Endling

Chapter One

Sadie Loyal stares at the yellow, peeling Pokémon wallpaper with all its fantastical cartoon creatures and imagines what it must have been like for her great grandfather in those more innocent times. It's getting harder to conjure a time before hope and resources were depleted. Young boys and girls collecting colorful little monster characters and wantonly playing games on clunky devices without a thought to energy rationing. That was back when little children were plentiful, too.

Sadie meditates, seated on the worn carpet in a small bedroom. Her small frame is motionless, palms facing up on her folded knees. She attempts to clear her frenetic mind screen, letting thoughts float through and letting them go. Or at least trying. She is about to make their next vlog entry in which she records a video of herself telling their story, the adventures of Sadie and Zeke. But the real purpose is to throw their hunters off their trail. This is her specialty as professional hacker extraordinaire. This is what she does to preserve her sanity and their lives.

A tiny scratching noise in the corner of the room makes Sadie's large hazel eyes snap open. The scratching becomes more insistent. On her feet in an instant, Sadie leaps onto the twin bed, her feet sinking into the ancient mattress. She teeters, poised ineffectually to face the maker of said scratching noise. "Zeke! A super rat!" She detests these critters more than anything. Almost anything.

Zeke appears in the doorway. He has Sadie's eyes, but one degree more intense. His lanky 10-year-old frame is coiled with controlled energy. He smiles at his mom. He thinks she overreacts. His mom is not laughing.

"Mom, relax, it's probably just that swarm of carpenter ants." He's probably right. She's been staring at those weird Pokémon creatures for so long, including Rattata. Super rats are much more common in the outer regions where the nukes hit, she knows this. What she wouldn't do for a contraband Xanax. Zeke asserts himself toward the noise and taps decidedly on the wall. The scratching noise intensifies. Zeke puts his hands over his ears and closes his eyes. He doesn't move for a solid minute until they hear the sound of a multitude of insect feet scurrying away. Sadie exhales and puts an arm around her son, her world. "What did you put in their little ant brains?" Zeke has the uncanny ability to insert thoughts into other beings' minds. "I may have given a few of them the idea that this place was on fire and they had to evacuate immediately."

She gives him the side eye. "Nice." Zeke is pleased with himself, having used his power of thought transfer constructively. He thinks her fear is comical. Maybe because her fear is comical. She has been much braver in the face of much worse. The singular truth is that if it came down to protecting her son, super rats be damned, she is forever a lioness. No more powerful force in nature than a mama protecting her young. It's downright primal.

Survival right now means Sadie and Zeke hiding in plain sight. They share a tiny room in an apartment with eight other people, in a densely overpopulated suburb of Chicago, shielded by massive on top of massive amounts of people. The apartments were built 100 years ago and probably haven't been touched in 50 years. The humanity here is so thick the streets teem shoulder to shoulder during feeding cycles. The overpopulation problem has been solving itself with plummeting birthrates. Sadie's generation, deemed Baby Busters, saw only one baby per 10,000 women. Zeke was one of the miracle babies born, Sadie has no clue how she got so lucky. Should have played the numbers that fated day.

Sadie is able to blend in and go unnoticed, just another woman. Zeke stands out like an ant in a rice bin. Before he is full grown, he will never be out in daylight without invisibility. Their discovery would mean instant death for Sadie and straight to the camps for Zeke. The camps are a controlled environment where they hope to solve the fertility crisis, starting with Zeke's sparse generation – the Endlings.

Sadie remembers reading stories about white rhinos before they disappeared, and the lengths humans went to trying to replicate the perfect habitat and the best breeding science to no avail. Cut to the next scene decades later and the same logic is being applied to humans. Will science win this time? Hmmm. About as likely as Sadie is to sprout a unicorn horn and fart rainbows. Science has become this warped morphing of government and religion and magical misinformation. The only real scientists have gone rogue to avoid persecution.

Despite their predicament, Zeke and Sadie Loyal and Sadie's mother Daria Loyal, have notable unexplained abilities. They've never met anyone like themselves and the abilities only manifested in recent years.

Sadie, has the ability in her mind's eye to take a bird's eye view of their surroundings much like a built-in Google Earth camera in her brain. She has a limited sight radius, but meditating strengthens this ability to pull out of her body and see above them. She tapped into this after having a near-death, out-of-body, traumatic experience on the occasion of Zeke's conception. In other words, rape. An experience she is not fond of remembering. Sadie's mom and Zeke's Nana, the diva, Daria, has the power of invisibility. Despite a surge in female power born out of decades of righteous protest, there was still bias toward older women, even from other women. Middle aged women were and are metaphorically invisible. It wasn't a great leap when Daria acquired this this ability in the physical world.

But Sadie and Daria's powers are nothing compared to what Zeke can do. Zeke has the ability to insert thoughts into other beings' minds, whether the brain is human or machine. That made for some interesting times when he was a toddler and Sadie would find herself compelled to sing Wheels on the Bus 500 times in a row.

So to re-cap Family Loyal: A single mom who can be in two places at once, a middle-age grandma who is sometimes invisible and a ten-year-old boy who can manipulate your thoughts. Your typical all-American family.

"Mom, what do you see out there," Zeke presses. Sadie is now back in meditation-mode, staring herself into a trance. She concentrates on her view from above of the suburban sprawl in which they live. Happydale is so much like everywhere it might as well be nowhere. The rows of housing structures and stacks of cars form perfect 3-D puzzle pieces in steel, concrete and aluminum siding, maximizing every inch of space. Charging stations on every corner gleam white and ready for citizens to line up at dawn for a day's ration of power. A behemoth structure in the distance boasts an Amazon logo, one of the only industries left-- carefully regulated distribution.

"I see something green!" Sadie exclaims. Could it be grass? Zeke brightens and draws near her. They've only ever seen grass in snaps. But no, it's just a discarded wrapper. Just on the edge of her periphery, Sadie sees what she fears worse that Super Rats – an ERM.

ERM stands for Epsilon Retriever Mode, a human-machine hybrid deployed by the powers that be to round up rogue Endlings and their mothers. The ERMs never tire and never stop looking.

"Zeke, we need to call Nana. Now." Daria had warned her daughter Sadie that they had been doing house-to-house raids in nearby Upper Grove. Zeke runs to call his Nana. Sadie puts her mobile phone on a tripod and addresses their virtual assistant. "Lu Lu, vlog entry please. We're going to need to make this brief."

Lu Lu: "Vlog entry to begin in 5, 4, 3, 2..."

She begins with a lie. "Hello, this is Sadie Loyal and this is my vlog entry, May 5, 2085. We have found our way to Buckfield on the Northern edge of Fancyfield ..."