Micah Errapel

### Early Childhood

I grew up in a crowded wasteland. The air was so polluted it was always night and so little water was present there that it rained only once a year, if we were lucky. More and more people flooded into our city every day, though resources were scarce there too. The rapid population growth only increased the damage of the plagues that riddled our home. They weaved their way through our communities, taking from us our friends and families and any last inklings of hope that we had. Of course they hit humans— including my family and me— the hardest. EXOGEN would stop at nothing to motivate the last of us to join the cyborg race, paying them thousands of dollars in the process.

We had no medicine to combat disease, nor money for it, and I became a thief out of necessity. I got good at making myself unnoticeable and learned all the quickest ways to sneak into the EXOGEN Distribution Centre downtown. I took small amounts of medication at a time to avoid getting caught and gave it out to those around me who were suffering most. I always had my parents store a portion of what I stole so that we would have the resources we needed when we inevitably got sick ourselves.

I kept up these robberies for close to three years and taught myself the compounds that made up each of the antidotes I stole. Using this new knowledge, I began to experiment with making my own medicines. I used any herbs, tonics, or chemicals I could find, though these resources were few and far between, and I became known around my city as the “Healer.”

### Young Adult Years

Not long after, I turned nineteen, and my parents revealed to me that they had been selling the medicine I had given them to store, saving as much of the profit as they could. They gave to me every last dollar that they had and told me to leave immediately for the nearest mod site. They said if I became a cyborg, my life would be better, easier, and I believed them.

I traveled to the center of my city and asked for a second set of eyes, right below my natural ones. The eyes would give me the ability to read the chemical makeup of a substance in a split second, allowing me to easily identify potential ingredients for my cures. They took some time to get used to and I spent a couple weeks healing on the mod site,  where I met Tanvi, a cyborg hacker with plans to leave Earth and travel to Proxima-B. She asked me to come with her, but I knew I couldn’t leave my parents behind, and getting humans on a ship to Proxima-B was almost impossible without the right financial resources.

I returned home as soon as I could, and found my apartment empty— my parents were nowhere to be found. I quickly got news of another plague that EXOGEN had sent to our city, an attempt to keep the population under control. Apparently it was one of the worst our community had ever seen, and though no one said it, I know that my absence was part of the reason there were so many casualties. It took me two days to find out what had happened to my parents. In an attempt to help a sick neighbor, they caught the plague themselves. I found all three dead in the apartment beside ours.

My denial quickly turned to grief, and then to anger at all that EXOGEN had done to hurt good, innocent people. In a blind rage, I committed my final act of theft. I took everything I could carry from the Distribution Centre and made one last delivery to the people of my city, hoping the stolen goods would last them at least a couple of months.

It wasn’t long before the missing resources were noticed and I was convicted for the crime. I became a target, hunted by EXOGEN’s security, so I fled. I made it back to the mod site and reconnected with Tanvi, who told me of a ship set to take off that night. We packed our things and said goodbye to the place we had always called home.

Now, against all odds, I’m here on Proxima-B. I will use what I know to fight, to make this place ours. I will make a home, so that those still left on Earth can join me and escape EXOGEN’s power, so they can live, free from fear and full of hope.