I want to tell them about all the worries filling my head, but I doubt they’d understand, so I only sigh.
Then I make a clumsy, apologetic bow and silently go back to the house, to my little room.
I lie down in the middle of my nest, curl into a ball, and somehow try to make peace with my fate.
Maybe that’s actually better?
Maybe I should stay muted like this, in a way cut off from my past and from that untamed side lying just under the surface, waiting for a chance to take over my life.
My eyes mindlessly scan the room’s furnishings. Then, something catches my eye.
A book.
The one that Snow gave me a few days ago. I'm not sure why, but I reach for it and open it.
It starts like this:
THE STORY OF THE HUMAN PAST
A thousand years ago, a terrible plague swept the Earth, targeting everyone with two X chromosomes.
The outbreak moved fast, wiping across the planet within a year. At that moment, a six-person human crew was out in space on a mission to study Jupiter’s natural satellites. They planned to drill into the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, because scientists believed there was a warm subsurface ocean there that could, in theory, support life.
They lowered their equipment down a long shaft through the ice and found strange lifeforms swimming in that ocean.
No one left a clear visual record of what those creatures looked like. The mission logs gave no reliable description: were they humanoid, fish-like, mermaid-like, or octopus-like? For reasons that remained unclear, those details were missing from the records.
Back on Earth, the plague was already killing women. When the crew learned what was happening, terror hit them. They understood that when they returned home, they would find a planet utterly changed, possibly torn apart by war, mass suicides, and chaos.
The men still alive realized they could be the last generation, that newborn boys would grow up in a world where creating families would be impossible.
The lifeforms the crew encountered turned out to be sentient. They were organized into a complex caste system, even though all of them were hermaphroditic. There were droneranks, purple warriors, and a rare caste of sorcerers. Those details didn’t show up in the mission logs; the crew only revealed them later in interviews after they came back to Earth, and no two accounts lined up exactly. That made it hard to know how accurate any of it was.
The aliens decided to help humanity on one condition: they wanted to be left alone. They launched a genetic program to reshape humankind; the plan was to create five hundred new humans, all hermaphrodites. But the experiment didn’t go exactly as intended. Some of the children grown in artificial wombs became omegas, capable of carrying life. Others became alphas, able to impregnate. Some were infertile: betas.
Those children were dispersed across nations so they could be raised within existing cultures and traditions. The fate of omegas at first was brutal; many were turned into breeding stations and incubators. Beta children were often killed, while omegas were treated as extremely valuable, even fought over.
The gender imbalance eventually corrected itself within a couple of generations. The surviving men who lived through the plague all died out without descendants, and everyone left was descended from the alien-modified humans.
A new wave of civilization rose. Over the next generations, society stabilized, knowledge was preserved and spread, and geneticists estimated the average person now carried a few percent of alien DNA. Children born from True Mate pairings, though, tended to have a higher portion of it.
When those children paired with offspring of other True Mates, their children could inherit increasingly concentrated traces of alien code. Over time, that led to visibly different people in the population: purple alphas and rose omegas started to appear, and the first sorcerers began to show up, though they were still very scarce. With each generation, the alien DNAseemed to coalesce more strongly, clustering and amplifying across TM family lines.
Out of this shift came a reactionary group called NFH, Not From Here. They believed the changing human genome was creating a Trojan Horse-type alien invasion and that people with alien DNA had no right to live on Earth. Their militants took root in many countries, wreaking havoc and targeting especially omegas and alphas. Villages were destroyed and entire families wiped out.
I stop reading, remembering one thing that cuts through the fog in my mind: my brother Ragnar joined the military specifically to fight groups like NFH after our granddad became a victim of one of their attacks.
The rest of this short book is much more fantastical.
It tells the story of human souls.
The author claims that among them are alien souls and even the so-called seeds of the gods, which exist in two forms: intact and damaged. They’re said to be extremely rare, especially the damaged ones, which sound more like a fairy tale than even a remotely plausible urban legend.
Feeling tired, I put the book down because, to me, it drifted too far from reality.
In the final chapter, it rambles about aliens observing the planet from afar, looking for a way to conquer it peacefully, supposedly, but still to replace the population with hybrids perfectly adapted to a completely different environment. After all, theirs is nothing like ours. They live in high-pressure oceans, and our world is dangerous to them, with its gaseous atmosphere and shallow seas. Yet, they see their chance in the hybrids.
Sighing, I lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling. I have no idea why Snow gave me the book, maybe to entertain me, or maybe to trigger my memory.
