Truest Angel Part 1 of 3

I used to wonder if the world vanished when I closed my eyes. I had no proof that what my eyes showed me was any more real than my dreams and imaginings. Still, I am grateful to be able to see. Even the void is full of light.

Even if what I am shown is fiction or reality, what proof will there be that we ourselves ever existed. The stars we live under will eventually extinguish but even before that, it is not as if they keep record or testify on our behalf. They merely quietly rage in the darkness.

Songs do not call me, fire does not warm me, honey does not sooth me, and the scent of flowers never reach me. I have yet to find a place I belong but I am also not unwelcome so long as there is light to see, air to breathe, and food to eat. I feel not the sting of anything nor does the stink of sewage and death trouble me.

Of course, not even my own voice reaches my ears. Feel free to tell me if I am too quiet or too loud. I have not talked in a long time. I would not know for myself if I have gone hoarse. I am surprised my voice is still with me. Let me adjust it for a moment. There, is this better? Good.

How can I speak your language? That is a bit complicated. It is through the same means that I seem to respond to you before you even need to speak. Strange, as this may seem from how I am acting, I can not hear you.

Do you find me to be verbose for one who can not hear? I can not hear but I can certainly read and the scientific journals I once read for entertainment spared no detail. At this moment, I am reading your lips… and thoughts as well. I apologize for the latter, I perhaps should have warned you.

I can not hear myself so I can not be sure at times if I properly expressed emotion in my tone so I used words to ensure my meaning and gauged reactions such as yours to see if they were conveyed. Even now, my voice sounds a little odd, I am mispronouncing a few words, I will try to fix that.

Where should I start? I could tell you much about my world, Hedelm. How it is juggled by three stars, Los, the star of industry, Ahania, the star of knowledge, Vala, the star of love, and after several long years it would for a time enter the orbit of its fourth sun, Enion, the star of fertility, before being returned to the chain around the other three. A normal year for Hedelm is about as long as four old years and a special year is close to the same as two old years. Once every three normal years, it begins a special year. A full cycle would be about fourteen old years.

I was born in the middle of a third normal year. I do not need you to remember the exact numbers but it might give you an idea of how I understand time. To me, a year is a very long measure.

To me, my world seemed normal as was its gravity and the scale of it all. However if the historians speak true, it is smaller than the place humans originally came from so the designs of rudimentary flying crafts my people’s forebearers abandoned found purchase within its weaker gravity.

Hedelm had more land than water. Our cities were built around great lakes. We most often farmed moss for food.

The limited water, while it did not lead to droughts anywhere near the lakes, limited expansion. Beasts needed water to carry supplies and perform other tasks though most organisms had been adapted to be very efficient, requiring very little food, deriving a lot of their energy from Hedelm's multiple suns.

Where there was no water, the scenery was that of empty rock and gray soil like the sight of our old world's barren moon with patches of color where groundwater might have been hidden.

To maximize efficiency, any stable nation had plants or something else to filter through their waste products to recycle the water and nutrients. The reach of what I guess you would call nations slowly grew with each year as new means of efficiency were discovered, the environment of the nations creeping across the globe like paint slowly being added stroke by stroke to a mural.

Without metal to forge, our ancestors took what knowledge they had and sculpted flesh. Humanity had been born of the previous world but humans had created this world. Every creature had a purpose, whether it be for farming or war. It seemed only natural that they chose to make a canvas of themselves as they did their world.

Our structures were constructed from a substance regurgitated by laborbeasts. Algae and luminescent plants provided light where the rays of the three suns did not reach.

We still had night when the sun we were closest to for that season was hidden from us but for every season there could be night, there was a season we were between the three so there was nigh endless day.

I would rather take this time to talk about myself rather than geography. I happen to be here. Maybe give me enough time and I could provide a globe or map. Otherwise I am talking about places without terms of scale or direction.

Still I will give you a further glimpse at our advancements so you know the society that created me.

Our idea of bows and arrows and firearms were of course living solutions. Organisms that would usually latch onto someone's arm or shoulder. The organisms would react if chemicals released via a latch, a certain pressure point was pressed, or an appendage was pulled.

Such examples would be a large legless grub that needed to held in two hands that vomited a stream of acid, warhawks that rested on their handler's arm or shoulder, plant pods that when thrown either outright exploded or unleashed ravaging spores, a hive of deadly gnats that was carried on someone's back so that when the directing organism was launched from the shoulder the gnats would be released to follow the pheromone trail and eat away at anything they encountered at their final destination, and many more. Poison in some shape or form was common practice as powerful enough toxins could fell soldier or warbeasts alike but acquired resistances and different biologies made those poisons often seem akin to acid.

A battle between such groups would have seemed like two ecosystems colliding.

As for the actual warbeasts, both sides used variants of similar ideas. Enormous hulking creatures that served as living shields and weapon platform all at once or more vulnerable large flying creatures. An example would be what I can describe as hornless oxen several times larger than the ones from the old world covered in a thick layer of bone on the outside. They may not have had horns but they had indentions on their backs to install riders or other creatures such as a variant of an acidspitting grub I might have mentioned that would instinctively engage any target they were trained to treat as hostile or spikelaunchers for aerial targets. They would be released by the Technocracy in stampeding herds to create a moving defensive wall and trample down potential obstacles.

If you need an idea of what we had in the air, think a massive bloated hippo with fins like a whale but inside its mouth would either be troops or smaller flying beasts to let loose on those below.

Now, I shall begin my own story. My story began very early. The moment I opened my eyes was the moment I was aware. A pair of giants loomed over me.

One compared me to the legends of a homunculus in a flask. She returned my gaze and placed a finger on the glass that separated us. She placed a label at the foot of my tiny home. Scrawled on it was my number, CIX.

I felt the giants’ exchange rather than heard it. Or perhaps hearing is the correct word, the thoughts of others echo in my mind as if they were my own, I originally thought they were my own. He called me One Hundred and Nine but my name formed on her lips for the first time, Cix.

He admonished her for giving me a name. He feared I might become like the others.

As they spoke, I learned their names in turn, Levianas and Geisler. The woman, Dr. Levianas radiated the closest thing I would ever know to warmth while, the man, Dr. Geisler dwelled in a realm of cold facts.

They both could have been called elderly, the woman was slightly older than the man but he appeared almost half her age, only having grey hair as evidence he passed his prime. His body had been rejuvenated with simple chemical treatments and along with viral treatments that would have been considered illegal in his home country while the woman chose to age gracefully.

I became quite acquainted with the two in the weeks I stayed contained in my flask. Indeed, I say weeks, not months. I am aware of the concept of a month but my world knew no moon, itself smaller than most moons. The units we used to divide the year are called “sols” in reference to which sun we happened to be orbiting around at the time. A rather petty detail I admit and for those of you who know what it means to have a moon grace the sky, I will say months for your sake.

In Hedelm, it only takes six and a half weeks for a child to be born, not by any fluke of biology but the sluggish pace that our home happens to revolve. A day for us would be six on the world all we humans once came from. I can explain the exact layout of our calendar later, I do not plan trouble you with exacting precision especially when I am still not entirely accustomed to your own ideas of time. For those of us that still carry the history of the old world, I will speak in terms of those hours and minutes but I can not so easily comprehend short days.

They visited me every few hours. Words came from Dr. Levianas’ mouth, and though I could not hear them, I felt their intent. I understood my existence more from her observations than I could have with my own eyes. She noted that I possessed normal body structure like she did, four limbs, a torso, a head, but with the addition of a pair of wings on my back, a trait they implanted during gestation.

Dr. Geisler barely spoke even to his partner, writing Levianas’ observations onto parchment along with his own. He remained distant, any sign of progress he found, he followed with a comparison to my hundred and eight predecessors.

It is odd to describe their dynamic. They were about as close to equal as two people could hope to be. It was Dr. Geisler's idea to continue, he lacking anything else and Dr. Levianas had nothing left. Dr. Geisler recorded Dr. Levianas's observations and reached his conclusions which were in turn reassessed by Dr. Levianas.

They would not tell me themselves until I was older but they unknowingly conveyed my creation through their thoughts. As you might have noticed from my wings, my physiology is not untouched nor was I conceived through conventional means. Rather I was grown within that glass womb and altered overtime as I became more developed. By the time my eyes first opened, they were done.

Having my wings grafted on were one of those alterations and I had to be made durable enough to survive the implantation but the capabilities I later describe came as a surprise to all involved so I was a strange one from the start or their experiments had an unexpected side effect. Among the donors whose flesh I owe my existence one had been described as being “abnormally adaptive” among other things.

I had several donors but the ones they hoped that secure my survivual was one described as adaptable and a sample of a soldier with the highest record of compatibility for implants.

I am not like most others. I do not have two parents but rather I was pieced together with the essence of the finest samples of humanity along with a few other things with the hope that adaptation and compatibility would serve as the foundation. I was designed to have enhanced strength and agility or rather the potential for it. I would say I was and still am stronger and faster than any ordinary human should be considering my lifestyle but my wings and other abilities spoiled me. I had the power but little need for it and thus not the experience to fully apply it. I do not have confidence my physical prowess would match anyone's who life was spent in gravity more powerful than my own, for now. Even now, I do not see myself juggling weights with my hands when I could do the same with my will.

It is not as easy as you might think to piece something entirely new together like a quilt. My people tended to have templates laid out with every aspect and connection charted to maximize the potential of success. Each part of one’s essence was connected to at least one trait, to replace that part with another might result in the loss of something important and there is a certain harmony required for an added trait to manifest. If you put the essence for a squid’s arms into someone, they will likely not sprout twelve arms. That was why surgeries were still popular and my essence was derived primarily from the stock of exceptional humans rather than be a more dramatic hybrid. At least some prior attempts to create those like me involved lengthening the essence, adding more links to the chain as you might say but my count happens to be the same as a human’s.

Even then, there were many traits from my donors that I never manifested. Inheriting flesh did not mean I acquired their spirit and some of their traits likely worked against each other as you notice from my lack of senses. I could quote the profiles of my donors but it is not all that important to me.

Technically, Dr. Geisler completed me but he used the templates from the previous experiments to aid him. He had been indirectly involved in the early stages. Once the others left, he simply took previous designs and built around them. He likely would not have given me wings if my design was entirely his imagination.

Dr. Levanias, with her superior medical experience, was the one that performed the surgeries on me. I fixate on my wings, but many of those surgeries were for my benefit, something like me would not normally survive in a glass womb.

My method of birth while not unheard of, was still quite rare. They needed to be able to observe my growth. If you saw our manufactorums, where the warbeasts were born, you might be disgusted. How should I even describe those mounds of flesh?

When the man spoke, he was quick and factual, stating only what he knew to be true. I would later appreciate that about him. I wonder now if he was even capable of lying to anyone other than himself. The rare times he bothered to weave words in a web of rhetoric was when he was explaining one of his own theories and wanting input from someone else.

His mind was constantly disassembling reality to its smallest components. As swift and short to the point as he was with his words, his thoughts were even more rapid. Even as an adult, he was one of the only people I ever encountered that I needed to read his lips to fully understand because I could not keep pace with his inner workings.

If he lacked anything, he lacked creative ambition. He certainly had imagination as I hope to mention some of his solutions later that proved quite interesting. He could see the problems in other people’s work and correct them yet if he was left alone, nothing would come of him.

When I was finally large enough, they drained the fluid from my flask. My vision darkened as my lungs filled with air for the first time. The glass shattered on its own. The astonishment could be seen even on their faces as I hovered in place.

I hope you do not mind me merely glossing over my earliest years. Milestones such as my first steps were not so noteworthy when the first thing I ever accomplished was floating.

I prefer to call this ability my will. See, I can lift stones and other things without touching them. It is how I can fly without needing to flap my wings. It lost its novelty to me as I always had it. I used it plenty throughout my life so forgive me if I neglect to mention employing it. It would be similar to specifying walking with my own two feet but I will try to remember whether I used my hands or will if it seems important.

Do I have any other abilities that I should mention? None that I am aware of. My sense and will are the only invisible traits that I have. Reason would dictate I now have quite a durable body to have survived the long journey here.

It was noted that I was not very violent growing up. Youngsters might pull the wings off insects or other cruel things out of curiosity. I actually do such things at least once. I squashed a bug between my fingers when I was a child.

However, its disappearance made my already silent world a bit quieter I suppose I should say. I did not dislike the presence of other creatures, they proved the world was real and gave depth to my surroundings a sterile room lacked.

It got less bad when I got older but I might have mentioned that the thoughts of others seemed like my own thoughts. If I did not, I apologize. I felt the distress of other animals in pain. The doctors fed me preprocessed meat when I did eat meat. I felt no such sympathy with plants and treated them like furniture.

They fed me until they thought I was old enough to feed myself. The first time I forgot to eat, my vision went hazy. It was finally when I nearly starved myself, they realized I was not sick as much as I lacked hunger or at least the sensation of it. One of many things that made my worldly experience unique. I still had to eat of course but I could not enjoy texture or flavor. I kept track of when I finished my last meal and ate accordingly.

It surprised my caretakers to discover that I could not hear. They ran a number of tests and found my vision to be the only sense I possessed. I also lacked what they called a sense of smell or touch and as I already mentioned, taste.

As soon as my condition was discovered, the two began a joint effort to “correct” my lack of senses. That was the exact exact word they used as curing would have been an improper term. Dr. Levianas herself had treated blindness and deafness and performed what some less advanced societies might consider miracles of medicine.

That should have been nothing new to her. If it had been caused by damage during development or later, she could perform surgery. If it was inherent, she could prescribe me viral treatments like the ones Dr. Geisler took.

I mentioned viral treatments before but I failed to explain them. They are a step beyond surgery. Imagine a contagion that made you better, relying on the body to restore itself.

Such things were heavily regulated where the two were from, even the ones that were considered necessary. The treatments had to be short lived and noncontagious as they, in practice, changed the essence of who you were as even after the contagions left, the changes remained.

For such a treatment to be considered ethical, the problem needed to be isolated and a strand of essence as close to identical to one’s own but without the flaw would be introduced.

Unfortunately, my problem was never isolated nor was any damage to my neural pathways located. Eventually, they reached a very simple option.

You see, in the previous wars, soldiers received augmentations, many surgical or viral. Increased strength, speed, or even aggression, things a civilian did not need. There was a viral treatment that returned such souls to a state of standard humanity.

This cleanser had been developed by the military for all the various mutations one might have undergone. It could even potentially be used as a weapon. In whatever case, it could most certainly make me the same as an ordinary human at the cost of at least my inhuman abilities.

They discussed the ethics of this option with Dr. Geisler being strongly opposed and even Levianas was a bit hesitant as my chimeric nature could result in complications. In the end, they settled for testing it and offering me the choice if trials proved it would work.

It turned out I was incompatible with such a method. Or rather I would have been compatible at first but blood samples of mine showed that my body quickly grew to recognize the treatment as an illness and attacked it and anything infected by it.

So, the offer was never made. Those trials were performed while I was a child and I had no sense of what normalcy was so I would have found the idea trivial. As I grew older, I would have happily accepted the treatment, not to become ordinary but to simply be able to hear, smell, and touch.

Dr. Geisler justified my condition that it was of greatest priority that one with wings have exceptional vision, hearing and smell meant little if I remained so far above. My sense compensated for most and learning to read lips allowed me to follow the conversations of others.

They taught me to read and write. They even taught me how to speak after I learned how to read their lips. I adjusted my voice based on their impression of my words, though my sense told me they often found my verbalization less than perfect, they were slow to tell me themselves.

While they were well aware of my will since the day of my birth, they remained ignorant of my extraordinary sense until my lack of regular senses came to light. They performed a number of noninvasive tests such as blindfolding me and moving things around me.

They found I did not notice the displacement of an object no matter how simple or complex yet I was aware of the presence of other living creatures though I remained oblivious to unaugmented plants. They had to, at the time, conclude that I perhaps had some means of detecting the natural currents of other creatures but it seemed strange to them that size did not matter as much as complexity. I could notice a mouse yet not find a tree.

When I learned to speak and write, I finally was able to explain my sense to them. I remember the brief awkwardness that drifted above the two as they realized every secret they ever kept and every detail of their lives that came to their minds while around me was something I knew.

As I figured out from their experiments, my sense is based around thoughts. The more complex or at least akin to me, the easier it is for me to understand. I understand human thoughts as if they are my own but something like a beast of labor might only be able to convey to me simple ideas like if it was scared or angry. I could not even gleam that much from something insectoid but I am at least aware there is something there.

I learned the words that formed on people’s lips were what they meant to say while the words I felt were what they truly wanted to say.

Dr. Levianas asked me how it felt to be deprived of the senses others had. I asked how it felt to lack the sense that I possessed. Neither of us could answer.

As I grew older the thought that I might cease to exist or the world around me might disappear when I closed my eyes plagued me.

Fortunately, my sense confirmed I was not alone. Unlike my eyes, which I can simply shut, I can not rid myself utterly of my sense. If I concentrate, I can reduce its range to my immediate area but I found it extends as far as it can when I am relaxed or distracted. Its reach grew further as I aged. I believe it was the end of my second normal year that it stretched far enough for me sense the two doctors' thoughts on the ground even when I was among the clouds.

I said they taught me but it was primarily Dr. Levianas that taught my lessons while Geisler graphed my development and secured or even crafted the supplies for my education. You can probably guess he was not the type of person a child would enjoy being around, especially a child that was privy to his thoughts. I kept my distance from him and he soon enough realized that and was untroubled at first.

How can I even describe how humorless that man was. I knew him my entire life and never once did I hear him laugh. If he happened to hear a joke, he would deconstruct it in his head until all amusement to be had was sapped away.

Fortunately, it was Dr. Levianas that also performed my frequent medical exams. Even she, at times, had doubts about my physical condition, besides my lack of senses, I was the picture of good health. I only got sick twice in my life, once when I was young and a second time when I began to roam and became exposed to an illness. Both times I recovered faster than should have been explained by the workings of the medicine prescribed to me.

What I tell you now is something I pieced together over the years. The facility was an old underground fortress sustained by the local groundwater situated between two rival nations. However, it belonged to neither though it used to belong to Dr. Levanias and Geisler’s homeland before it was abandoned.

The nation the doctors came from was a technocracy and I will refer to it as such if I have to speak of it. The other one was a republic. Or at least that was what they were by the time I was born. The doctors’ homeland became one where power was given to those specialized in their roles and their opposition chose the path of popularity. I found it strange the system that valued merit deplored human modification.

Where we lived had been a battlefield, though it most certainly did not look to have been one. Both sides fought with beasts rather than machines and concocted plagues to combat both soldier and animal. The conflict perpetuated a cycle of new diseases being born only for immunity to be developed so that something even more deadly was necessitated.

This ultimately led to both sides creating strains so virulent that if improperly used, not only would all parties involved be caught in the spread but the whole world could be stripped of life. This resulted in them having to negotiate peace or risk losing everything.

There was still conflict though, the occasional scouts spying on the other or even battles over disputes of border but they could no longer safely engage in open war. Instead as Dr. Levianas put it, they learned that they had to fight with words.

The older inhabitants of this world had an idea to spread colonists across the globe like spores and the growing settlements would assimilate each other once their borders met rather than slowly creep across like (single colony of mold.) However, feuds started to form as to who was to assimilate who. It was always meant to be settled diplomatically but complications emerged as colonies fought to maintain identity, absorbing each other in a race for… I think dominance would be too strong a word.

They thought of this as a battle for the survival of their cultures even as they integrated new designs from those conquered. There was a popular theory that the societies would evolve to be incompatible with each other, that the organisms used by one would not be able to thrive within the ecosystem of another. The expansion for the Republic and the Technocracy had slowed due to their pact. They geographically shielded each other from other threats and if spies caught wind of one absorbing another neighbor, that might be grounds for open hostility to begin again. The doctors predicted such an outcome to be inevitable, even if both sides somehow came to a complete halt, the borders of some other nation would eventually cross into one of the two’s territories. The hope was that such a situation could be defused peacefully as originally intended.

Depending on how you wish to count, approximately two generations that no longer knew open war had been born into this world. Long enough for those that fought to grow old yet see the world around them transform.