I opened my eyes to see a shining, bright light.

“Looks like another failed mission.” I mumbled while pushing myself up off the bed. I looked around, only to see a handful of scatterbrained scientists asking me questions.

One of the scientists spoke up “Are you able to see alright, Ople?”

They wanted to make sure the teleportation worked as intended. You see, I was just teleported back from a different planet, after I almost died. And every so often, people would come back with complications, such as memory loss, issues hearing and worst of all, problematic motor-skills.

In fact, the oldest person out of the 233 living residents of this spaceship, know only as “Float”, came back from a mission unable to move most of his body.

But don’t worry, that was over 70 years ago, and most of the teleporter’s kinks have been smoothed out now.

The old man’s name, by the way, is Lysen, and he has a floating chair, real space-age like, so he’s doing fine now. Aside from the occasional tantrum every now and then, which the doctors say is to be expected of someone at the age of 140-something.

Anyway, I got sidetracked.

The scientists were still perstering me with questions, when the black sliding door that served as an entrance to this room flew open. Red and green warning lights flashed.

It kind of reminded me of this ‘Christmas’ celebration that I had come to learn about, during my many days spent in our library.

Once again, my inner dialog has become sidetracked, you should probably get used to it, though, as I have a tenancy of doing it.

Well, whatever.

I looked up at the door, and saw the silhouette of a girl, panting heavily. Instantly I realised that it was my birth-partner, Shing-X78. Or just Shing, if you prefer.

Shing looked quite similar to me, because of the fact that we’re what is know as ‘Birth-Partners’ which means we were both born of the same mother.

Twins, basically.

We a have some population issues, so to combat that, a long-dead scientist, named Sorvorn-RyH, figured out a formula that could make the rate at which women birth twins 100 percent.

That’s quite handy, but the biggest problem is the fact that everyone basically has a Dopple-Ganger running somewhere around the ship. Some people’a Birth- partners even became traitors, and that inevitably Caused scorn apon both twins.

However Shing and I were lucky, as we were fraternal, so we looked a fair bit different from one another. However, Birth-Partners don’t share DNA, due to the. fact that one child is made naturally, and the other is made chemically.

In our case, it was Shing who was the artificial baby. There for, Shing wasn’t fully human.

Shing was genderless.

They were genderless.

‘They’…

Shing grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the room. They looked so angry that not even the scientist would try to stop them. Shing dragged me down the long hallway which was filled with what seemed like a thousand doors that all looked the same.

Their hair was simi-long, and it was a mix between scarlet red and chestnut. For a second I realized that her hair matches her personality quite a bit. And I pondered whether there was a God choosing people’s hair color based on their personality. I thought that maybe I had short, white hair because I was an introvert, but the connection wasn’t really there, so I disregarded those thoughts.

Once again I was snapped out of my thoughts when Shing turned 90 degrees to the right, and opened one of the doors.

How can she even tell the difference between the door she wanted to go though, and all the others? I’ve probably spent half of my life walking down these halls and opening every door until I found the one I wanted, every time I needed to go somewhere.

The door she pulled me through lead out to a balcony. It was completely in closed by glass, as to not let any of our precious oxygen out into space.

However from where I was standing, it was clear that we were in a ship, floating throughout to final frontier. I could see a few little red dwarf planets, similar to what was know as ‘Pluto’ from the Earth’s Solar system.

I stood there bright eyed, as I had never been to this part of the shop before. I turned over to Shing to see if she had the same expression. But, oh no, she was still angered, something which I had forgotten about.

I immediately averted my eyes down to the floor, because it felt like her case would pierce through me otherwise.

I started to speak sheepishly. “Ah… so, what’s going on, Shing? You look a little perturbed.” That was a lie, though. She looked incredibly mad.

Like they say, if looks could kill…

Shing’s anger seemed to disappear, as they looked at me and said “I’m not mad at you, Ople. It’s about mom.”

Shing’s expression was now one of sorrow. With that alone, I knew something bad was going on. And something worse was soon to come.

-Chapter 1 End-