Born of Kytec by Kennedy Harkins (the best e book reader txt) 📖

When I set out that day with my two best friends, I had no idea the events that would unfold before me. I didn’t know about the tragedy I would face, or, of the life changing decisions I would make. I was just a kid trying to enjoy some of her last days of freedom. Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself; let me give you some background.


Prologue

My name is Gianna Jacobs, the year is 4026, and I live in an underground civilization called Nucleo. How far underground you ask? About 3,954 miles from the earth’s crust. For those very intelligent people out there; congratulations, you are correct, I live in the earth’s inner core. Now depending on who is reading this and what time period you are from, you may be thinking; What the hell? Is she impervious to flame?

The answer to that is: of course not, who the freak do you think I am? One of the Fantastic Four? The core cooling is old news. How old? About two-thousand years give or take.

It all started in 2012. This crazy scientist, Sean De Laurre, created a new kind of bomb. It was unlike anything that had ever even been thought about. The bomb didn’t actually explode, it gave off invisible and disastrous waves that had the ability to shake the entire earth. Stupid, right? Kind of like the atomic bomb. Why invent that kind of power anyway?!

You wouldn’t believe the reaction of the public when the media got wind of it. Shit literally hit the fan. There were riots, and raves. Crime stats hit an all time high. The world was falling apart, and the bomb hadn’t even been used yet! People have a way of focusing on the small unimportant details.

One of the mobs was led by a man named John Gieser. An ignorant leader to lead ignorant people. What could go wrong? A lot, as it turned out. See, John wasn’t happy with protesting and waving signs. Nope, he had to step it up a notch; breaking and entering. Where? Oh, just Laurre’s private laboratory, where he just happened to keep his new invention. No big deal, right? Ha!

They broke in, proceeded to trash the place and while they were doing that, one of the idiots detonated the bomb. It’s people like them that make me Pro-Choice.

As you can imagine; it was awful. The entire world convulsed uncontrollably for days, before they could turn it off. Hundreds of thousands of people died and millions were injured. It was the greatest disaster in the history of the galaxy.

When they finally did turn it off, the damage was irreversible. I’m not talking about the cities in ruins, or the lives lost, or the records of the past that were lost forever. This was much bigger; deep in the core, things were going ballistic. Not to get too technical; the protons, neutrons, and such were splitting in half like maniacs. This made the radioactive atoms even more unstable and causing their half lives to decrease drastically. Basically what should have taken billions of years was done in a thousand. By approximately the year 3000 the inner core was room temperature.

Now, if you have a basic high school level knowledge of science, you know we don’t get our heat from the core, but from the sun. No big change there. Unfortunately, the heat from the center of the earth does do something pretty important for us. Two words; Magnetic field. Or more commonly known as the force-that-keeps-crap-from-falling-on-us-from-outer-space.

Now it didn’t completely disappear, but it no longer kept rocks from raining on the people of earth.
Our population continued to decline. The great minds of that generation got together and created a compromise; live underground. Simple, but effective. They started construction within the week. It wasn’t hard, we already had the technology to get the job done cleanly and quickly.

That’s about when this strange group of meteors landed all over the world. They contained a new chemical that later became known as Kytec. It was completely new to the earth and completely radioactive.

Anyone who came into contact with it, or came into contact with someone who had, was infected. At first we thought it was simply a virus, and in a way, it was. The people started to morph in horrible ways. But more importantly, they advanced. Their movements increased to speeds that had once been thought humanly impossible. This wasn’t the only development; they became stronger, as in Superman, stronger. The Kytec also made it harder for them to be killed; someone infected jumped from the thirty story building and lived. Sure, a gun shot to the heart would still do the trick, but only if left untreated. A professor later remarked that they were becoming the perfect predator.

The digging kept going through all this chaos, and for a time we lived in an uncomfortable truce. No one really knew what to make of them, at first. But, eventually, instincts took over, and fear settled in. They were animals, evil creatures, that would see us all dead the moment we turned our backs.
That’s when disaster struck, in the form of a twenty-two year old named Jenny Hinderson. Or as her coworkers down at the local strip-joint called her; Ginger Snap. She was the lowest form of woman that was still uninfected. Respectable people avoided her like she was the Plague, that is, until she was ‘attacked’.

Now, since I wasn’t actually there, I can’t tell you exactly what happened...but I can get pretty damn close. Ginger was walking home from her job as a pole-whore, I mean dancer, when she ran into Lance Yoburg; an infected young male. The way the media tells it, what happened next was completely his fault and that he sexually assaulted a young innocent woman.

It was like the Scottsboro Boys all over again, only on a much larger scale. By the next morning the world knew, and were outraged. The infected people because they believed that Lance had been falsely accused. The normal humans saw it as an attack on the whole population, an act of war, and that was it for trying to play nice. A full-blown war broke out, with the uninfected greatly out numbered; three to one. Not to mention the fact that they were basically fighting super heroes.

Miraculously, we managed to hold our own until construction was finished and the core was pronounced ‘safe to inhabit’. With out ever really declaring an end to the long war, we retreated into Nucleo; the name of our new world, and shut the infected population out for good.

A millennium later, we’re completely settled. No one has any delusions about returning to the crust, who would want to anyway? We have everything we need to survive and thrive. Here we are safe. Here we are at home.

Less than a fourth of the earth’s original population came down into the core. With so little people we banded together to form one large society. We all serve under one family, a monarchy of sorts, the Everetts.

They came into power long before the meteors fell, and after all this time, it just felt normal to look to them for guidance. Sure, they weren’t the only ones in charge. There were always powerful families that got their say, but the Everetts’ word was law; literally.

So, life went on in the core, and apart from the small bits of radiation, which was easily fixed by our Skin Suit, it was perfectly perfect. That is, until we imploded utopia.

Not for the first time that evening I found my eyes roaming to the digital clock on the wall. 7:35 pm; just five more minutes left of this torture.

“As I was saying, I am the direct reason for the doubling of sales in my department...”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at my handsome ‘date’. The handsome part was true enough, I thought as I gazed at his sharp jaw and beautiful complexion, but I couldn’t really call him my date. Dating involved something consensual, and if it weren’t for my father, I wouldn’t be here.

Pretending to listen, I played absently with my Skin Suit, full body under armor made of stretchy radiation proof material. It was mandatory to wear it all times, except when inside one’s own home. Mentally I tried to scold myself into paying attention to him. It’s only the rest of my life.
Glancing up into his grey eyes, I couldn’t imagine marrying him. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me. But it was happening, whether I liked it or not. Control was something I thrived on, and being without it was like a sharp slap in the face. In reality, I did have a choice. I could leave my family and never look back. Right, like that ever works out.

My watch went off, signaling that it was time to leave. I sprang to my feet and nodded my head at Walter Jones, and tried to keep the disgust out of my face.

“I apologize for having to cut this short but-”

He smiled, “No, I understand. I’m sure you’re in a big hurry to take off with your friends.”
I waved awkwardly at him, and then exited the restaurant. It was completely pitch black out, apart from the few street lights, and the weather was perfect. Then again, living in the core, we don’t exactly get real weather. The glass dome that covered our entire civilization was the only reason we saw a change in time of day, and even that was electronic.

As soon as I was safely in the shadows where the street lamps no longer illuminated my path, I took off. My legs became a blur beneath me and I reached speeds that I wasn’t aware I could. Off in the distance I heard an Enforcer call out to me, telling me to slow down or he’d have to report it.

Without bothering to slow down a laughed at him, “Yes, sir, Mr. Policeman, sir.”

It was really a stupid joke, Enforcers hadn’t been called the police or the armed forces in eons. But what can I say? I’m a history buff.

It was all so surreal, I couldn’t believe the day had finally come. The Last Summer. Come fall it’d be all over, no more school, no more grades, and...no more Koen or Cedric. It was a bitter sweet moment, on one hand, I was dying to spend two whole months with just my friends.