ABOUT.

[pragmatics]

name XXXXXXX XXXXXXX Julian Kinsey

age 37 (born 2048)

canon Original sci-fi/apocalypse

pitch Lying liar lies to survive and also for fun

allegiance Herself

pb Dichen Lachman

tl;dr

Most of humanity is sterile. Corporations promised perfection to the human race through gene editing, but instead rendered the vast majority of the population infertile. The unedited few are sacred; religions and corporations fight over who controls them. The world is incontrovertibly broken, but it lumbers slowly on as the population dwindles and life stretches thin.

Julian Kinsey (just call her Kinsey) is a recent convert to the Vanguard, a religious paramilitary organisation. Her first assignment is to transport some precious cargo – a young, still-fertile woman – to New Bethlehem, a sanctuary outpost where the unedited are welcomed as saviours of the human race. Desperate to prove herself to the Vanguard, Kinsey will do anything to protect her young and fragile charge.

(None of that is true. Julian Kinsey isn't even her real name. In the few years since her military service came to an end, she's been a floater and a scavenger, avoiding the increasingly more religious city centres while she fends for herself. That's how she ran into the real Julian Kinsey, who was every bit the zealot she's now pretending to be. Unfortunately for him, he was also an easy kill. She stole his supplies and then, after rifling through his belongings and finding details of his Vanguard assignment, his identity. Transporting some unedited baby-carrier to New Bethlehem will get her a nice payout, and nobody needs to know the truth.)

first impressions

visual Tall (6'0") and slim, well-built but wiry. Striking face – high cheekbones, long straight nose, small mouth. Blonde with dark roots. Dresses very functionally, lots of military-adjacent clothing best suited for travelling long distances. Usually carrying a weapon and a large backpack.

notable A small symbol at the very top of her spine – an X stylized as a double helix, the logo of Genexa. It might appear like a tattoo at first glance, but it's actually a birthmark.

aural American accent, relatively low. Her tone tends towards the sardonic.

demeanor Straightforward and easygoing but definitely a little mean. She will crack jokes, but largely at others' expense. Gives the impression that she cannot be fazed or offended.

abilities

Kinsey received gene-editing before her birth that erased the spinal muscular atrophy she would have been born with otherwise. She was also given some minor biological enhancements at the same time.

enhanced musculoskeletal density Stronger bones and denser muscle fibres, leading to generally higher stamina and reduced risk of fractures.

accelerated neural processing Faster reaction times, improved spatial awareness, and stronger capacity for accurate memory forming.

improved vision Small adjustments to optic nerves, leading to perfect vision and relatively strong night vision – she is able to see fairly clearly at night where others might need night vision goggles.

increased respiratory efficiency Tweaks to hemoglobin and alveolar capacity, boosting endurance and efficiency in low-oxygen environments. Functionally allows her to hold her breath longer (six to eight minutes) and to operate at a higher capacity with little oxygen.

stress response modulation Tweaks to regulate cortisol and adrenaline spikes, meaning her physiology stays calmer in high-stress situations.

accelerated wound healing Tweaks to tissue regeneration, meaning that her healing and recovery time after injury is about 50% faster than a regular human's. For example, a broken arm would heal in three to four weeks instead of the standard six to eight.

metabolic regulation Adjustments to energy storage and calorie processing, such that she burns fuel more efficiently. She can last longer on less food. An unintended side effect of this is that she runs relatively hot; she has a higher baseline body temperature and slightly increased resting heart rate.

enhanced pain tolerance Subtle edits to neural pathways controlling nociception (how the nervous system signals pain). She still registers pain, but the intensity is dialed down and her body prioritises function over sensation during trauma. This leads to a reduced shock response and increased chances of survival where immediate medical care isn't possible. As a result, Kinsey often underestimates the seriousness of injuries she receives.

world

Kinsey lives in a world that is chugging very slowly towards an apocalypse, but moving on as if nothing is happening. In the big cities, people still go to work, pay their rent, and live as normal, while the world around them decays. The development of gene-editing led to mass infertility across the planet, and reactionary conservative religious groups have swept in to fill the power vacuum, gloating that their longstanding moral opposition to gene-editing is the only thing preserving human life.

Major urban centers cling to an illusion of continuity, kept alive by government subsidies, private security forces, and advanced tech infrastructures. But outside those dense, protected cores, smaller towns and rural communities wither and die. Many major industries have collapsed one by one, leaving behind hollowed-out economies and entire regions abandoned to scavengers, mercenary groups, and extremist enclaves. State authority has receded, replaced by local militias or paramilitary faith sects in many areas.

The dwindling population has not put a halt to climate change, but rather unevenly redistributed its effects. High-tech urban centers double down on energy-intensive infrastructures like desalination plants, atmospheric water harvesters, and vertical megafarms, while abandoned rural zones became dust bowls or floodplains. In the north east, key cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. continue almost as normal, albeit with intense military presence. Major cities clustered around the Great Lakes have seen a resurgence in importance despite the loss of industry in these areas because of their proximity to freshwater reserves. In the south, religious enclaves control significant inland settlements; rising sea levels and hurricane escalations have made several locations on the Gulf Coast functionally uninhabitable. On the west coast, gated biotech zones within major cities thrive, while outer suburbs gradually empty. Many cities in central US have become vital logistics hubs connecting east and west, but beyond those the region is largely a dead zone. Roads, especially highways, can become lethal when travelling without military or paramilitary support.

timeline

→2032 Genexa Biotechnologies, a private US-based genetics firm which was initially set up as an IVF company, announces that it has developed technology to be able to edit the genes of a developing fetus, eradicating hereditary diseases and birth defects, with "near-zero off-target errors". The US government signs early research and defence contracts with Genexa. Religious and anti-eugenics groups protest, but are dismissed as fringe. Genexa gene-editing is expensive and restricted only to those who can shell out large sums of money to pay for it.

→2036 Genexa's marketing pivots: while they still offer "Class-M" (medical) gene editing, they also begin to offer "Class-V" (viability) packages. At first this covers minor functional enhancements such as muscle density, metabolism tweaks, and resistance to common pathogens, but Class-V packages are soon expanded to include cosmetic changes like eye colour, hair colour, and height. Class-V packages are branded as "generational upgrades" and are still largely only accessible to the rich. The government invests heavily in Class-V, with a number of specific improvement edits earmarked as valuable traits for soldiers.

→2038 Parents can now finance Class-M edits via government-backed loans, opening up the market to more than just elite consumers. While pure Class-V edits are not accessible through the loan system, they can be packaged alongside Class-M edits; this is referred to as an M/V combo. A story releases in major newspapers later the same year alleging that members of Genexa's salesforce were instructed to hard sell M/V combo edits to parents who were unaware that they were agreeing to cosmetic changes alongside medical ones. Genexa survives the minor scandal, even managing to expand into other countries, while other copycat companies fill in the gaps, such that gene editing has become a worldwide phenomenon. There are even a number of genetics charities working in the global south.

→2040 Genexa begins to offer "completely free" edits through a new loan system where parents can take out a Genexa Future Life Credit. With Future Life Credits, parents no longer have to worry about a repayment plan – instead, the loan is repaid through service to the US government when their child comes of age. This is explained as a mandatory period of enlistment into the services of a government body, not unlike conscription. Future Life Credits come with mandatory Class-V edits including enhanced endurance, durability, respiratory efficiency, thermoregulation and pain tolerance – they are billed as free bonuses, but are essentially part of an investment in a generation of enhanced soldiers.

→2045 Independent scientists publish papers noting that multi-generational editing might interfere with embryonic development. Genexa, with the help of the government, suppresses the findings and launches an aggressive PR campaign discrediting critics. Nevertheless, more pockets of resistance grow, in religious circles as well as secular groups who are generally opposed to what they see as eugenics.

→2048 75% of births in the US involve at least one Class-V edit.

→2055 The first wave of Genexa-edited children reaches reproductive age – conception rates plummet. Genexa blames environmental stressors, but quietly launches Project Sarai, a classified fertility restoration program. Unedited births now represent less than 10% of US newborns. As doubts about gene-editing come to the fore, religious enclaves swell in both numbers and political influence.

→2058 The fertility crash is confirmed, with the WHO issuing an emergency report highlighting that global fertility rates are down 68%. Studies confirm that edits are strongly correlated with multi-generational infertility. Religious factions gain huge cultural leverage.

→2070 Throughout the 2060s and 2070s, societal breakdowns accelerate. In the US, federal authority weakens, giving rise to armed religious enclaves. Groups like the Vanguard openly declare their mission to "preserve God's unbroken line" by gathering and protecting unedited, fertile individuals. The government, as well as corporations like Genexa, back proxy militias to maintain control over dwindling resources.

→2076 A massive whistleblower leak confirms that Genexa knew about the fertility issues by 2045, but buried the research to maximise profits. Riots erupt, at first across the US and then internationally. Genexa's biotech stranglehold persists because Project Sarai is currently the only known fertility restoration therapy, although it has a 98% failure rate. Unedited humans become commodities; some are protected by militias, while others are trafficked.

→2085 The global population has plummeted to below 1.5 billion.

history

childhood

2048–2058

Kinsey was born on November 2nd, 2048, in Bakersfield, California. Two months before, her parents found out that she would be born with spinal muscular atrophy and would likely be unable to walk and support herself without permanent care for the rest of her life. They decided to approach Genexa about taking out a Future Life Credit loan to have the disorder edited out of her DNA. As part of the agreement, Kinsey was not only given the Class-M edit to correct the spinal muscular atrophy, but also a bundle of Class-V edits, sold to her parents as "generational upgrades" that would not only make their child's life better, but put her far ahead of the curve. The Future Life Credit system allowed families to receive fully funded gene edits in exchange for their child's mandated participation in the government’s Strategic Service Enrollment program at age 18.

The area of Bakersfield Kinsey grew up in was pretty rough. Exceedingly hot summers, water rationing, smoggy air pollution, and rolling blackouts meant that nothing was ever easy. Her parents weren't rich, but they were absent: her father was a long-haul trucker, and her mother worked nights in a care home, and so were in many ways peripheral to Kinsey's upbringing. She knew from a young age that they had lost a child a few years before she was born, an older brother who hadn't made it out of the hospital thanks to a premature birth, and his absence weighed heavily on the family. There was, for want of a better word, a shrine to him in their living room, which Kinsey would compulsively avoid looking at or even being nearby. It always made her skin crawl.

Money was the most frequent topic in their home. Kinsey's father loved his daughter but was emotionally stunted and struggled to express it; her mother routinely used up all her patience on the elderly people she looked after overnight and had little to spare for her daughter, and so she and Kinsey were frequently at loggerheads. For a large part of her childhood, Kinsey was unaware of the loan her parents had taken out to fund her edits. At the time she was growing up, Genexa edits were fairly commonplace among children given that 75% of births the year she was born involved at least one Class-V edit, but the Future Life Credit system was, while she was a child, regarded as kind of like being on food stamps, even in less than affluent areas where food stamps and loans were commonplace. Her neighbour, Lucy, had received a Class-M edit to correct a congenital disorder. However, Lucy's parents, dubious of the FLC system, had run themselves into financial debt to afford it and weren't able to afford any Class-V edits alongside it; as a result, Lucy was somewhat ostracised by her peers, constantly on the outside looking in.

Even as a child, Kinsey didn't really have friends as much as a group of children she would persuade to get into trouble with her. She never really connected with or even liked them, but she was reckless and always looking for adventure and that was more fun with others. Late one night, the unsupervised group of children, between eight and ten years old, headed to the Kern River Oil Field where Kinsey climbed over the fence and dared the rest of them to follow her. Lucy, desperate to be accepted into the group, tried to clamber after her, but jammed her foot in the chainlinks on the way down, fell, and broke her ankle. The children, including Kinsey, scattered, leaving Lucy behind; intimidated into silence by Kinsey, none of the children immediately told their parents what had happened to Lucy, and she was missing for an entire day until an oil field worker stumbled on her and carried her home. Lucy's parents extracted the truth from her and refused to let her play with Kinsey or the other children after that. They moved away from Bakersfield not long after.

The house was bought soon after by the Moreno family. The parents belonged to an anti-eugenics protest group and their son, Kai, was born completely unedited. He had asthma which was considerably worsened by the poor air quality in Bakersfield, and left the house infrequently. Kinsey had never met an unedited child before. Despite the fact that edits were social capital among children, this never seemed to affect Kai, who was proud of his unedited status, often parroting political lines from his parents whenever others asked him about it.

Kinsey was ten in 2058 when the World Health Organisation issued an emergency report highlighting an alarming decrease in global fertility rates. At the time it was of little importance to her – it was mostly just something she heard being discussed by her parents and on the television.

school years

2058–2066

Due to his asthma, Kai was homeschooled, but he and Kinsey wouldn't have gone to the same school anyway. There were enough children in Bakersfield enrolled in FLC that they were all sent to Summit Point High, a Strategic Service prep school, where in addition to the core curriculum they were taught additional classes on subjects such as Citizenship and Civic Values (Genexa corporate conditioning) and Systems Literacy (mechanical and software fluency and repairs). Almost all of the classes doubled as mechanisms for data-harvesting, as a way for Genexa to keep track of and analyse the development of the children who had been edited. School was also the location where Genexa scientists would perform biological checks on the edited children under the guise of their Pediatric Monitoring Network: Kinsey spent a lot of time at school having her blood drawn and vitals tested.

Kinsey's bad behaviour didn't really follow her to school, though she was primarily motivated by interest in terms of whether she would bother applying herself to classes. Her favourite subjects – sports and STEM – were ones in which she excelled, while "fluffier" disciplines like literature fell by the wayside. Other students regarded her as aloof and unapproachable, which made her desirable and perversely rather popular. She liked being popular, mostly because she liked the attention, but eschewed close friendships. When she was fifteen, she and Kai started dating, much to Kai's parents' chagrin. She vastly preferred Kai's company to her hangers-on at school, and they would frequently spend time wandering around Bakersfield late at night together.

The same year, Kinsey was snooping through her mother's desk drawer in search of some money when she came across a copy of the FLC contract her parents had signed, which explained in clear terms that she had been contracted to government service for a minimum of eight years upon turning 18. Furious, she confronted her parents, who tried to explain why they had made the decision they made, but the lie of omission was too great, and Kinsey found her relationship with them irrevocably shattered.

In the past she had just put up with Kai's anti-Genexa opinions and mostly tuned them out, but her recent discovery about the Future Life Contract made her more actively invested in Kai and his parents' stance. They would graffiti anti-Genexa slogans in public spaces, and Kinsey occasionally tagged along with Kai and his parents when they attended meetings relevant to their anti-Genexa cause. At one relatively small anti-Genexa protest, the National Guard was deployed and the crowd was sprayed with a water cannon and shot at with sponge rounds: Kinsey was hit in the shin and Kai in the shoulder, and a woman near them was shot in the eye, which she subsequently lost. It was Kinsey's first exposure to real violence, but the protest was more fun than serious for her and Kai at the time.

When they were seventeen, they were caught on CCTV throwing bricks through a Genexa pharmacy window and destroying some of the products inside. In court, Kai was sentenced to 50 hours of community service and 6 months of probation as well as a $2000 fine. Kinsey's sentence, on the other hand, was commuted, in exchange for another two years added to her Strategic Services Enrollment term. The disparity in their punishments caused a rift between Kinsey and Kai. She told him repeatedly she would rather have shared his punishment, but he resented her for seemingly getting away with it while he hadn't. Paying the fine almost bankrupted his parents, and they were forced to move away shortly after the incident.

As her eighteenth birthday loomed, Kinsey spiralled. With Kai excised from her life, she vowed that she would never return to Bakersfield once she left, forcing herself to view her mandatory enrolment as a chance to escape. In a final explosive argument with her parents a month before she turned eighteen, she cut contact with them and spent those last four weeks essentially homeless, until on her eighteenth birthday she presented herself for assessment for Strategic Service. Like almost all of the other children whose parents had taken out FLC loans, she was assigned to the US Army.

strategic service

2066–2081

Thanks to her Class-V edits, Kinsey was quite literally born to excel in the military, and so training was a breeze for her. Her time at Summit Point had prepped her for service, and she found that following orders was a far sight easier than she'd expected it to be as long as she turned off the part of her brain that rallied against authority and disliked being told what to do by people who, she believed, were only superior to her because of circumstance and not acuity.

Her first field deployments were domestic security issues in southern California in 2067: disaster responses during water shortage crises and escorting relief convoys through partially collapsed infrastructure. It was all relatively tame, except for an incident where a large mob swarmed their convoy and the crowd quickly got out of control. To beat back the crowd, Kinsey's team was instructed to use sponge rounds, and Kinsey couldn't help but feel a little bitter that she was now on the other side of what she'd experienced at the anti-Genexa protest she'd attended with Kai and his parents when she was a teenager.

Back from her deployment in southern California, Kinsey was selected for specialised leadership training, where she developed skills including small-unit leadership, reconnaissance tactics, and rapid decision-making under duress. Following the training, she spent much of her early twenties on domestic deployment in a number of high-conflict locations across the US. The operations she took part in were either surveillance and tactical responses to religious militia activities or containment missions for fertility protection programmes. Despite a scattered number of incidents where she was disciplined for talking back to or disagreeing with her superiors (all of which added years to her mandatory term of service), Kinsey was promoted several times, reaching Staff Sergeant by 26.

Her first international deployment was shortly after her 27th birthday, when she was sent to Morocco to patrol the coastal zones around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. By this time the US had its fingers in several international pies, and military forces were regularly loaned to foreign countries to protect critical corporate and government supply routes transporting food, water purification technology, and medical resources to regions with high unedited populations. While there, they also encountered some interference from radicalised religious militias that had been targeting these convoys for control of resources. This is where her first kill happened, and it was surprising to her only because it seemed not to affect her at all – since then, she's counted her kills, but only out of a sense of morbid curiosity.

The team was recalled from Morocco in mid-2076 to police a number of large-scale riots that broke out across the US in response to the whistleblower leak which confirmed that Genexa had buried research on declining fertility rates all the way back in 2045 in order to maximise profits. These riots were much more intense than the resource squabbles she had been policing in the past: battalions were instructed to use lethal force as appropriate to beat back the crowds.

Kinsey and her team thrived on small-scale information-gathering or stealth missions where her primary role was to undermine and fracture the growing religious militias across the US. Overseas, their role was generally to protect high-level targets including natural resources. They worked well as a unit, although a number of her subordinates rotated out due to personality clashes: Kinsey was good at bending the rules in her favour, and she would often engineer scenarios to protect herself (and by extension – mostly – her team) which sometimes landed others in trouble our outright danger. In Morocco, for example, she lied about orders she had received and instructed another team to go ahead of hers; that team was killed in an ambush they triggered, and Kinsey came out unscathed. Two of the members of her team requested transfers after that.

Outside of active service, she took little time off. There wasn't really a structure of tours of duty, both because of the national and international crises and because of the terms of her Strategic Service Enrollment. The limited time she did have away from the army was spent getting drunk and thrill-seeking wherever she could. She avoided relationships, preferring one-night stands with whoever caught her eye. Her time in the army was marked by low-stakes, high-result manipulations which prioritised her self-interest and, when not on deployment, impulsivity and occasional self-destructive behaviours that racked up her term of service to a total of fifteen years.

nomad

2081–PRESENT

Kinsey's term finally came to an end when she turned 33. She briefly considered staying but recoiled at the idea of voluntarily putting herself back into a situation where she could be told what to do – and forced to do it – with impunity. Leaving the army behind was, in her mind, a way of taking control of her life.

By the 2080s, the global population has plummeted severely and many of the more rural areas across the US had emptied bit by bit, except where militia-guarded enclaves had built up. Having been deployed in many locations over the country during her time in the army, she knew better than most where the resources were. Without a formal allegiance or any moral scruples, she started to sell her skills as a mercenary or scavenger-for-hire, offering covert reconnaissance or tactical services to factions that can pay in resources rather than money: she had developed a very useful contact list for bartering and black-market trading over her years in the army.

Without the structure of the military, she floated. For a while she found pretty steady work as a mercenary and runner in St Louis. Most of the time she was just looking for people who hadn't paid their taxes or showed up for court dates, although sometimes she was given more interesting work to steal supplies for the criminal groups which, bit by bit, were taking over the city. On one occasion she was hired by Dr Mara Lethbridge, a former art history professor turned hobbyist "knowledge hoarder" who was trying to build an archive of information as the world collapsed around them. Kinsey, going by the name Ida Hayes at the time, found herself fetching rare materials and providing muscle for Mara on a number of occasions, and as they continued to work together they fell into a friends-with-benefits situation. Mara, in her late forties, harboured a deep fondness for Ida, and in return Kinsey found herself enjoying Mara's company. Mara's house became a refuge for her, and they'd often stay up late talking to each other. Kinsey found a real propensity for lying during this time: though she'd lied to get her way in the past, it was effortless to build a story when she was with Mara, and she even let herself get comfortable inside the narrative she'd built for Ida. Acting as Ida was easy, almost instinctual, although she never told Mara the truth about any part of herself, which allowed her to keep Mara at arm's length while accepting the intimacy of a close relationship at the same time.

She and Mara spent almost a year "together". In the end, Kinsey wasn't really sure why she torpedoed everything, but she did. Without thinking much about it, she notified a criminal group about Mara's hoard of information and pre-2032 relics of the past, and in exchange for a middling sum of money and weapons she let them ransack her storage for anything of value. Mara lost a substantial sum of work overnight, and realised it could only have been "Ida" who let it happen. Kinsey ran, and as far as she knows there's still a bounty out for Ida Hayes in St Louis.

For a while after St Louis she tagged along with a travelling convoy of nomads who moved between cities, travelling west and avoiding large population centres. Going by the name Grace Monroe, she spent a few months doing security jobs for the convoy – guarding supply runs, fixing mechanical issues, and occasionally exerting sometimes lethal force on attackers. She ditched the name Grace Monroe when the convoy was attacked and, instead of defending it, she used the chaos to steal a truck and vanish.

By the time she got to Nevada, she'd picked up another alias. As Helen Carter, she settled for a while in a tiny commune outside Reno calling itself the "Free Zone". The small population was made up of people who rejected both Genexa and the religious groups gaining traction across the US. Helen's acceptance to the Free Zone was based on the lie that she was unedited; it was an easy lie to tell, since the only way to prove she'd been edited at all was the Genexa logo birthmark on the back of her neck. Helen was a fairly indispensable asset to the Free Zone for several months – that is, until one of their missionaries returned from a trip. It was Kai, her old childhood friend, and he knew the truth about her. He confronted her the night of his return, and told her either she had to leave or he'd tell the truth about who she was: not only had she been edited, but she'd spent a large part of her life as one of Genexa's footsoldiers where she'd (he assumed) been used to tamp down resistance and even turn deadly fire on protesters. He wasn't wrong, but he'd forced her hand, and that made her angry: instead of just leaving, as she'd been planning to do anyway the moment he showed up, she raided their medical supplies on her way out, selling them for a price to the criminal gang running Reno before she fled east.

Kinsey has always been a gifted liar and manipulator, and lying about herself to tag along with groups for survival reasons came easily. If she ever did travel alone through dangerous spaces, she'd move quiet and slow, scavenge what she could, and treat anyone she came across as suspicious. Nobody's called her by her real name in a long time. That's how she came across the real Julian Kinsey one day: travelling from one city to another, she spotted him walking by himself, which was always dangerous. He was carrying enough supplies to make him a solid target, so she killed him without a second thought. Rifling through his things, she found enough documentation on him to know that he was edited and had served several years in the army but had recently joined a religious paramilitary organisation called the Vanguard, which she knew had a combination of big pockets and little oversight of their members. He was travelling to a Vanguard-controlled town in rural Kentucky to pick up a young fertile woman named Nora and shepherd her to "New Bethlehem", the Vanguard's "fertile sanctuary outpost" in British Columbia. A large payout was promised upon delivery. It didn't take much for her to decide to pick up the name as well as the rest of Julian Kinsey's supplies and head for Kentucky.

personality

+ resourceful tba

+ adaptable tba

+ strategic tba

– manipulative tba

– impulsive tba

– cynical tba

– stubborn tba

– selfish tba

– deceptive tba