Altus: Part I

Altus: Crucible

    Every generation has had an issue that has defined them, made them grow stronger. It is only when we struggle to survive that we fully appreciate life, and use it to do something extraordinary. Without the crucible, a generation roams aimlessly, accomplishing no greater purpose than to fulfill their own desires, which seem to change with each stray gust of wind. Is there any other way to describe the citizens of the turn of the 21st century? Aimless, hopeless...convinced that their own small problems were the only things that needed any tending to, while the world around them burned to the ground. They partied atop the castles their forefathers built for them, making a mess of the place, sure that no one could ever touch them, only to recoil in horror when the house crashed down, surprised that their own pride destroyed them.

    I was born on January 21st, 2058 in Oklahoma City. By that time, our nation had been subject to the Polo Treaty with China for eight years, and it looked like we would make a rebound from a financial crisis that would have made us look like a militant African tribal nation, making the ones before seem like a little speed bump. Or at least, that’s what the media would have had us believe. My first memories were of a run-down two-bedroom house in the suburbs, shutters falling off the house, white paint stained by the smog in the air, and trash in the yard from the people who were just too lazy to find a bin somewhere. We weren’t the poorest people in the world, and we learned to appreciate what we had, even if we had less with each passing year.

    I discovered very early on my love for learning. I could not put down books even so mundane as school textbooks, and by the time the end of each school year came, I had usually been trying to find something to fill my time for three months. I heard the comments that were par for the course of such a pursuit of knowledge: nerd, dweeb, and the like. But I was only seven years old when I figured out the first undeniable truth of the modern man...

  There are two typical responses to the unknown: curiosity and fear. Curiosity compels the curious to learn everything they can about that they do not understand, no matter the danger, no matter the cost. Fear takes the easier path of shunning the unknown, proclaiming that they know of it and dismissing it publicly as terrible, which masks the truth of their own weakness and inability to overcome it.

    Yes, I wrote that when I was seven. It never occurred to me that that is not something a seven year old typically writes.

    But then, that was my response to wedgies, name-calling, and attempted humiliation: to study it. I felt no anger, no desire for retribution, and no desire to find out why I didn’t want these things, only to know why people react the way they do. I quickly found a knack for discerning personalities of those around me. I could dismantle the insults of those children who came to me with their shallow names, and send them crying to their next class with words alone. I never did any of this for fun or for revenge, but simply because time spent pulling my underwear from my buttocks was time I could spend learning something.

    Most of my teachers did not mind having me in their class. Sure, it bothered some of them when the principal would come by the classroom to find me reading a book on macroeconomics while the rest of my classmates were learning to add double-digit numbers, but I was able to convince them to let me do my own thing, so long as they gave me a signal to let me know when I should look clueless as to what they were trying to teach me. It was here that I learned another undeniable truth...

    In the face of authority, most are only concerned with their appearance. Whether they seek to please authority or spit in the face of it, they will create an image to suit their purposes, their subconscious will force them to obey rules that they did not even know they had set for themselves.

    I was bored. For four years, I had been filling my time with filler material, though I learned a lot. Macroeconomics, history, and psychology were some of my favorite subjects because I could see how closely tied together they were. More on that later, though. Most of my teachers were lazy, not really caring to help me excel, but only to earn their measly paycheck and return to their lives. Even at eight years old, I could see the desperation in their eyes...no one wants to live this way, but most people feel so trapped by the lifestyle that they will never reach for anything more. There I go waxing poetic twice in one paragraph. Point being, it took my teachers four years to finally get me to some more challenging classes. When they found my IQ to be 184,  I got my first taste of advanced algebra at nine years old.

    Now I was loving life. Unknowns were wonderful...endlessness of possibilities! I grow nostalgic. I chewed through everything they gave me, and soon, I was finding reading material again. By the time I reached sixth grade (at the age of ten), I was earning college credits. But I was not in a huge hurry to leave this place. Why leave somewhere when you have everything you need to survive? I never thought that I would have to look inward to find another undeniable truth...

    What a man is born into, he will fight for. Rags or riches, if he had either as a baby, he will die defending them, and may never try to fight for anything more.

    Of course, it was at the age of 11 that I began to fully realize that one. No one will forget May 2069, when Exodus attacked the nuclear power plants.

    I remember studying them (it scared a few of my teachers to see me reading nuclear theory). They made their own fuel through Underground Pressure-based Transmutation, which left it somewhat unstable, but it worked well enough. The consequence was that the fuel fell apart into many more radioactive substances than naturally occurring uranium when used as fuel. They also used this fuel in massive quantities, seeing as the planet had run out of fossil fuels in the late 2020’s. I knew exactly what would happen if those plants in the worst-case scenario: they would create thirty-mile long parking lots with each detonation, and spew radiation wherever the wind blew for decades. That is exactly what happened.

    I’ll never forget seeing the news report. I’ll never forget the stone-cold voice of the Exodus member as she explained what they had done in a video...

    “For far too long, the United States of America has allowed itself to grow weak. We have relied upon the labors of other nations, fattening ourselves with their crops, while they starved to support our royal appetite. Today, we will upset that balance. From this day forward, if the United States hopes to survive, they must once again fight for their lives. They must return to the fields and rebuild upon the ashes. The alternative is death...choose,” the woman said, as the video faded to black.

    I was shocked. My family worked very hard to support us...did this woman not know that she would destroy the lives of many innocent people, all of whom had no say in her crusade? It did not matter. The mushroom clouds in the distance said it all: we had to leave. My parents quickly pulled me out of school and took us home to pack and leave immediately. I was especially worried for my mother, who worked in the city. She looked particularly sluggish as we tried to get out of town, and my father sat her down in the car carefully before he went back into the house to grab more items.

    I can still recall the smell of destruction, the darkening of the skies as poison filled the air. The prairie wind was blowing it towards us, so we had to leave. I knew that the city was likely blanketed with it already, which left us little time, if any at all. We packed everything we could grab into our car and drove eastward. My mother tuned in to the radio, trying to hear everything she could about the attack. My father was trying his hardest to get us out of town, but the interstates were jammed.

    “Residents are advised to seek shelter immediately, and not to enter the city limits if at all possible,” was a snippet of what I heard on the radio, the emergency broadcast playing on all stations.

    My father laid on the horn desperately, trying to get people to move. It was too late, though, as a cloud of dust had caught up with us, carried by the hurricane force winds behind us. My mother began to cough violently as she tried to cover her face. I grabbed a blanket as my father turned off the air conditioning, told me to hold my breath, and smashed through another car as he headed onto the opposite side of the freeway. He put the pedal to the floor, driving the station wagon as fast as it could go. Looking ahead of us, we realized that this was not an isolated event, as several more mushroom clouds were visible in the eastern sky.

    Knowing that the winds would carry it east, my father said little. We were racing away for our lives, and if we slowed down now, we probably would die of radiation exposure. I watched with worry as my mother continued to cough, nearly passing out several times. I could tell from the look in my father’s eyes that he wanted to stop and to try to find a clinic to treat her, but that he knew that doing so would only doom all of us. Soon, the radioactive fallout would fall on top of us as well, so we had to make it somewhere safe before we could attempt anything.

    Those next 18 hours were the longest of our lives. My father, dodging traffic as best he could, took us on a course heading southeast, through Texas and Louisiana. By this time, there was a good estimate on the scale of the disaster. No one was allowed to head west, and police officers and the National Guard were directing people to keep moving eastward. At every fuel stop, I watched the descent of humanity, as hundreds of panicked people fought at each gas pump, wrestling them out of the hands of others. People were running out of the store with goods that I could tell were stolen. At each station, we waited at least 45 minutes for gas, just hoping that there was some to be found. It was a miracle that we were able to continue.

    And my mother...my poor mother. She gasped for every breath, vomited regularly, and drifted in and out of consciousness. I could tell that she was experiencing radiation sickness. She had been weak from illness for many years. He begged every policeman he found to treat her, but we were simply told to press on, that no clinic in any area was open, and that even if they were, there were thousands of cases of reported acute radiation sickness being treated, and that they would probably not get to her in time.

    We reached Mississippi, and my father’s desperation reached its limit. We headed to Biloxi, and went to Keesler AFB. My father was former Army, so I suppose he hoped that they would treat her there because of his old connections. The base was at FPCON Delta, locked up tight, with guards posted.

    “You need to move along, sir,” the airman at the gate said.

    “Please, please just help my wife!” My father begged.

    “We cannot let you on base. Now please, turn around and keep moving east, or we will have to detain you,” the airman said.

    “Then detain me! Just help her, please!” My father screamed, with tears in his eyes. I looked at both of them, wide-eyed in fear as the airman raised his weapon.

    “Sir, please leave!” the airman replied forcefully. My father responded by hitting the gas, slamming the car into the gate.

    I jolted in my seat, but I was fine otherwise. My father’s head lashed onto the steering wheel, causing him to bleed from his forehead. I watched in fear as the airman opened the door and threw my father to the ground, cuffing him, while another tried to pull my mother from the car. He screamed angrily, cursing the other airman as he dropped her, but they paid no attention and simply called an ambulance over. Another quickly pulled me from the car and cuffed me, carrying me over to their station. I remember seeing them load her onto the stretcher, and rushing her in an ambulance over to the hospital.

    I was in a daze. A nuclear holocaust is difficult to fathom, especially for an eleven year old. But here I was alone, hoping that my father hadn’t gotten himself killed, and that they were able to pull my mother through. It seemed like forever that I was kept there, until finally, they decided that an eleven year old refugee was probably not a terrorist. They took me to the hospital to see my mother, and left me alone with her.

    I didn’t need to see any charts, I knew that she had been irradiated heavily. At eleven years old, I was cursed to be able to understand that the fact that she absorbed 32 Grays of radiation meant that she would not survive. Her ATIDS had was only being further exasperated by the radiation that had been killing her white blood cells. And for a moment, my analytical mind could only focus on one thing...my mother was dying.

    All this knowledge, and I could not help her. I knew of no way to pull her back from the brink. Tears rolled down my eyes as she strained to take my hand one last time.

    “Love you....Vince....” she said breathlessly. I could think of no words to say, I only nodded and kissed her on the forehead as I watched her slip into a coma. I hated myself for not being able to bring her back. I wiped the tears from my eyes and sat at her bedside, trying to savor the last moments I had with her. It was no comfort...I just wanted her to stay alive, and I bawled my eyes out in that hospital room. I yelled for her to come back, screamed that I loved her, begging her not to die, despite everything I knew had already happened. The doctors came and escorted me out gently, and I sat outside to cry some more.

    Two hours later, she drew her last breath. April 7th, 2069, 4:22 P.M.

    My father never was the same after her death. They took me to see him at the holding cell, and I watched from the outside as they told him the news. He simply lowered his head to the table, sobbing deeply. They let me in to see him shortly after, and he held me close. There were no words that could possibly describe what we were feeling.

    He was a widower, homeless and lost. We stayed in a tiny hotel room for months, and he would come home every night wasted, having drank himself into a stupor. Every night, I could hear him cry for her, yelling her name between sobs. I caught him several times simply watching me with tears in his eyes...he was so broken.

    And then one day, he simply vanished and did not return.

    They found his body washed up on the shore one night during low tide. According to the official account, he was caught in the undertow out at the beach during one of his drinking binges, and drowned when he could not keep himself afloat.

    I could spend days describing the emptiness that filled me for a while afterwards. But it did not matter. I had to continue...it was either overcome this, or fade away. I resolved that one day, I would no longer be subject to the whims of others, and that I would control the hands of fate, so that no one would ever make me a victim of a massacre again. I would simply have to rebuild upon the ashes...