I hate this place.
I shouldn’t, really. That’s what abuela would tell me. Then she would remind me of how she and Grandpapa had been captive and caged for years, little more than sentient lab rats, and that we should always be thankful for what freedoms we are given.
And maybe she’s right; after you spend so much of your life here, it does kind of grow on you. There are a few pleasant parks here and there, breaking up the monotony of concrete, steel, glass, and asphalt. Sometimes while you’re walking, a breeze will bring you some intoxicating fragrance or a flurry of blossoms from a tree nearby, and if you don’t follow it back you won’t have to see its branches desecrated with hanging effigies waiting for the night’s burning.
Or maybe the familiarity simply makes you numb. After all, it's not like we really have a choice. I've seen the people who didn't get used to it. They never last long.
Even the nice days somehow manage to drag your spirit down. You'd think that a warm spring day, with a clear blue sky and a cool breeze, would make you happy to just be alive, but here it's as if nature mocks us, taunting us with visions of what the world should be, what it is outside the walls of the city. Inside, it's the same fight as it always is: the strong fight to dominate, the weak fight to survive, and the rest of us fight to stay out of the way.
It's easier for people like me, I suppose. We were born here, so we never had anything else to compare it to. My first memories of my mother are of me clinging to her skirts in fright, listening to the screams of a woman below our apartment as a local gang raped her. I cried for hours afterwards, when they stopped. I don't even flinch when I hear them now.
I didn't understand until much later the complete unfairness of our lives. It was my grandparents who'd been sent here first, the last subjects of a failed Canadian genome project. Somewhere amid the scramble for cybernetic super soldiers and mankind's next level of evolution, someone got it into their heads to attempt splicing human and animal genes together.
It didn't work, at least not in the way they'd hoped. In their first attempt, the only attribute that transferred over was an almost uncontrollable feral nature. They kept trying, though, despite repeated failures and the deaths of many of their subjects, and towards the end of the project they had almost perfected the procedure, partially enhancing a few of their subject's senses in the best cases.
But then the war was halted, and the project scrapped. The few remaining subjects, my grandparents among them, were immediately imprisoned and shipped to this glorious cage they call Septu; though their 'treatment' had been finished, they had not yet been released, so their capture and relocation had been a simple process, allowing the governments involved to put a face of successful action on the situation while saving resources to continue their search for those earlier 'projects' that were no doubt striving to remain free.
