The A.P.E.X. Saga

By J.B. Fankam

In 2045, following the collapse of the Federal Government, the United States has fragmented into an uneasy alliance of sovereign city states, living side by side in nervous apprehension.

 

As crime runs rampant in New Philadelphia, drastic measures are considered to ensure the survival of what is left of civilization. A research

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jayfankam
• Release date: Jan 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088007457

Book preview

Chapter 1

Not Just Another Day

Truth went first and jumped up for the ladder, climbing with a few effortful exertions. Alex clumsily followed up. The thuds of the Arbiter grew closer. Amid the panic she realized she had miscounted how many times they happened; how close her pursuer really was. She felt the whole building shudder again, like the explosion from before, and heard the terrible sound of mechanized feet falling on the floor closer than ever. Truth held the roof hatch open for her. As soon as she was clear, he closed its two metal doors and cinched it with his crowbar laid across them.

That won’t hold it for long, Alex remarqued.

That won’t hold it, Truth corrected, At all. But their orders are likely to take you in alive. If they sent something like that to kill us, it would have taken the whole building down. No, they want you unarmed. Well not to the strictest sense of the word...

Then what do we do? Alex asked. She heard the heavy stomps now entering the maintenance shaft. It was mere feet beneath her. She ran to the other side of the roof, away from the street, while Truth ran forward. He looked below. The NPPD lined the street and kept a far, respectful distance away. A drone ship circled overhead on heavy fan engines, ready to land and take up the whole roof on the Arbiter’s signal. The whole grid was locked down to keep the runaway terrorists at bay.

Truth grinned. He reached behind his back into the corners of his rucksack and pulled out a long dangling piece of fabric. He attached it, one hook at a time, to two flexing rods that came from the frame of his baggage. His heavy looking sack deflated and compressed down around a bump of protective padding which encased the laptop and his other highly valuable assets. The rest of it unfolded into a pair of massive leathery wings. A do-it-yourself wingsuit.

As he turned to face Alex, he winked at her while walking backward, ever closer to the roof’s edge. Let the Truth, he called out as he faced her, Set you free!. And just like that, he had let himself fall backward into the nothing. After flipping gracefully around, his wings expanded out, caught the air current and carried him soaring deep into the skyline of buildings for what must have been miles. The police who saw him couldn’t believe their eyes.

Alex in turn, was left stunned on the roof. He had abandoned her, left her to the Arbiter’s wrath. She was no longer needed, so she was discarded. She had no memories of her infant past but being left behind and forgotten felt shockingly familiar.

At that moment, the sky hatch burst open and landed next to her with a huge indentation. The Arbiter had slammed through the metal doors and in a mighty leap landed on top of the roof. Alex crawled behind an air intake duct to hide, hoping it didn’t see her. But the Arbiter’s thermal sensors would do short work of that attempt.

There was nowhere to hide, and she couldn’t fly.

She thought about it, for a moment, but relented. Even though Truth betrayed her in that final moment, she still believed him, at least about Cami and Vex. And about the Arbiter’s intentions. She was in clear sight. If it wanted her dead, she would have heard gunfire and felt burning pain. She was still alive - not that it improved her situation.

The mechanized suit ripped the air vent off the roof and tossed it aside, like it was moving plastic furniture. Alex was left exposed. She turned and looked up at the cold mechanical being. Its body paint was scuffed with char from the explosion and splattered with evidence of battery acid across its front emblem. It reached down to take her.

A cold sensation overtook her body and Alex faded out just as the oversize hand came down over her face. A sprayed airborne tranquilizer.

Rather than meet her fate eye to eye, in the clench of the Arbiter’s fists, she would have to wait.

At least she knew for sure now, whoever they were, they wanted her alive.

*Three Days Earlier

The sun shined differently today, past the nexus of buildings that eclipsed the skyline for most of the day’s beginning hours. It reflected and caught on the glass of the New Philadelphia skyline to create a kaleidoscope of shimmering lights that shifted and wove across the rooftops of the suburban sprawl into the poor districts. It snaked its way past the uneven blinds of a bedroom window and fell on Alex’s face to wake her up.

Despite her best efforts not to be afflicted with the painful sensation of the sun in her eyes as the first sight of the day, just as the world was ever changing around her, the results always stayed the same. She had anchored herself, assuredly in place to sleep facing away from the window, but through much thrashing over unremembered terrible dreams, she fell on her other side anyway.

Alex sat up in her bed and rubbed her face to clear the spots from her eyes and warm up her muscles so she could frown more effectively. She had a long day ahead of her. It would be the same, but slightly different. Just another day at school where her time felt wasted, and her future seemed to vanish before her own eyes. Not much different from how everyone else lived. The same, but different.

She got up and let the sliver of light hit against her pillow, almost taunting her that she couldn’t return to sleep again. Even closing the curtain didn’t help. If she shifted it too far in one direction, the other side would shorten and let the light in somewhere else. She just endured the low orange tint to her room for the time and started adjusting herself in her mirror.

The morning glow didn’t affect her complexion much. She had naturally smooth, olive-tanned skin and her hair was only frizzed out on one side and flat everywhere else. She could fix that with a comb and a bit of a time. Every time she looked at herself and stared into her own deep green eyes under her straight brow, she reflected on her age. She couldn’t tell the difference between being 16 last year or turning 18 in a few months.

She didn’t take too much time on herself. Her hair was most important. It was straight and simple to care for in the winter but the months leading up to that were between frizzy with static or curled and wavy from end to root. It was nothing like her mother’s hair which stayed in a constant state of curls through rigorous routines, or like her father’s which was short but straight. Looking herself over, like always, brought conflicting feelings over her unnatural situation.

She held back on her regular existential crisis. There was a place for that, and it was called the Standard Educational Facility. School was an outmoded term, too vague and too classical. The world had changed since the crises of old, from what she learned in her modern history class. And yet so much remained from the older ways of life that it felt like the time before she was born would be mostly the same. Different, but the same.

She picked out her clothing - no choice, just the same uniform as everyone else. Mixed shades of off-blue grey, muted and calming to look at was the color of choice. It kept eyes from wandering too far and concealed the body to be without judgement. It was, itself, a lesson, to not take others for granted by their appearance, because once they came of age it wouldn’t matter what they looked like.

The only accessory she kept was her bracelet. Her name was on it and had been since she was adopted. It was the only name she had, with the Redfields family title granted to her by her adoptive parents and the state. It was her only possession from the life she had before, probably since birth, a time she couldn’t remember no matter how hard she tried. A life she abandoned, that first abandoned her.

Alex left her room behind and started going downstairs. She was near the kitchen when she heard her parents talking. She hesitated from revealing herself, not wanting to interrupt them, and accidentally eavesdropped.

Just look, her father Roger said. This is what’s holding me back.

Your hair is fine, her mother Alysse replied, chastising him. It’s a sign of wisdom.

It’s a sign of male pattern baldness, he replied. My dad didn’t have this problem. I never had to prepare for this. And yes, it is holding me back because who out there is putting up with this? pointing to his bald spot.

It’s no excuse, she said, sternly. There is no excuse to reduce yourself into sin.

There’s a perfectly acceptable excuse, he said, even God would overlook.

Don’t you say that.

It’s for Alex.

Alysse thudded her hand on the table, holding back from a loud house-shaking smack but unable to restrain her reaction any more than that. Don’t bring her into this. This is your decision, your awful choice, you can’t blame it on her.

I’m not blaming her, he said, also holding himself back from raising his voice. Neither of them were aware that Alex was even awake yet, and they certainly didn’t know she was listening on the other side of the wall. I’m blaming society for forcing us into this position. Everywhere I look outside there’s people on Morpho and they all look the same. I’ve seen the same face a hundred thousand times out there and all of them have the same good looks and the same full heads of hair. That’s what’s holding me back. Success has an image now, and if you don’t fit it, and you can’t change it, you’re out.

So you’re willing to debase yourself, she said, dehumanize yourself - to fall into that chemical trap just for some extra money?

Dear, he began, we might lose the house.

It’s my father’s house, she said. That can’t happen. The banks don’t own it, we do.

But the banks own everything else, he said. The electricity, the water, sewage, the street, even the yard. They’ve written us out of everything but the floor underneath us. They’re taxing us out of our food money and the church kitchen can’t just take all their stock out for us every week. We can’t live on that charity alone.

God will provide, she asserted. He calmed down slightly and sat, with the chair creaking under his own weight. He will provide if we stay faithful. If you don’t poison yourself and win against this temptation.

Lissy, please -.

You don’t need to plead with me, she snapped back. You need to pray. I won’t accept you if you come home looking like anyone but yourself, for any reason. You are providing for us enough as it is. Anything past this is vanity.

I’ll skip eating, he said, to keep Alex happy, but that’s not enough anymore. It’s all changed. There’s no place for us here. We either have to abandon the house and move out to the Agrobelt or we -.

We’re not leaving, she insisted, and you won’t take Morpho.

I need to decide what’s best for this family myself, he said. She got up in a huff and walked away. And while she left, he sat at the kitchen table with his head resting in his flustered palms. Alex left before she heard anything else, and only barely alerted them both to her presence as she quietly shut the door.

She was down the street in a huff. Every exhale was a sigh of her frustration and each inhale was a sharp, shaky breath that dragged in the smell of pungent weeds and car exhaust. She felt surrounded at the sidewalk, even though she had a whole yard to walk through. Hers was one of the few houses left, a block and a half of suburban homesteads remained from the former years, and the rest were replaced by high rising low-income multi-family projects.

The skyline in the distance, huge buildings that towered beyond what seemed possible, with lights of their own to glare out brighter than the light of the sun, were like impassable mountains blocking her from leaving. The other side, reaching away from the vast expanse of metropolitan engineering, was unseeable past the many buildings, but she knew it was nothing but abandoned farms and rural hideouts for those too far gone from society’s standards.

On her walk to the corner where the crowd waited their turn for the respective oncoming buses. The kids like her, teens bound for the Standard Education Facility, were on one side of the street. Across the way was their potential future, the adults, and the blatant effects of Morpho at work.

All the men looked identical, exact down to the height. They had dark skin, and broad, pointed jawlines with dark, thick hair that stuck up in a natural spike of bangs and a rough, thick but short beard that laid flat against their skin. The only thing that set them apart from one another was whether they were smiling, and how wide. The women, similarly, were all the same model of blonde, with puffed out high cheekbones and pouty lips with a natural glossy sheen to them and small button noses, wide blue eyes heavy with thick lashes and light, faded eyebrows. Identical, except for their makeup.

And just overhead, down the street that led towards the cityscape, was a billboard. On it were the two faces. Identical to those on the street. The models had no names and were just slightly different from the ones who shifted around in stiff suits that all matched without fault or error. Everyone was the same, but they all felt a little different. All because of EiríniiX, the drug sponsored above the faces of the model citizen portraits on the billboard.

The only ones who weren’t the same were the teenagers like Alex. Most of them beheld the adults across the way with deep envy and dissatisfaction. The girls hid their faces by staring at the ground and the boys tilted their heads up, looking down at the adults with a mix of scorn and shame to hide their obvious true feelings of want. They were trapped in their youth and prevented from joining the ranks of the same-faced masses like they wanted. They were forced to stand out to learn how important it was to fit in.

Hey, Alex, someone said. She turned and recognized the voice. It was Vex, her best friend ,a mountain of a man with a heart of gold but a hot temper, swaggering up to the line. He was followed by Cami, her closest girl friend who was never really far from Vex, and who kept her hair long, straight and lightly colored at the ends. They were totally different from everyone else, unique and unafraid to stand out, which put them at the back of the group with Alex.

Hey, Alex replied. They could both immediately tell that she was in poor spirits and assumed the worst of the group behind her.

What’s up? Cami asked.

It’s nothing.

What kind of nothing? Vex asked. "Nothing someone said or nothing someone did?" Vex was always quick to blame and judge, but only in defense of Alex and Cami.

My parents, Alex answered. I heard them arguing this morning.

Ouch, Cami sighed. Her sincerity overpowered the natural sarcasm of her response. Well, at least your day can’t get any worse.

I guess so, Alex said. Maybe I can talk to them once I get home.

The bus pulled up to the stop across the street, followed by the bus at the student corner that loaded on all the kids. Alex and her friends were the last in line and the last to board. The day went forward with such a similar set up, with so much the same as every other day that Alex didn’t notice the small changes which made it different. Like the hooded man cutting through the crowd who rammed into her side without even trying to avoid her, forcing Alex to spill her books out of her carrying bag and onto the ground.

Vex charged in immediately. "Hey man, did