There are things in this world I can work for, plan for, put effort into aside the toil of each day's duty. I asked for love, for health, for happiness, for everything that really mattered to my hearts.
Nature's beauty comes as if she is God's daydream. She taught me to look closely at the world, and in doing so, I finally learned how to look kindly at myself. Naturally, nature's ally.
I looked like I'd spent the afternoon arranging ikebana instead of lying on my back in the meadow, perfecting the art of emptying my head. There was only so much trigonometry I could take before I needed a wide open sky and fistful of wildflowers.
They hadn't built a better human, and they hadn't engineered a better beast. They had opened a door to a biological tier that rendered humanity obsolete—a Mutant that viewed the food chain as a suggestion rather than a law.
In the old world, survival was about adaptation. You grew thicker fur for the winter. You developed a sharper beak for the seeds. You played the game and you hoped the house didn't win. But as the climate collapsed and the oceans soured, the house stopped playing fair.
Centuries later, a jagged tooth of chrome and hubris where the final embers of humanity’s "Golden Age" flickered. They spent decades trying to map the soul, but ended up just stitching together biological anomalies that the natural world had spent eons trying to prevent.