Omega Point

The sun was still low in the sky when the last drop of Synthestane seeped through the thin metallic tunnel into Firenze’s skin. Her geometrically ideal eyelids fluttered open with a bat of long, curled lashes.

Designed. It was all designed. It was all unreal. She wished she could be less real.

Thoughtlessly, Firenze stretched her thin arms skyward, before feeling the familiar twang of the needle in her left vein. Almost every morning this happened, and almost every morning, the pain served as a reminder for the rest of the day to think before taking any action whatsoever. Sighing, Firenze ripped out the needle, wincing at the realisation that once again, she had been too rough on herself, and sat up in bed.

Like every morning, Firenze felt completely unrested. The last time she had ever felt like she had gotten a good night’s sleep was when she had run out of Synthestane and was forced to sleep manually. It had been hard to fall away – there wasn’t the blissful peace as her vision swam, just before it sank completely – but she had felt more energised than ever upon awakening. And thus, there was no retched needle ruthlessly digging a hole into her arm.

But she could not sleep manually too often. Elites just didn’t do that kind of thing. There was no way anybody was going to find out she was a Ficial. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. They simply couldn’t.

Firenze put an old green dressing gown over her silky nightdress, both of which had once belonged to her mother, and stared into the mirror. The girl looking back was the same she had always been – long waving red hair, undisheveled, even though she had just rolled out of bed, perfectly symmetrical face, with a long concave nose, high cheekbones and full red lips. The one thing that had changed on occasion were Firenze’s eyes – those painfully perfect, strikingly green, wide eyes. They were hollow today. More hollow than usual.

Firenze’s perfection frightened and angered her. She could smash the reflective glass in front of her in a minute, if only to scar her face in some way, to make her look less… perfect.

But she wasn’t perfect. Perfection had to be a common opinion. Firenze was the only person she’d ever known who had not swooned at her appearance. She would have gladly given it away to the short girl on the eighth floor. She would have gladly given those six feet of nothing but white skin and brittle bone to anyone who asked. But she couldn’t. She was made this way. If only her mind had been made for her too…

Firenze padded over to the window and drew up the blinds. Rays of sunlight fell in her eyes, burning them, closing them for her. She just stood there for a while, accepting the pain as if it was a part of life. Then, she thrust the blind back into place and stepped out of her room.

There was the smell of something cooking on the stove – fried eggs. Firenze shuddered as she took a place at the small square table in the not so accommodating kitchen. She had never been a big fan of eggs. They were just a mass of unborn organism with a million drugs pumped into it.

“They’re good for you,” the officials had said. “They will aid your mental progression.”

As if. Firenze knew that nothing would change her low IQ score. All those drugs that made you smarter, faster and more imaginative only ever worked on Elites. Only those, whose IQ strands had been moulded into a fake shape at the young age of negative numbers, could have their minds altered further. But Firenze had to pretend. She had to pretend her retched whore of a mother had focused on her brain, as well as her appearance. She had to pretend for everybody’s sake, and her own.

The short, thick mass, which Firenze had to call a woman, or, more precisely, her mother, took a seat in front of her daughter with a pile of eggs pumped high on her plate. She had given up on attempting to feed them to Firenze a long time ago.

“What?” Anna muttered in a gruff voice as she realised her daughter was watching her with disgust, as she shoved forkful after forkful into her mouth.

“How can you eat that crap?” Firenze asked, scrunching her face into a mass of wrinkles. Such perfect, perfect wrinkles…

“It’s just eggs, Firenze. It’s not crap,” her mother replied, staring her offspring directly in the eyes as a morsel of fried egg fell off her plate and onto the floor, only wrinkling Firenze’s face even more.

“They’re disgusting. They’re full of drugs,” the girl objected.

Anna put her fork down and gazed out of the window behind Firenze’s head, a solemn expression in her eyes. “You know just as well as I do that the drugs won’t work on me.”

“Yes, I know that,” Firenze replied, throwing away the urge to slam her fist against the innocent surface of the table. “It’s not my fault you’re a Natural. You could have at least made sure the drugs worked on me.”

“Honey.” The word made Firenze wince. “My mother didn’t make me pretty. My mother didn’t make me anything. And I’m glad she didn’t, because it’s disgusting the way all those people go and change their unborn babies. However, I wanted you to be happy with your appearance, like I never got the chance to be.”

“You could have at least made me more interesting,” Firenze moaned, before starting again. “And you knew exactly what kind of discrimination I would go through. You knew education would be hard for me. You could have at least boosted my IQ strands a little.”

Anna began to eat again. She swallowed, then spoke, “Firenze, I didn’t want to mess with your DNA in the first place, but I didn’t want you to end up looking like me. I think it’s disgusting to mess with somebody’s mind.”

“But Mum, everybody’s doing it!” Firenze opposed. “Nobody’s died from it yet, but I might die without it.”

Anna chuckled. “You won’t die.”

“How do you know? There’ve been hate crimes against Naturals all over the world. How do you know Ficials won’t be this hated next month? How do you know?”

The woman shuddered. “Ficials, Naturals, Elites… They’re all just words. Why don’t you just embrace what you are?”

“A Ficial, that’s what I am! It’s a fate worse than death, if you ask me. I hope somebody kills me after all.” With that, Firenze stormed out of the kitchen without breakfast. It wouldn’t be the first time.

She knew she was being childish, but she had every right to be. Her mother had ruined her life the day she signed that paper. If only she had designed the IQ strands of her DNA, Firenze wouldn’t be this angry, this messed up, this punished. And for what? Something she didn’t have anything to do with. Sighing, Firenze went into the bathroom to brush the filthy words off her teeth.

She refused to look in the mirror this time. She was sick of analysing, and overanalysing herself. She didn’t want to see the same emptiness in her eyes she had seen this morning. But at the same time, she didn’t want to see the fire burning in them. She just wanted to be normal. She just wanted to be an Elite, like everyone around her. She wanted her DNA IQ strands to have been altered, just like everybody else’s were. It never once crossed her mind to feel sorry for her mother, a Natural, for being completely unchanged. Anna was happy the way she was. But never did Firenze envy her.

After stepping out of the bathroom and walking back into her own room, Firenze got dressed. There was nothing nice in her closet. There was nothing that the rich liked to wear. With a sigh, Firenze realised that she hadn’t bought a single new piece of clothing in over a year. After putting on a pair of solid stockings – the type which didn’t get runs after just a few days of use, yet felt like sandpaper on her legs – she grabbed the only pair of jeans she had left, which didn’t have some kind of hole forming in an inappropriate place, and shoved it on violently. The jeans were nowhere near as tight as they used to be. Firenze sighed again, taking in her new, even thinner shape.

The jeans were followed up with a long sleeved top and an old T-shirt over it. A tight black jersey went after that, followed by a loose one. November was a cold month in Sector 67, even if it was only autumn.

Firenze slipped her feet into a pair of grey woolen socks, and slunk her hands through a pair of matching mittens. A squirrel-fur hat, which Firenze’s great, great, great grandmother had owned years and years ago, was secured to the girl’s head, followed by a thick black scarf. A bear’s fur coat followed suit. Firenze sighed as she took in her form in the mirror. Even in the huge jacket, she looked malnourished. But what bugged Firenze the most was the fact that she had to wear the jacket at all. All the other girls her age and older wore coats with the fur on the inside – they were warmer, more expensive. Firenze dressed like a very tall child, it seemed.

Without a word of good-bye to her mother, Firenze put on her wool-layered boots, popped her wallet in her pocket and walked out the door, listening as one lock automatically clicked shut, and locking the other two behind her.

The elevator that stood in the midst of doors to the neighbours’ apartments had been renovated at least a hundred times since it was built. Some vandal would always come back and burn off the buttons, pee in the corner and write his initials on the wall. Then the operator would forget to clean or fix this or that, and the lift would get stuck. Thankfully, there was no record of this lift having ever fallen, but it shook Firenze to think that she could be the first.

As she pressed the button and waited for the elevator to come to her, she thought of those grand buildings in the richer parts of the Sector. The lifts there were new. They didn’t have the dodgy old ropes holding them up – they just glided up and down on request, and were a lot safer, it was said.

There were two other people in the lift when Firenze walked in – a woman and a little girl. As the lift moved gently down, Firenze heard the girl whisper to the woman, “Mummy, is that the Ficial girl?” She hushed her daughter, but out of the corner of her eye, Firenze could see the woman watching her, as though she was a mongrel, who could leap up and rip her daughter’s neck open at any second.

Firenze didn’t waste any time getting out of the elevator and jumping down the three stairs in front of the main entrance to her part of the building. The main door had been slammed shut to keep the cold air out. Not looking behind her, Firenze struggled to open the ancient lock manually, as the fingerprint screen had long ago been burned to a crisp by some idiot. A Ficial, no doubt. Or maybe a Natural. Elites never fell out of line. It didn’t seem to be in their capacity to do so.

Once again, Firenze sighed, and heaved open the door. It was heavy, but not heavy enough to make her heart feel lighter. She was a Ficial, and that was all there was to it. There was nothing she could do.

It was still sunny outside, but it was not warm. Even in her thick attire, Firenze shivered, and walked out to the bus stop, past the crumbling stone buildings. These buildings were tiny – sixteen floors was the most they managed to stretch to. Firenze’s house only had nine. As she went around the corner towards Stavnikova street, she couldn’t help glancing at her crumbling fourth-floor balcony. She had never been allowed out there, even as she grew up. There was no more ledge to save her from falling down, and it was a long drop, though not as long as the drops in the city center. Those stretched to hundreds and hundreds of floors, and made Firenze feel small and insignificant, not to mention poor.

For fifteen minutes, Firenze sat, curled up at the bus stop. Although the bustling kiosks around her saved her from the wind, the chill refused to leave her alone. Finally, the bus was here, and the girl stepped on and pressed her wallet against the small screen by the driver’s seat, who glared at her through the bars between them. It beeped three times as it recognised Firenze’s card among the fabric, and for what seemed to be the hundredth time that day, Firenze sighed. Three beeps meant she had four bus rides left until next month, or until she put more credit on. But where was she going to get the credit when nobody would give her mother a job? It was all because Anna was a Natural. She was all real – looks and brains, and it didn’t help her in life. Much less did it help Firenze.

The bus shook and rattled for ten minutes before Firenze finally got off and watched it hover away. It was old and needed an upgrade, just like everything else in this Godforsaken place. Five hundred years ago, Anna had once told her, sectors were called cities. Sector 67 had been called Yekaterinburg, and a clump of sectors put together was called a country. The city of Yekaterinburg was in the country of Russia, Anna had told her. And it was once so beautiful, so fresh and fragrant, but of course, Anna had only read about it in books. There was no way to know for sure how lovely this sector really used to be.

Firenze walked through yards of more crumbling buildings. Wherever she went, it seemed everything was crumbling. It was like a curse she carried with her, and couldn’t throw away. It was there, and it was there to stay, it seemed.

There was a man on the corner of a street between two buildings, with a strange sign in his hands. He wore a ragged trench coat, and his hair looked more like a nest of twigs. Firenze knew a homeless person when she saw one, and she knew to keep away. Through the distance between them, she could hear his voice, crackling with illness. “The Apocalypse is coming!” he was shouting at her. “We won’t live to see the year 3000 and the new millennium it would bring us!”

At last, Firenze reached her school. It was a three story building, yet half of the rooms had been demolished a long time ago. She walked into the monitored front hall, and followed the hallways towards her classroom. People were already gathering in their chairs, quiet and eager to be pumped full of knowledge, which never seemed to fill Firenze.

She took a seat in her usual seat in the back of the room and carefully attached the wires and tubes to her head with the suction nozzles. A nurse walked around the classroom, helping whoever needed the aid to insert the sterile needles into their veins, but of course, nobody needed the help. Everyone here used Synthestane nightly, and everyone here plugged it in on their own. They all knew how to drug themselves up, how to put themselves out of their misery, even if only for a little while.

Firenze sighed as she remembered that this was the last of her three years of school. She stared around at her sixteen year old classmates – all a year younger than her – who had already inserted their needles. Sighing once again, Firenze winced as she inserted her own, and waited for the nurse to turn on the main switch and allow the Valestane to fill her veins and put her into a receptive comatose once again.