By the time Isaak awoke from his self-induced drug trip, the sun had already begun to wane over the horizon. The sky had turned an amber shade reminiscent of a dim fire over Firehawk Base, which proved quite a picturesque sight to behold.
He had slept through the entire day, but it mattered not, since it wasn't his fault at all.
When he opened his eyes, Isaak found himself in a sterile room devoid of any personality. White walls, white beds, white shelves — there was a prevailing theme wherever Isaak looked. His initial assumption was that he was in a morgue, but he knew better than to blindly hope.
'At the very least, I wouldn't have to deal with this fucked up world anymore...'
"Oh, would you look at that! Sleeping Beauty's finally woken up!" said a man in a white lab coat when he noticed Isaak try to get up from the bed he had been strapped onto, to no avail.
"H-Huh? What the fuck is this?!" stammered Isaak when he recognized the fact that he had been tied onto the bed he was on, restrained like an inmate that belonged in a bughouse.
It wasn't a very pleasant feeling having one's agency robbed from them, and Isaak did not handle it well as he thrashed around like a wild animal. He wasn't going to take the situation lying down, not while he still had a chance of escaping.
Adrenaline coursed through his veins like wildfire, giving him a much-needed burst of energy to thrash around, culminating in an anticlimatic result: He toppled his bed over and fell along with it.
"Argh, fucking hell! Relax, kid! I'll unbuckle you, so stop thrashing around like that!" said the man as he hurried over to help Isaak. "The fuck's wrong with you, Christ. Don't go all psycho on me as soon as you wake up. Gonna give me a heart attack, I swear..."
For what it was worth, Isaak was usually a rather amenable person even when faced with strangers but after that hair-raising awakening, he was anything but sociable.
"The fuck are you? Where the hell am I?" said Isaak as he glared daggers at the bearded man in the lab coat, as if he were eyeing out a potential predator out for his skin.
"I'm David Cortez, the only doctor in Firehawk Base... And the guy who saved your life, by the way," said the man, absolutely unperturbed by Isaak's open-faced hostility. If anything, he seemed somewhat amused as he observed Isaak warily scan the room in suspicion.
Isaak scoffed and said, "That so? Saving my life by restraining me up? Must've been really serious if you had to keep a sedated man from moving."
Even for Isaak, there was a limit to the bullshit he could take. What could have been able to do whilst he was completely knocked out? The logic didn't add up, no matter how you spun it. There shouldn't have been a need for the medical restraints, and yet...
Cortez scratched his beard and said, "That's the thing... you're weren't sedated when we found you. Williams found in your room a convulsing mess, practically foaming at the mouth. Would've choked on your own bile had he not checked up on you at the right time."
He pulled up the collapsed bed and gestured for Isaak to sit on it, as he was still too weak to properly stand up on his own. A small act of goodwill, not that Isaak interpreted it that way. Still, it calmed him down enough to not do anything rash to the supposed doctor.
"I... don't remember anything like that," replied Isaak, trying his best to remember his last moments before he fell asleep. "Just remember getting tired and then I fell asleep on the floor like an idiot."
Cortez laughed and said, "Sounds about right. Williams did say he found you in a pool of your own drool. PRC-xA's a real bitch the first time around, but it becomes... manageable enough after you develop a tolerance for it. Grats' on popping your cherry, haha..."
'He's an odd one, for sure,' thought Isaak, but he chalked it up to his upbringing in the ruined world he grew up in.
In his mind, he was certain that death was a frequent enough occurrence to joke about it. Or he simply had a keen sense of humor for shit situations. Perhaps both. Not that Isaak really cared; the only he wanted to do at the moment was get out of dodge.
But that didn't seem like it was going to happen any time soon. After the initial surge of adrenaline-infused terror faded, he felt as if someone had sapped the life out of him.
Sluggish. Fatigued. Weak. He felt genuinely awful, almost as if he'd caught something serious. Had Isaak been anymore paranoid, he would've guessed that he had been poisoned.
"Why do I feel like total shit? Did I catch something from that... that Metastasis Burst? Or this an aftereffect of PRC-xA? Feels like I'm running on empty here," murmured Isaak.
Cortez sat on a bed adjacent to Isaak's and said, "Yeah, it's a bitch of a hangover caused by your body trying to reacclimate to all the sensory input you usually interpret normally. That, and the fact that your heart is thumping with about half of the strength it produces."
He pulled a large monitor beside Isaak's bed and pointed at several in-depth scans of his body — heart rate, blood pressure, neural activity, deep muscle tissues, and bone scans, etc. There wasn't a single thing that wasn't accounted for, Isaak suspected as he studied his own health reports.
"To be honest with you, I've never seen someone like you," said Cortez as he eyed Isaak's health reports, "Never seen someone from the Wilderness with a genome as stainless as yours. Shit, if I didn't know any better I would've thought you were a Promethean based on how pure your blood is."
"Promethean? ...Like that old god who stole fire from the gods? What are you talking about?" said Isaak as he laid back down on his bed. He'd run out of energy to even sit up properly and gave up on trying to act as if he could handle it.
Cortez's eyes glimmered with interest when he heard Isaak's belated response. Williams had told him the truth about the boy, but he'd held a bit of skepticism until right now.
The fact that he was able to read his own health report, could reference forgotten mythology, and even had an untainted genome was enough proof for him.
'Holy shit, Williams wasn't lying... Probably. What in the fuck did he pick up back then?'
"A-Ah, I forgot you came from the boonies. 'Promethean' is a term we use to call a genetically modified human. Designer babies, really. It's filthy expensive, but if you got the cash, then you can ensure that your children are born with the greatest advantages ever conceived."
It was then that Isaak learned a startling fact about human life at the end of the world...
Humanity was dying. Very slowly. A wilting tree, poisoned by the fruits of their labor.
One of humanity's biggest issues in the twenty-second century was that reproduction had become enormously difficult. Human fertility had all but disappeared in the wake of the Twin Harbingers. Whatever they had inflicted upon the planet had irrevocably changed everything.
The birth rate had fallen so low that natural conception was considered by the scientific community a fading prospect. Couples could try for more than a decade and not see any results... And if they did, fatal complications were unfortunately common.
"Truth be told, before I signed up with the Peacekeeper Corps, I ran a fertility clinic," said Cortez with a wistful smile as he patched a feed of painkillers into his arm. "And every day, I would meet hopeful couples who desired to conceive... the natural way. Don't know how many fertility boosters I prescribed, but goddamnit I was determined in helping out."
"The natural way? That's not how people do it in... the Federation? How do you have kids then?" asked Isaak.
Cortez frowned deeply and replied, "Most of the time, we use In Vitro Fertilization after extensive filtering and testing. It can take several years and tens of thousands of credits to produce even a single successful fertilized egg with... a minimal chance of complications."
'Jesus Christ... What a fucked up mess of a situation.'
Isaak sighed.
The reality of the situation did not escape him, even if he lacked a lot of common knowledge about the new world he had been thrust into. There wasn't a chance in hell that normal people would be able to afford that sort of money, leaving them to fruitlessly try on their own.
Pregnancy was something you had to buy, meaning that the poor were effectively barred from it. Isaak could think of nothing grimmer than that human life now had to be bought.
"So, what is it about my genome that makes me so special? Don't tell me that I've got handsome genes because I already know that," said Isaak as he let out a long yawn.
Cortez smiled, happy that the boy finally loosened up enough to crack a joke. That was a good sign in any patient, no matter the illness. It was proof of mental fortitude even in the face of adversity. And he preferred happy patients to depressed patients, too.
"Your genes are the real deal, my boy. Top-shelf stuff, rated at 9.3 — all of the genetic markers responsible for fertility are there and accounted for. No signs of editing or transplantation either, too. To put it simply, your genes are a masterpiece in terms of purity and integrity. Think of your genes as a piece of work from Picasso or Mozart for reference."
And it was all true, which meant it was a sad state of affairs that a normal person like Isaak was now considered a rarity.
Isaak possessed a level of genetic purity that rivaled Promethean children, who had their genes scrubbed, tested, and modified to the extreme, albeit without the advantages they were granted by their extraordinary blood.
A real Promethean was almost always a product; a costly investment that was not born of love, but rather of necessity. They were usually heirs to the ruling megacorporations that supported the Federation, children of high-ranking politicians, or incredibly wealthy private individuals...
They were, for the lack of better words, completely inhuman. Most of them had unbreakable bones, hearts that could outperform actual horses, lungs that could withstand even the most toxic environments, and of course, minds that rivaled the Old World geniuses of yore.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg, as far as genetic modifications went for these superhumans who knew not of mediocrity.
To outperform the greatest natural Olympic athletes and the brightest scholars and intellects that Earth had to offer — that was the essence of being a Promethean...
Cortez leaned close and whispered, "To be real with you, a couple of milliliters of your semen would sell for a hefty price. I wager in the hundreds of thousands of credits, perhaps even millions. And a complete recording of your genome with samples? I can't even begin to fathom the total sum if that ever went on the market..."
Even more so if people learned the donor's origins. Cortez shuddered to think what certain individuals would do if they found out that an untouched, pristine human sample was for sale.
They would hunt down Isaak across the ends of the world and destroy anything that got in their way.
And then, a sudden realization hit Cortez and he held his breath for a moment in terror.
If the Federation already knew about the boy's origins, why was he still here? To them, the boy in front of him would be no different than the biblical Adam that gave birth to humanity.
Were humanity to have any chance of making a feasible comeback, the best solution would be held within the boy's blood. He was THE answer that they had been praying for...
'And yet, they left him here out in the middle of nowhere on this little base... Why do that?'
It was then that a chill ran down his spine, for knew that he had been brought into something bigger than he could have ever imagined by Williams, his old friend.
Though he had known Williams for several years, he had always thought of him as nothing more than a grumpy, old mechanic with a sharp eye for odd things. Now he knew better.
Isaak snorted weakly and said, "As if I'd let myself become a glorified stud horse. I can't imagine a fate worse than that as a man, selling my own spunk for the rich..."
"I can think of much worse fates for you, my boy," said Cortez with a sympathetic expression and warned Isaak, "So don't go telling anyone about your unique genes, alright?"
'For all our sakes, especially yours...'