Part 1: The End of Mankind #8

Post date: Mar 13, 2016 1:51:21 PM

Part 1: The End of Mankind

“What was that…that thing?” Fisher demanded, not two seconds after she and Baylee had gotten back on the road.

Baylee had hoped she’d have time to ease into her explanation but, as usual, her friend Fisher had other ideas. Baylee took a deep breath and released it slowly. She wet her lips.

“Quit stalling.”

Baylee shrugged her shoulders trying to lessen the kinetic tension that the crash had produced. She kept her eyes focused on the wavering orange mass ahead.

“That wasn’t a thing,” Baylee said, a little too curtly. She knew she shouldn’t snap, not after what she’d just put Fisher through. It was only that it was hard to hear the prejudice in Fisher’s voice and not take offense. “Dewey is an-”

“An alien entity?”

“You know?” Baylee responded in shock. Her eyes shot to the review mirror.

How could Fisher know about the Dueania race? How had she found out when she herself had only recently stumbled upon the foreign entity?

“Seriously?” Fisher cried. “I was joking, Bay.”

“Oh…I.”

“You better start yapping and fast,” Fisher’s voice took on a slight panicked tone.

“There’s so much to say. I don’t know where to begin.”

“Start anywhere, but I hope whatever you have to tell me it isn’t that this Dewey thing is what I’ve been hearing whispers about?”

Baylee sucked in a breath. “Whispers? What whispers?”

Fisher made a nervous coughing sound. “There’s rumours that an uprising is beginning to form among The Forlorn Ones.”

Baylee gasped.

An uprising among the scavengers. Against who? The Dueania people or people like herself.

“Fisher, where have you heard this?”

“Well, everywhere. It’s all the Sperm Releasers talk about.”

Baylee glanced again into the review mirror.

“I haven’t heard a thing.”

Fisher snorted. “That’s because level 4 SG’s don’t mingle with the rift raft.”

Baylee wet her lips. Again Fisher was starkly reminding Baylee that her friendship with Fisher was tolerated for the exact reason Fisher had just stated. High ranking reproductive families, such as her family, were awarded special and often rare privileges within the Reproduction of Family Ministry. One of those privileges was that they could form friendships outside of their ranking circle.

The exception was that when it came to reproduction all high ranking families were strictly matched with other families who were ranked at the same level as they were.

Level 4 rankers were those who had produced multiple children and who had the unique genetic coding that allowed their children to reproduce as well.

Fisher’s mother had only produced one child, Fisher. Whereas Fisher’s father had fathered more than two, thus giving Fisher the unusual status of a Sperm Gather level 2. And though Fisher herself had not inherited the specific genetic coding allowing her to reproduce, she had shown potential because Fisher’s father possessed a variating strain.

Baylee swallowed hard. Her hands gripped the trike’s handlebars so tightly that her hands began to sweat within her gloves.

Her friend Dewey had dissipated down, due to the lack of light, to the size of what used to be referred to as a ping pong ball.

He hovered a couple of feet in front of her and to her right. He was riding shotgun. Offering her protection in the early predawn.

“What else have you heard, Fisher?” Baylee said, opening up the conversation with Fisher again after several minutes.

Fisher hesitated and Baylee, knowing her best friend so well, knew she was trying to think of a way to lessen the impact of her next words.

“There have been whispers that some of The Forlorn Ones have begun to reproduce.”

Baylee gasped.

Children? Children outside of the Reproduction Facilities were being born. How was that possible? She’d never known a child bearing woman to be banished from their society. Were not The Forlorn Ones’s female population too old to give birth?

“But there’s something wrong with the babies,” Fisher continued cautiously. “They’re not like other human beings.”

“How so?”

Baylee caught a glance of Fisher shaking her head. “The whispers aren’t specific. Only that the children aren’t like normal human beings.”

Baylee felt her heart speed up.

“Bay? The Forlorn Ones blame the administrators of the facilities for the mutation in their children.”

“Why them?”

Fisher scoffed. “Why else, Bay? Everyone of us has spent a lifetime of being experimented on. We’ve all been injected with every possible substance known to man in an attempt to get us to become more fertile. We’ve undergone surgeries and countless other medical procedures and on a daily basis ingest hundreds of separate chemicals to keep our bodies living longer.”

“Still, that not a reason to…” Baylee countered.

“It’s every reason,” Fisher said, as if Baylee hadn’t tried to interrupt her. “Each one of those ‘scavengers’ we saw were once just like the two of us. Who are you going to blame when the administrators decide you’re no longer of use and finally cast you aside?”

Fisher had a point. Baylee felt ashamed that she’d lived such a sheltered life. So clueless of anything outside of the walls of her own existence. Even her research had been conducted in a safe bubble. What did she know of the outside world? The cruelties of what life would offer if she was ever relegated to the life of a scavenger?

But if there were actual children being born, then the intervention of the Dueania race must be having a positive impact on the world. Her research wasn’t that far off after all.

Excitement coursed through Baylee. She’d been right. Her theory could actually do some good. She couldn’t wait to get started. To show Dewey what she’d brought.

“Er…Bay?” Fisher said, breaking Baylee’s train of thought. “What is…Dewey? It really isn’t from outer space, is it?”

Baylee glanced again into the rearview mirror. She met Fisher’s gaze even though she couldn’t see Fisher’s eyes.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Does it want to cause us harm? I mean…back there…we could have died.”

Baylee returned her eyes to the road focusing on the hovering sphere of light before her. It seemed to shift, almost as if Dewey was awaiting her answer.

“The cause of the crash was my own paranoia,” she confessed. “Dewey saved us, so I’d say he doesn’t want to cause us harm.”

“Dewey’s male?”

Baylee paused.

“I don’t know if you could categorize the Dueanian people into male or female. They just are.”

“Huh?”

“It’s hard to explain, Fisher. When we stop I’ll try and make some sense out of what I’ve learned. But it would be better for you to see for yourself. Dewey is quite remarkable.”