DATALOG 951
BORN FROM PAIN

“After you're reborn, after the pain, the first thing you learn is that mirrors become useless. The face that stares back is a stranger's - thickened hide where smooth skin used to be, muscles bulging with unnatural density, eyes that glow faintly in the dark. But it's the mind that proves the real battlefield.

Most of my brothers lost themselves to the rage when the Reaper agent took hold. I watched them transform into mindless beasts, their humanity burned away by the mutagen's fire. By some miracle - or curse - I retained my sanity. The memories of who I was remained intact, even as my body twisted into something new.

This duality of existence - being both man and monster - offers a unique perspective on our shattered world. I watch the endless stream of clone workers pass my market stall, each face identical yet housing a unique soul struggling to define itself. My wife Sara, a former agridome worker, still marvels at how my massive, mutated hands can so gently cradle our daughter.

Yes, we can still create life, we are the Reborn. Our children emerge as purely human, though the girls often show enhanced strength and resilience. Our son... we lost him to the agent at puberty, like so many others. The pain never fades, but it teaches us something crucial about this world - that hope and horror walk hand in hand.

The Prime AI's clone armies saved humanity, yes, but at what cost? We've become a species that manufactures its children in vats, that treats life as a commodity to be spent. Yet even in this industrial reproduction, something beautifully human emerges. The clones form bonds, fall in love, develop unique personalities that defy their programming.

Living in Praga, I've watched civil society slowly rebuild itself from the ashes. The Athena AI maintains order through her City Watch, but it's the small, everyday acts of kindness and commerce that truly hold us together. In my market stall, I trade with humans, clones, and even the occasional Reborn, each transaction a tiny thread in the fabric of civilization we're trying to reweave.

But we cannot forget what we are - survivors of humanity's greatest mistake. The mutations that transformed us were born of arrogance and desperation. Now, the mud lands are teeming with nightmarish creatures, and even the air itself can trigger horrific transformations. We live in the shadow of our own hubris.

Perhaps that's why I find a strange peace in my condition. My body is a living reminder of mankind's folly, but my preserved mind allows me to understand its lessons. We Reborn are bridge-builders - between the human past and this transhuman future, between the civilized world and the wasteland horrors.

My daughter asked me yesterday why she doesn't look like her mother or the other clone children. I told her she is proof that life finds a way, even in desolation. Her existence - born from the love between a monster and a manufactured woman - gives me hope that humanity hasn't lost its capacity for genuine connection, for creating something beautiful even from the ashes of apocalypse.

The mud will never wash away completely. The scars will never fully heal. But perhaps they're not meant to. Perhaps our task isn't to restore the world that was, but to build something new from what remains - something that acknowledges both the darkness and the light of human nature.

In the end, that may be the greatest lesson of the Desolation: that humanity's capacity for destruction is matched only by its resilience, its ability to adapt and find meaning even in the depths of catastrophe. We Reborn embody this paradox, and in doing so, might just point the way forward through the mud.”

Written by Kairos Veld,
former steel worker and merchant in Praga's Lower Market,
Published in the Archives of the Cartographers Guild,
Day 27 of the Howling, 124 AP.
Transcribed by apprentice cartographer INX-394 "Inks".