Divide The Sea

By Peter Sargent

Maybe anyone could see this coming. After all, how long can a population stand its subjugation? We divided the world between those who could afford to enhance their genes and those left to push around in the mud with what they got from nature and chance. It started with subtle rebellion and ended in a guerrilla war that brought down the pillar of civilization. Then, there emerged a boy among the ranks of the privileged who bridged the spaces between different worlds. He was more surprised than anyone to find himself possessed of the duty to raise them from the ashes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Sargent
• Release date: Jun 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311609595

Peter Sargent

Peter Sargent's ancestors were lamplighters, steam train engineers, architects, firemen and preachers. He has a sense for the timbre and color of urban life and industry, coupled with a taste for philosophy and its questions of human destiny. With a classical training in mathematics, Peter spends most his career writing radar processing software. His fiction, mostly of the speculative variety, is the passion of his nights and weekends. A native of Greater Boston, Peter still resides in Massachusetts with his family. If you like his work, then you might consider liking him personally. Visit Peter Sargent's author page on Facebook and get notifications of upcoming work! https://www.facebook.com/petersargentscifi http://petergsargent.blogspot.com/

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Peter Sargent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Divide The Sea

I saw him light the fire, but I don’t think Sam even knew I was there. There were five or six of us, and I trailed along in the back ‘cause I was the smallest brat in town. Since I was just an idiot kid, I didn’t know what he was going to do. But then we left the woods, and we were at the trailer park where all the household help in our town lived. We were at the home of Sam’s laundry lady. I remember that he had a matchbook and a bundle of rags. Sam wrapped the rags around the propane tanks at the back of the trailer, and he pulled the hoses out. I remember the sound of the gas hissing and the smell of it. Sam lit the rags and we all ran.

The blast shook us and I fell on the ground. I hope the laundry lady was gone in a flash, because my dad told me about the rest. He said he was driving when a mob of people dashed across the road, flames flapping behind them like burning flags. They were trying to get out of the inferno, but I also think they knew that the other half had done it to them, and maybe they wanted to stick us with the mess of cleaning them up. The police found charred piles of them lying in the road like a plague of frogs.

* * * *

It’s fitting that I’m writing this as I sit on the train, because from the elevated tracks I can see the expanse of smoking rubble that used to be my town. It’s been years since I was that brat, but at last the ghosts of those trailer people have gotten their revenge. The rows of gigantic birthday cake houses where all of us rich kids used to live are now spots of cinders and ash in about the shapes of the foundations. And little Nelson, who was the smallest brat in town, is one of the last survivors.

I know you think you know how it began, but you can’t really imagine how it was before. These days genetically engineering children is a cheap and dirty deed done in back alleys and ramshackle clinics. The results are the masses of deformed creatures that walk around us today. We had that back then too, but we also had the good stuff. If she had the money, your mom could walk into a hospital that looked like an up-scale shopping mall, with marble floors and shining glass atriums. She would walk out with a single fertilized cell in her womb, and it would have Mommy’s eyes and Daddy’s nose. But it would also have brains and muscles and bones manufactured at the gene factory.

That’s what we rich kids had, but the trailer people had either the stuff God gave them, or the back alley stuff that gave you a 50/50 chance of going up or going down. You could join the ranks of the holy, or you could wind up a three-armed Cyclops with no teeth, pan-handling on the street corner, wrapped up in a blanket even in the summer so no one would puke when they looked at you.

I think you get the idea. Now, as I search for a place to begin my story, I’m trying to tell you how it was for me. Just as you know how it ended up in the war, you know how it ended up with me. But the thing that everyone really wants to know about