Keary Taylor: The Eve

Once upon a timethere was an intelligent, beautiful young woman. Her hair was blond, her eyes a cross between gray and blue. She had sharp features and a small but strong frame. But her intelligence outweighed all else. She excelled in the field of science. She studied hard in school and then she secured the job she had always dreamed of.

She was helping to save the world. They were engineering a technology that was going to save and improve so many lives. She believed in what she was doing.

There was a boy, outside of work. Whether it was like, lust, or love, she wasn’t entirely sure. Sometimes he was there, most of the time he wasn’t. Then she found out she was pregnant with twins.

This did not hinder her work. For a while. She told no one at first, kept it a secret so as not to risk losing her job. But eventually her stomach grew disproportional to the rest of her body. Everyone found out. And while she was scolded and looked down upon by some people, she kept her job. She kept working towards what she believed in. She had worked so hard to see this dream actualized.

There were complications with the pregnancy. Her blood pressure was too high, she was swelling. Things were happening too early. She shouldn’t have kept the babies; that was what she was told. But those babies were all she had in this world. She had no siblings of her own, her parents were long gone, and the father was out of the picture, this time for good.

So she kept those babies, let them grow inside her.

Their arrival was early and brutal. There was blood, there were tiny pink and blue slimy bodies.

The mother took her last gasping breath as she saw her two daughters for the first and only time.

She was laid to rest not far from the place she had dedicated her life to and the babies were watched over at all hours.

One baby, though small, seemed healthy.

The other, it seemed, would not live past her first week.

Her lungs couldn’t function. They were underdeveloped and weak. Her heart couldn’t pump fast enough to keep up with the demands of the world outside the womb. Each and every day she grew weaker.

But a Man of Science, one the child’s mother had worked with, had been watching her, knowing he had to do something to help. He had an answer but it had yet to be approved, to be cleared for official testing.

He couldn’t just let the tiny child die though.

So in the dead of the night, when the babies’ nurse was distracted, he slipped into the nursery and administered an injection.

Just a tiny dosage. Barely enough to be measurable.

The child was too weak to even cry at the sharp prick. A small twitch of the leg and that was all.

The Man of Science pressed a kiss to the child’s forehead and left the room. He didn’t sleep that night.

By morning, the infant’s vitals were improving. It was just fractionally, but she should not have been getting better. The nurses and doctors couldn’t explain it, but the Man of Science smiled from the back of the room.

The twin’s mother had helped him develop a way to save her child.

The following night he gave her another injection. And he continued them for the next two days. Four injections total.

Each and every day the child continued to improve.

She was going to live.

Others suspected what he had done but they knew better than to question. Questions would make the actions real and known, and for now what was done had to be kept secret.

He named each of the girls Eve. The child who had been born healthy would be known as Eve One, the other that he had saved was Eve Two. They were, after all, the first of their kind.

Two, who had been given injections, was studied, watched, and revered. And the technology that had saved her continued to creep towards approval.

The children grew, One more quickly than Two. They ate, they slept, they lived.

But there were complications that later manifested in One, the child that had been born healthy.

She wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t keep eye contact. She never smiled and she did not like to be touched.

The Man of Science’s son, a Man of Medicine, confirmed Eve One was autistic.

Questions started circulating. The technology had fixed Two. Could it help One as well?

Injections were given, once again behind closed doors and in hushed words. But she was given treatment.

It took a year to see the difference. But it was working, slowly. One improved. She learned to talk, learned to interact. She formed an inseparable bond with the Man of Medicine’s son. She still trusted few people, but always the Boy.

The Eve’s continued to grow and progress and to amaze and astonish. They were studied. And the technology continued to develop. Official testing was announced.

But then the government blackmailed the Man of Science and his course of direction was shifted.

The girls’ emotions and pain were stripped away.

They were given different kinds of tests.

Years went by and finally they were passed off to be kept and preserved when the blackmail money ran dry.

For two more years they simply existed, emotionless. They were given to a Keeper to be maintained.

The development of the technology was finally continued.

It was stronger, better, quicker. And required only a single dose.

The technology was finally ready for the public.

But not everyone agreed with what the Man of Science was doing. Man was not supposed to be combined with machine. Man was not to play God.

There was a plan laid under the Keepers nose. A carefully plotted one that had been developing for over a year. They infiltrated the company, gained trust, secrets, and information. When the time was right, they took one of the girls. She had trusted the traitor and went willingly outside.

The sun was so bright. She had never seen it before. The air was so fresh and cold.

She didn’t get to enjoy it for long though. She was pushed into a vehicle and a needle was pressed into her neck.

Then there was nothing but blackness.

When she woke, there was a set of doors before her. The world was fuzzy and too bright and there was something ringing in her ears that drowned everything else out.

The doors opened and people rushed outside to drag Eve Two back in.

When they reached the center of the building, shouts started rising into the air. Other men of science came running out of rooms.

People were dying. People who had been given the first dosage of the new, stronger technology. The technology was shorting out, and as it did, it shorted out their very lives.

Eve Two had been tampered with. The people who had taken her had put something in her head, something deadly to the technology. And she was killing everyone around her who had just received it.

Everyone went crazy. Eve Two was scared—one of the first emotions she had felt in years—and tried to hide, to escape.

And then her sister was there. Eve One raged, holding her hands against her head as if trying to keep it from splitting open. Maddened bellows poured from her mouth and her eyes were blood red from the damage being caused inside her body. She did, after all, have only a slightly different version of the technology that was being shorted out.

The Boy, the one that caused hatred and rage inside of Two, but was the only friend of One, came into the chaos, and not being able to tell the difference between One and Two in such a disordered moment, tried to comfort the wrong girl. Two tried to push him away as she attempted to hide. And even though One’s emotions were locked away, the heightened moment brought out jealousy and rage. She attempted to push Two away, but in the scuffle, nearly ripped the Boy’s windpipe from his throat.