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?”

Hmm, 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 it 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 was left. After that, while I was cleaning up all the traces, somebody, another Jack, 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 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 losing 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 unstable 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 taboo, as it took genetic manipulation to do that, and after the gen food 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 utter 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, which 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 as increased the number of sensory nerves and upped the size and efficiency of the sensory regions of the brain, making the victim more observant, increasing 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 expressions. 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.

Which 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.

The invention of the grav turbine and the subsequent scramble into orbit, followed by asteroid and lunar mining averted 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 slugfest.

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 as 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 on 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 150 years, we lost 78% of our population. We are back where we were in the mid 19th 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.”

I had to take another sip to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Unfortunately, it did not work.

“Well, long story short, the Nephilim were prepared for entering the war, even if they did not want to. They had built several automatic factories that they fed with raw materials from the orbital smelters. They had built new weapons, like the coil gun, the plasma projector, and many more. Their missiles were faster, harder to see, and nearly impossible to stop. And of course, there were the combat automata. For every soldier the other sides sent into the fray, the Nephilim sent four bots.

For every grav destroyer, the Nephilim sent two automatic cruisers. The war lasted another two years until everyone accepted that they could not beat the Nephilim forces. At last, they simply wanted to spite the US and her Allies and used weapons of mass destruction against us.

Washington is mostly a hole in the ground and from what I learned still glowing strong enough that it is visible from orbit at night. And of course, southern California is simply gone. I never will understand what they had against LA but they used roughly five percent of their warheads there.

New York was relatively unharmed, only Manhattan was completely destroyed and rendered uninhabitable.

Seattle was also targeted, nearly as hard as LA, but again, the Nephilim had planned ahead. Not one warhead reached what is today the Commonwealth. Nearly every formerly arable land was poisoned beyond all recognition.

The Nephilim could not prevent the Alliance from retaliating in kind.

So in one moment, what is now called the Night of the Falling Stars, practically 90% of all food production and 78% of all oxygen production ceased to be. The wastelands are teeming with mutated monsters, some of whom had human ancestors.”

I made a short pause, and let them think about it for a time.

“After the war, the algae tanks saved us all, as honestly, all life would have suffocated before they could starve to death. The first batch was a rush production but it came in time to keep humanity alive.

It took three years before enough algae tanks were built to stabilize the world. The desalinator design was now insufficient to deal with the irradiated and poisoned water, and a new one that could deal with the pollution was hard to build.

Without the water from the ice caps, humanity would have died from thirst. And even if enough water had been available, the land that could have been made arable with enough water was mostly destroyed. After six years the newly designed water desalinator/purifier made water shortage a thing of the past.

The effects of Sanderson’s Folly were not yet evident, so it seemed as if the world would slowly regain its balance. Unfortunately, while the Nephilim concentrated on repairing the damage, all others started an arms race to negate Nephilim superiority, and the zealots gained footholds in many of the governments, including the one of the United States. In 2103 they gained enough power to ram through some acts that essentially stripped the Nephilim of their rights as citizens. The Nephilim were no longer allowed property above $100,000 in worth. They had to pay 90% in taxes and were excluded from welfare and social security. Also, Nephilim had lost the right to bear arms, to self-defense, and to a jury trial. Further acts that essentially would have allowed the government to shove the Nephilim into concentration camps were only a vote away.

These changes in the laws would have taken effect on January 1st, 2104. When all appeals and negotiation attempts failed, the Nephilim, who had by now 70% of the population of the North-Western region decided to secede. That was the start of the third American Civil War. The US thought that they had closed the gap to the Nephilim military enough to force them to their knees with higher numbers. For some reason they assumed that the Nephilim would not improve their military. Nor did they think that the Nephilim would keep producing combat automata the whole time. So what was expected to be a rout became a rather protracted war.

In 2108 the South Eastern States decided they had enough, and they seceded and founded the Confederate States of America.

With the breakaway of these resources the US could no longer keep up the pressure, and in 2110 a peace agreement was signed, that accepted the creation of the NWC and the CSA.

The southwestern States were a hotbed for the fanatics and viewed the peace accords as treason, so they split from the US and founded the Alliance of Free States.

The AFS immediately declared war on the NWC. And that is the situation we have now.

In a full bore information campaign, the Nephilim renamed themselves the Pure. Something about that we are the purest of the remaining races or such drivel. It sadly stuck. I personally prefer Nephilim.

The change did nothing to increase our reputation, and I have to agree with Jacky, that Nephilim simply sounds cooler. But the only ones outside of the Commonwealth who still know about it are the zealots of the AFS. So Pure it is. As a label, it is as good as anything.”

After I stopped for a while they all started talking at once. Then Marc emerged victorious.

“You talk a good talk. But you don’t have a single shred of evidence for what you have said.”

OK, that was funny. I had to laugh a bit. When he looked at me pretty irritated, I got myself under control and answered him.

“I will have you know that what I told you is not the history taught in Pure schools.

If you had that, then you would know the difference between truth and propaganda. Concerning proof, how much time do you have?

Roughly 90% of what I told you can be found in the surviving library systems all over the continent. You can even get it online in many cases. You just have to dig.

Look for July to October 2047 to get the information about the Nephilim virus.

You will find the articles about the trials of the scientists from January to September 2049.

You will learn about the tensions rising between March 2058 to May 2070, when the invention of the grav turbine by Kobashigawa Atsutane was announced.

In the next three years you will find articles about how this invention made the space industry affordable, and then about how ores first from the moon and later from near-earth objects eased the lack of raw materials.

Then you will read about how the tensions about water and food began to grow.

On August 23rd, 2078 you will find the notice about the desalination project. If you look at different sources for that you will learn that most of them were pretty derisive of it, and if you read between the lines you will see that the derision was solely aimed at the Nephilim who invented it and not the project as such.

Then of course comes February 12th, 2079 with the headline that China invaded Taiwan.

That was the start of the Big War.

Over the next 12 years, you will find out that several of the mainstream media blamed the Nephilim for not doing anything, and that the Nephilim were considered too unstable to use in the war. Sometimes in the same article.

Next is July 16th, 2091 when Sanderson’s manifest was released together with his virus, on the 54th anniversary of the Nephilim release.

Over the next year you will find reports of how Nephilim units defeated this foe or another, while the MSM still celebrated Sanderson.

Then on October 4th, 2092 you will find a press release from the CDC, that the massive reduction in pregnancies was the result of Sanderson’s Folly.

Of course, at this time Sanderson was already safely dead. And lastly, you will find on November 9th, 2093 a much-reduced number of articles about the Night of the Falling Stars.

Much reduced because the majority of the MSM had their place either in Manhattan, Washington or LA, so only the survivors could report.

Over the next years if you will search carefully enough you will find the work the Nephilim did on the algae tanks and the desalinator/purifier mentioned in some offhand comment.

Between June and November 2103 you will find first the proposals and then the votes for the new laws that would take the rights of the Nephilim away.

Then on December 18th, 2103 you will find the public outcry over the declaration of independence from the North-Western States.

Between April and September 2108 you will find the declarations of secession from the States that now make up the CSA.

Finally, on June 12th, 2110 you will find the signing of the peace accords and formal recognition of the NWC and the CSA by the USA.

The secession of the now AFS happened between July and October 2110.

The history taught by the schools in the Commonwealth has the basic dates right, but emphasizes much more the heroic deeds and sacrifices of the only pure people of earth.” I tried to make the sarcasm drip onto the table with this last sentence, before continuing:

“Not quite as wrong as what is taught in the AFS but propaganda at its finest nonetheless.”

I had to suppress a chuckle.

“Of course, if you set out to do it yourself you most likely will spend a few years searching all the archives you can reach. It took me 6 months, and I wrote a news aggregator that I let run on a borrowed supercomputer to get it all.

I could offer you to use the aggregator, and would even be willing to try to help you find a supercomputer, as unlikely it may be that we will get one for you, but I fear you would accuse me of tampering. So you are on your own in this. Have fun. Next question?”

Darren was next.

“You talked about the five categories. Are you willing to tell us where you are in that respect?”

“This question is considered pretty rude. I hope you accept that I want that information to remain private. Nothing against you, but that was one of the reasons I had to flee from Seattle, and I don’t make it too easy to find me.”

He was visibly disappointed but nodded anyway.

“Any other questions?” Marc raised his hand. “Yeah, you talked about how Pure's coping mechanisms are gone. What exactly does that mean?”

Urgh, OK, here we go.

“Humans cope mostly by forgetting, repressing and filtering.

They forget things they can’t handle.

They repress memories that are too painful.

And they automatically filter things they can’t cope with.

Pures don’t have these capabilities anymore. A very real example we have here just now. All of us women were tortured and raped for three days.

It is hard to process for all of us. With time Natalie, Christine and Jacky will forget the pain, the humiliation, and the helpless anger. They will remember that they were in pain, were humiliated, and that they were angry. But the pain itself, how it felt, they will have forgotten.

Same with the humiliation and the anger. They will have flashbacks of it for a long time. But still, it will be a muted thing compared to the real experience.

For me, I, unfortunately, have a perfect memory. That means I only have to close my eyes and think about it and feel the pain again in crystal clarity. I will feel the same humiliation as at the time Frankel played with me and the same rage I felt when his boys entertained me. It is as if it were burned in crystal. It will be so today, tomorrow, in twenty years, and if I live that long, in 200 years.

Fortunately, there are techniques that were developed to keep the trauma down, or I would be bonking mad in a few years.

But these techniques require a bit of discipline. So remember, if you hurt or humiliate a Pure, he will remember it fully, even decades later. He will never forget. What somebody else would laugh off after a few months or years, a Pure has vividly in his memory.

Now I would be happy to simply talk with you about whatever you want to know, but time is at a bit of a premium for the next few days. We can sit down and have a history lesson or talk about the differences between the various races and whatever, but for now, we should concentrate on things you really have to know. OK?”

They all looked sheepish, and Kate a bit dejected, but they all nodded.

“Well, then, any questions pertaining to what we have to do in the next few hours?”

Christine spoke up.

“Yes, what do we do with the slavers?”

“That is easy. When the bots are ready, especially the big security bots, have them dragged individually into the lab, slapped into a rack and then collared.”

“Uh, how?”

I had to blink at that. “What, how?” By now we both were confused.

“How do we get the bots to get them? And how do we collar them?”

“Oh… ok, the bots will obey your verbal orders. So simply tell the security bots to fetch the first un-collared slaver out of the pens.

You should make sure you are in the lab when you do that, otherwise the bots may bring the slaver into your room or wherever you are.

They are a little dumb that way.

Then order the bots to place them into an empty rack beside one of the control consoles. Watch that the bots don’t mess this up. Afterward, get a collar of approximately the right size, don’t worry, they resize a bit, and lock it around the slaver's neck. At the back of the collar you will find an OPB jack.

Grab the OPB cable from the console and jack it in.

Then on the console you agree to the new link and, when it tells you that it has established the link, activate the options ‘Voice Suppression’ and ‘Truth Indication’ and then hit the option for ‘Neural Mapping’.

Then have the bots bring him back to his pen and fetch the next one. Anything else?”

Nobody answered me.

“All right, Jacky, do you have any professional business clothes? Something you can impress in? If not, we need to get you something from the fabber.

Dress to impress, and then please call Benjamin Walker.

The number is already programmed in the phone system.

Tell the secretary you most likely will get, that you want to make an appointment for me to pay my respect and negotiate my opening a business in his territory.

Don’t mention my name. Just refer to me as your boss. Can you do that?”

She nodded, and I looked at the others.

“Who of you will play the driver and bodyguard?” They gestured toward Kate.

“Do you have anything like a black suit or any formal clothes?” She shook her head.

“Then we will have to make you something. We will meet at the fabber after you have finished your breakfast. I think that is all for now.”