The Glass Dragon
$0.99  (5,795 words)

A story of the convoluted consequences of a near-future world of time travel gone awry.  Can the newly-introduced TimeCops restore order?  Or will they be erased before they ever existed?

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The beginning of the Third Millennium was a time of great global conflict. Since the first years of the 21st Century, mankind had waged a long and bloody war over differences in race, ideologies, and religion. Though the people who lived through the first decades of this war did not yet realize it, the Final World War had begun all the same. Its first battles were fought in New York, Iraq, and Jerusalem. Before long, skirmishes and attacks of escalating severity cropped up all over the world. Only once both sides of the conflict had acquired nuclear weapons did the rest of the world realize that it was, in fact, at war. By then, of course, it was too late.
The devastation caused by the first use of nuclear weapons since World War II - and even the far greater devastation unleashed in retaliation - claimed hundreds of millions or even billions of lives, but it was not what earned the Final World War its chillingly fitting name. Ironically, nuclear weapons would become only a footnote to history. The people vaporized in those attacks were only robbed of a few miserable hours. Days, at most.
In retaliation for a nuclear strike that claimed Los Angeles, biological weapons were used against the attackers. The man-made viruses released by those weapons were not subject to nature's complex series of checks and balances. They were engineered as perfect killing organisms, and they spread prolifically. It was only ignorance and pride that led the weapons' creators to believe that they could be controlled. The super-virus quickly mutated, rendering antidotes useless. The ensuing genocidal pestilence dwarfed the results of the Black Plague. Surely it would have been given a far more sinister name, if anyone on either side was left alive to name it.
Humanity, however, found a way to survive. Just as mankind's forays into genetic and biological research had unleashed a force strong enough to exterminate itself, human intelligence had also found a way to ensure the survival of the species, albeit in a modified form.
Tucked away in the mountains of Switzerland, unknown to the world's governments, scientists at a privately-funded research lab had been researching the creation of eugenic "super-humans," genetically-perfect specimens that were smarter, stronger, and healthier than their natural-born brethren. Their near-total lack of recessive genes also made them more resistant to disease - and allowed their survival, even as the scientists who created them succumbed to the super-virus and died.
This small enclave of super-humans was all that had survived the devastation. Genetically perfect, and therefore identical, these survivors vowed not to make the same mistakes of their forefathers. Gone were differences of race, color, creed, and religion. A new society sprang forth, one that looked past physical differences and concentrated solely on intellectual pursuits. This society was peaceful, strong... perfect. But the creation of Utopia had a price, and its "perfection" was only skin deep....