It's 2141. Clones have taken over as the dominant species. Using brain nanochips to surveil thoughts and actions, they have pushed traditional humans down to a status of low-class workers in a discriminatory dystopia.
A nineteen-year-old aspiring me...
All my family members, posing and smiling for an imaginary photograph in my mind – a heart-warming mental reminder that they were there for me, cared for me as much as I cared for them.
However, one day the photo cracked where my mother was. Her face split in two. No, the photo didn't actually crack. It was a puzzle, getting slowly undone as time was going by and hurting my family and me.
Then, my brother was gone. His face and body experienced the same fate. Piece by piece, he was gone from the picture.
Next, my father. I was alone.
A ruthless, anger-driven hand had slammed on the table of my world, and the puzzle that my entire life was shook, scattering the pieces in the air and undoing who I was while making all those pieces carelessly fall on the floor down below.
That was what Apollo and the clones had done to me until that fateful Wednesday.
Apollo had shot my father in the head – and I had witnessed it from afar, while Peace Square sent an ocean of deep-red blood down the drain that Wednesday evening. And down it went, into the underground guts of the city, and into the madly polluted sea in the east.
Our blood had become the blood that an entire city had shed, not just my community. With that action, Fortune, both the song and the concept, was calling for vengeance with the music of every drop of that blood. And those traditional-human cries which had thundered in Peace Square would soon be paired with similar echoes, uttered by hopeless, clone mouths.
But that wasn't me pledging vengeance.
No, that was the tale written on Sigi's face when he witnessed Apollo shooting my father dead and hearing my subsequent soul-shattering cry. The contorted expression on his face had the intensity of an undying wildfire.
Seeing a beloved person die like that made some things crystal clear for me, like feeling like I was a goner. My hope had evaporated like water in a pot on the stove.
However, only one tiny, little detail remained blurry: why had my father yelled "Hecuba Regina" right before dying?
The two words were written on the back of my dear red alarm clock.
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"We have to hurry!" Sigi exclaimed.
Sigi and I were both panting. We had run to the front door of my home. I got the keys and opened the door in a hurry. He had parked his bike at a safe distance from the door in case the Black Masks came while we'd be inside. We had fled from Peace Square on his bike safe and sound, and then it was time to salvage what I needed from home and flee once more.
Luckily, my home was still standing and unburnt. The Black Masks must have been busy until that moment, but I wouldn't consider myself lucky until we both got out and fled, never to return again. It saddened me beyond anything describable, but after seeing my father get shot and killed, I didn't think it possible to suffer even more.
