First: The Testers

Previous:  The More Things Change…

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Mom Cara shed her white suit, revealing herself to be still rather like herself.  “Not everyone has extreme visible changes. I run a few degrees colder than I used to, and I tend to be a little quicker to fly off the handle if I don’t pay attention, but I still look much like myself.  And I’m still myself, Kelly-boop.  I promise.”

“I believe you.”  Nobody had called her Kelly-boop in years.  She found herself wrinkling her nose the same way she had back then, before she found out that it would end more quickly than she’d thought.   Continue reading →

First: The Testers

Previous: Up

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Slowly, very slowly, Kelly turned around.  It was Reyansh, and yet it wasn’t.  His face was more pointed, his eyes bigger and also more pointed, his skin looked iridescent, and he had wings sprouting from his back, bug-like wings that glimmered in iridescent blues.  “The Bees, their most potent attack was their most subtle.  They created something we’re calling a smart virus.  It mutates us, all in a hope of making our brains more susceptible to the Bee Hive’s commands.”

The green-blue woman filled in.  “Children born into this environment have almost no chance of surviving – they cannot withstand the immunization for the mind control, and second-generation physical alterations are almost always fatal in utero, if not soon afterwards.  They weren’t looking for a breeding population – or, we think, the ‘immunization’ against the mind control alters something that is meant to let us survive.” Continue reading →

Part two of The Testers.

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The testing seemed to go on forever.

Kelly didn’t remember it being that long when she was 15, or before that when she was ten, but this one was supposed to be the biggest, the most important, so maybe that meant it was the longest, too.

She answered questions on things she couldn’t remember ever learning.  She performed first-aid on a very creepy dummy that seemed to breathe and sweat and bleed.  She sewed together two pieces of fabric.

The screen continued to ask her questions through all of it.  Some were personal: when was the first time you had sex?  Do you sleep with your partner-parent?  Where do your children sleep? Continue reading →