Luhan doesn’t know much about the Great War, he’d stopped paying attention to retelling after retelling of the story when he was young. He just knows it started in 2100 and lasted fifty years. He doesn’t know if it was a territorial dispute that caused it, or if it might have been another country trying to assert It’s dominance. He just knows that it set the foundation for Caelum. It was the after effects of the Great War that had country and person united under one government and the ones that hadn’t were either wiped out or were too insignificant to care about.

Luhan was born in 2175, 25 years after the war ended. His father was a war veteran, he’d joined the last efforts when he was 16 and helped Caelum become the country Luhan knew well.

Perfection, the gene, which engineers had tried to create in time with the war to make superior soldiers, was completed for human testing in the year Luhan was born. The first prototype, the answer to gene evolution had finally been finished.  It had promised to strengthen immune systems, senses, and the mind’s abilities. The first users, Luhan and the other children whose mothers died to give them such abilities were lauded. They were child prodigies until mid-2176 when a more stable Perfection gene came out and nearly every single person, except for the poor, got themselves injected with the gene.

In 2181, six years after the first prototype was released, the Imperfect genocide occured. The Great Ruler accused the Imperfects, the children and adults without the Perfect gene, of being against the state. Half of Luhan’s classmates stopped going to school, and on the news there were images of men women and children being rounded up, handcuffs around their wrists, most sick and fragile looking.

They were animals, rebels against the order, and a danger to the foundation of man. They were monsters. Luhan remembers the fights, the riots that began and continued until over 3/4 of the world’s Imperfects were either dead or imprisoned.

The remaining 25% begun to hide in the cracks of the larger cities like vermin. They had no rights regarding them, nothing that kept them safe from abuse and thus the reason why most of the Red-light districts were filled with them.

The others were rebels, Red Devils, is what the media called them, Luhan never knew if that was their official name. He does remember watching a public execution of a high member on television before.

He remembers the words spilling from the gruff man’s lips, their slogan or chant, or whatever it was had scared 12 year old Luhan at the time. He’d watched as the bearded man glared straight into the cameras, arms behind his back as the silver metal of the handcuffs cut into his thick wrists. He stood beside a noose, and then as he’d begun to speak the executioner hung the noose around his neck.

The cameraman of the channel Luhan was watching zoomed in so that Luhan could get a good look at the guy, with grey-green narrowed eyes, and spit clinging to his lips as he shouted to the crowd. He’d dropped then, after his speech, and Luhan continued to watch as the man’s body convulsed his face turning a bright red and his eyes watering from the pain. Eventually he saw the light leave the man’s eyes, saw the way his body sagged into itself as he remained swaying, lifelessly.

More than the image of the death, the words the man spoke was the thing that kept him up with nightmares, the thing that brought a fire into his heart for his remaining years.

We are the resistance, the rebels, the spirits of the burned books, and parents of dead children. We are the marginalized society, the Imperfects, and we won’t stop till perfection is dead. We won’t quit till the sky is red and ripe, and the blood of our oppressors runs through the city streets.

This is meant to give you some background on the society Luhan is living in.