Read Genesis: A science-fiction short story. for Free Online

eyes. “It’s lovely, you should show it to Kate, too.”
    Maggie expression bounces up from puzzlement back to happiness; the swift change of emotion that only a child can experience. She bounds away, happily, as Caroline sits down on the kitchen floor and leans herself up against the cabinets, just out of view. There, she cries, as quietly as she can.
     
     
     
     
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    It was called Aquion; one of those meaningless old-world brand names that could be anything from prescription laxatives to bottled water. Nestled within the murky comfort of an immense and hollow man-made infrastructure, positioned off the thin, jagged edge of the Antarctic, sat a thousand voluminous metal spiders, dark tendrils sliding down into the oily depths.
    It wasn’t the power source itself that important: it was what it powered and what it represented. The Aquion network was what powered the domes. What had begun as a network of cloistered scientific labs had become mankind’s only shelter against the fickle wrath of nature. And within these domes was something of even greater power: the res stations.
    The aged and the damaged; they crossed exquisite plastic marble floors to be accepted by the hauntingly youthful and attractively androgynous lab technicians, all dressed in white; the color of science. Patients were then—after a brief insurance and identification check—guided to an empty pod wherein they would become renewed.
    Skin, fat, muscle and bone; all of this would be removed in the res. The machine took everything but the neural networks, the stuff of the soul—as much as we could presume.
    An entirely new body, an entirely new being, would be layered upon these shuddering, twisted wires of biology. The finest molecular technology coated and rebuilt them, layer by layer, straight from an original scan usually taken on their 21st birthday.
    They were created completely anew, not a wrinkle or a fat cell out of place... assuming they took the recommended precautions before their scan. It was all covered in the readme doc issued to every citizen’s anno once they reached adulthood.
    I tied my long, now gray hair back, and dressed myself in the papery robe ubiquitous to all medical facilities. It rustled against my skin.
    I was one of the original sixteen scientists who had been originally tasked with, and had ultimately completed, the res project. We were scientists in the labs long before the deep freeze. The generators were our predecessor’s invention and the only thing that had kept humanity alive after the war. To prove ourselves to our metaphorical parents, we had created life after death.
    We may, in retrospect, have slightly overreached.
    There were only four of us left alive from the original experiments: myself, Sara, Jake and Cheli. Though we randomly attached others, our core group ultimately remained the same, stuck through time.
    Originally, our group had been composed primarily of men. But with immortality, one’s greatest enemy became statistics. Men were more likely to die by accident than women, and women were more likely to die from old age.
    In theory.
    I was at my fourth stage, and preparing to molt. I sat on the ridiculously cold table, and it felt like the first time again. You never quite got past that unsettling, desperate feeling of dread.
    Actually, it intensified.
    The nameless doctor walked in as I absently took off my jewelry, placing it on the tray in front of me. I remembered to unwrap my anno from my left wrist. My arm felt strangely light and ethereal without its weight. The doctor fiddled with the screen embedded in the machine, and then sent me a glance and a nod. I reclined onto the table.
    Soon I would be stripped of all the unnecessary—flesh, sinew and bone—until all that would remain would be my