Abigail

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. He said had been the same since before he could remember.

There were no trees dotting the horizon, no wildflowers strewn across happy meadows. All she could see was red skies and molten earth. Everything else had died out in the Big Before.

“I heard from your sister today,” he smiles.

A lie. As always. But a pretty one. And, oh! How her heart longs to believe him.

Instead, she does what she knows she must. She buries her emotion and replies tonelessly.

“How lovely.”

She blinks empty eyes.

Her life (if you could call it that) seemed to begin and end within the four, bare walls of his godforsaken room.

Father Time moved slowly here, she noticed. Perhaps he was lost in grief? Forever ruined by the memory of Mother Earth’s brutal and violent demise, wrought by very ones she had sought to protect.

Maybe Father Time was dying too.

A broken heart could do that to you. She knew it better than anyone. Her own death had started the day her sister breathed her last breath.

Abigail was never like the rest of them. She was different from the beginning.

It was only days after they had opened their eyes that she noticed that he (along with everyone else from the Big Before) had a name and demanded that she have one too.

He let loose a barking laugh that startled the rest of them. Then he called her ‘Abigail’. It had a special meaning, he said.

Conceived in a test tube and grown in an incubator, Abigail should have been exactly like the rest of the livestock he had reared for the singular purpose of trying to save humanity. Abigail should have been like her. Docile.

But she wasn’t.

Instead, Abigail was full of those things that he had explained marked him as human – fear, joy, sorrow, jealousy, anger. She was brimming with them. And it had cost her life.

“What are you thinking?” he asks quietly.

Lost in thought, she hadn’t felt the weight of his watchful gaze. Had she been on the verge of betraying her emotion?

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!

She reigns it back in. Tightly packing the best of herself in a box that she keeps hidden; shut away from his prying eyes.

“Nothing much at all.”

The light overhead casts a sterile beam.

The day Abigail first called her ‘sister’ was the happiest of her short existence. No longer alone, she was something to someone and she had felt its full effect – thank goodness he hadn’t been there at the time!

She remembers the feeling of her tears, hot and wet, cutting a streaky path down her face. She remembers the overwhelming and totally unfamiliar feeling of joy.

But that was all gone now. Gone with Abigail.

Right before he killed her sister, he had gathered them all together.

“Abigail is proof that you are our greatest hope,” he had said.

She can still remember the warmth of his hand as he caressed her face gently – almost lovingly – as Abigail looked on with flashing eyes.

“That’s why I’m sending Abigail to live in the colonies.”

He promised that the rest of Abigail’s sisters could eventually follow her. That they, too, had begun showing signs of their humanity, and that it would not be long before would travel to the colonies to join her to experience the earth’s last surviving beauties.

“Say your goodbyes.”

Abigail made her way around the room, saving her until last. When she reached her, she clutched at her shoulders, pulling her into a vicious hug.

“Do not cry,” Abigail whispered so that no one else could hear. “Do not show your emotion. Or he will kill you like he is about to kill me.”

“I promise, I will not.”

Then Abigail let go and turned to leave with him, without another look.

One by one, each of her sisters had ‘followed’ Abigail. She had done her best to warn them against the dangers of their own emotion without scaring them, but in the end, every one of them had fallen.

Now she was the only one left.

Inside, her heart was an open, gaping wound. Every single moment, of every single day, all she longed to do was cry. But she could not. She would not.

She had a promise to keep.

---

When a virus that infected only women threatened the survival of our species, the world erupted in war, decimating its already dwindling population further still. Only when it was nearly over for good, did we finally turn to science.

That’s when the Eve project was born.

For decades, they shut themselves away in the last laboratory in a bid to contain the rapidly mutating virus. Day and night they laboured, the view from their solitary aboveground window a sad reminder of humanity's race against extinction.

Our heroes. The scientists. Those who dedicated what was left of their own lives, desperately trying to save the rest of ours.

Their first attempts to create laboratory-grown, virus-resistant women yielded subjects that were human in body only.

They were dealt with accordingly.

There was an outcry of course, but these soulless specimens didn’t hold our sympathies for long. Their lack of anything akin to human emotion was unnerving, but it was their empty eyes that troubled us most of of all.

Finally, though, one scientist found success. He named her ‘Abigail’, which means ‘her father’s joy’.

---

Abigail was the first of her sisters to arrive in New Eden, the last, unscathed pocket of the planet. For 472 days Abigail has revelled in the beauties of nature. She has bathed in cool streams. She has slept in peaceful clearings under black, night skies full of stars. She has bitten into fruit so deliciously ripe that sticky rivulets of juice have dribbled down her chin. Each of these joys is only surpassed by the arrival of another one of her sisters.

Now, there is just one missing.

As each new girl arrives, Abigail feels a little worse about the lie she told in petty jealousy before leaving the laboratory. But she always brushes the feeling away. Everyone makes mistakes.

“And, really,” she thinks, “It's only human.”