Tales of the Apocalypse, #1
Forty years since the apocalypse.
Mark, unfortunately, had been born well past it.
Long before, advancements in medicine had helped us look better, be better.
There had been pills and procedures for pretty much anything.
Everyone could restore their hair, fix their teeth, cure their ailments.
As a result, natural selection had evolved, making it easier for each and every individual to reproduce, to breed, regardless of their original shortcomings.
The genes, however, were still there.
And Mark had been born past the apocalypse and had never had access to such technological advancements.
On the other hand, Mark wasn’t familiar with them either and, as such, he figured that it was normal that he was losing his hair as the years went by, or that the pain on his lower back was getting harder to endure.
When he finally met the other party, who had never been deprived of technology, he was overcome by a mixture of emotions.
At first, he was amazed: full heads of hair, beautifully aligned white teeth, strong, fit, tall.
Nothing like him: bald, crooked teeth, short and, quite frankly, a bit ugly in comparison, as a result of an absence of skin treatments.
Then, he felt something else, as he realized that they either felt pity or disgust towards him.
Later, he’d feel the world had wronged him when he figured that these new people were also so much smarter, clever, knowledgeable. A product of treatments, implants, the right education, and other things he wouldn’t be able to understand.
Soon, he would gain access to some of those advancements as well, but not all, mostly due to his age.
Plus, some things couldn’t be changed through technology, such as his manners and personality.
The others were so much nicer, so much calmer, so much more thoughtful.
Still, after all these years in the wild, all of that wouldn’t be what would hurt him the most.
It would just strike him hard that, with all those strangers around, Laura just didn’t seem interested in him anymore.
