Èryuè 1st 250X Cont.

Sirka ran her fingers over the electronic date tag she was holding, frowning at the numerical display. Sometimes she was convinced that the years passed as quickly as days. Other times she felt as though she had lived centuries in the penthouse, watching the world whir and stutter beneath her, unable to be a part of it.

The year was officially 250X, as if society had wilfully forgotten the old ways of numbering the turns around the sun, perhaps because you could barely see it anymore. Most people now lived in the Poleis; giant concrete cities that linked to each other via the Venae - tube systems that ran like clockwork capillaries beneath the scattered metropolises.

It was the 32nd day of 250X and Sirka had just turned a Quart. Twenty-five years of life, of feeling the days change beneath her fingertips. She hadn't been keeping track of the numbers, knowing that she had lost some time in the haze of her madness.

It was Akeem, her adoptive father, that had had to remind her of her age today. She could have sworn she was older, despite the youthful appearance of her face she was sure her heart felt older than a Quart.

Suddenly Sirka noticed a dampness splatter against her bare arms. She glanced up at the darkened sky from the balcony upon which she was perched.

You shouldn't taste the rain.

It was something she'd always been taught. You should never stick your tongue out to taste the rain, no matter how much you might want to, no matter how thirsty you were.

The rain was dirty, just like everything else on the godforsaken planet. The water droplets had to travel through the Polis' thick layer of pollution before they even reached the rancid streets below.

"It will burn your tongue."

She still remembered her maid scolding her as a child.

"Too much acid in it, you'll get boiled insides like a sewer fish."

At the time, Sirka had been copying the street kids, imitating them as they attempted to quench their thirsts. She could have been one of them, with their haunted eyes and blistered mouths. The orphanage would never have been able to find her a work placement, especially not as a helixed child. Sirka could have ended up scrambling in the alleyways with them, drinking hungrily from soiled puddles. That, or been sent to the Polis Asylum.

The best she could have hoped for would have been to be sold to one of the less depraved brothels in the Pleasure District. It wasn't meant to happen, the Polis orphanages were meant to be a steady supply of kids growing up to become low paid city-workers, but - as with anything, some got skimmed off the top. No one recorded it, no one cared. Everyone knew once you were lost to the pleasure houses of the notorious Dragon District, you disappeared forever amongst the flashing lights and even darker shadows.

Yet that hadn't happened. Instead, Commander Akeem Morcos had happened, or rather 'Lieutenant' as he'd been known then. The enigmatic military official with no wife, family, or even a mistress to give substance to the gossip that surrounded his persistent bachelorhood. He had simply strode into a Polis orphanage one day and offered to adopt a little girl. Sirka presumed he must have been asked if he wanted to see only non-helixed children, and she could only suppose that he must have said no.

An apparent nineteen years later and the Commander's staff still wore the same expressions when they had to talk to her, when she caught them staring nervously at her out of the corner of her eye. She couldn't blame them, after all - who wouldn't be afraid?

It had happened sixty-three years, one hundred and twenty-eight days ago; the solar storm that brought the spores into the Earth's atmosphere. The subsequent winds that had carried them across continents and oceans to settle in the lungs of thousands of hapless humans.

No one knew where the spores had come from - a passing alien craft perhaps? An accident at one of the science branches of a nearby space station? Some said that a classified research facility released them on purpose, turning the Earth itself into one giant Petri dish.

Regardless of their origin, everyone knew the result - mass fatalities. Amongst those who had been infected only a small percentage survived, however they suffered from genetic mutations. New strands of alien DNA twisting themselves around the double helix. With every further strand of DNA the more abilities you potentially gained and yet, with every new twist of involuntary evolution there were crippling side-effects.

"Do you know how to tell a helixed person Sirka?" Akeem had asked her once, the one and only time he had brought up the subject.

"The DNA tattoo," Sirka had replied eagerly, always hoping to please her adoptive father.

"That is correct, but what about something naturally occurring? Something you can't hide?"

"Rings," Sirka supplied after a moment's thought.

"That's right," he had nodded, "rings around the pupil of the eye. Each ring represents an additional strand of DNA. Most helixed persons of course have one or two rings."

"How many do I have?" Sirka asked, before twisting her head to try and glimpse her reflection in the vehicle's window.

"Three my dear, you have three."

"What's the most you've ever seen father?"

Akeem had sighed and closed his own eyes before answering, "Four."

Sirka hadn't asked any more questions after that. Everyone knew that with each ring came a further 'fracture'.

Fracturing was the curse of the helixed. The genetic mutations caused by the spores appeared to put inexorable strain on a person's cerebral cortex and brain function.

Nearly every helixed person was recorded to suffer from hallucinations, personality disorders and to one degree or another - schizophrenia.

'Fracturing' was the term given to the most prominent side effect of being helixed, it meant having facets of your personality take on a form of their own. Namely in a doppelganger that only the helixed themselves could see. The more rings you had, the more fractured you became, the more ghosts of your own self that haunted you.

Such hallucinated alter-egos were called 'fractals' and sometimes did not fully manifest until later life or when they were perhaps triggered by physical or emotional trauma.

However, regardless of how many 'imaginary friends' you could see, if you were helixed - you were considered unstable. That's the way it was - hence the fear, the dirty looks and of course, the ban. Breeding laws issued fifty years prior, making it illegal for helixeds to reproduce. However, as in every society, some laws get broken.

Not every child born from a helixed necessarily carried the 'Spore Strain' themselves, but those that did were often abandoned - sent to orphanages or sold on the black market to the medical Guilds for the shadier side of scientific research.

So for Commander Akeem to adopt a helixed child, one rumoured to have three rings no less, well that set the gossip mills churning. Some people suggested that she might have even been his - born from a dalliance with a brothel girl carrying the gene years before. Akeem paid no attention to these whisperings, he would merely smile and shrug. Sirka herself never wished to ask.

"It's all nonsense!" Tasha, her maid, had scoffed one day. "If they could only see you they'd know - you look nothing like the man. Your skin's as pale as his is dark!"

Sirka agreed whole-heartedly with Tasha. Besides, if there had been no biological obligation fuelling her adoption, it made her feel more special to her father, more chosen.

Perhaps Akeem regretted his choice - how could he not? But he must have realised what he was letting himself in for, selecting a helixed daughter. Sirka had seemed quiet and obliging enough as a child, but when adolescence had arrived, so had Iskra.

Iskra was Sirka's first fractal, a mirror image of herself with the same long black hair, sharply cut bones and muted green eyes.

"I wouldn't mind her so much if we could just have a conversation!" Sirka had complained to her father soon after Iskra's first appearance in their lives. "But all she does is wail and speak in riddles!"

The Medic they called gave his diagnosis of Iskra via the symptoms that Sirka described to him. Sirka's fractal was, as he tactfully put it, 'deeply disturbed'.

Sirka had long since learned how to ignore Iskra's confused ramblings whenever she appeared and yet, such an undertaking was always going to cause some strain.

Furthermore, just before Iskra's first appearance, over a year of Sirka's life had been lost to what the family Medic had described as a 'catatonic state'. Sirka had only woken up to reality again after she'd turned sixteen.

Sirka was now twenty-five and all she could think of was the one gift that she wanted more than anything else in the world. It was the same thing that she’d desired for the past nine years. She wanted to follow her father into the military, she wanted to be a pilot.

Podolsk Polis was where Commander Akeem Morcos' penthouse was situated and it was also the central stronghold for the Aviation and Starcraft Division of Earth's armed forces.

The discovery many centuries ago of other sentient species in the universe had been a world-changing shock to everyone on Earth. As the years passed however, the sensation faded into part of everyday normality and now it was largely ignored as people got on with the everyday struggles of surviving.

Some species had aligned themselves with the Human Empire and had become known as the 'Allies', others were admittedly, on less friendly terms.

Humanity was not yet engaged in all out war with any alien species, however some of the political relationships were hostile enough to warrant the implementation of lottery-based conscription along with voluntary enrolment to the military.

Ever since arriving in the Morcos household, Sirka had become obsessed with the starcrafts that she heard passing overhead - plastic models of which her father would bring home from the nearby airbase.

Sometimes, when the smog was buffeted and parted by seasonal winds she could glimpse the reflective metal surfaces of the ships, shimmering like silver linings to the perpetual clouds of Polis pollution.

Enrolling in flight school and becoming a pilot was the only thing Sirka could get Iskra to agree with her on. She would eagerly devour the heavy instruction manuals in her father's office, detailing every aspect of aviation from engine mechanics to plotting government standardised flight paths.

When Akeem gave her a copy of the flight simulator programme they used for cadet training, it would take nothing less than her maid Tasha's promises of smuggled sweets to tear her away from the computer interface.

Everything about flying felt right, it was the only time when the voices in her head fell quiet and a contented silence washed through her brain like a purifying rain.

If Sirka had been a normal girl wishing to become a pilot with the Commander as her father , she would have been immediately enrolled in the Podolsk flight school. She would have risen quickly through the ranks, ignoring the teasing banter and whispered accusations of 'nepotism' and she would have gotten her wings before she turned eighteen.

Sadly, Sirka was not a normal girl and Commander Akeem quickly dismissed the desperate ambition every time she spoke of it. Sirka had long since realised that the closest that she was ever going to be allowed to the sky was sitting on the balcony jutting out from their lavish apartment in the Epsilon zone.

Helixeds were unstable, everyone knew it. The only recompense being the gifts that sometimes manifested themselves. Abilities such as heightened speed or strength, telekinesis, telepathy and other more rarely reported skills.

When she turned eighteen Sirka had complained to her father that her only gift appeared to be a youthful complexion and an evolved tolerance for living her life in the 'cage' of a government penthouse.

She was strictly forbidden from going outside without an escort of maids that somehow always seemed to make themselves unavailable. Sirka's resentment grew only more bitter when she found herself being hidden away from the guests or visitors that occasionally frequented their luxury-clad world.

"It's nothing personal my dear," Akeem would console her, "they don't know you like I do."

The 'and they would never want to...' was only too heavily implied.