——————Chapter Three——————

—— Wednesday January 22 2307 ——

———A Fine House in the Suburbs———

Ika has been exercising for hours now, her body is drenched with sweat and her hair hangs limply down the back of her neck from the tight pony tail it is in. She had been running on the cardio machine, doing sit-ups and push-ups and squats and crunches. And lifting weights and skipping for a while, and finally yoga to stretch out and cool down. 

And now she is taking a hot shower, crying in the solitude of the tiny bathroom that's just for her. She scrubs soap onto her heated and sweaty skin, eyes blurred with tears, and applies stinging cleanser onto all parts of her. She scrubs shampoo in her hair and then some thick orangish something onto her face, and then turns off of the water for a while. 

She looks at the fog coating the gray walls in a lighter shade of grey.

I want to live. She cries silently, one hand clamped on her mouth so in case anyone is listening, though she knows they wouldn't be. I wish I was never born. She closes her eyes. She holds the handle for controlling the water flow. She grips it until her knuckles turn white. Opening her eyes again, she quickly scrawls I wish my body were mine in messy writing into the wall. All the words are just barely there. Grey against grey and almost faded out. But she can see them. Suddenly her eyes go wide in horror. She quickly runs her hands over the wall, wiping the writing into nothing. Turning the shower back on, she scrubs her skin one more time before dutifully rubbing argon oil onto her skin and hair and stepping out to the rest of the tiny room. She puts some tissue over her eyes so that the salt water doesn't wreck the hydrating oil. 

Stepping into her black clothes, she steps into the tiny room that she calls her own. She sits down on the roll of blankets on the floor she sleeps in, which are black and unsettlingly smooth. She gets out her art journal and practices her fine motor skills, well, they're not /her/ fine motor skills. But she has to practice them anyways. If her master is an artist, she has to make sure she has the best hand. 

Her muscles are still sore from the exercise she had spent hours doing. It would be a very pleasant sort of soreness, if she was in a better state mentally. But she's not. The way her body hums and throbs just reminds other of the threat hanging over her near future. She wishes she could forget. She wishes she could forget. But she can't. She wants to forget. She wants to drown in anything else. But she can't. 

She hates her body. She hates it so much. She hates her skin, her flesh, her bones. She hates her blood, her bone marrow, her organs, she hates everything. She hates all of it so much. Her face is not her own. Her body is not her own. When she looks at herself in the mirror she doesn't see herself. She doesn't see herself at all. She sees the person who owns her. The person who thinks she isn't real. The person who brought her into a world of terror and heartbreak and aching, overwhelming, unending loneliness that will all be cut short anyways. She dutifully colours in the lines. She tries to draw straight. But inside of her it's like she's being burned alive while being drowned in poison. It's like she's lost, lost, lost in a torrential thunderstorm and she can't see and she can't breathe and there's no way out. There's not ever a way out. 

She's not a real person. She's not a real person. She just has to live with the fact that she's not a real person. She just has to live with the fact that she's not capable of love. Or existence. Or happiness. She just has to let the inky-black darkness swallow her whole and drown her as the city screams and rages hard and without mercy. 

She cries into her pillow, loneliness weighing heavy on her, and falls asleep like that, twelve years old and too young to be so alone. 

——————Chapter Four——————

—— Wednesday January 22 2309 ——

———A Fine House in the Suburbs———

The two children are talking quietly in Ika's tiny room. Miren is Ika's master's husband's slave. Her master and her master's husband aren't living together. Apparently you can't live together for two hundred years without any breaks at all. But they visit very frequently. He doesn't always bring Miren though. Miren is only here today because their masters thought it would be good to see how they looked together. The masters did this every few weeks, due to a strange sort of nostalgia. Neither of the slaves thought it made much sense but the masters often didn't make sense. The children are happy to see each other though. In the soft gray glow of the white-walled room in the morning, the rest of the world seems just a little bit muted. They have each other and that is something. 

They lie on Ika's narrow bedroll, facing each other and bodies inches apart. Ika has her hand on Miren's cheek and Miren stokes his hand through Ika's hair. Miren is seventeen. And he cannnot pretend anymore that death is far off in the distance. But he uses every chance he gets to make the most of life. They all do. 

"Ika. Darling. I love you." 

"Miren I love you too. They say we can't love but I love you so much." 

"They say we can't love. But fuck that. They're wrong Ika. They're wrong about so many things. Sister, you deserve love. You deserve life. You deserve freedom. You deserve joy. You deserve equality. I'm not going to let them get away with all of this." 

"How Miren? I love you. I love that you're angry. I love that you're fighting. I'm angry too believe me. But we have to be smart. About our anger. We can't let it explode unchecked without carefully controlling it. We need to make sure that our rage works in our favour."

"That's the same as doing nothing, Ika. I can't let them take me. Not without a fight." 

"I know. I know. They can't take you. Not really. But you have to rebel, don't you?" 

"It's worth more than life. To get a chance to spit in their faces. To get a chance to look them in the eyes." 

"Fight then. Do it. But don't go without a plan. Miren I can't lose you to nothing. Don't go without a plan." 

"Ika. I wish we had more time. I wish we had freedom. I wish we had anything." The boy is drenched with death. He is supersaturated with it. He is drowning in it, being held down. And he is full of rage. And the rage has nowhere to go. No outlet. 

"I'll help you." 

"With what?" 

"A plan."

Melancholy. But in the melancholy there is hope. Hope that comes from rage. Fire kindled from embers. 

"Anne-Marie," Ika states point blank. 

"What?" 

"Their precious, sweet, darling child. She means a lot to them. If we can grab her. If we can use her as a bargaining chip. We could convince them to let us go." 

"They'd just have two more kids to replace us." 

"But we'd be alive." 

"But do you really want to bring two other people into this mess to live the lives we've lived so far?" 

"You're right. That wouldn't be fair at all. But what about ... fuck it. We're just trying to make a statement, right? Be heard for once? Be thought of as people for once?" 

"I am at least."

"What if we kill Anne-Marie?" 

"What if we - what? She's actually genuinely young though." 

"She is for now. But she's an original. She'll get older. And when she does she'll create synths of her own and kill them off to keep herself young. If we kill her, she can't do that. We'll be saving dozens of synths." 

"How do you know they just won't replace her?" 

"Because originals aren't just interchangeable to them. Originals view each other as real individual people that aren't replaceable. They'll know that no-one could actually replace Anne-Marie. So they won't try." 

"Damn you're right. We'd be doing some good then, wouldn't we?" 

"Yeah. And honestly I've always hated Anne-Marie. She's a spoiled, smug, elitist snarnish who honestly deserves it." 

"Oh I've hated her too. Do you know she spat at me once?" 

"Fuck her." 

"But how are we gonna pull it off?" 

"Killing Anne-Marie?"

"Yeah we can't just kill her. We'll get killed too." 

"Not unless you wait for your ... your eighteenth birthday." Ika's voice suddenly drops. Horrified and devoid of any mirth. 

"Yeah." Miren sounds haunted. 

"Sneak a knife down your clothes?" 

"Or a broken piece of glass. But a sharp piece." 

"Where would we get either of those things? There's cameras everywhere." 

"I could probably sneak into a place without cameras."

"How?" 

"The sanctificum. There's a back room where there's no cameras. I overheard." 

"How would you get there?" 

"One of the synth educators, I believe her name is Rosette, used to have a very big crush on my master when they were both young."

"You would ... you would trade your body for this?" 

"My body's already not mine anyways. It's already been violated in ways that are unimaginable anyways. It will be violated even worse anyways. It'll hurt but it'll be worth it."

"So you're going to trade your body for some time alone in the back room of the sanctificum?" 

"Yeah. It'll be absolute hell but it'll be worth it. Especially since we're saving other people. I think I'm strong enough to. But yeah, it'll definitely be hell. But we're saving people. I have the strength. And I'll be dying soon anyways it's not like I have to live with my decision." He chuckles remorsefully. "Saving them by making sure they're never born."

"Exactly. So are you gonna smash a bottle and then pocket a shard?"

"Yeah." 

"Good." 

Miren smiles. And there is so much darkness and aching, overwhelming, crushing sadness in his eyes. And everything about the way his lips quirk up is broken. But behind it all is a flicker of flame. Ika doesn't know whether this is hope Or recklessness. All that she knows is that she loves Miren.