Gears of Freedom

The shrieking wail of the newborn cut through the chaos like a banshee's cry. Amidst the roiling clouds of black smoke and screams of the dying, one fragile new life had been violently thrust into the world, as if the universe demanded a witness to this atrocity. In the makeshift nursery compartment, Zen's mother went ashen and lifeless, her glazed eyes forever frozen in an expression of pure terror from the toxic miasma flooding the room. The system monitoring her vitals let out a flatline alarm, then shut down as its own systems succumbed to the paralytic agent. There on the obsidian slab, umbilical cord still connected to his mother's corpse, lay baby Zen convulsed and thrashed. His cries escalated in desperation as the poisonous clouds thickened around his fragile form. Tiny fists flailed, as if the newborn could somehow beat away the encroaching apocalypse claiming his first gasps of life. Outside the nursery, the nightmarish landscape of the processing facility's main chamber could have shattered the most hardened mind. The industrial intake halls, which normally pulsed with the drumbeat cadence of worker drones being processed, now descended into a hellscape of death and ruin. Hundreds, if not thousands, of inert bodies carpeted the ground - a ungodly sprawl of lifeless gray fabric punctuated by contorted faces and clawing hands eternally frozen in their last agonized gestures. Haze thickened the air into an abyssal miasma, concealing smoldering equipment fires spreading in weaving tendrils of smoke. Flashes of weaponized ordnance and energy pulse detonations strobe-lit the whole horrific scene in glimpses of chiaroscuro dread. And stalking impassively through the blackened corridors amidst the unfolding c*****e - the shrouded, gaunt silhouettes of the genocidal eviscerators who had enacted this terrible vengeance. Their oscillating smoke generators continued saturating any remains of viability as they tracked through the ruin like specters of a nihilist fever dream. Zen's wails intensified to a piercing, plaintive shriek, as if he somehow perceived the implacable nightmare fate had settled upon his entrance to the world. His flailing limbs began slowing, each fitful twitch weaker than the last as the toxins seeped into his minuscule body. Soon he would join the teeming ranks of the newly dead, purged from existence before ever tasting life's cruelties. That's when one of the gray-cloaked nightmares stalked into the nursery, its elongated face concealed behind a breath mask. The robed figure paused beside Zen's biostation, almost seeming to study the convulsing newborn with a c****d tilt of its deathly silhouette. Its bone-thin hands reached for something at its belt. Then the figure froze, paralyzed by a sound which should have been drowned amid the ambient cacophony - a soft, descending tonality amidst the madness. Whirling, it detected the noise's source near the accouched entrance. A second hooded silhouette stood waiting with measured calm, bulky object clutched in its grasp. As the first turned towards this newcomer, it realized what the artifact was just as the weapon's discharge detonated in a shredding plasma-bloom of actinic forces. The smell of seared flesh joined the turgid, deathly atmosphere as the first figure reeled, gargling a final pneumatic choke of disbelief. It slammed into a bio-prep table, toppling it over in a noisy clatter before collapsing to the obsidian floor. Its cloaked form bucked erratically for several moments, limbs fibrillating in lingering shock, until finally falling shudderingly still forever. Through the clearing smoke pall, the second robed figure stepped forward, shrouded head pivoting slowly to take in the smoldering remains of its counterpart. Its piercing stare continued roving, coming to rest at last upon the source of the newborn squalls still defiantly rending the air. The weapon lowered fractionally as the faceless mask focused on Zen's writhing form. Then, almost contemplatively, the figure reached up and retracted its cowl with a single fluid motion. A sculpted masculine face was revealed beneath the hood - shadowed, implacable features sizing up the last living soul in this morgue of industrialized human efficiency. The man's piercing emerald eyes locked with Zen's wide, unfocused black orbs as the baby's cries tapered into a weak whimpering. Something inexpressible shifted behind that mesmerizing, wolfen stare. Some unbearable compulsion to defy the eradication he had so clinically enacted all around them. Moving with grim purpose, the revealed figure crossed over to the bio-station, taking a portable oxybreathing unit along the way. He keyed in a sequence, activating the sealed pod and engaging its lockdown inoculation mode. Air began cycling back into the chamber, slowly purging the lingering toxins as the transparent canopy sealed over the tiny occupant. Zen's whimpers grew stronger, his minuscule chest expanding with each precious gulp of clean oxygen now circulating. The hooded figure knelt beside the bio-station, one calloused palm pressing against the oxybreathing unit in quiet observation. The baby's dark eyes drifted towards the imposing figure looming over his confined sanction, seeming to study the savior's face in uncomprehending appreciation. Then Zen let out a thin, reedy wail - this time absent the previous shrillness of suffering, but an almost resigned cry for direction in this desolated world pervaded by demise. The ghost-pale man recoiled fractionally at the sound's naked vulnerability, then steadied himself. "Be at peace, young one," he spoke through the vocorder integrated into his breather. His deep baritone resonance emerged amplified and dispassionate, belying any hint of comforting humanity. "You did not choose the circumstances into which you've been bathed, but I can envision you threading a life's journey through this carving immensity to come." His free hand found the weapon at his side once more as his aspect almost seemed to fold inward in reflection. "You are now the sole inheritor of both our transgressions and transcendental sins. Our crusades have forged you an existence imbrued with such infinite promise and peril, I can scarcely divine which energies truly delivered you unto this crucible." Through the stillness, the howls and fading shrieks of the mortally forsaken filtered in from other sectors, providing a haunting undersong to the man's soliloquy. "But since in this entropic abattoir only you remain to inherit the shattered continuum, I name you Zen - for yours shall be a lifelong quest to articulate harmony amid chaos." The hunter's countenance seemed to harden with forlorn finality. "And in this, I anoint your path...Orphan of the Sabled Purge."