Chapter 1: No Matter What it Takes
1414 Words
*Ring*Ring*
A man turned his head to his phone as he heard it ring.
He picked it up and noticed an alarm that he set has rung.
"It's already morning?"
The man frowned. He dismissed the alarm and tossed his phone to the side as he continued working.
There were various test tubes and chemicals on his desk while the man himself is looking through a microscope.
Suddenly, a synthetic voice rang out from his phone.
"Sir Luke. You need to eat."
"Shut it Athena. I'll eat when I'm done."
"You haven't eaten for three days. At this rate, your body will give in before you can finish!"
Luke didn't say anything and merely tapped on his phone to shut her up.
Athena is an Artificial Intelligence that Luke had created to assist himself in his project. As for why he didn't hire other people instead, it was because he didn't trust humans at all.
Correction, there was one human he did trust. However, that person is now dead.
Without her, Luke felt as if the world has ended.
It may sound dramatic but to Luke, she was the only person that mattered.
Luke was an orphan. He grew up without a mother or a father and had lived in the orphanage since he was a baby.
He was named Luke as it was quite common to name children from his orphanage with names of saints and angels.
As a child, he didn't talk much or played with others. He was always alone, looking at the sky as if thinking about something meaningful.
At first, the people from the orphanage tried to 'help' him. However, they all eventually gave up and left him alone.
Like that, 10 years had passed with no one bothering him.
One day, a priest led him to some strange people. They are looking to adopt him, he said. But Luke saw those strange people give the priest a few stacks of green paper as they exchanged him with smiles on their faces.
Then, he was forced to work.
He was thrown onto the streets, begging for money and food.
The food, he took a bite then hid the remaining. The money, he handed to those strange people.
If he didn't do so, he would be beaten.
For five years, he was treated as less than a human being.
Finally, the police caught the strange people and Luke was free. But without any parents, he was once again thrown back to another orphanage.
Not even a week has passed, he was once again 'given' to strange people who wanted to 'adopt' him.
There, he was taught how to make drugs.
Luke worked without any emotions on his face but he worked seriously so he wasn't beaten as much.
Although Luke didn't have any education, he was a genius.
An amazing genius in fact.
Those years he spent on his first ten years, he has learned how to speak, read, and write just by watching the priests and nuns.
The five years he spent begging for food and money, he listened to various chatters and information from the people who passed him. He learned how the world worked.
Now that he was taught how to make drugs, he learned about chemicals, elements, and their reactions to one another.
When he isn't taking or making drugs, he learned some more.
Luke absorbed everything like a sponge on water.
Finally, after five more years, he was able to make a bomb from the various materials he had been saving up.
The whole operation exploded while he escaped.
He was once again free.
He was 20 years old and finally able to start his life the way he wanted it.
As he was about to start this new life of his, he came across her.
He found a woman who only looked a bit younger than him being dragged by some thugs to an alley.
Luke sighed.
Even though he was free, he had learned one thing after all those years.
Humans are ugly beings.
But...are they all?
Luke sighed. he decided to give humanity another chance.
He saved the girl...although he was beaten quite a bit, the girl managed to escape.
Luke laid in that alley all alone with bruises and cuts on his body as he bled.
Just as he was about to close his eyes and rest, he heard footsteps approaching.
"Hey! I've called the ambulance! Please don't die!"
"...You came back..."
"What do you mean? Of course, I would!"
"..."
Luke showed a small smile for the first time.
For a while, he was hospitalized and the girl took care of him.
In that time, Luke had finally seen a small light in his dark world.
The two of them fell in love with each other. But her parents didn't agree.
She belonged to a wealthy family. The two of them were not meant to be.
However, the girl wanted to be with him. While having an argument with her parents in their house, there was an accident.
Maybe their fight got a bit too heated up, as they shouted at each other, the girl tripped and fell down the stairs.
When the news reached Luke, he sunk into despair.
However, he didn't snap at the family.
He laid low...started from the bottom, then reached the top.
In a short seven years, he, who was dirt poor at the start, now became one of the wealthiest men alive.
He created Athena, the self-growing Artificial Intelligence which earned him a Nobel Award.
He also made various breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and other related fields.
Luke Black. The genius of the century.
Luke used Black as his surname because of something that girl said to him in the past.
She said she liked his black hair a lot and would often stroke it while he's sleeping.
Since Lucas didn't have any surnames to attach himself, he simply used Black as his surname just like that.
Right after achieving success, he used his connections to acquire everything that the girl's parents owned. Soon, they were forced to bankruptcy, and their family crumbled with no property attached to their names.
It was his revenge for her death.
After finally achieving his revenge, he started focusing on his next and final project...the resurrection of her.
Reviving the dead is something one can only see in fiction and movies. But Luke thinks that it is possible.
He studied various chemicals and DNAs of various animals and managed to synthesize a compound.
He first tested on rats.
After injecting the compound on the dead rat, the rat...woke up!
But something went wrong.
When the rat reawakened, it started acting strange.
It ate the other rats in its container and it started displaying increased strengths.
Luke burned it and started his next experiment.
For three years, he continued to experiment on dead animals but none have achieved any success.
They do indeed go back to life, but they are not able to retain their sense of rationality.
Luke had also started to use dead humans to experiment on.
Like the animals, the dead humans rose as well. However, they acted sluggishly yet their strengths had increased.
When Luke throws meat into their cages, they don't eat it.
But when Luke throws an animal that's still alive, they would all pounce on it like hungry savages.
From this, Luke can tell that these creatures are attracted to living things, but not as food.
Yes, they bite at it, but it is more of an instinctual action than an act of 'hunger'.
After the animal died, they would lose interest in it and the dead animal...would rise up as well.
Right, Luke had created zombies...
Luke continued to study their DNA, hoping to find a way to effectively revive people without other side effects.
He sighed and got up from his seat to eat.
As Athena said, if he doesn't take care of himself, he won't be able to continue working.
He was about to head out to eat but first, he stopped by a certain room.
In that room, it was as cold as the arctic.
A cylinder container can be seen in the middle of the room, its surface was frosted from the cold.
Luke walked over and wiped the surface of the cylinder, revealing the contents inside.
A woman could be seen in the middle, frozen.
"Just wait...I will definitely bring you back...no matter what it takes..."
- Writer
