A Roll Of The Dice - 02
This series of narrative fiction is based on random words that are picked via dice rolling.
Occupation • Agriculture • Excavation • Experienced • Aquarium • Laboratory • Economy
Part 2
Agriculture was the first to go. Gene bombs went off in the central valley before anyone realized we were under attack. Forcibly changing the genome of entire biomes doesn’t go well, especially for the food supply. There were no bullets that could combat poisonous crops. No drones that could strike down famine. Our military starved with the rest of us.
The economy collapsed soon after. That’s not true…the money collapsed. Economies of relationships and services popped up everywhere. Prostitutes and hitmen, mostly, with the occasional smuggler. (Where would we be smuggled to? What was left?) We don’t really call it anything, like “Black Tuesday,” or “The Collapse”, or whatever historians made up back then. There isn’t enough society left to keep a common history straight, anyway. Most people won’t even talk about it.
Occupation only came when we were on our knees, begging. People called it an invasion, but it was more like colonization with how few of us remained to fight back. They didn’t bother imprisoning us or killing us. Instead, they put us to work. Gave us food. Gave us water. They saved us from the very horrors they’d created.
A Roll Of The Dice - 02
“None of us talk about the pain. Pain that most people have never experienced. If they’re lucky, they’re already dead.”
The gene bombs hadn’t just been to starve us. There was something our saviors wanted, and we would work to get it for them. Labor camps cropped up all over the central valley before the excavation began. It only took us about two weeks to unearth their prize: oil. Sorry, not oil. Not like we knew it. This was something they’d manufactured with gene editing. It was special in ways we couldn’t have imagined.
The oil wasn’t for machines. It was for us. The labor camp became the laboratory, and that’s when the experiments began. They called the new oil “slip-seed.” That’s the English translation. It burned going down as we drank, but it was the injections that made the breakthrough. Our bones snapped, our muscles ripped, our eyes bled. Every part of our body broke as our DNA rewrote itself. Slip-seed made us more than human…and less. We were no longer what nature intended. We had new mutations. Gills, carbon lattice bone structure, something about our stomachs digesting more. We were genetic hybrids that would serve the rest of our days as lab experiments in an aquarium. With oxygen being in short supply, it was probably for the best.
They eventually developed masks for us so we could walk around. None of us talk about the pain. Pain that most people have never experienced. If they’re lucky, they’re already dead.
The masks were their biggest mistake. We took all their supplies with us after burying the bodies.
