Finding the Good News.

Magda was walking down the scorching street, looking for her sandal. She had run away from some mutants earlier and lost it here, somewhere. It had rolled in the dust and pebbles as she bolted and clambered up the tree and onto the wall. They could not follow her there, they were too stupid. After they left she eased down from the parapet and looked for the sandal. It was gleather sandal, and while she could probably get another sandal like it easily she just didn’t want to on principle.

Ah there it was, under a pile of gravel. Only the heel was poking out a bit.

Grabbing the sandal she shook it out and put it onto her foot. What was she doing before the sandal? Couldn’t remember but she figured she will eventually if she kept in the general direction form before. The effect from the mutants was always like that, suddenly you could not think straight and if you spent too much time around them there were other effects from the radio frequencies that they emitted just because of their nature. They were scrawny, short, malnourished, bruised and mute. At one point by the end of the great shift and more than than half of the world population died, those that survived were the unmodified and by some fluke, some of the modified except they were now mutated. Somehow they kept reproducing and sustaining a small population by scavenging, hunting, forming little tribes. The unmodified helped them a bit, after all they were humans too. The mutants often had disfigurements, cancers. They emitted a radio frequency as well as paramagnetic particles from their bodies that attempted to invade the bodies of others, and demagnetized any devices that were on the victim. Recharging was always needed later and an Antidote had to be taken to decontaminate. It was unfortunate but after the tribulation, such were the outcomes.

The mutants had thought that they were going to be the other way around – super human, supra human, the mensch as it were, but they were not. They became what they feared, and continued in this way. Nobody knew what they were thinking about 100 years laterbecause they lost speech, they died fairly early in life and really how do you ask someone like that about their feelings and life. However, they liked to hassle the unmodified even as the unmodified fed them. Gangs of mutants stalked the plains and forests. They had had organization, after all they were simply a sickly regression of human potential. The instincts were still all the same. Of course the unmodified who rejected the biogenic nanotech weren’t untouched by the frequency and the radiation but they also, were still able to slowly grow their population with only slight issues. Cancers were fairly common, those that had access to the bio-beds could keep them controlled indefinitely, although that indicated bad genetics more than anything and once there was a cancer it was best to not have children. The arts flourished, communications were kept honest and full, society progressed slowly but surely.

Magda had not been alive during the great shift, she was only 20 now – 100 years later, but she heard about it from her parents and her grandma. In the great shift her parents and her grandparents had not succumbed to the pressure and managed somehow to survive through the three year regime and the chaos that followed. Her grandparents had been young then, in fact her parents had been born during the great shift and never knew life as it was back then.

She took her flask of Antidote out of her bag and drank to stop the ringing in her ears and extreme disorientation caused by the mutants. She kept walking and soon saw the mesa appear around a hill, a towering wall with beautiful greenery on top, enclosed, but you could see the tops of the trees and the creeping ground cover and vines bursting over the tops of the encircling parapet. Inside it was beautiful – the settlement had built an amazing integrated space, with bio beds and greenhouses and replicators, combining human effort and smoothness of well calibrated AI. Soon she will be there but first, something needed to be found. She kept walking, wishing that she had her mono wheel with her – she could hear the mutants scrambling not too far away, following her across the shallow slopes, through the sagebrush and other bush off in the near distance. They never managed to harm her, and sometimes she wondered if they even tried to harm anyone or whether they were just reflexively reacting to stimuli, an organism with a vague memory of it’s own fall from grace, trying to survive.

She had been searching for an item in the rubble of a town close by, a heart shaped locket that had belonged to Lila way back. The community sometimes talked about it, those that were from that town initially. The locket supposedly contained encoded information of some sort that could potentially help the radio-frequency issues and the paramagnetic effects of the mutants. Supposedly the lockets, once opened, held information for the bio beds frequency modulation that could reverse what was done to the mutants. Effectively a locket, once unlocked generated a three dimensional matrix program that could indeed give hope in correction the frequency and particles emitted by the mutants and potentially undo the corrupted genetic code. During the great tribulation, when the bioweapon was deployed under the guise of a benefic health nanites (they didn’t work the way it should have), after about a decade there were about twenty of the lockets created and Lila’s family had received one of them.

Nobody truly knew the details, they were a lost code in the mists of time, chaos and survival. In order to keep the code and instructions safe the lockets had been kept separate from the main-net and so the information was nowhere to be found on the back up servers once the dust settled and the remaining global population started picking up the pieces.

The mutants didn’t bother the animals, but humans – yes they loved humans. After all, they were human themselves. Certainly they were not zombies or apes –no, nothing like that. This wasn’t the zombie wars, but the mutants had certain paramagnetic quality which broke technology, make the plants, animals and people become ill if around too much or if they came onto the compound at any one point. They looked like regular people but not quite. They were short, perpetually bruised, they had no speech and they were cannibals. They had a smell to them like dried blood.

Magda kept walking towards the mesa, through the rolling hills.

Living in relatively primitive communities, the mutants managed and the unmodified population tried to support them by airdropping food and basics. In the colder climates, the mutant populations simply died out.

Magda veered to the left, and down the slope of the hill, sliding down the dry sagebrush, scaring a rabbit and then a vole and then a snake as she peered through the lengthening shadows. They were playing tricks on her eyes. The sun was low on the horizon, the shadows were casting a deep dusk. She still could see a lump in a little dell between the hills. The lump was moving slightly and there was something gleaming by it. Always curious, Magda kept walking towards it swatting bugs as she went. It turned out to be a large rock with some kinds of carvings on it, perched over top what looked like a deep drilled well, but the thing that was moving was a cape draped over the rock – a plain hemp cape with arm slits. Standard issue for long travel. Presumably someone had gone down in to the dark opening.

“Is anyone down there?” she yelled, her voice echoing far down and bouncing back at her. Shining the light down and across she could see rungs that inched up one side of the opening and disappeared into the darkness below. There was no answer to her query. This whole mystery was puzzling as well due to the fact that on the known maps of the area and of all the fortifications and items this section had not been indicated. Magda knew— she had studied those maps thoroughly.

There was still no answer after another query. Magda decided to take a look at the cloak and see what had been glinting so brightly in the sun. It was a heart shaped brooch, one that was obviously also an interface. Excitedly she unpinned it from the cloak and put it into her fanny pack, folding the cloak up and putting it into her backpack. She looked around fruitlessly trying to find the owner, but there was no one to be seen. No footprints, no pack animals and no dogs. She made a widening circle around the area searching for any sign life other than snakes and small rodents but, nada. Finders keepers.

The sun was truly setting— it was time to go now. There was not a cloud in sight upon the cerulean evening sky, and the hills and mesa bathed with the liquid gold of the sun glimmered and shimmered. It was always such a sight to behold – occasionally there was the glint of a window in the vertical cliffs of the mesa.The greenery on top, vines and mosses trailing down made it look welcoming.

Once she was was up inside the mesa, and in her living quarters she plugged the brooch into a decoder. What came next was more than she ever expected. Magda stared in disbelief and joyful shock, at the information hologram in front of her. It was complex, and beautiful and it was everything she hoped for and more. The question now, was as always, what the information would be used for, since it could be both destructive and a boon to what was left of humanity including the mutants. Her comm beeped.

“Magda, we are detecting unusual configurations within the matrix coming from your quarters, are you Ok?”

“Yes,” said Magda. “I have the good news.”