PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4| PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7

Wintmos woke feeling strange sensations throughout its body. It first noticed an almost deafening silence. Where is Leywat!?! It searched its mind’s eye for its genio pair and felt panic creep up the back of its neck. Then it perceived a sound that said simply, “Open your eyes, Wintmos”.

Confused, Wintmos just lay there until the instincts of its body took over and raised the lids of its eyes. Looking into its face was what looked like a sub-Human female with dark brown eyes and blue black skin. Her hair was short and tightly curled and she stood over Wintmos with her hand on its cheek.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked.

“Who are you? And how do you know my name?” Wintmos felt things moving on and inside its face that seemed to correspond with the thoughts it was trying to communicate.

“I am Leywat, of course,” the sub-Human looking creature replied.

“But, but, you are…FEMALE! How is this possible?” Wintmos exclaimed.

“Surely you did not think we would be able to do this without adopting a gender, Wintmos,” Leywat smiled thankful that she had taken responsibility for this aspect of their mission.

“But why can I not hear your thoughts?” Wintmos struggled with finding the right words to communicate its distress.

“I set our parameters to mimic the same conditions as our sub-Human subjects so that we could better understand their experience,” she explained. “What concerns me; however, is that I assumed that Human 314’s memory would place us in a testing facility similar to the one that we work in normally, not what appears to be a residential pod.”

Wintmos sits up and looks down at its hands in surprise. Gone are the smooth golden hued hands that it has known all of its life. In their place are rough looking, tan colored hands with what appears to be a thin covering of fur that extends up its arms.

“You might want to go take a look at yourself in that reflective surface in the corner room. It was certainly a shock for me when I first woke,” Leywat said smiling.

Wintmos slowly made his way to the object Leywat had pointed to and jumped back at the first sight of its face.

“How does it feel to be male?” Leywat laughed at the expression on the rather handsome face Wintmos now wore.

“It is both fascinating and terrifying,” he replied touching the squareness of his chin in curiosity. “How do sub-humans refrain from trying to scratch themselves all day through this fur?”

“I assume they are used to it.”

“This is strange,” he concludes and moves away from the mirror.

“Look out of that porthole over there,” Leywat suggests as she walks toward another small room full of fabric coverings. Her research indicated that during this era, the branch of humanity that both she and Wintmos had descended from that was unaffected by the mutation that devastated the population wore clothes for protection before the evolutionary jump made such things unnecessary for auKind.

Wintmos was looking out of the window now at the thousands of people who seemed to be moving about down below at the street level. He noted that there was very little color and not much light the further down his view went but everything seemed to be moving quickly.

“What do we do now? How do we find Human 314?” he asked.

Leywat emerged from the closet holding two sets of clothes. “I suppose we put on some clothes and start looking for her.

~ Marta C. Youngblood