Halcyon: Era

Chapter One 1.0

This is the year 2059. Humanity has come a great deal from the recent past. The world has evolved in a more ludicrous manner than what anyone's imagination could devise. Today Earth is peculiar, outlandish, unearthly. Ridiculous to believe, but 98% of the population embodies only children and juveniles aged between 1-22 years. The rest 2%? Yes, adults. The World Alliance, the sole government that dominates the Earth. Moreover, to feed the shock, every person at Earth, which we don't call Earth anymore but Hjem [pronounced Jem, meaning home in a once spoken language called Danish], owns at least some minor power emerging from a test everyone has to take, called Genetic Alteration. This, of course, is self-explanatory.

In this newbie superhuman society, we youngsters learn to adapt to our freshly gained powers and solicit to use them for survival amidst the universe. The universe, it has finally freed doors for mankind to converse and immerse with the rest of it, an event taking place not so many years ago. Life is out there. And mankind? We are about as primitive as a race can get. To some extent, at least.

We the new population only know of these things for a year at best, minus the World Alliance, of course. Not so long ago, mankind discovered itself having to keep up with intergalactic races and avoid alien colonization in our land, accordingly leading to us having to have powers and advanced weapons at all costs. Otherwise, our species would be obliterated very easily.

10 months ago, Earth was still Earth, not so much distinct from what you see around you. Mankind was on the early stages of developing into a multi-planetary species, inhabiting Mars and the Moon and just starting to learn how to grow vegetation on extraterrestrial lands.

At least, that's what we were told. At least that's how much we knew about our technological progress. Back then the space agencies were dispersed, many countries having their own companies. The new space age issued years ago, and at present time space studies and research is the most vital to mankind, thus having one prime agency. WASA, World aeronautics and Space Administration. Back then, whilst still unknown to us, the governments had joined forces, creating one regime and inventing newer, greater technology behind our backs. 

 Today there are no continents. In honour of history, there is only one city that covers all of Earth, named Pangea.

I am Halcyon, which isn't really who I was a year ago before all of this happened which is also the time no one on Earth but World Alliance knew about all of these oddities. My story begins 10 months ago in a small British town named Stramford.

Out of nowhere, a new and unusual disease shows up in Russia, known as the Ghost Sleep Disorder disease induced by the Ghost Sleep Disorder Virus or GSD-1 Virus. It affects people aged over 25, causing their neurons to contract and expand irregularly, developing to brain leakage and drastic deaths. The first stages are hallucinations, then sleep paralysis, and ultimately death. What's monstrous is that this whole process takes no more than two to three days at best, leaving little to no time for victims to react, or doctors to treat them. Horrifyingly enough, no treatment has been discovered or invented even after months of the epidemic.

Soon enough GSD-1 has afflicted the perfect world in no more than 2 weeks after first showing up in Russia. Russia denied to have manufactured the virus, and insisted it was natural. But no one ever found out exactly where it came from. People are dying. Every state, every country is on lockdown. The virus is reported to drift in the air. However, wrong they are. The virus does not only float, it crawls. No one can be excused of its deathly claws no matter what steps are being taken. The brightest scientists fail to collect any data. No vaccines, no medicines, nothing works.

The world, is dying.

It is now a suffocating and gruesome places of bodies everywhere, thousands of people perishing in minutes. Four months pass, still nothing. Nothing at all. 40% of the world population has already lost their lives, the remaining ones counting seconds to death. Only youngsters survive, constantly grieving the deaths of their guardians and family.