Chapter One

I am sprinting through the forest, tripping over the dying trees and severing off the loose branches in front of me. I can see the looming shadow that sweeps life away from the village; I can hear the discordant gunshots going off and the ear-piercing screams that follows. The suffocating smell of gunpowder reaches my enhanced olfactory cells right afterwards, and my tongue feels the bitter taste of the grey and black smoke, coming both from fire and corpses. Thorns and shrubs are cutting through my skin and ripping my flesh, but my brain doesn’t even have time to process that.

I didn’t know what I was doing in the village, my body wasn’t always controlled by my mind, not THIS mind that tells me to stop doing what I was doing. They drugged me, numbing my thought, so I could follow their orders like a puppet under the strings. Unlike the others, I am human. I am alive. I have an actively-functioning brain. I have the power of independent thinking and decision making, which is, trust me, pretty rare. They shot doses of drugs into my veins, and now they are ordering me to commit murder, or maybe massacre is a more precise word.

When I saw the village filled with humans like me, a violent reaction goes on in my body. My head ached so much and adrenaline was gushing in my blood. My heart beat twice as fast and as hard, and my kidneys, despite all the pain, were filtering out all the drugs from my bloodstream. It was an ability passed down by the ancestors of the human race. Humans used to live together and work together in huge settlements unlike the small villages we see now, and that created a bond between the human beings. This bond was operating inside my body and making me fully human.

I run on and on, my wrist twisting that 10-inch combat knife in front of me, cutting through obstacles.

Suddenly, my ears pick up a shuffling noise behind me, advancing closer and closer. Instinctively my brain runs the calculation like a computer - converting the frequency of the sound into the approximate speed of the threat, which is 10 m/s. With that speed of running, it’s probably a sergeant who has noticed I ran away, or maybe an officer of a higher level. From the loudness of the sound my brain figures out the size of the target. All these operations are completed in no more than three seconds. My neurons fire electrical charges at each other at an overwhelming rate, connecting to each other, passing the message along at a speed that no normal human can achieve. Yes, I am not completely normal, I am enhanced. You can say I’m superior, but I prefer to say I’m just one of the lucky ones, or unlucky ones.

At the exact moment of 1.28 seconds before the target leaps out behind me, I raise my knife and flings it forward, arm going down in a smooth semi-circle. Just when my finger is pointing toward the target, the knife escapes my arm and spins forward. This move is embedded into the deepest parts of my subconscious brain and I have practiced this hundreds of thousands of times. No chance it will miss!

However I don’t hear any painful cries or smell the warm blood gushing out of the sergeant’s body. I can’t sense any damage at all. I raise my head and stare in shock at this seemingly-frozen scene. The knife has stopped millimeters in front of the sergeant’s heart, and the sergeant is grabbing tightly onto it. Damn! The sergeant’s reflex is so quick that he can catch something flying as fast as a car at full speed.

I see no terror or fear in the sergeant’s eyes, nor pride or disdain, in fact nothing at all. His eyes are just staring blankly at me, his brain analyzing me and figuring out how to take me down. I don’t blame him, since he isn’t a human like me, and he has no emotions programmed into his brain. We, no I mean they, are born to fight, to kill, and to die. I am born to live and to make a difference. I’m the only human being strong enough to withstand their crushing power, the only one who has enough strength to push them away and to protect myself from their pulverizing blows.

No, I must protect not just myself.