33 Skies of Grey

'Warning! Warning!'

There was a blaring noise coming from far away as I stared up at a single moon that was lit with lights. Above me was a massive sea of stars that were moving far too fast, their white and red lights flickered in and out of existence. Lowering my eyes, I noticed what was in front of me which made my heart nearly stop.

In front of me was a massive city, with towering skyscrapers, flickering like Christmas lights. Cars blared their horns on the highway, various buildings stood out to me they were easy to spot as I had seen this same sea of lights a thousand times. In this city there were millions of people living their everyday life going to work, partying, going to see family members.

Advertisements were all over the place from billboards, to the buildings themselves marketing everything from food to women. A layer of smog hung closely to the city, only the tallest buildings piercing through the man made fog. In the outskirts there was a large back building with five glowing red lines going up it, the roof perched a giant Turtle sitting on a leaf, staring down at everyone.

"My.. house.." I tried stepping to it, but I found I was floating in the air high above the ground, there was no wind, and no way I could move.

"This is humanity at its peak when I was dying." An old man's voice carried through the world around me. "They had hit a roadblock, where the individual human no longer had much worth. I saw that when my only son died."

There was a long pause, my vision changing to a modern laboratory, a rabbit was stored in a cage staring with its big eyes at men in white coats. Each had with them a sensor, and a tablet going about the readings on each sensor. "With my research we found what we now refer to as the M gene, not very thought provoking as it was the gene that let our ancestors use magic. This discovery would change mankind as we knew it, and I knew it wouldn't be for the better."

The scene changed to a man sitting at a computer, a layer of smoke gazed the light and I could only see his back as he smoked a cigarette. His hair was greasy and dirty, his clothes layered in sweat as he ferociously typed at the keyboard. "Humans needed a predator, we had become lazy and our bodies were weak, our minds only programmed in schools to do menial tasks. The threat against human life was merely ourselves at this point so our technology was mainly used to kill fellow humans."

A monster core appeared as a hologram in front of him, thousands of small lines of code were swirling around each other with mana as its foci. A swarm of small grey objects went over it and slowly created it from nothing like a 3D printer. "Yes, I played God."

The scene went dark, a billowing smoke was coming out of a pitch black facility, the smoke moved unnaturally and I knew what it was. "Nanites?"

"Nanites are small machines that can create or destroy from a cellular level. When I created Program Core, they were created by my hand as well." A deep sigh came from beside me and if I had the ability to jump I would have. "The world was clouded and rained for forty days just like the Bible had said happened in ancient times. They carried my hope for humanity, and maybe a little bit of anger."

"Even God was wrathful when he saw the state that humans were in at one point, and cried tears that filled the world to the brim. I am but a man, how can I not weep the same tears?" The voice sounded regretful, and hopeful at the same time.

The cloud spread from this factory at an alarming rate turning the whole sky a dull grey, as if the world was now in an eggshell made of fog. There were screams coming from everywhere, fire blazed and the world was lit up in a hellscape that one would only see in their nightmares.

Then I saw something pierce the clouds, hundreds of warheads like shooting stars started falling to the earth. The ground shook with such a ferocity that it screamed like a mighty beast dying, everywhere a mushroom cloud touched was no longer in existence. "Humans in their final struggle tried to erase my work, plans to start anew with the humans that lived upon the moon colonies."

"Mother Earth was stronger than they anticipated though, over the hundreds of years they were gone nature had taken over with the help of the M gene. When they came back to the ground they were on an alien planet, filled with new life that grew from radiation and my experiments." Beasts started appearing from the ground around me, from hounds spouting fire, to mighty serpents that flew through the air with no wings.

"The humans that came back, they were weak at first. Their minds kept them from dying out as a race, and soon their offspring had discovered the M gene in themselves." The serpent from earlier tried to swallow a man as he sliced his sword at it, electricity flowed through his body as they collided. Their fates were unknown to me though as the scene shifted once more.

Now I was in a cave, a man sitting in front of me, his body the same as it was before but this time old. Sitting in front of a computer the same fire wasn't there as he typed on the keyboard weakly. A cigarette slowly burned in a dish to his side, he seemed defeated, you could see his time in this world was coming to an end.

"Why, you ask, are you telling me this?" He paused as if to let me confirm his thoughts, he nodded, "Because humans were supposed to have a core themselves but they mistakenly killed off their own kind who developed a core. You are one of the first to have gained a core and I need you to finish my project." The view of the cave slowly got further away, it was unnatural built under a building that resembled the factory that once spilled out that vast grey smoke.

"Come to the lab, start up the project once more. Fulfil a dying man's last wish, and help make a world where I would want to raise my son if given another chance." The man slowly stepped forward, and in his shaking hands he grabbed mine. Tears dropped down his wrinkled face as his hazel eyes looked into mine, pleading with me after hundreds of years.

My voice shook with emotions as I placed my hand upon his, even though I knew this was an illusion I still felt my heart wrench at the man's sight, "Of course I will…." The last words wouldn't leave my mouth as the world around me started to fade to black. I wondered how many hundreds of years that message had been waiting to play, how many people had died trying to complete his promise.

With a heavy heart I let the world fall apart slowly around me as tears rolled down my face,a weight I never knew that was there lifted from my heart because I could finally say words that haunted me. "Goodbye…"