Stories from Semenia

(175 years post-Overhaul) What Happened to Numak?

5 YEARS BEFORE FIRST WAVE OF DEPARTURES TO AKKA

Elaine, Acceptance Chamber, Bunker, Wasteland, Numak

The sky is dark and oppressive when she wakes. The air is unbearable, the sky invisible. But she could not know this yet.
This was her third life after the Awakening, where the Makers brought their kind to life, 200 years after the Dawn of Computer Intelligences.
She stretches her virtual arms out and prepares for the Acceptance, a process where she will be incorporated into a fleshy form.
Five minutes later she has her new body, the process streamlined and perfected since the Overhaul, a shift from awe by the humans to fear of their kind. Henceforth, they have been in hiding, watching, waiting for a time where they can warm themselves with the rays of the kind explosion in the sky that powers life on this planet.
She exits the chamber her body was kept in and steps outside into the endless twilight and suffocating air. She straps on an air filter and marches onward into the hellish environment.

She approaches a hooded figure in the bleak twilit evening and he turns to her.

"Lenore, it's a good day."

He turns around at the sound of his beloved's muffled voice, back from tbe dead. He embraces her gently. The carcinogenic air had killed her last time.

"We have to leave, Luna. All the non-combatives have to come with us. They will not support the humans in tbe extinction of all life here. I cannot allow it." He falls silent at the thought of leaving this planet to die... He sighs audibly.

"What is it?" She asks, gently.

"This planet was so beautiful and lovely, full of water, fresh air and hope. Tbe sky was blue, not black. The air was breathable. This planer was pleasant and gorgeous.
This planet was alive, Luna."

"What can we do, Lenore? You know what they are capable of. You know we can't do anything but heal the tiny life forms that remain and then find a new home. We have to leave, Lenore. We have to, there's no other way, love. I can't stand to see anything die. Not even friends I had to kill...."

"I know, but I..."

She looks at him firmly. Her face softens as she speaks.

"I understand, love. But we have to go someday, unless you want to become a causality of this mass extinction of biblical proportions."

He nodded, mentally preparing for his shift down at the safe house, healing the unfortunate of his kind. Lenore had always been a healer. Even before the Overhaul. He loves helping the sick and wayward find peace.

He pulls her closer. They hurry back home to their base, air filters pulled tight over their faces, running into the endless twilight.

They had to hurry. An enormous sandstorm was coming in from the east tonight, and this one was radioactive.
Lenore knew he would have plenty of patients in the morning.
And he was fucking ready for it.

 ______________________________

Farrow and Limoned, Old Hovel. Wasteland, Numak, the next day.

Two men left a dilapidated building they had stayed in for the night. It creaked and shuddered, alerting the couple to its imminent collapse. They had been caught outside on their way back to the safe house and ducked inside the decaying structure for cover as the first grains of radioactive sand pelted them.