Amanita: Poison Shot

Chapter 15: Dream of Apollo

*Note: This is a special chapter, with a POV of Apollo. None of its content is revealed to Daphne, the main character. Meet the "Living God".

I'm staring at the Neon Sea right now, from the top floor of the Faculty of Medicine and Biology, all alone. It's raining cats and dogs over the city tonight. The streets are deserted, of course. The only ones who won't care shit about this hellish acid rain are the wild creatures that live in those poisoned waters. The Neon Sea is the most dangerous place in the whole world, and it bathes the eastern shores of my city.

The Neon Sea got its name forty years ago when the pollution started to exponentially threaten my world. It glows in neon blue and turquoise hues at night due to a mutant kind of plankton that thrives there. A deadly beauty that lusts for destruction. The water is so toxic that it can kill a human being in a few seconds of bathing in it. And I am responsible for it.

Thank God I've kept it contained with a huge underwater impenetrable net. It's more like a wall, actually.

I stare at it every day from the windows of my office and lab, that underwater hell, reminding me of my mistakes and my past.

It's 2141, and I still haven't succeeded.

I sigh as frustration rips up a black hole deep within me. I'm too old to be doing this.

Yet millions of people look up at me, hoping to guide them into the future like I have done so many times before. I can't let my followers down. I let out an exasperated sigh.

The reason? A group of rebels is threatening peace. They've dared to perpetrate a terrorist attack on my dear BioBank and the GSNS, so I'm called into active leadership once again, to ensure the clone supremacy over humans in the traditional sense of the word. I was retired, but that won't be possible anymore.

Our world is split in two, and the only thing we share is hatred. Fuck – as I said, I'm too old for such a fight. I don't think I can do this – she could, though. She never lacked passion in anything she put her mind to.

She escaped from my reach back in 2101, my dear Valentina, and the world has moved on – the whole world but me. I was foolish to fall in love with my employee, a twenty-four-year-old intern. I was almost twenty years her senior, but I didn't care. She was the smartest young woman I've ever met. I scared her away when she refused me when I tried to blackmail her to force her to love me. I acted foolishly, and yet I swear that I'd do it again. She was too valuable.

How hopelessly do I crave to see her again? A lot more than words can do justice to such a feeling. Forty years without her, in which I've struggled against this longing like trying to break free from a pair of invisible handcuffs.

I smirk at the dark window in front of me, and I swear that, for a fraction of a second, my reflection is the most wicked thing I've ever seen. A distorted portrait of a human being, now a demon with decaying flesh that strives to survive year after year. I'm eighty years old already. It's as if I've just seen myself from my dear Valentina's eyes for a moment, and I've seen the repulsive monster that she believed I was – that I am.

She could've been right, she could've been wrong. I'm not delusional, though. However wrong she thought I was, I enabled her to make her dream come true. She wanted to become a scientific hero, and I gave her the wings she needed to soar high in the sky, in the company of the worthiest. Me.

Exactly. She was the actual brains behind the scientific breakthrough that changed it all: human cloning on a massive scale to supply the largest demand for blood and organs the world had never seen. I simply took credit for it when she realised the moral downside. We had created life only to kill it, over and over, in massive organ donations. Otherwise, the virus would have become humanity's game over for good.