The Delta Project
Zac Strong
Copyright © 2021 Zackery Strong
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to those who look from more than one perspective.
Chapter 1
Every twenty to twenty-five years I lose my mind. A thin, charcoal-colored box suspended from the wall in front of your bed has managed to do the same in mere minutes. The screen lit with lies squawks angrily in my direction. The people inside, perfectly adorned in their riches, give the illusion that this program is life or death for me – that everything is on the line. Don’t believe them.
You’ll see it everywhere. It’s constantly broadcasted from every possible perspective. Fear. They aren’t even trying to hide the fact they lie. They infuse you with terror and anxiety just to get more views, to increase their ratings, while simultaneously selling you their mind-numbing formula to ease the disease they installed in you - modern capitalism at its best. They are using us. It’s all so fake too, insulting really. They go back to pompous lives of gold and freedom, their perfect, symmetric existence, while everyone else is stuck here living in each other’s paranoia, trapped in the never-ending loop of humanity.
Today’s injection? More of the same. Propaganda from Olympia praising the Delta Project one frequency, the next they threaten you with another story on a possible asteroid collision thirty years away. It’s moments like these I wish another one would hit. End all of our suffering in a fiery blaze, finish the job, ya know? If something crazy were to ever happen again, they have cried wolf so many times no one would believe them, at least not anyone I respect. How did something created with the sole purpose of informing the general public, turn so easily into the insidious mouth of corruption itself? Maybe it’s always been this way as if that makes it right. I guess that’s all part of living the dream here in 34.
Outside your window an almost permanent grey overcast clouds over this city, yet it hardly ever rains. The land is barren, too dry for anything to survive naturally. When it does rain if you don’t filter it correctly, it’ll kill you. That’s one of the first things you learn. There’s no telling how many first times we’ve learned it.
Consumption of water from locations other than Lethe Corporation-approved facilities is strictly prohibited for your safety. Drinking radiation-contaminated water may result in irreversible illness or death.
LETHE CORPORATIONS
Safety Manual for the Reborn
Section II, Article 9
They tell us this is how the world perished. Toxic rain from the aftermath of the meteor, starving nearly every plant and animal on this planet. I’ve got my own suspicions.
The Lethe Corporation, despite the sheer chaos after the impact, found a way to create nourishment and clean water. With these advancements, they replaced natural death with everlasting, eternal life. They were prepared. By pairing the catalyst they use to produce the sustenance pills with their breakthroughs in stem cell technology, they essentially created immortality or something close. The Lethe catalyst saved the world, and at the perfect time too.
The shit is in everything, the pills, the water – I wouldn’t be surprised if they found a way to saturate the air as well. If you’re the only company that has the resources to exist, then I guess you can do whatever the fuck you want. And they do. At our expense. They have owned nearly every aspect of our lives for the last couple of centuries. I suppose all that was left to own was our deaths.
Immortality has a price. That price is what we call being reborn - our own little fucked up reincarnation.
The catalyst made it possible for our frail, decaying bodies to keep grinding through the tedious, everyday motions we call life, but at the expense of our minds. Death has been replaced with rebirth. People no longer perish from diseases of the old, they’ve been cured. The goal of every civilization since the dawn of man was reached forever ago by Lethe, and with this achievement, they gained all the power in the world. Science and fortune did what any myth could not. Eternal life.
Disease, famine, religion, entire nations… erased. While the world was unraveling at the seam, Lethe built an empire. They are in full control of everything now, owning nearly every resource left. However, they don’t force anyone to obey them. They don’t have to. If you don’t like living under their boot, you can always starve in the Outlands, and believe me, Kalli, you don’t want to be out there. Nothing but sand and death outside the city walls, along with the occasional savage raider if you believe the mongering of the news.
Personally, I think would’ve liked it better when the whole world was fighting over a tiny fraction of oil and imaginary debt. It’s not that I have a problem always being healthy... with each pill, millions of cells are rewritten and repaired. It’s just at least back then there was a chance at bettering life. The meteor changed all that. The world was on fire. Arising out of its ashes, our savior and enslaver – The Lethe Corporation.
They’ll explain this to you better when you wake up, but the stuff they put into our bodies - the stuff that cures any sickness has a bit of a
