The air is crisp and cool like the steel and titanium skeleton holding me together. As I sit at my desk, observing each person passing by the one-way mirrored partition that separates my lab from the busy hallway of Epogee, I marvel at all that I’ve accomplished without ever being seen. I wonder if they know who dwells behind these walls? The truth is, most have no clue that I am the mastermind behind the buzz and chatter surrounding this company as of late. Instead, when I encounter them each day on my way into the lab, I’m aware that they never notice the tall, dark woman with the fuzzy, waist-length tentacles dangling from her scalp, wearing the white lab coat, who has never called off. The woman who’s poured more of herself into this company than all of them combined. But, I didn’t do it to be noticed or acknowledged. I did it for my people, and today I will be rewarded in ways more than their awards and recognition could ever yield. So, as I sit here, I can’t help but smile as I await the culmination of all of my efforts. Today is a means to an end.
It’s been five years since they stole him from me. It’s been five long years since they stole the promise of hope and revolution from a world in dire need of the many changes that only he could bring. The only person on earth capable of initiating a technological and evolutionary disruption that would bring the most elite to their knees and the most in need into power was exterminated with less care than vehicles give squirrels on the roadway. Five years ago to the day, they murdered my lover, the only one with the heart and will to deliver his people and mine from the oppression that plagues us. But, he’s gone now, and as Earth continues to hurtle through space and time on a course toward its demise, continuing the work that he started to save our people is the only reason I pour into this company at all.
My ancestors arrived on this planet as refugees. My mother was fleeing tyranny from leaders on our home planet, only to be met with similar if not worse circumstances here on earth. If only we had known the young blue world we knew so little about would harbor more prejudice toward us than the tyrants we left behind, due solely to the color of our skin, maybe we would’ve gone elsewhere. My people are not like the humans with dark skin who preexist us in this world--Black people. No, we are much darker, and everything about us is much larger than the humans who live here. We are giants in a foreign land, but it’s our melanin derived from the five suns that heat our planet that the humans in power hate the most.
Initially, we were captured and caged. But, once they discovered our abilities, the ruling elite immediately found a use for us in their societies. They call us the Obsidians, but our actual name is the Meiyechu, the people of many suns. Now, here we are, doing our best to navigate a world in which most have no plans to accept us as their own. Despite the seventy-five years we’ve been here, following human laws and adapting to human social standards, we are only welcome in Black communities, but even they know we are not exactly the same. Still, we get along peacefully with most of them, some of us forging interspecies relationships that have resulted in a new hybrid species. I am one of the firstborn of such a relationship.
So, it is for my people that I put on this invisibility cloak and slave away at a corporation that pays me pennies on every dollar they get for my ideas and innovation. Therefore, it’s no surprise to me that as I sit here, waiting to meet with the man I vowed to kill five years ago, he hasn’t the slightest idea who I am, and that’s exactly how I like it.
For the past ten years, I’ve developed the perfect plan of action—one so unsuspecting that the potential for failure is impossible. I positioned myself strategically, expertly implementing the art of stealth, a skill I’d honed through years of arduous training and observation. I dedicated myself to a task so genius that they would never dare to acknowledge the Black hybrid-woman behind it all. But, in this case, it’s fine with me.
My lover, Dr. Jonathan Wade, was one of the world’s most renowned innovators. He was on the verge of revealing one of the most significant scientific discoveries the world would ever see when he was murdered by one of his closest colleagues, Teffrin Bane. Bane is the CEO of Epogee Enterprises, the world’s leader in AI weapons engineering. A little over ten years ago, Jonathan came into possession of a legendary codex believed to have been created by an extraterrestrial source. Years earlier, the codex was uncovered during a secret exhibition of Mayan ruins. Once properly decoded, rumors began to spread about its power to give anyone who possessed it the ability to create life or end it at will. In essence, whoever had it would become a god on earth.
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