Chapter 9

Christine was the first one to speak.

“Yeah, well, we all asked ourselves, what could make a Pure leave the Commonwealth? A Mute, even a Mongrel, sure. We are second class citizens there. But a Pure?”

Hm, that was a tough question. How much of that could I answer?

“All right. Please accept that I only talk in generalities. I have taken a new name for a reason. Well, here goes...”

A deep breath, and then I continued.

“Contrary to what you seem to believe, the Commonwealth is no utopia. It is a police state with a corrupt ruling class. Even as a Pure you can find yourself on the wrong side of the law with no fault of your own. Just a peacekeeper throwing his weight around or a tin-pot dictator decides that you have to have done something even if it is only that you annoyed him.”

I stood up and walked to the fridge.

“Anybody else something to drink?” No reaction, so I took a soda and got back to my seat.

“The worst corruption is in the council. There were, until a year ago, three major power blocks. Two of them were essentially corrupt power grabbing clubs with the only thing they fought over was who deserved the power and the riches. The third block was actually trying to rule fair and enforce the laws for everyone equally. But they were the smallest of the three major blocks. The minor powers often tipped the scales, but had no real power of their own. My problem was that I made a convenient whipping girl for someone who had angered the biggest of the blocks. They couldn’t touch him, but through some scheming and distortion of the truth they could punish my mother for his perceived impertinence. And me as an extension. That happened before I was born, so there was no way I could be at fault. But nonetheless, they made it so that my life was a living hell.”

I took a mouthful of soda, and waited a moment.

“Two weeks ago, I was nearly done with extracting myself from under their thumb. Nearly everything was ready and only one hurdle left. After that, while I was cleaning up all the traces, somebody, another hacker, thought it fun to crash the whole network. As far as I know, he ceased to find it funny when the intrusion countermeasures fried his brain. While I came out physically unharmed, my files were still with the traces of the manipulation, and unfortunately glaringly so, as I was just in the middle of working them over. And suddenly the peacekeepers were very interested in my person.”

I gave a sad smile.

“I hope you can understand that this situation was untenable for me. So I made my way over here. Any other questions?”

Jacky sounded a bit breathless.

“But, but I thought the Pures were so much better. How can there be so much corruption?”

Marc answered before I could

“That the Pures are so much better is just propaganda. They need something to justify setting themselves up as a master race.”

Wow, that sounded bitter. And wrong. No better time to clear it up then now.

“That is so not entirely accurate. The Pures are better in quite a few areas.”

“Oh, come on. That is just supremacy drivel.” This came from Natalie.

I looked at the table and shook my head.

“I think it is myth buster time then. What do you know about Pures?”

Of course I got the typical jumble of prejudices, misinformation, half-truths and flat out lies.

“Let’s go through it one after the other. First, with the exception of Marc’s sentiment that Pures are mostly arrogant assholes, everything you just spoke is more or less completely wrong.

First, the wars: There were only three World Wars and three North American Civil Wars at all. Two of each happened decades or even centuries before the release of the Nephilim virus. The Pures were not around when they started and were concluded. The third World War started a bit over 30 years after the virus, but the Pures mostly kept out of it for twelve years. Sure, there were a few individuals that fought in the war, but that was less than a thousandth of a percent of the Pures.

That changed when Sanderson released his plague. After that the Pures took part, and ended the war within of two years. The Pures did start the third civil war though, but they had their reasons. More of that a bit later.”

I nodded to Christine.

“The wastelands were created in the great war, but not by the Pures. It was the last gesture of defiance by the loosing sides. The whole war was about food and water. And when they could not gain the corn belt or the Ogallala aquifer they used neutron bombs and instable mutagenic retroviri to poison them for millennia to come. China used the neutron bombs, while Mexico and the NAN used different viri. We are lucky that they did not manage to poison the ice caps.”

I looked at Jacky.

“The Pures are neither angelic nor demonic origin. That prejudice is actually one of the reasons for the third civil war. It was roughly 20 years after the second American Civil War that a group of scientists bought wholesale into SMI²LE. That is Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension. Space migration was a slow progress then, as the world had still not recovered fully from the decades of depression and the various civil wars that followed all over the world. Increased intelligence and life extension were more or less a taboo, as it took genetic manipulation to do that, and after the genfood debacle many tried to kill any genetic research.

Nonetheless, these scientists were of the opinion that they were entitled to upgrade humanity. After several years of work, they had results that they found satisfying. They had combined all the small component upgrades into one retrovirus, and in a fit of utterly stupidity released it into the world.

Even if they had done their work and more importantly their tests, correctly and had taken the necessary care, this move would have been highly unethical. Unfortunately they had neither the prudence nor the diligence needed to make the virus safe.

For one, they had not one non Caucasian in their group, and therefore in the test group. Second, they had a way too small test group. To make it short, the virus was deadly in roughly a third of all people who got it. The death rate was considerably higher in non Caucasians. That is the reason why roughly 70% of all Pures are white today.

What the Nephilim virus did was increase its victims, and their descendants in five separate categories. It increased muscle mass, density and energy metabolization, increasing strength and endurance considerably. They called this category Alpha. It increased the signal speed and precision of the nervous system, increasing hand-eye-coordination, reaction speed and manual precision, what they called Beta. They increased the interconnectivity of the brain cells, as well as their number, and increased malleability, increasing pure intelligence and memory, called Gamma. They decreased the autonomous filters for sensory input as well increased the number of sensory nerves and upped the size and efficiency of the sensory regions of the brains, making the victim more observant, increase all senses, including pain and pleasure, calling that Delta. Then they increased the random association capability and as such creativity and the feel for art. That they called Epsilon.

An average Pure is 67% stronger, 46% more coordinated, 51% more intelligent and 23% more observant than the average human. It is not possible to quantify the increase in creativity and art, as those are subjective areas, but an increase is there.”

I took another sip, and let that sink for a moment.

“Unfortunately the scientists made some non negligible errors. First, as mentioned, the virus killed roughly a third of its victims outright. Considering that more than 1.3 billion people got infected, we are talking about over 400 million dead. Fortunately it could be stopped before more than 13% of humanity was infected. Before you ask, yes, the scientists were held responsible for that. They were all executed as mass murderers.

Second, even the ones that survived the virus had some serious problems. It never occurred to the idiots that some of the limits they deactivated were there for a reason. A high Alpha will most likely have joint damage and destroyed ligaments before he is 40. A high Beta will experience cramps and tremors throughout his life. A high Gamma is prone to crippling headaches, and much more importantly, to mental problems, as most of the coping mechanisms humans developed over several hundred millennia were just gone. A high Delta is as a rule either a hedonist or a masochist, or both, and is crippled with sensations that others find only mildly inconvenient. A high Epsilon is often trapped in his own world, with only occasional contact with reality.”

When I looked into their faces this time they were showing a different expression. I had thought that the last point would make them think.

“Especially the higher vulnerability to mental problems is in large part responsible for the way the Pures act today. Simply put, the ones clawing for power and wealth the hardest are usually the ones who have lost a few marbles. Megalomania, narcissism, paranoia and good old sociopathy are rampant in the upper echelon of the Commonwealth. But to continue, after the virus ran its course, the world was confronted for the first time with a truly different human race. Before, racial differences were there, but mostly cosmetic. Size, skin color and broad features in nearly all cases. Some had a few internal differences like sickle cell anemia, but even these were exceptions and not the rule.

It took not long before one of the mass media coined the term Nephilim for the new race.

Wich media outlet it was is lost. But it spread fast and in less than a month that was what the new race was called.”

Jacky interrupted me: “Oh, Nephilim sounds so much cooler than Pure. I like it.”

I snorted.

“It sounds cooler, until you learn about the origin of the word. It comes from the Abrahamic religions. Accordingly to their holy texts, there was this one almighty god, who created earth and anything living, crowning his creation with humanity. This god had a servant species called angels.

The angels were divided into several subspecies, or orders, and God charged one of them, the Grigori to watch over the humans. The Grigori now impregnated human women, and the children were the Nephilim. In the actual holy texts that is not even fully fleshed out, but in the legends that grew around it, it was more or less told that Nephilim had the strength and power of their angelic fathers, and the free will of the humans. God saw them as a plague, punished the Grigori and then exterminated the Nephilim, going as far as nearly killing off all life on earth in the Flood to do that.”

I smiled sadly.

“So for the pseudo religious semi informed, we suddenly became monsters one step, if barely, above demons. And they railed against us. In the three decades between the Nephilim virus and the big war, the Nephilim population shrunk from a bit over 900 million to a bit less than 700 million. More than 90% of the dead were killed by religious fanatics. Then the big war broke out. The invention of the grav turbine and the subsequent scramble into the orbit, followed by asteroid and lunar mining averted the war for nearly a decade, as it solved the most critical shortage. Raw materials. But the other shortages, mainly water and arable land increased tensions to the point of breaking again.

Shortly before the war, a few Nephilim tried to help the world by designing the fusactor and pairing it with a desalinator. Technically this would have made massive amounts of fresh water available, enabling the people to turn arid territory into arable one. Over the years, that would have made gardens out of the deserts. Unfortunately, at this time the Nephilim were already deviled by the media and such by the population, so this invention went mostly ignored. And then the war broke out. Who fought against whom is ... complicated to the extremes. I am not sure that I know every belligerent. I know that China wanted the North Pole and Alaska, for the water. Mexico wanted the Corn Belt and the Ogallala Aquifer. The Native African Nations were simply peeved with the outcome of the Second American Civil war, and that the African-Americans lost it so badly. Other regions had their own reasons for fighting. It was a big free for all slug fest. The Nephilim had meanwhile mostly congregated in what is today the North West Commonwealth. With the Nephilim virus outbreak centered in Seattle it was the most logical choice. They tried to stay out of the war, and offered multiple times to help with the shortages, tried to bring the warring sides to the negotiation table. But to no avail. The algae tanks that produce 90% of our food and our oxygen today are the results of that effort. The Nephilim only intervened when Bryce Sanderson started his lunacy.”

Marc interrupted me here.

“Don’t talk bad about St. Bryce! He saved the world from the Pures.”

I sadly shook my head.

“You heard me when I explained that the world needed no saving from the Pures? Sanderson’s Disease was what forced the Nephilim into the war. It was a bioweapon aimed directly at us. But Sanderson was an idiot of the same magnitude of those that released the Nephilim virus. If we find no way to reverse its damage, he will have the sole distinction of being the one who exterminated humanity.”

Marc’s face became hard.

“So you say. I have seen no proof of that.”

“Then you are blind. What is the average number of children a woman gets in her life?”

That confused him.

“Every third woman gets one, why?”

“Before Sanderson’s Folly a woman had two children as an average. Before the war there were roughly nine billion humans on the world. When the war was ended in 2093 it were still 8.6 billion left. Today we have 1.1 billion humans on this planet. In only a bit over 130 years we lost 78% of our population. We are back where we were in the mid 19^th century. And the numbers are falling. And you know what the really bad part is? The only ones even trying to do something about it are the corrupt and self-serving Pures. The Commonwealth is the only nation that makes a concentrated effort to reverse the trend. We are dying out, and Sanderson is responsible for that, but because he preached against the Nephilim he is considered a saint.”