Ch. 1

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[ CHAPTER 1: THE DEATH DATE ]

    Hello, connected?Connected?Good

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    Hello, connected?
Connected?
Good.
I am here to tell you a story.
A story soon to become reality.
Sooner than you think.
Listen close.
Please.
You are our last hope.

    I can't remember a time when the sky was once clear. There was a time, they say, when nature, true nature, covered the earth like a freshly fallen jade blanket. Where children laughed and played and breathed, breathed in the air that came from the soft green that fell all around.
I wonder if they took it for granted.
I wonder if they knew that one day, it would all be gone; plucked, like a precious flower in the cruel, hardened hands of humanity.

    I don't think they knew that instead, children would know of nature as if it was an ancient artifact in a now sullen world; something they yearned for, but never to show it.

    I wonder if anyone ever really knew what would happen to us; perhaps they wondered. Perhaps they didn't.
Long ago, there were theories that one day, technology and urbanization would take over the world. If only they knew how right they were.
Now, we no longer can see the sky.
Now, all we see is a thick grey cover, like a suffocating curtain.
Now, there is no more life.

    Air has become precious. Huffing out of sacred machines, built to create and substitute a once so natural cycle.
Now, resources are draining away. So slowly, ever so slowly, we are beginning to fade.
We desperately attempt to hold on to once was, but we have become so corrupt with building, expanding, conquering, that we have lost sight of our true meaning — to live. To hold on to the fragile feather of life, that seems to be trembling and withering as we know it.

    Now, all we can do is hide behind a mask that smiles and lies.
We walk in straight lines, looking no different from one another, terrified to step out in case our mask slips to show our true faces.
We are no more than machines.
Machines meant to wake, exist, and die.
We look nowhere but forward, now. Forward, step by step, to the day we are snatched from everything we have ever known, and never seen again.

    They etch it on your arm. Black, arial font, sized exactly 16. The precise date of your prestigious doom. I suppose it's for comfort. So it doesn't come as a surprise.
It seems like a blur; no one really remembers. One moment, your arm is bare and innocent and safe; the next, the moment of your birth exactly 13 years later, it's there. A tattoo. A scar.
A burning reminder embodied on your skin that one cannot survive, while the other continues to live.

    I received mine on a rainy day.
It was my birthday.
The famous day of maturity that we pretended to celebrate, only to hide the true pity that laid under our deceiving smiles.
So many say that we should appreciate the dates tattooed on our wrists. That it should be a comfort, an acceptance, a gift.
But they are lying.

MORTAL ⇴ DYSTOPIANWhere stories live. Discover now