6

I still remember it like it was yesterday...

I had a cousin on the ambassadorial mission, a distant one – I can't even remember her name – but it still hit my parents hard. They had been against the mission, I sometimes wonder if they had known just how bad of an idea it was...

I was seventeen at the time, I was one of the scientists working on the evolution project. Or rather, I was an intern on the project whose opinion was highly valued by the head researcher. I actually found one of the evolution points – the specific parts of Human genetic coding that provide for the conditions that must be met for humans to evolve into their next stage.

Because of my involvement with the project, my name was automatically entered into the pool of candidates for evolution induction. The rest of my family – my brother, sister, and parents – all volunteered as soon as the project was made public. Amazingly, all of them passed every one of the tests we threw at them. Due to a clerical error, my fourteen-year-old brother was somehow listed in our records as sixteen, so he was legally allowed to be a part of the project if he had parental consent. This later led to several important events, but I had no way of knowing this at the time...

We were each assigned a number, these numbers were the order in which our evolution would be induced, and therefore also correlated to when we would evolve. My parents were never exactly the most responsible, and though they tried and did their best, many times while we were growing up they seemed to forget that we were children. My sister and I took matters into our own hands with our brother, tying him to his bed and locking him in his room while he was asleep to make sure he wouldn't be able to make it to the evolution induction. My sister even went so far as to steal the ID that would allow him to use the evolution chamber so that he wouldn't be able to evolve himself later on. I have to laugh looking back on this event, knowing that the ID would later save the lives of two good men, seven close friends, my worst enemy, and my best friend. At the time the only life we were trying to save was my brother's.

The evolution chamber worked. Exactly the way it was supposed to. The way we had designed it to. Maybe that should have tipped me off to the fact that something was wrong. The attack started around twelve, the city was put to siege. We were the soldiers who were supposed to protect it and we could do nothing. We had had almost no training, most of us had absolutely no idea how to fight, most of us had never even seen a death induced by violence. But far too soon though it was, the war was upon us.

Somehow we managed to push them back from the ones who still had to evolve, I guess we thought that somehow we would figure out what we needed to do once we had all evolved.

I will not lie to you. We did not win that day. We managed to push the enemy out of the city, but their weapons, and the fact that now for the first time we were seeing actual killing, many of us simply froze, unable to do anything. Then we got lucky. A traveler and some pokemon who he was traveling with joined the fight on our side and were able to take out the enemy's command station.

We lost over a hundred of us that day...it took us a long time to figure out how they knew where we were and when to attack. I still find it hard to believe that all that time he was...

They had destroyed the machine during the battle, and stole the primary circuit board, making it impossible for us to rebuild it, at the time we thought that their only objective was to make sure that we couldn't evolve any more humans. Well, at least we were partly right.

This had been the first battle in our war, the second took place over the next few months, as we trained, attempted to become ready for battle, and recovered. But the enemy had other plans for us, and over the next three months we were targeted, not us personally, that quickly became to difficult to pull off. They targeted our identities, our families, homes, jobs, friends. Everything.

A girl I was partnered with for combat training was the one who finally figured out what we needed to do, shortly after her entire family – right down to a second cousin that she didn't even know she had – was brutally wiped out. They were targeting who we were, we needed to give them nothing to shoot at. We needed to give up ourselves, our names, our identities, everything. And so we no longer used our names, instead using the system of numbers that we had been given when we evolved. This system was not without its own dangers though, as we quickly found that our numbers were also our weaknesses...

And then I was set on a path that changed the course of this first war, which was ultimately sparked by an event that changed everything about who I was, and redefining who I am.

– The Boy in the Leather Jacket