This is Max Ride based. It takes place from Alpha's point of view. Alpha is my own character.

I do not own Maximum Ride!

Who am I? What am I? I could never answer those questions. Why? Because, you see, I am not like you. No. Individuality has nothing to do with this. The only way that you and I are alike is that we share some of the same human DNA. I say some and human and DNA because I am not completely human, at least that is what I have been told. They have convinced me, or tried to, that I am an anomaly, a break in scientific studies. I am a living nightmare, a Frankenstein, if you will.

So, what am I do you ask? Well, my friends, if I could call you that, I am nothing that your sane minds could adjust to. Although, seeing as most humans in this world are either corrupt or part of some conspiracy, I may as well tell you who or what I am. Curious? Do you want to know? How bad do you want it?

My biological name is Eric, and for those of you who use last names in this world, I suppose mine would be Drive. That's what I heard from the scientists. Oh, these aren't your average scientists. Chemicals and test tubes aren't enough for these guys. They just had to get into embryology, genetics, physiology, and ornithology. That's right. You heard me. Ornithology, the study of birds, and that's what makes these guys not so average. You see, they don't just do one or two of those things. They do all four . . . in a single project. And if you haven't guessed it, I am one of those projects.

How did I come to be like this? I'll tell you, I wasn't born to a normal family. I can hardly say I was born at all. From what I've heard, well, not actually heard, but I'll explain that later. For as long as I could remember, the world has been dark, enclosed, and full of pain. The stench of chemicals, anticipant, ammonia and other unidentifiable scents lingered dreadfully in the stale air.

I may be mostly human, but they treated me like the experiment and plaything I was. They stored me in a cage, a large dog kennel. The metal bars that enclosed me reeked with the foul scent of rot and decay. When they would feed me, if you could call that crap food, they'd just shove the tray through a slit in the bottom, like I would kill them if they touched me. There was never a time when I was content. A void was always eating away at my soul, and my stomach was never full. Had I known what suicide was at that young age, it would have been a wondrous break.

By the time I was seven or eight, somewhere around there if those scientists were correct, I had realized that I wasn't alone in that cold world. There were others in cages like mine, but were they like me? The two extra accessories on my back were also apparent on theirs. I knew that we were different from the men in the long white lab coats. Their backs were bare, where as ours were not. These three other children in the room with me all seemed the same age, though younger than me. Had I known how to speak properly, I would have tried to communicate with them, but I sensed that we were all too frightened to utter a single syllable.

The tests they did on me and those other kids were horrible. Those freaks of adults would take us one at a time into a room. I know that they would stick me with needles, poke at me with stinging sticks, and make me run until my lungs burned, and I imagined that they did the same to them too. One of the kids, a dark haired boy, never cried, never whimpered, never made a sound. He was a lot like me, I guess. We always seemed to be tested for the same amount of time. The girl was always being tested and examined for long periods of time. Then the other boy, who had sort of blondish hair, was in there for a while, but after a few days, he seemed less important to the scientists.

Over the course of a few months, I found that my head would be pounding in pain sometimes. I held my head in between my hands, afraid that if I let go my head would explode. It was when this started happening that the scientists began show extra interest in me. They attached these wires to my chest and my temples and hooked me up to this machine that beeped and made colored waves on a screen. Then they would hook me up to another thing that would send these impulses through me that would make me jump.

It was soon after that when I started hearing these voices in my head. I tried to clamp my hands over my ears to make the voices stop, but they never did. After a few weeks of agony, I learned how to tune the voices out of my head, and I ignored them.

One day, while I was resting in my crate, the scientists ripped me out of there. The held me in the testing room where they checked me to see if I had changed at all, I would guess. When they brought me back to the room, my old dog kennel was gone. In its place was an even bigger enclosure. It could have held three of me. There was this piece of fabric in it that was really soft and warm, and then there was this soft thing that was kind of fluffy. I could finally stretch out the things on my back, and boy, did it feel really good.

The things were each as tall as me, and there were two. Both of them felt amazingly soft, and they were light. It made me smile when I touched them because made me feel happy, like there was a chance at hope or something. These things, whatever they were, were this extraordinarily dark color, but I could see this other color in them too sometimes. They were kind of like that one kid's, the dark haired boy. His were this profusely dark shade, like mine.

Just as I thought about him, he appeared with the scientists. They held his arms behind his back in a painful manner. I hadn't noticed it, but they had stopped, and he stared at me in my new cage. It was like I could feel, no, I could hear the anger and distaste he had for me. He glared at me with his dark eyes.

That was when I heard a voice that sounded unfamiliar, which was also when I realized that it had to be his voice.

Who died and made him king of the lab?

I growled in the back of my throat. "Who made you in charge of judging?" I snarled at him as best as I could.

His eyes showed the surprise in my response, but he physically didn't show any sort of reaction.

How did he know? I didn't say anything.

"How did I know?" I snapped. I had another feeling that he was surprised again. "You were the one who said it, not me. You started this."

The scientists around him seemed to brighten up by our fight. Their eyes lightened up, and they became giddy.

"I didn't say anything," the boy said.

I flinched. This time, I saw his mouth moving. The actual sound that came from him sounded ever so slightly different than the voice I had heard from him just moments before. "If you didn't say anything, then how . . . ?"

Before I could finish, the scientists shoved the boy into his crate, and dragged me out of mine. They ran a series of tests unlike any I'd had done before. These weren't painful, but they seemed stupid. This guy kept asking me questions and asking me to concentrate on his thoughts. At first, I had been ballistic. How can I concentrate on his thoughts? They were in his head, not mine. Ironically enough, that was when I heard it. I heard the scientist's thoughts. I jumped back in shock.

It all started to come to me in bursts of mental images and voices. The sounds of the scientists, the voices, their thoughts all totaled up. Reality had come and stabbed me in the gut. I gripped my stomach and doubled over. What kind of sick world was this place? What kind of people did this to children? What drove them to do this to us?

It was then that I swore that I would get back at them for doing this to me and those other kids. I'd have to be smart about it, though. I would play innocent and dumb.

"Who am I?" I quietly asked the man in the room with me.

He looked over at me and smiled pleasantly. "Well, we would call you Experiment 0190, but you're other experiment brand name is Accelerated Legerity Preternatural Hamilton Avian."

I wrinkled my nose in confusion, or at least I was confused for about half a second, but he wouldn't get the satisfaction of knowing that I'd already figured it out.

"A.L.P.H.A. stands for what you are," the scientist told me. "Well, more so what you will become." He glanced down at me, and I faked the reaction he would have expected from someone. Once he was sure I was only half baffled, he continued with his explanation of who I was to the scientists.

He didn't need to explain to me. I already knew. This new ability I had, as he called it, allowed me to enter the minds of these people, or anyone I wanted. All I had to do was practice, and I'd have this whole mind thing under control.

"And that's why you are so important to us, especially myself and the man behind your creation," he finally finished. I looked up. "Professor Hamilton is the scientist who grafted the avian DNA into your embryo, thus being the reason you are here to this day. Isn't that incredible?"

I nodded my head solemnly. What this man didn't know was that I was already plotting my revenge on them. Some of you may be thinking, okay, this kid's only eight. How can he even think about revenge? Let me tell you, when you find out why your life has been so horrible for the first eight years of your life and you know that you're not going any where any time soon, you mature quickly. Plus, the geniuses behind my existence didn't know what they had unleashed. My mind started making calculations, brilliant equations for my age, but child's play for me. I'd noticed that I was beyond their intelligence, and I was a prodigy in the making.

The man lead me back to my enclosure, and the moment I sat down, I decided that I would go along with his plans. After all, I knew what the man was planning on doing in two years' time. He would spring us all from this place, make us think that he had saved us, and then make us save the world from something. My mind drifted back to what the scientist had told me.

Accelerated Legerity Preternatural Hamilton Avian.

"A, l, p, h, a," I repeated the letters in my head. Well, this is who he said I was going to become, so there it was. "Alpha," I whispered, enjoying the sound of the word. I picked up a book that the scientists had put in my enclosure, a dictionary. After flipping through the pages, I discovered that it really was a word in the English language.

I read the definition out loud to myself. "The first letter of the Greek alphabet," I mumbled. That didn't do me any good. What was Greek? I'd have to read on to find out, but I kept on reading on about this alpha thing.

When I had finished reading all of the definitions, I decided that there were two that I found that defined me the best. I read them both in a whisper, as if this was a secret that I needed to keep. "The first, beginning," I breathed with pride. "Being the most prominent, talented, or aggressive person in a group–" I closed the book and my eyes.

I propped the pillow up under my head and pulled the blanket over my waist, which I had learned what they were called. Then, I opened up a biology book nearby and flipped it open to a random page. There was a picture of a bird. What struck me the most was the pair of things coming out of its back. They were wings. Now, the objects on my back had a name too, wings.

After setting that book over in the corner, I closed my eyes.

I am an experiment. I am a monster. I am a freak. I am brilliance. I am defiance. I am great, the ultimate, I am Alpha. This is who I am.

Well, this doesn't directly have any of Max Ride's usual characters in it. Well, actually, if you really think about it, you can name three, possibly four characters.

Anyway, this may turn into a series. If enough people like the idea of Alpha, my character, I may take this chapter and make it the first one in a story. Actually, it would make a lot of sense. This could be sort of like pre-Code Name Alpha, one of my other stories. Regardless, Alpha isn't going any where. He's my character, and he's here to stay!

Please review and tell me what you think about the the story idea. Oh, and it won't be all description and no dialogue all the time. That was just the best way I thought I could express Alpha's side of the story here.

- Saz