Week of May 4, 2008

[MaxBro]

Thanks Toni_V

[MaxBro]

The year 2057 would be known as the Year of Sorrow. It was the year AXS-55, the genetically-enhanced super virus, became a global scourge.

Originally started as a quaint project outside Kansas City, MO at a research lab, it wasn’t long before the U.S. military, and its allied affiliates, had it weaponized and mass-produced for use in a variety of tactical urban missions.

They thought they could control its effects. They thought they could minimize the teeming crowds writhing in filthy little towns, spewing blood and bile from every orifice, and screaming incomprehensible gibberish, from reaching the ethereal lenses of the news cameras.

Never in the show-polish clean minds of those dusty bureacrats did they ever imagine that one of those journalists, thinking he was doing humanity a favor, would procure the soiled shawl of an eldery woman recently deceased from the virus, for use as a prop in a press conference back in the United States.

In New York.

Once in Manhattan, AXS finally had the only lustful wish written into its nucleaus like a lone commandment from its creator, Dr. Frederick Thoroughgood, fulfilled and fancied—millions upon millions of people with inumerable cell structures.

At long last, it could multiply, divide, split, multiply and divide again to its hearts content. At last it had unlimited reams of flesh stalking around on frames of calcium, ripe for the taking.

That’s why John Newman, aged 27, walks up a flight of stairs that in another age would have moved him automatically by means of pneumatics. That’s why he hangs his head heavy, his pure cells stuffed with the unfortunate knowledge that he, like only 12.7% of the world population, is immune to AXS-55.

He’s leaving behind the bodies of his mother, his girlfriend, and his brother, whom he just watched cremated in the daily ritual created by the Sterlization and Cleansing through Cremation Act of 2057.

It’s not a difficult process, really. You flick a switch, stand back several feet, and watch the crimson ultra-radiation particle beam evaporate your loved ones until they bamf into a cloud of ash. It’s no more a mundane sight than the snap of a magician’s fingers over a top hat.

He carries their ashes in three seperate vials. And with that precious cargo in store, John Newman leaves one worldto enters a new one.