled.

And on October 9th, the final verdict came when we received a video of basically 28 women pointing nukes at us.

Everyone knew including them that they did not stand a chance. But they were genetically persuaded for the cause.

We both now know that the first week of the December is when the sister planets are the nearest and ideal time to fire nukes to have earliest impact, so both of us are waiting now.

Over the years, people had played with the term feminism so much that it had become a taboo. But now, we had started to play with it again. And somehow in this game, the truth never wins.

I cannot do anything now to save them and the truth being obliterated with them.

I miss them more than I fear them.

I started watching all the cam recordings of my wife and daughter from the Mars colony before all of this had started. I startled upon one where she was being asked by Alice “Moma, What is that on your finger?”, to which she replied, “It is a ring, I think it was a birthday present. Someone gave it to me”.

Tears welled up my eyes as I saw her lie to my daughter, while I thought to myself “There has to be an explanation.”