first mutant

History will remember July 17^th, 2024 as the day everything changed. On that day, a young boy of 14, we’ll call him John, suffered what the experts like to say spontaneous cryogenesis. If you can’t puzzle that out, he froze up, along with everything around him, including a nurse. The vid showed every part of the hospital room frozen solid. Not just frost along the walls, more like an ice cube. He had been admitted to a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona 4 days earlier. He wasn’t the first mutant to appear, and his existence would have been kept a secret like all the others except for coincidence.

            On that day, at that moment, a local reporter was visiting the hospital. She was outside the room when it happened and as luck would have it, had her trusty hand recorder at the ready and set up to stream to her blog. The event spread across the web in minutes, along with all the theories you will here. She kept recording until the ice started to melt, 4 hours later. Speculation says that’s when John finally died, possibly of asphyxiation.

            After that the lid was blown wide open and information started seeping from the shadows. No one is saying how long mutants had existed before this event; months, maybe even years. In the following months at least a dozen events were reported while panic ensued. Experts arguing about facts they new little about. Preachers quoting the end of the world, claiming mutants were demon-born or some nonsense. Others claiming it was all a hoax. The few rational voices trying to figure out what to do about their kids turned living catastrophe were drown out.

            That was what, three years ago. A lot has happened since then. A few disasters got the community up in arms. Most of the names have been forgotten, we just give em our own names. Not mutant names though. For example, little Amy was shopping at the mall with her parents in Chicago. Rumor says she got in an argument with her mom, but her screams started shrill like a normal 13 year old girl, and then turned super sonic. The death toll was in the hundreds most of the mall was reduced to rubble. No one could get near her to stop her until finally she was silenced by the collapsing roof.

There was no chance really, for those who wanted to protect us. That still saw us as kids; their kids. Fear and paranoia always win out. Spook squads had already been operating in the shadows, but it wasn’t long until they came out in the open. If that wasn’t bad enough, some preachers started organizing witch hunts, claiming we were demons. Then there’s the private citizens that form up militias and hunt us, either out of fear or sport.