Starlight

Ten years.

Ten years have passed since the “War to End All Wars” began and two years since the ceasefire was called. Unlike most wars, the first to launch is unknown but the cost is seared into the memories of those who remain. Millions upon millions of lives lost, entire populations erased, all in the name of greed and pride. And although the war has come to a halt globally, civil unrest is nearing its peak.

In the center of the Texas capitol, a young woman walks the ruined streets as the sun sets behind the cityscape. She is clothed in a maroon hoodie with the logo of a wild cat, dark blue jeans and black Chucks. Her golden skin, where visible beneath alternating layers of dirt and grease, carries the warm of the Texas sun and her jet-black curls cloak her left eye, leaving its dark brown equal bare. She continues walking as her mind races struggling to recall what it is she is searching for. Every street sign she reads brings forth a fractured memory until, finally, she sees it:

“Brazos Street”

The sign lays torn from its post resting against the chain link fence of what was once a quaint one-story in the heart of downtown. She pushes through the door on its last hinge and past the rubble-filled living room to the door with the crooked “L” hanging from it. In the top drawer of the nightstand, she finds the heart-shaped locket, wrapped in cloth and remarkably unscathed.

As she unclasps the latch of the locket, the floorboards creak behind her and a shadowy outline enters the doorway. At first glance, he seemed an ordinary man, tall and thin, clad in an ordinary black suit, tie and dress shoes but the more you observe, the further from ordinary he became. His skin was extraordinarily pale from lack of exposure, fingernails long and yellowed from decades of smoking, thin cracked lips hid the decay of his crooked yellow teeth and his thin grey hair was slicked back despite the absence of product. The shadow surrounding him was not from a lack of light but rather an unnatural aura that distorted both the light and world around him, accompanied by what appears to be an endless cloud of billowing smoke.

“There is nowhere you can go that I won’t find you.” He said in a voice that was somehow a whisper and a howl, simultaneously.

“This place is no longer apart of you and you can never go back to who you were before. You are now and forever a SimilaReplicant. You are ‘SR-A1-1', the first of your kind and a creation of design, my harbinger of Death, programmed to obey. Did you really think I wouldn’t find you here of all places? You forget I was the one who purged you of these memories and the emotions embedded in them.”

The locket she now held in her left hand dangled by its chain, slowly spins to reveal its contents. On its right half, the portrait of a mother and father stand closely embraced with their daughter between them, her arms clinging to her father and her head adorned with jet-black curls.

As her left hand clutches the locket chain, her right arm leaves the pouch of the maroon hoodie. The sleeve starts to burn and disappear, the seams of her arm come undone and reconfigure, quadrupling their original size to form a high-powered photon cannon. The locket spins to reveal the inscription etched on the back:

Forever our little Starlight

Love Mom and Dad

She points her arm cannon at the man in the doorway and her lips part to speak.

“My name...is Luz.”