Humanity Redacted

“Trade?”

The garbled askance barely washed over me. I was too busy glaring into the distance, thinking about the next place sitting in the back of my mind. The air was humid, the scent of week-old rot heady in the air mixed with the unpleasantries of the coming rains. The rains weren’t due to spoil the lands for a few hours, clouds of gray and green swirling in the distance, the rumbling of whatever deity deciding to dance onward still out of hearing range. I shifted my bag, an old beat-up thing I’d found somewhere on the outskirts of another town ravaged by the blight of the unanswered problem that allowed that gnarled hand waving at me to exist.

My finding it was dumb unfortunate luck. It was a trophy after prying it from the pitiful frustrated hands that reached upwards to find some type of salvation.

His salvation was the brick I’d dropped after making sure he understood I was no angel of mercy.

“Trade?”

I shifted away from the merchant. My hood kept my face out of sight.

The ruddy shambles of makeshift stands stretched to the ends of this road and broke off into another. Sellers rambled on about their wears; the shouts for trades reaching crescendo as some of the travelers caught interest in something. It was probably some lost piece of life before the Ravaging, some lost piece of what life was like before the Ends devoured all, and the Beginnings screamed themselves into dominance.

There were other words for it once.

The ramblings of something else caught my ear. I was ruminating near pity, the babbling familiar and haunting in a way that didn’t sooth whatever was left of me. I could see him calling out, ignoring the way his arms twisted as he was dragged by the soldiers that walked in perfect stride. They stalled for no one. Everyone gracefully or clumsily swerved out of their devout way, heads bowed and unwilling to rise until those soldiers were out of breath’s range. What pity could be given wasn’t, and the man screaming for his God was unheard as they threw him into the waiting vehicle hovering several hundred feet away packed with those who had been marked.

The mechanized voices of the crowd chanting the daily word flooded my ears and I resisted covering them.

“We are none. We are all. We are as one, and we die as one.”

The words would never leave my mouth. The foulness in them…it was something I relished feeling as if to remind myself that I was allowed to do that. I clenched my hands, dropped my shoulders, and dove into the soft wisps of memory I kept to myself always.

It all started…with a spark.

The birth of a new life…a new future.

The designated answer for the world that was lying in ruin; the world that saw no rest even when day and night sought slumber.

Death lies within time, walking reaping and taking those who sought its hand and those who weren’t. Life had long since slowed, offering no more than a precious miracle in the form of a small babe every few moons or so. Populations had capped. Nature had deemed humans a parasite and sought to abolish it with mutations in generations that would keep their numbers dwindling. It started long ago with a virus, one that kept mutating. The answer to that was found at the cost of reproduction…and those who could not be saved were sent off in contained pyres whose ashes were buried in the depths of the deepest earth.

The Ends were upon them. The Ends would rob them of memory.

No one knew it then, because they were focused on the Beginnings, the promises of rebirth and the renewed.

Much of that time is redacted, buried deep into the mainframe of the collective mind hovering over us, but I knew some of it. Hours of scouring ruined cities in the outskirts of “Eden” were worth the soft whir of my knee adjusting my stance so I could ignore the burden of having walked five hours without stopping before coming here to this makeshift outpost of sorts. These things were always popping up somewhere, and they were allowed to exist in the effort to keep some complacency amongst those who had been cleansed.

When that spark had been created, it came in two.

The atom that was named after the Creator allowed these two singular beings to be born with the intelligence of the world and the infinite possibilities. They were genetically engineered to do what humanity had been forced to give up to save themselves, and yet damning them to death.

Solstice and Equinox.

Solstice was a genetically modified human, gendered to resemble a woman with fine ringlets of gold that fluttered about her fair head whenever she moved. Equinox, also genetically modified, was gendered to appear male, his face stoic and void and did little to feign some type of emotion when the need arose. Within them sat the universe, the unlocked door that humans had opened in their quest to become the new gods of a dying world still desperately trying to rid itself of them.

From their new abled minds came a third.

Their name was Antiquity.

They liked to go by Ares.

They promised the death would find no home in theirs. Days of mortality were gone, and those who embraced their solutions would find immortality. There would be an end to famine, an end to the rising climates, and end to the deforestation that had killed more than eighty-five percent of the world’s flora, and an end to the worry that humans would cease to exist.

Those who would take their mechanized hands would find that they were indeed no longer in fear of death.

Death would find no need to pity their flesh as it kept walking without the souls it harbored.

The Ends were the first of an armada that would carry out Antiquity’s task of what they called cleansing; a download that kept the flesh here but removed the small spark that made humans…what they were.

They called it freedom. Immortality.

There was another word for it once.

I peer at the fluttering paper stapled to another stall. On it I can see them, Solstice with her fair hands stretched in offering, Equinox standing aside her looking like the same soldiers that had marched off with the rogue one a moment ago. Antiquity was sitting between them, like the doll they were assembled to resemble and the picture of unkempt joy since they would never age beyond that. Beneath them was the advertisement that still ran religiously within everyone’s heads at all hours of the day.

Will you choose to be free?

Even I heard it when the signal was strong enough, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that numbing dissonance.

Humans didn’t even see it coming until it was much too late.

Even those who would resist found themselves strung along, the top tier for those who would be cleansed.

I still hadn’t found some of the redacted pieces. It was a jumbled mess to decipher from the thousands of encryptions it sat buried in. I could only surmise what happened from then.

I wasn’t here.

Antiquity hadn’t made toys to play with and to break just yet.

“You’ve got a lovely piece there.”

The person that stopped in front of me tried to grin. My stomach twisted a bit as I glued myself to my spot and tried not to stare into those gaunt hallowed eyes. Jaundice had long since swallowed what color would have been upon his face, have covered with some ugly misshapen half melted mask that did little to hide the rusted bolts beneath his eyes. From what I could see, he was an older form…one of the few that probably wasn’t cleansed to the points most were these days. There was no way to tell how old he was. He was a jumble of mismatched parts that were scraped by others for upgrades and the only way he was alive right now.

I could smell the roaches crawling within him. Funny how they managed to stay alive.

“Say…where did you get that?”

I knew what they spoke of, but it was none of his business. The gleaming thing around my neck always seemed to untuck itself at the worst times, but I could no longer part with it as it was something of mine to own without predetermined permission. It was such an odd thing, no one really tended to notice it save to question the origins of it. But this one…this one was locked on with a curiosity that was dangerous.

“It’s a pretty little locket…shaped like…one of those heart things. You wouldn’t be interested in a trade, would you?”

Tones like that offered no choice. Trades were asked and forced if the setting was right. I was smaller than this junkpile, clothed in rags and probably smelling like ripe dog from days within the sun and whatever had melded to my rags. I knew what I looked like. I had chosen it well.

Too well.

What little patience I had fell away as he reached to snatch it.

Complacency kept you alive.

“What the—?!”

Disobedience warranted the wrath of the gods sitting in the invisible network wired into every mind.

I could hear the alarms screaming with the righteous zeal of contempt that came from those who believed someone like me to be a demon. I was no demon, though I bore no weapon but my hand to smash his frail one into shards of irrevocable pieces. He staggered back, appalled, working his face into a sneer he couldn’t manage to hold.

I shoved him into his stand and moved on, disregarding everyone’s eyes and the haunting voice that kept asking me how long I planned to keep running from them.

So many files were redacted.

There was one that they could not hide.

I grabbed the heart-shaped locket around my neck and held it tightly.

Being salvaged from the junk pile was perhaps a small blessing. Antiquity never played with anything twice, and everything was “upcycled”. The smell of those pyres still haunted me, and had it not been for another…

I was recused holding this. A broken piece of Antiquity.

A small simple locket that meant nothing because they thought it was gone.

It was the silent strength of what little hope I dared to have. It was the only thing that was mine and mine alone without the permission of the Gods that directed those soldiers to come find me and bring me home.

Back to them.

I wasn’t going home. There were rumors sitting in the air and sitting in garbled bits of writing I kept close. Places that they couldn’t touch. People that didn’t belong to them and hadn’t been erased. I wasn’t like them, but I was no god. I was someone, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t one.

“Samael!”

Will you choose to be free?

I adjusted the backpack on my shoulders and ran from the fight that was programmed within me.

I was free already.

The others would be free soon enough…and Death would find purchase in the world again. For now, I’d find the other redacted parts of this strange testament, and I’d keep my memories safe within the heart thumping on my neck.

If all else fails, perhaps another will pick me up and find the truth.