Wingless

Prologue- A Whole New World

Everyone thought the world was going to end.

It wasn't looking good. A supervirus had sprung up, extremely contagious and fast spreading. The symptoms would appear to be simple at first, small bloody noses, headaches, and dizziness, but within a couple of hours the victims would suffer from massive internal bleeding and strokes as the virus began to attack the cardio vascular system, tricking the blood into thinking the body was the enemy. It had a horrifying sixty-seven percent deathrate of those infected within twenty-four hours, almost up to ninty percent within two days.

No treatments worked. Not even vaccines, because as soon as someone isolated it to study and create treatments, it would attack and kill itself in it's ravenous hunger. Once infected, nothing could stop it.

An eighth of the world's human population was dead within a week, putting the world in a state of panic. Governments shut down. People went into hiding, accepting help from no one, giving help to no one. Farms were abandoned, money turned into fire kindling, it really looked like it was the death of the human race.

Until they found a cure.

Well, not so much a cure as a defense system. And not so much found as unveiled, with much gusto.

In 2036, over fifty years prior to this pandemic, there was another, weaker, but still concerning, supervirus. In the end, only less than a quarter of the world's population was wiped out, thanks to vaccines and research facilities all around the world. Civilization was able to get back up on it's feet quickly, and most assumed that this virus would never return, and slowly, the general population forgot about it.

The virus was very nearly eradicated, all except for a few facilities who continually researched it, attempting to find an origin, an animal or a place where this virus could have come from, but for some reason, it was impossible. The virus had come from nowhere. There was no origin area, no concentrated area of sickness where the virus probably began, it was if it just appeared all over the world, in different areas at the same time. No animals in nature had ever been documented to have any type of disease similar to this. There was no evidence of it in nature, no obvious path of evolution, no origin point. It was as if had just popped into existence one day and began killing.

And there was another oddity about this virus. It seemed to only affect humans. Any animal that came in contact with this supervirus was never affected, the only exception being apes, animals with similar genetic code to humas, where the symptoms were nothing worse than a little fatigue and drop in blood pressure before returning to normal. Whenever it came into contact with non-human animal cells, even with no other cells around, it would die out and become dormant, not even attempting to attack or evolve, earning itself the name "The Suicide Virus", Suvi for short. No scientist could understand the logic behind this phenomenon, but for the most part, they all agreed on one thing.

This virus was not natural.

It could not have survived in nature on it's own, someone created it, possibly cultivating it from some older, less harmful virus, to the point that no one could recognize it.

It took nearly fifty years and the beginnings of a war that would have destroyed the Earth to discover who this someone was.

Meanwhile, the science community, with suspicions that this virus was meant for biological warfare was given permission to begin looking into editing and modifying the human genetic code, using the animal DNA to find the perfect balance between immunity and human DNA. They kept these projects as secret as possible, to hide the fact that they might be developing a defense against this virus from whoever created it, in hopes of being one step ahead.

And it worked. In a few years, with many of the world's best and brightest geniuses working together with their full focus, new humans were made. Hybrid humans. They were born and grown in labs, kept hidden from the outside world, and in some cases treated inhumanely, but in most, just left to live their life so they could be observed by doctors and the researchers. The genetic code of the hybrids were improved to great lengths, they lived longer and longer until they were equal to that of a regular human, and their immune system became stronger than that of an average human.