Chapter 1
Serenity: Life is a Garden
I still remember the first day I saw one of them. I was six. The boy was maybe four or five. He didn’t look like me. I noticed that first thing. His eyes were muddy, impure, marbled brown and green and blue like a wild animal’s. His hair hung down around his ears, scruffy and thin and matted with filth from the slums. His sunken cheeks were sprinkled with freckles – things I had never seen, only heard about in stories. I couldn’t stop staring at him, so fascinated was I by his strange appearance.
“Stop it!” my guardian hissed, jerking my arm and pulling me closer to her. “Don’t look at it, Ren. Just pretend it doesn’t exist.”
I found myself touching my cheeks, my eyelids, my hair, wondering if my skin would ever become dirty like his or if my eyes would change from emerald green to that odd multicolored hue.
But then Jewel gave my arm another tug, and I obediently left the boy behind, following my surrogate parent through the congested street.
I did what my guardian had told me. I made myself forget about the boy. He no longer existed in my mind, because he shouldn’t exist at all. Jewel and Eron tried to explain it to me. Life is a garden, they said. A beautiful garden full of flowers so perfect it would take your breath away. But there are weeds in the garden too, and if the weeds are not removed they will grow and grow until they choke the flowers and kill the beauty of the garden. The Defects are society’s weeds. The bio-monitors are like the gardeners; their job is to take out the weeds. But sometimes the gardeners overlook a weed or two. Those weeds grow up, but then there’s nothing you can do about it because the weeds are strong and stubborn. So the gardeners leave the weeds alone, ignoring them until they eventually die off.
It made more sense as I got older. Natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Adaptation. Just like the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger, Mother Nature stated the Defects had to go. It was an act of mercy, really. With so many impurities in their bodies, there was no way they could survive in our perfect garden. Evolution demanded their deaths.
That’s why we learned to ignore the crippled man on the street corner. The little girl who was blind in one eye. The young man with a missing finger. Because they didn’t exist. They were as good as dead.
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