My name is Free and I am the child of two X-series, X5s to be exact. I'm twenty-four and for the first eight years of my life I lived inside Terminal City with my family.
I was brought up to think of everybody who'd been born in Manticore, or born of the Manticore transgenics, as my family. Specifically, my blood relatives were an older half-brother, a younger sister and my parents, Kara and Splint.
I remember walking down the greyed street, hanging off one of my mother's hands with my sister holding onto the other hand. I couldn't have been older than five. The sky was blue above me, and while the scene was more like a slum than most of post-Pulse America put together, it was my home and I felt happy. Transgenics to left of me, transgenics to the right. There seemed to be more every year. Perhaps that's why nothing phases me. You don't get easily phased after growing up with animal-human hybrids for neighbours, a woman who could snap your neck if you played up for a schoolteacher and reporters constantly hassling us for gossip and interviews.
My sister was Steel, my half-brother was Justin. All our names are complete jokes. Take Justin, for example. You might think that a pretty ordinary name for someone related to an X-series, but you'd be wrong if you knew where it came from.
My parents had a love-hate sort of relationship. They met in Terminal City when Mom was pregnant with Justin, a child of the Manticore breeding programme. Dad kept insisting it would be a girl, and Mom kept telling him she was sure it would be a boy. So Dad comes into the room where Mom had just given birth and says, after congratulating her on a job well done, "What's her name, then?"
Mom snapped. "Just in, you moron," she hissed. "The baby's a boy!"
So that became Justin's name. Two years later, I was born. I was about two weeks late, and the first thing Dad said to me when I was born was, "You're free, kid!"
Dad was blind drunk the night Steel was born. He thought Mom was gonna die in childbirth- everyone said she wasn't going to make it. Drowning his sorrows (to this very day no-one knows how the hell he managed to get his hands on alcohol), he found out his little girl was born just before he passed out.
By the time he was able to come and see Steel, he was still kinda woozy so he dropped her on the floor. Everyone stared in shock at tiny little Steel, lying there motionless. Was she dead?
Then she started crying, a bit shaken but fine. Mom cradled her, smacked Dad upside the head and a passing X8 remarked, "That girl's made of steel!"
Dad was always accident-prone, even when he was growing up in Manticore. The adults used to tell us gruesome stories about that place, so that none of us feared Hell, exactly- we had Manticore. Dad was named Splint as a young child because he was always breaking limbs or getting weird allergic reactions to things. It was thought to be his genetic anomaly because he didn't get seizures.
Dad was also a local celebrity because he was the X5 brother of our leader, the X5 Max Guevara. A lot of her brothers and sisters were dead. They were like urban legends, almost like our fairytales. There was Tinga 'Penny' Smith, who had given herself up to Manticore so that her child Case, the first ever child of an X5, could live. There was the Great Storyteller, Ben Blueman, who had died rather than gone back. There was Jace Morales, who as far as I know is still living in Mexico with her only child, Max 'Little Max' Morales. She overcame a 'simplification' to escape there so that her daughter could live a normal life.
All of us second-generation X-series are endowed with basically, the same abilities as our parents. We have no barcodes. In a couple of generations, our genetically-enhanced 'powers' will have been bred out, save for the odd great-grandchild with incredible vision or super-strength.
When we were finally to leave Terminal City, I was eight years old. Justin was ten, and Steel was seven. There had been a final battle that had brought to the attention of the public our plight. My father, Splint, was killed.
Our family appears in a tape of the news coverage of the battle. The footage was most of the reason the public realised how unfair they'd been.
It shows a street in Terminal City close to where my family was living crowded with dead transgenics, their families sifting through the wreckage to try and find their bodies. A man is lying on the street, the front of his shirt soaked with blood from being shot through the heart. A woman (my mother Kara) and three children (Justin, Steel and myself) crouch over the body. My mother is crying uncontrollably. Even though she did smack him around a lot and often felt exasperated with him, she loved him.
There we are in the tape, which sometimes airs in documentaries on the transgenic population of Seattle. My brother, my sister, me. We are crying quietly.
A week or two later, a peace treaty was reached with the world outside and we left Terminal City for the first time. We lived in the Outside on and off until I was twelve, when we left for good and settled in a neighbourhood nearby.
Terminal City was between being a terrible and a wonderful place to spend your childhood. There was the unity, the satisfaction of rising above adversity with those you loved the most. But then again, there was the limited food and water, the violence and the bigotry against us all. We were openly hated for simply being born.
The children born and, for the first part of their lives, raised inside the City were simply that. Children. We were like any normal children, like the offspring of any Ordinary but we had been thrust into a weird situation.
Even outside the City, I still tended to lean toward transgenics and see only them as true allies. A peace treaty could not hope to instantly wipe childhood memories of abuse screamed at us from the other side of a fence. It couldn't make us want to go to non-transgenic schools, or smile when Steel brought home her first boyfriend, an Ordinary.
Justin was our protector- Dad always said he reminded him of the famous X5 CO, Zack. We grew up with military jargon uttered like casual slang around us, and we couldn't help but say things like, "Move out." when we were leaving to see our friends or "There is no I in team." when Steel was sulky.
Steel was the baby of the family, my adorable little sister. She constantly pestered Mom and Dad for tales of their own childhoods as a small girl, fascinated with things like gene therapy and drills.
And then there was me. Named jokingly for something I couldn't know for my first years and brought up in a siege, my mother widowed and my extended family hundreds strong, I am blessed with almost total recall of my early years and will likely never forget growing up in Terminal City.
* * *
DISCLAIMER: 'Dark Angel' belongs to Fox and James Cameron. Not me. So don't sue.
I was brought up to think of everybody who'd been born in Manticore, or born of the Manticore transgenics, as my family. Specifically, my blood relatives were an older half-brother, a younger sister and my parents, Kara and Splint.
I remember walking down the greyed street, hanging off one of my mother's hands with my sister holding onto the other hand. I couldn't have been older than five. The sky was blue above me, and while the scene was more like a slum than most of post-Pulse America put together, it was my home and I felt happy. Transgenics to left of me, transgenics to the right. There seemed to be more every year. Perhaps that's why nothing phases me. You don't get easily phased after growing up with animal-human hybrids for neighbours, a woman who could snap your neck if you played up for a schoolteacher and reporters constantly hassling us for gossip and interviews.
My sister was Steel, my half-brother was Justin. All our names are complete jokes. Take Justin, for example. You might think that a pretty ordinary name for someone related to an X-series, but you'd be wrong if you knew where it came from.
My parents had a love-hate sort of relationship. They met in Terminal City when Mom was pregnant with Justin, a child of the Manticore breeding programme. Dad kept insisting it would be a girl, and Mom kept telling him she was sure it would be a boy. So Dad comes into the room where Mom had just given birth and says, after congratulating her on a job well done, "What's her name, then?"
Mom snapped. "Just in, you moron," she hissed. "The baby's a boy!"
So that became Justin's name. Two years later, I was born. I was about two weeks late, and the first thing Dad said to me when I was born was, "You're free, kid!"
Dad was blind drunk the night Steel was born. He thought Mom was gonna die in childbirth- everyone said she wasn't going to make it. Drowning his sorrows (to this very day no-one knows how the hell he managed to get his hands on alcohol), he found out his little girl was born just before he passed out.
By the time he was able to come and see Steel, he was still kinda woozy so he dropped her on the floor. Everyone stared in shock at tiny little Steel, lying there motionless. Was she dead?
Then she started crying, a bit shaken but fine. Mom cradled her, smacked Dad upside the head and a passing X8 remarked, "That girl's made of steel!"
Dad was always accident-prone, even when he was growing up in Manticore. The adults used to tell us gruesome stories about that place, so that none of us feared Hell, exactly- we had Manticore. Dad was named Splint as a young child because he was always breaking limbs or getting weird allergic reactions to things. It was thought to be his genetic anomaly because he didn't get seizures.
Dad was also a local celebrity because he was the X5 brother of our leader, the X5 Max Guevara. A lot of her brothers and sisters were dead. They were like urban legends, almost like our fairytales. There was Tinga 'Penny' Smith, who had given herself up to Manticore so that her child Case, the first ever child of an X5, could live. There was the Great Storyteller, Ben Blueman, who had died rather than gone back. There was Jace Morales, who as far as I know is still living in Mexico with her only child, Max 'Little Max' Morales. She overcame a 'simplification' to escape there so that her daughter could live a normal life.
All of us second-generation X-series are endowed with basically, the same abilities as our parents. We have no barcodes. In a couple of generations, our genetically-enhanced 'powers' will have been bred out, save for the odd great-grandchild with incredible vision or super-strength.
When we were finally to leave Terminal City, I was eight years old. Justin was ten, and Steel was seven. There had been a final battle that had brought to the attention of the public our plight. My father, Splint, was killed.
Our family appears in a tape of the news coverage of the battle. The footage was most of the reason the public realised how unfair they'd been.
It shows a street in Terminal City close to where my family was living crowded with dead transgenics, their families sifting through the wreckage to try and find their bodies. A man is lying on the street, the front of his shirt soaked with blood from being shot through the heart. A woman (my mother Kara) and three children (Justin, Steel and myself) crouch over the body. My mother is crying uncontrollably. Even though she did smack him around a lot and often felt exasperated with him, she loved him.
There we are in the tape, which sometimes airs in documentaries on the transgenic population of Seattle. My brother, my sister, me. We are crying quietly.
A week or two later, a peace treaty was reached with the world outside and we left Terminal City for the first time. We lived in the Outside on and off until I was twelve, when we left for good and settled in a neighbourhood nearby.
Terminal City was between being a terrible and a wonderful place to spend your childhood. There was the unity, the satisfaction of rising above adversity with those you loved the most. But then again, there was the limited food and water, the violence and the bigotry against us all. We were openly hated for simply being born.
The children born and, for the first part of their lives, raised inside the City were simply that. Children. We were like any normal children, like the offspring of any Ordinary but we had been thrust into a weird situation.
Even outside the City, I still tended to lean toward transgenics and see only them as true allies. A peace treaty could not hope to instantly wipe childhood memories of abuse screamed at us from the other side of a fence. It couldn't make us want to go to non-transgenic schools, or smile when Steel brought home her first boyfriend, an Ordinary.
Justin was our protector- Dad always said he reminded him of the famous X5 CO, Zack. We grew up with military jargon uttered like casual slang around us, and we couldn't help but say things like, "Move out." when we were leaving to see our friends or "There is no I in team." when Steel was sulky.
Steel was the baby of the family, my adorable little sister. She constantly pestered Mom and Dad for tales of their own childhoods as a small girl, fascinated with things like gene therapy and drills.
And then there was me. Named jokingly for something I couldn't know for my first years and brought up in a siege, my mother widowed and my extended family hundreds strong, I am blessed with almost total recall of my early years and will likely never forget growing up in Terminal City.
* * *
DISCLAIMER: 'Dark Angel' belongs to Fox and James Cameron. Not me. So don't sue.