Tainted Blood

Prologue

The year was 2024, time was still known yet the impending death and infection that drew closer was not. Life was simple for those who were oblivious, living in chaotic and mind-numbing darkness as their technology rules their lives. Mobile phones were the mind and soul of each living citizen within the Metropolis; likes, retweets and the number of friends you had were more important than the protection against what was thought to be fiction but was soon proved to be all too real. The MAO-A virus. A plague that intercepted a dormant gene within those whose minds were weak to manipulation, greed, and death. A gene that once activated, wiped the person that was once known and brings forth a darkness that has one carnal need to quench a blood thirst that drives the mind into a state of insanity. Before the world was divided and peace to the immune was found; loved ones who were consumed by their darkness were often murdered in front of the eyes of those they once held dear. It was a necessary evil they once said, a precaution to ensure that the safety of the greater population. Little did the population know that the loved offspring of the deceased were also branded condemned to the conspiracy that the MAO-A gene was hereditary. A theory that was not proven wrong until decades past and the supremacy of the immune was declared. From that day on any being, adult, or child, that showed signs of being a Mono was condemned to the Pit. A dark place that was overshadowed by the high rises of the immune and the metal wall that divided the damned from the saved.

The year now is 4010, time now is an imagined concept that does not govern when a life begins and ends. Technology has evolved to allow for the immortality of those who have the means to pay for it or the connections to gain ownership of the precious solution that deters death by the hands of age. Life within the Metropolis is prosperous and the need for supplies in order to survive the night is non-existent. However, for those who bear a child that will one day reach their 18th year and be tested for the gene. There is always the underlying fear that their child will be sent to the Pit where all contact from the immune world to the Mono's is forbidden. For those who have dared to try to see their once beloved daughter or son are charged with crimes of treason of contamination against Metropolis and are sent to death in the form of living their years out in the Pit. However, not one immune is yet known to survive the transfer across the bloodied gates of the divide. Within the Metropolis one family stands to rule over all immune since the beginning of the plague. They have governed those with an iron fist in order to ensure that the once savage atrocities that had occurred would never again enter the hearts of the pure and uninfected. This is the Mercer family; the one known clan that has never had a child condemned to the Pit. They are said to be the purest of heart and mind. Their leader, Hennessy Mercer is said to be a thousand years old, old enough to have seen the plague and survive the onslaughts of the infected in order to build the divide that separates the savage from the civilised. Among him is his wife, Liliana and their children Spencer Mercer and Alistair Mercer. Time has not affected their family for hundreds of years; no one has yet to object to the rulings of the Mercers whether it be from fear or from respect. Yet, time will tell if their leadership remains or a revolution will bubble from the condemned and the oppressed.