Serendipity

PROLOGUE

I guess you’re wondering what everything of this is about. Well, I’m going to tell you an ancient story:

History books say, a lot of centuries ago, one and only kind of humans inhabited this planet. They were all the same, they were born with the same abilities and possibilities, paying some mind to little differences: skin color, religion or sexuality were some of them…

But one day marked the future and all those things that kept them separated stopped matter anymore.

First offspring met daylight crushing the mother form the insides. Four months forward, that baby had the stature of an adult, normal human. Emergency interventions by the responsible scientists were actually useless, letting the breaking news slip into radio and TV, the project of a giant baby that made its mother explode due to the fetus’s abnormal size and development.

It would be a wonderful terror story if it weren’t because it wasn’t an isolated case. A lot of incidents like the previous one peaked some weeks after that. Who knows if the rich and privileged knew about this before the rest of us…

Strong investigations started in every country. What could it be? Toxins, viroides, mutations… Nothing seemed to make sense, they couldn’t find the reason. Sadly, some predacious people put their eye on it looking for a unique opportunity. New test tube babies. They weren’t genetically engineered but, once fertilized and showed an excessive growth, they were extracted from the belly and maintained on enormous tanks that emulated placenta.

First years were met with failures and the deafening fall in the world birth rate. Just a few babies were born with normal conditions, with human proportions. Anyways, the discouraging perspective for couples to keep trying to be parents made it collapse. No one wanted to give birth. Chances were low, only 12% of pregnancies found the four-leaf clover and went awfully normal. The horror of the remaining 88% meant an overdeveloped not-born crushed the mother form the inside without enough development to eat, breath of merely live without a machine. They were trying to maintain a giant one or two-month fetus. It would never work.

Babies kept growing in size while time passed but not a single one survived. One decade went by a number of deaths and lost inversions until… a baby girl was born. Healthy, pretty and gigantic. While the clinics and labs halls were full of cheers, streets were full of hate. What to do with a baby that no one could properly attend? Who would teach, feed and handle her? And, the least and worst, who was going to deal with her when she was adult enough? Who was supposed to go against her wishes?

Sooner than later, some of the brightest minds found a conclusion: if we couldn’t stop nor fix whatever mutation that afflicts them, we would improve it. We would learn and work for a new human generation. Opposition and admiration became enemies to death. Cities burned, complains were massacred and, of course, entire governments and countries fell. From time to time, the first fights were replaced for some with new values. Nevertheless, there was something that anybody could kill… human scientific curiosity.

More than a million new human failures were the first stone for the future path: to replicate the original mutation on adults became a reality. Shifting was slow, painful and irreversible, but compulsory. First of all, it was a progressive change, they were bigger each time holding their morality and intelligence, which only resulted in more experiments, cheerfully this time. Even so, it all was a unique question: why would you want -and keep- 90 feet human guinea pigs if you weren’t enough strong nor competent to even control them? Like every human being, those experiments also became ambitious.

Finally, an important 72% of population reacted positive to the mutation, it seemed that the new designed virus acclimated itself slow but unstoppable. From that initial 72% only the half made it through. Which was the position the old generation was holding now in? A minority, so small at number and size both.

There were multiple tries for coexistence thanks to equality factions, none of them worked. There wasn’t a single person in the whole world that didn’t know the REM implications. It started as an integrative association for the new -old- minority for them to live in big cities, just so oversized for them. Unfortunately, soon the cover went down: it was a military special branch focused on infiltrations and information seekers. They had never stopped those experiments. The main director, Avery Dorens, showed his face without doubt when his name appeared on every media. Visionary, he called himself, who had been fighting in order to find a cure for the Older’s involution problem. His followers were ex-military agents, spies and even ex-convicted. All of them strong people with weak or broken ideals. Nothing could stop him and, some years later, even with his expedient still opened, Dorens’s project received tons of support and financing.
That’s how war started. A war my side lost. Giants versus humans. Step by step, giants replaced us. Some of us were immune, I don’t know why, so we saw ourselves as the resistance. We were the ones loyal to the human race. This meant a rupture with society. Most of the knowledge became lost or destroyed because of the war. Giants called themselves Newman, the new improved human race, since my kind was baptized as Older, the old, outdated, weak that had to disappear in order to favor the species’s development. Newman versus Older.
Older were expelled after losing the Size War. They hid themselves into the most rural places, out of reach from Newman. It wasn’t an easy task since nature seemed to grow with them, grass strands were the size of a person. A lot of species disappeared along the Size War, some others integrated the mutation.
Nowadays, here we are. It’s been 200 years and, theoretically, Older are all dead. We are a fantasy creature that only appears in kid’s tales and history books. We have been forgotten and my generation is being prepared to guide our little world, the one they let us without knowing it.

Who would believe that creepy story? It was a horror tale to tell the children to sleep. Real world was there waiting for me to conquer it. I wasn’t supposed to waste my life yearning for something interesting to happen in Berhem, was I? It was a beautiful and small city with a familiar atmosphere. It was perfect for breeding kids and living a peaceful, long life. It was placed in a long-lost forest, protected by some hundreds of natural, green barriers that kept us from the ugly outside. None of the young knew how to go through it nor did we had permission. Where was the sea? Snow? Dessert? Legends, that’s all it was.  And I wasn’t one to keep dreaming and waste my time wondering. I needed to know the truth.

What was outside those green walls?

—Don’t stop running, Walker! — the trainer’s voice resonated through the pavilion’s walls. I knew she wasn’t expecting an answer, so I didn’t. I kept my usual rhythm. The resistance test was the one I was focused on now, it took me time to get the trick, but I got it at least.

Sooner than later, my life was going to change. I was training for the Military Force, Exterior Initiative  -MFEI abbreviated - section. I’d always been a curious child. Reckless and shameless, my mother used to say. Me joining MFEI was completely opposite to her beliefs but she had understood it would be the only way for me to be happy: finding answers to my never-ending questions.

I could have started my own little company, study abroad, learn a profession or even just stay at home with a good husband who would keep me fed and healthy, but that wasn’t my deal after all. I dreamt about exploring new areas, look for whatever land that was our so far in the past. I wanted to find a time where we weren’t Older, just human.

And that time would come when I was accepted at MFEI.