New Human

Nemesis trudges across the barren wastes that are the surface of the Earth clad in her skin tight armour suit. Her purple hair billows behind her as she holds her left arm up to shield her mainly red eyes from the swirling dust all around her. Lethal doses of radiation eat at her body giving her continually stinging pains, which are almost immediately repressed by the nanomachines in her body as they administer pain suppressants and fix the damage seconds after it is done.

She knows she shouldn’t be trudging through this dust storm, which even with her enhanced eyesight she can barely see a metre in front of her as the abrasive dust tears at the exposed skin of her hands and face.

For any normal human, the last of which live in Olympus and number only a few million, this would be certain death, but for an Olympian, especially her, it is little more than an inconvenience. The only real dangers to her out here are the firestorms, she knows, and those she avoids at all costs. The swirling force of the gusts suddenly doubling in strength forcing her to dig the toes of her boots into the dust to stop her from being whisked away. It works as she breathes calmly in and out through her nose, unwilling to taste the acrid dust of the world as she keeps her head at a slight downward angle. Suddenly the dust storm passes her. It doesn’t dissipate though, as it continues on its raging journey that could see it circle the Earth more than once.

Again Nemesis asks herself why she is out here, but she doesn’t know. What she does knows is the feeling that is sitting deep within her, telling her that she is searching for someone. She doesn’t know who or why and that’s frustrates her enormously.

Her red eyes, the inner ring of which is flecked with yellow and orange, scan her surroundings. Nothing, in any direction, except dust and radiation as far as her enhanced eyes will allow her to see. Which to put more accurately is as far as the curvature of the Earth will allow. She lets out a sigh of disappointment as she recalls that she doesn’t really know how long she’s been searching. Decades, maybe. Centuries though seem more likely, but she can’t be sure. The passage of time means little out here in the barren wastes and crippled crumbling remains of civilization. To be honest she can’t remember civilization, not really. She remembers war against the AI Apocalypse and then the endless monotony of what followed in the wake of its defeat. It hadn’t been a grand victory. She, like everyone else that survived, had lost too much and that loss brings her only sadness as she breaks into a stride now. She no longer has to lean into the heavy winds now that they have eased. The radiation continues to eat at her body as the nanomachines thwart the radiations continuous attempts to bring her death however.

Nemesis wonders how Olympus may have changed during her absence. Will it have grown? She wonders as she heads for a mound of dust and ash. All this had once been people, animals, plants and buildings; she thinks as her boots compact it beneath her feet. She knows she will have to return to Olympus before long, otherwise the others, Ares especially, will begin to worry. It brings a smile to her face to think of her fellow Olympians, living and dead. So many dead, she thinks as she begins up the steep side of the dust mound, her boots slipping as she digs her toes in trying to find stable purchase, but finding little.

So few of us remain, she thinks as she continues up the unstable shifting dust of the mound until she reaches the top. But she finds only disappointment on the new horizon as there is just dust and some rocky outcrops. None of them are big enough for anyone to make them a home, but they are scorched black and they lie at the edge of a vast crater. It’s where one of the thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads fell, which means there once used to be humans here. Nemesis wonders if they got out before the bombs fell, she knows the reality is that they likely didn’t. Instead, they would have been obliterated. This crater is the only proof that anyone existed here. The detonation would have torn them apart atom by atom until nothing remained. Was it worth it? Nemesis wonders as she stares at the crater until the pain and loss becomes too much for her to bear. She feels the lust for revenge boiling deep within her. But revenge has already been wrought, she knows, though somehow the defeat of Apocalypse hadn’t been enough. It would never be enough for her. The ending of one thing didn’t avenge the murder of billions, not in her mind. That just isn’t how Nemesis operates. She is, after all, the namesake of a Greek goddess known for revenge, even if that revenge is supposed to be against Gods. There are no gods in this world. She isn’t one, even if the citizens of Olympus regard her as one. She had been like them once, before she’d joined the Olympus Project and been made into a new human. An improvement necessary for her to serve as part of an army of augmented humans created to stop Apocalypse and its almost endless army of machines and networks.

It’s time to head for home, Nemesis concludes with a sigh. Only problem is that Olympus hasn’t felt like home for a very long time. The other Olympians treat her differently now, at least in comparison to the years during and immediately after the war. She doesn’t know why and they insist to the contrary, but Nemesis knows something changed. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but as her need to search for someone grew she began to notice it and the more she focused on it the more obvious it became. Had she done something to them? She doesn’t know, but her need to search for whoever she is searching for helps her avoid the looks and words she knows they exchange about her.