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Sometimes in such dreams, I am visited by a prepubescent girl;
her hair is metallic with a soft, unique green sheen as light reflects off
it. She isn’t beautiful, more like exquisite and strange but I think it’s
all the same. She had seen colours that do not exist and her skin is
like marble. There is something eerily dissimilar about her existence
that I could never place, now I know it all too well. In the New
World she is part of the
Homo eximius
, a new strain of humans; a new
strain that will evolve frommy creation –my cure. They become the
dominant race. In the New World, I find her, the
real
her but only
when she is all grown up and she becomes mine as I am hers. She is
my Delilah.
Balthazar is already there by the time I get to Yggdrasil. It is often
called the Warehouse of Youth, here people are able to buy new body
parts to replace the old, technically grasping at immortality. Although
Sector 5 is the most clean of all the soon-to-be 200 sectors, it is most
renowned for the infamous clubs that slip beneath the surface.
‘You’re early,’ is all I say as I enter the skin branch.
‘So are you,’ Balthazar’s back is unmoving as he continues to print
off new sheets of skin.
I ignore this and ask with an exaggerated tone, ‘Do you
need
any
more skin?’
To this he turns around, normally purple eyes glinting grey with
the blue light that reflects off the white, clinical walls, ‘Even with all
the ReJuv I’m taking, being 60 years old and looking like you’re 21 is
hard work.’
‘Do you have the stuff?’ I ask and he envelops me in a strong
embrace.
‘Happy Quarter-century Oz,’ he says as he slips the package into
the inner folds of my parka. I amoblivious at the time to his lingering
glance and prolonged touch. The loyalty he has to me costs him his
life in the dying embers of my soured empire.
I take the elevator hidden behind the Lungs branch and I descend
into Club Kerosene. I open the package and shoot up the syringe of
amber liquid in the corner of my eye as I enter the throng. The sudden
paralysing pain only empowers my anticipation of what is to come.
I am already lost in the bass line of the pulsing music as I pass the
TubeRoom. I remember being scared of this room, the hive of humans
attached to drips releasing the addictive liquefied soundwaves, black
The House of M
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