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-Skepsis
Clinical Trials
Prologue
Escaping was the easy part. People always go into a sort of plotting frenzy when they need a plan, but I didn't. Breaking out of the Genetix facility was as easy as hopping onto one of the air trams and skipping a stop, then just going, running, hiding, the usual. I didn't stop moving until I was in the next state over, probably new hampshire but I wouldn't know for certain. I could tell it was cold, freezing actually, and shelter was sort of necessary. I did eventually find a place to stay, some youth hostel on a reservation. See as I mentioned before that was the easiest part of my journey.
My name is Eros, means something about love but I didn't exactly pay attention to the educational part of my entrapment. When I was five or six, my parents sold me, unknowingly, to one of the most corrupt and surreptitious companies on the face of this planet. They thought it was a temporary change, and with three more mouths to feed the money was a necessity. "Just for a month" they assured them, but after a child is sucked into the world of human testing, they are almost completely untraceable. Not able to hire a lawyer or private investigator, my family was one of thousands targeted by testing companies. The filth of society, we wouldn't be missed. I had been away from them for a decade now, and at this point family was my drive.
I won't skip the history of my predicament for honestly it shows how utterly embarrassing our species "progression" has been for the last fifty years. After the nuclear crisis of 2024, the Middle-East was decimated. Some attack scare started the fighting but what started as a coarse battle ended as a plain of glassy, melted empires. Shadows of people running are still burned into the walls of the central city buildings from the nuclear flash, like some kind of sick, sadistic photograph. Refugees died in the next few years. Cancer got the strong ones, but the feeble died right at the start from radiation poisoning and sickness. A cloud of toxic rain the size of the Texan Federation drifted around the gulf stream for years, infecting nations with tainted water and metallic, inedible crops. The world governments decided on an enormous relocation, and by 2045, the middle and first class citizens of the world were moved to oxygen centers on Mars and Mercury, and satellite colonies orbiting Jupiter. Nine settlements in total, all funded by a new, privately funded company, Genetix. They were quickly put into a position of power, and while there are still "politicians", Genetix controls it all. By 2060, the settlements started to see evidence of new diseases and microbial bodies, starting the age of medical experimentation. Laboratories were erected in mountains on the east coast of the USA, and highly dangerous samples were flown in from the nine colonies. The final piece of the puzzle was finding a source or lab rats, and the children of Old Earth were perfect, undesired subjects. Its 2072 now, and the situation is the same. I was in the neurologic wing of a Genetix lab, and I remain infected with a non-contagious microbe. This medical mystery, known as the neuro-tick, is not fatal, but gets progressively harder to push back. I hallucinate frequently, and experience thoughts that are not my own. Genetix did this to me, and I will bring them down, whatever the cost may be.