2 Episode 2: An Odd Return

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The mechanical voice ranged out from nowhere but dimmed out immediately as if it was malfunctioned. Barely anyone could hear it.

-Huff, Huff, Huff, Huff...

Alan gasped hard. Lying on his sweat-stained, rusted bed, he tried to control his body. Streaks of light blinded his eyes, buzzing noise ringing in his ears, threatening to forever disable his senses. After 10 minutes or so, the after-effects started to be alleviated. Alan slowly regained his consciousness. He opened his eyes and stared at the dark, dilapidated ceiling. What time is it? He looked over to an extremely old yet seemly sophisticate wooden clock on top of his table. 4:30 AM. It took him a while for his mind to be fully functional before realized how early it was. Trying to tuck himself into the ragged blanket, he found that he could not go back to sleep at all.

Soon, Alan decided to get off his bed and went for a hot shower. What hot shower? Alan sadly realized that today was Tuesday, not his room's allocated time. Luckily, if he forgot and went ahead with showering, he would immediately catch a cold under the icy water. Alan thought it was a miracle that such cold water can still keep flowing out of the pipe, not intending to be frozen inside it.

Frustrated, he felt quite bad about his body scent, which mostly was his hallucination since no one could sweat under such bone-chilling temperature. He looked around for something to do. His two-room block was small and worn-down. Most of the wall dyed in yellow stained due to lack of maintenance. The wooden floor would creek wherever he stepped on. Despite the small in size, his room was clean and not stuffy, as there was hardly any furniture inside. Not much different from any other rooms of the Blackened Buildings.

Blackened Buildings was the oldest district in the entire Hallaway city, it was established many many years ago. That was when human still used coal and fuel, and the Blackened Buildings used to be the most resplendent area where white buildings were built to commemorate the White Wars II. However, over the time, with the high density of coal particles and dust pollution, the used to be white buildings started to be stained black. But that was not the only thing that gave the district its name. Here, in this district, the first case of Blackening happened.

20 years ago, humanity was growing at a tremendous speed in science and technology. As if such a pace ired the gods, a disaster struck down out of nowhere.

6:32:12 AM, May 5th 2017, White Valor (Blackening Buildings now), Hallaway city. A high-pitched scream shattered the morning's sereneness. On the street, a drunkard ran down the empty street. Following him, there was a silhouette of a young man, shuffling across the road. As the sky was slightly lit, the appearance of the young man was obscured. Yet, what was terrifying that a part of his shadow has disappeared, it was as if his body was floating in the air. Looking back at his physical body, it was slowly taken over by pitch darkness. Everything was there but was cover by the void, no lights could penetrate through it, similar to the eclipse over the sun. On his face, showing all sort of emotion: fear, anxiety, desperation and ... fury? Then out of nowhere, a car was speeding madly towards him. The fury his eyes seemed to intensify the moment he caught the glance of the car. Even though the car seemed to notice him, it did not slow down, accelerating nonstop. It passed directly through his body as if he was not there. Because of the disturbance from the acceleration with the drunkard's scream, curious bystanders started to flood the street. What they saw made them horrified, a pitch black human-like mass was standing on the middle of the road but cast no shadow. As the void had entirely covered the young man, it contracted rapidly, leaving nothing behind. He was gone.

Witnesses tried to recount the incident to the police. But everything that was told was quickly dismissed as it was too unbelievable. But many days later, they were forced to witness the same phenomenon occurred to everyone around them. Similar to what happened to the young man, many people spontaneously disappeared from the face of Earth. It followed no rule nor obeyed any laws. Children and elders, man and women, janitors and world leaders went away one after another. There was no scream, no pain. Just like a magic trick, puff, people disappeared.

Some said that it was God's Retribution. Some others said it was the aliens' abduction. Conspiracy theorists said it was just all the solution of the world leaders to reduce overpopulation. Despite which was true, the entire world was in pandemonium and everyone dropped the bottom of desperation. Violence, theft, rape,... Crimes were everywhere. No one was there to stop it as government leaders disappeared, leaving gaping holes in the country's administrative structure. Everyone thought that humanity would have gone extinct but after three years since the firsts Blackening, the incidence slowed down and came to a halt.

It was naively thought that Blackening was entirely gone until everyone knew that they were dead wrong. The world finally calmed down for around 5 years, but like a terrible chronic disease, Blackening reoccured one after one. People again started to become desperate and demanded an answer.

In such a situation. the remaining scientists, with the help of AI's computational simulations, convened to research on the cause. A shocking model was created. Only 6.626% of the current population since 2017 still remained on Earth, but that number signified something more than that. It seemed like whenever the population was under that number, Blackening would not happen as if it was never there. However, when it went over that threshold, Blackening came back like a grim reaper, ripping away loved ones from families and friends.

From that fact, the remaining survivors came together and create an administration that oversees what was left of humankind, to protect them from harm and chaos, to control their population so that no one will die without a cause. They named it reB.O.R.N. Reconstruction Enhancer: Birth Observer, Restricter and eNabler.

Humanity almost got extinct, but they stood up and went against the odds, reborn into a new life. Of course, the journey going to that process was not as steady as it seemed. One of the most traumatized experiences to humanity was the Meltdown Disaster that had happened 2 years after Blackening. There was a genius hacker with code name Uvuec. Distraught and enraged by an incident where his wife was brutally raped and murder on the street under the indifference of bystanders, he hacked into every countries' power system and created a massive power surge at a global scale. Under his attack, every Nuclear Reactors around the world went under meltdown and there was no one there to stop it. An enormous amount of leaked radioactive went into the atmosphere, traveling through the weather pattern and spread to every corner of Earth. 80% of humanity was wiped out due to radioactive contamination over the course of one year. It was horrifying how an entity could affect significantly many others. After that, the world's atmosphere became deadly radioactive, preventing any life form, if any left, to survive. People had to live under radioactive insulated buildings or districts that were covered by insulated glass domes

For now, the used to be 7.2 billion became 440 million. The current population grouped into sectors with 40 million each, there were 11 sectors in total that span across the world. Blackening Buildings of Hallaway city was in Sector 9. It was one of the few districts that were able to survive the aftermath of the first Blackening event, but such event had imprinted deeply into the mind of the residents that one by one they started to move away from the omen. After some time, the remaining residents were just the most destitute ones out of all. And because of that, no one gave much attention to the infrastructure, giving off the current dilapidated appearance of Alan's neighborhood.

Now back to Alan's reality, he still had dazed look around his empty room, trying to figure out some ways to kill time but in no vain. His eyes lingered on the old guitar leaning neatly at the corner of his bedroom but he gave up on it immediately. That old hag would start nagging non-stop if he let any sound leak out into her room at this time of the day. He tried to read some books, which was a rare antique nowadays, down to take a quick look at it. But he put it down 10 minutes later after his eyes gave in to the seemingly dancing small words. He could not help it, it was like that every time he tried to read without the Auto Corrective Dyslexic software which of course was out of his affordability.

Alan looked out of blurry his air-tight window, it was almost dawn and the sun was sluggishly pull itself up from the horizon. Within his vision, there was another entirety that was as bright and as massive as the sun laying at the horizon. Covered by a layer of reflective cover, the glass dome looked like an enlarged giant fish tank laying upside down, protecting what underneath of it. With a bitter-sweet experience, he could not help himself from thinking about her. Maybe she was sleeping, how good it would it had been if I could bring her with me to Rainbow District. Alan thought to himself. Of course, life was not that easy, resources were still limited post-apocalypse as wants and needs were unlimited at any period of time. No one would want a frail, terminally-ill girl anyway. It was of great luck that she had not been "expelled" yet. Alan knew that it was because of his influence as a "Primus Atlatus" and this made him anxious to keep up with that title for her. Alan had never tried this hard before, but for her, he would do everything.

Alan's eyes shone determinedly. He resolutely suited up, putting up the glamorous uniform that he kept carefully in his wardrobe. When he took it out, the well-tailored, hi-tech uniform was disproportional with the room. It was not exaggerated to say the uniform was the most luxurious out of all the things he had ever had. He still could not forget the time when the principal gave him this uniform on the first day he got to school, the honor of being the "Primus Atlatus". The title of being the best elite out of the entire year-group in Gregorian School of Elites, Rainbow District. In his orphanage and destitute life, besides #####L, this uniform was one of the small things that kept him from having a mental breakdown.

Careful and slowly, Alan slid himself into the uniform. Looking at the mirror, there was a tall 17-year-old suave young man. His face was not exquisitely handsome but pleasant to the eyes. His squared jaws' lines in combination with his bright brown eyes accentuated his masculine stubbornness. And with his medium undercut, it fits perfectly with his tight-fit and tempered body under his dashing uniform.

He breathed deeply, 7 seconds in and 7 seconds out. His chest moved up and down under the compression and relaxation of his large lungs. He felt odd, felt a bit dejavu. For some unknown reason, he felt like he had experienced this scenario before. He dismissed it immediately though, as he thought that it was not something worth thinking about.

Instead, he put his hand on his heart and mumbled:

-ERP activate.

A thin, transparent layer rapidly covered his entire body, sticking tightly to his skin. Fragile as it might be seen, it was good enough to block ionizing radiation, which was equivalent to a protection of a 12 meters thick of concrete wall. But it also acted as a semi-permeable membrane where only oxygen and carbon dioxide can travel through. Apparently, the embedded Environmental Radiation Protector was the reason behind the extravagance of Alan's uniform. Even with the current technology, common people would only wear the out-dated Hazmat suit when traveling under the deadly radioactive air.

To Alan though, today was like every day. Another day to struggle to survive for him and for his beloved.