I stared at the narrow body that showed itself in the mirror, remaining unchanged and lacking mutation day after day. My eyes focused on the slender torso, two shoulders, the single neck, and my lone empty face. I was one mind, one spirit, one person. What I saw was an anomaly, a rarity that was treasured above all else in a world of pain and confusion, a condition considered valuable after an awful twist of fate. I was a reminder of a simple past, where ethics were relevant and life was embraced with free-spirited attempts at improving the world. If only man could turn back time to a place long forgotten. . .
. . . . .
Many people considered me lucky. I had unlimited access to privacy, I could swim and ride a bike without hesitation, and, most conveniently, I didn’t have to devote my entire education studying for the Test. I never had to compete to be the better one, the stronger one, the one who would be a better mother, because I was the only one. There was just one me when I went to bed at night and one me when I woke up. Due solely to my genetic makeup, there would always only be one of me and I had to learn to deal with it.
Somehow, the twins who admired my lonesome stature never factored in what few splendors I was missing out on; they only saw in me what they didn’t have, a typical shortcoming of the human condition I eventually forced myself to become aware of. They didn’t realize that I was denied the physiological connection only a twin could provide, the constant surety of bonding with someone who literally knew everything about you.
These twins had no idea what it was like to walk around in a world where factors out of my own control caused strangers on the street to view me in a plethora of ways, both good and bad. Some just stared, surprised to see a singleton female, often wondering if I was actually much older and had already taken the Test with extremely good separation results. Some just judged me, assuming I was an elitist snob, viewing myself as somehow more civilized than the twins. I never understood these people, thinking that I even had a reason to feel even the slightest bit more important because of my DNA. All I knew was that we were “different, but equal”, a term my parents drilled into my head from an early age.
I never felt the desire to bully twins, mainly because I was more likely to admire their normalness than make fun of it. As a child, I often felt left out without a guaranteed best friend. The people who thought I was fortunate were completely unaware of what it felt like to be without a partner to confide in, a person who knew what I was thinking without a word leaving my lips. I hungered for a twin by my side, a sister who would be there day and night to appease my need for company. I wanted somebody to understand me and know how I felt. My own thoughts were trapped inside of me, and without release, they continued to grow stronger.
. . . . .
I knew more about twinhood than most of the singleton population. While the United States was one of the few countries that hadn’t yet turned to censorship, schools were becoming less adamant on covering the subject. Theoretically, one only had to search in order to find every piece of twin history in publication, but all too many people made the decision to remain ignorant; it tended to lessen the pain. Since I was a singleton child who didn’t fit into my world full of twins, I was used to what pain felt like. I never knew anything different.
Since I didn’t have a need to study for the Test at school, I found myself with extra time to spend at the library from a young age. I studied all the history I could find with agonizing enthusiasm. I had a strange desire to learn about the life I would never have, hoping that if I could feel the twin experience, if only through the written word, I would be more complete.
At first, I kept with light literature; children’s books taught about the process of taking the Test and going to camp, nothing you couldn’t figure out by watching TV or talking to anybody who had ever been a twin. I soon got bored, and as I matured, so did my literature. By the time I was fourteen, I was reading books about conspiracy theories, ethical misconduct, and information on twin history that even the most ambitious of educators wouldn’t teach. Government-approved educational tools began appearing more and more appalling as I immersed myself in works that warned of a future filled with despair and regrets. It was at that point in my life that I taught myself to view twin culture from the outside, to peel back a layer of artificial acceptance to reveal a raw, hopelessly grim truth.
Most of the population had grown accustomed to the irrepressible twin pandemic, treating it as if the world had always been that way. Society had long before surrendered to the fate of the shockingly uncontrollable event, trying to fit the results of the tragedy into everyday life. The result was a mass amount of corruption, denial, and painstakingly concealed distress.
Most people had lost hope in ever fixing the problem, taking life one day at a time simply to remain functional. In fact, I didn’t even realize how depressed the world had become until I read enough about my ancestors to envy their happiness. They didn’t have an overbearing issue that covered the entirety of the developed world, and you could tell just by looking in their eyes. There was something inside of them that remained hopeful, a glimmer of faith that the next day would bring something better. There were very few living people I had met with that same look about them, and I quickly attributed it to the guarding of human emotion and the abandonment of the most basic ethics that the world had come to rely.
Oddly enough, the entire social calamity can be pinpointed to one isolated event, not less than two hundred years before. It happened in a laboratory in California, and was, at the time, a discovery demanding worldwide approval: Dr. William Damien had discovered an eco-friendly fuel source, a brand new easily-produced formula known as B13-26. Its active ingredient was a newly-discovered compound, Thermohexydrine, which bonded to water molecules, giving them the ability to not only combust, but do so without releasing greenhouse gasses or any impurities found in black exhaust. Gas stations would be able to fill their tanks with 80% water and 20% of the mass-created thermohexidrine (THD) solution, making it cheap, efficient, and available from labs in every part of the world.
The timing could not have been better. Oil prices were rising by the hour, causing economic difficulties and global power struggles. On top of that, environmentalists were constantly worrying about the livelihood of the atmosphere, claiming that by burning gasoline, humans were slowly destroying the earth. They had already donated millions of dollars into Dr. Damien’s efforts, and were proud to hear of his success. It was a discovery that was internationally awaited, and the liquid peace would be soon dispensed in gas stations worldwide.
Before its release to the public, the B13-26, eventually known as gas-elite, underwent extensive testing to prove it was in fact safe. It would be at least five years after the initial announcement of its discovery before it could be put into use. Vehicles of every make, model, and age were tested repeatedly to make sure their emissions were as harmless as was claimed, and time and time again, all that could be detected was pure water vapor and a miniscule amount of THD that seemingly had no harmful effects on plants, animals, or humans in the testing environment.
In the summer of 2012, gas-elite was released in every major city from Los Angeles to Sydney. Eventually the entire industrialized world was running on what many praised as being the wonder-fuel that would end all problems. Within a matter of months, economies improved drastically, wars in the Middle East ended, and environmentalists could put forth their efforts into protesting cows, or whatever they worried about at the time.
People drove their cars (and flew their planes, after air-elite was discovered) uneventfully for years. It wasn’t until 2045, when Tokyo reported a drastic increase in female conjoined twins, that anybody worried. At first, scientists blamed the mutation on exposure to radiation, but the problem quickly plagued every urban center on the globe, taking no pity on Western civilizations. By 2060, 95% of urban-born females were conjoined.
Dr. Benjamin Raelin from London was the first man to connect the incident to the international use of gas-elite. An unforeseen result of constant THD exposure was X-chromosome mutation, a genetic tragedy that didn’t show up until the third generation of gas-elite users.
The first group of people exposed to THD, known in textbooks as Gen1, had no adverse symptoms from the mutation. All the chemical did was mutate the X-chromosomes in male haploid cells, better known as sperm, causing the sex cells of both males and females from the second generation, Gen2, to be affected. When two of the mutated Gen2 X-chromosomes came together to form the females of Gen3, in a process science is still unsure about, the embryos split into what would normally be identical twins. For whatever reason, the split was never completed, resulting in all affected female infants being born as twins connected at the shoulder. The mutation was consistent, and varied very little from case to case.
A set of twins was typically connected at the shoulder. They shared most of the spine, but it forked towards the end, allowing two separate necks and heads. They had even control and feeling in their two arms and legs, and their brains somehow knew to connect for relatively simple physical maneuvering. They were often slightly short in stature, and had wider torsos than average, but their general anatomy was close to that of a singleton, majorly differing only from the shoulders up. They only had one heart and two lungs, and their bodies were slightly weaker due to overexertion of the heart supporting an extra head, causing the average age of death to drop down to sixty-five years old.
Birth rates decreased tremendously for a number of reasons, starting with social confusion. Since all males remained individual, most twins desired two separate husbands, but most governments were opposed to the idea, viewing twins as singular beings. There was a period of time in which twins remained unmarried their entire lives, causing a 30% world population decrease. Eventually, society became used to the situation though, and men simply became used to marrying two personalities. The next problem had to do with the physical hardship of pregnancy and giving birth. Most twin body systems were already in overdrive trying to support two people, and once a baby was introduced, it caused a whole new set of problems. Miscarriage was common, but even if a fetus went close to full term, stillbirths were frequent. Some mothers, fearing a stillbirth or even feeling sorry for their future daughters having to deal with twinhood, turned to abortion.
Most countries weren’t sure how to handle this problem. Obviously, the use of gas-elite was immediately abolished worldwide and quickly replaced with old fashioned gasoline, but the damage was done and irreversibly etched into the gene pool.
In the East, many governments encouraged their citizens to refrain from having children, viewing it as an opportunity to reduce their overbearing populations and hoping that the mutation would somehow go away over time. That plan quickly backfired as the population dropped 95% in fifty years, causing eventual economic failure.
Some countries sought out singletons in an attempt to purify genetics, but ultimately realized they were destroying potentially world-saving un-mutated X-chromosomes when the children remained conjoined.
Feminists viewed the situation as unacceptably sexist. They claimed that if males had been affected, scientists would be doing everything possible to end the problem. They obviously had no idea that laboratories all around the world had devoted years to try solving the problem, but to no avail. Some extremist feminists went as far as to suggest a gene that, when injected into males, would cause Y-chromosomes to mutate in the same way the X-chromosomes had, but that notion was immediately proved not only unnecessary, but completely impossible.
The world was enveloped in a situation that can only be considered ethical hell. Nobody knew what to do with billions of conjoined twins, and the only obvious solution, at the time, was still considered morally abominable. That soon changed as nations became more and more desperate.
After three generations of conjoined twins, the United States was willing to try everything. Fewer and fewer healthy babies were born every day once the medical expenses providing every pregnant woman with a C-section proved too much for tax dollars to handle. The government, without the use of democracy, instilled a plan to appease the problem. They simply called it “The Test”, and there was no way to stop the inevitable horrors it implied.
The Test came into play when my parents were young, so young that they have very little recollection of it. Many controversial history books termed this period as the modern end of humanity. It was a last-ditch effort to fix the world, and very little opposition took place out of utter desperation. The value of human life was reconsidered, and decreased in the hope of a better tomorrow. Of course, few people by now view it that way, but that’s just part of the plan.
I risked my innocence to learn of the horrors that go on behind closed hospital doors, to study the test that had become nothing more than a fact of life that accompanied growing up. Ignoring the world’s efforts to make this practice okay, I maintained my secretive stance on its obvious barbarism. I felt alone in my opinion, but that was all the more reason to keep a firm foundation of ethics.
For every day I kept to myself, the more corruption I saw around me, and it wasn’t safe. If for a single reason, I wanted a twin to reinforce my own ignorance. I needed someone to tell me that I was wrong about the way twins were handled, but my mind remained isolated.
. . . . .
As I walked to school sometime in late spring, I saw my friends, Jane and Cleo Anderson. Their parents were long-time friends of my parents, so we had practically grown up together.
“Hey Leah!” shouted the energetic Cleo from across the sidewalk, waving her arm excitedly. Her curly brown hair seemed to be going in every which way, while Jane’s was more tamed, tied back in an orderly bun.
“Hi guys. How’ve you been?” I asked as I approached them for a hug. It had been over a week since I had seen them because they were off at prep-camp.
“Stressed!” lamented Jane as we pulled away from our embrace. Her eyes sported familiar gray bags. “This test is awful. They don’t even tell you what to study for!”
“Oh, it really is terrible. Jane’s gonna pass, though. She’s always gotten better grades than me,” Cleo assured me.
“You mean ‘better grades than I’. You’d be a better mom though, and they always talk about how important that is,” said Jane, always trying to keep things even between the two when it came to intelligence.
Cleo and Jane were different than most twins. It’s almost as if they were totally against the Test, but were so caught in the middle of it there was no hope in bringing their concerns out of the subconscious. They would be subjected to it no matter what, and feeling sad about it would only worsen the pain. There was something about them that just signified sorrow. Something in their eyes said “I don’t like this”, a deep pain that only a fellow anti-test believer could detect. There was no way we could ever discuss it, but we all knew of the terrible place the world had become. They loved each other, and didn’t have the competitive nature most twins did that hid their compassion. They felt empathy, something that most of the population had long before learned to abandon.
“I’m sure you’ll both do great,” I said, doing the best I could to hide the disgust I felt with my own words. Who was I trying to fool? It didn’t matter if they both did great, because one of them would fail no matter what. One of them would be denied the right to live, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.
“Anyways, how was school this week?” Cleo asked curiously.
“Empty. It was just me, the younger girls, and every obnoxious boy enrolled. Most of our teachers didn’t even show up because I was the only one who went. I spent most of my time in the library,” I replied unenthusiastically.
Classes, between sixth grade and junior year, were divided by sex and age. The girls, all twins in my age group except me, were taught on Test subjects, and slowly conditioned to believe one of them was better than the other. Of course I benefited from core classes covering math, science, and English, but other classes like Test prep, a course called “living separated”, and “Raising healthy children” (a class that recently began encouraging gender-selective abortion), were useless to me. It was always awkward on the first day of school when I would ask my teachers if I could just go to the library instead of their class, but they were usually more than supportive. They probably didn’t want me getting any strange ideas about twin traditions. Unfortunately, it was much too late for that.
“That sounds really boring. I doubt it was as bad as prep-camp, though,” Said Jane, rolling her eyes in a casual manner.
“What was that all about?” I asked. Prep-camp was a relatively new step in the process of separation. Few people who hadn’t attended knew anything about it.
“It was terrible. It was just workshop after workshop that encouraged us to ‘try our best on the test’. It was really just another step in this whole inane process of idiocy-“ and then she stopped. Cleo had the tendency to go too far when discussing the Test, but it had never been this bad. To be that openly negative was not only taboo, but punishable by law. She was just lucky enough Jane and I were the only ones to hear.
“Watch your mouth! We won’t even make it to the test if you aren’t careful,” Jane scolded. She became pallid with anxiety. Her eyes seemed to tear up a bit, but it was hard to tell. She had to maintain her composure as we approached the school.
“I’m so sorry,” Cleo offered, beginning to subconsciously mirror Jane’s emotions.
Exchanges like these between twins were rare, and were observed with worry if others witnessed them. Just last year, a set of twins, Sarah and Julie Truman, broke down in the middle of a class on separation. I was there because the library was undergoing repairs, and there was really nothing better to do. A description of the Aftershock, the term used to describe what a newly-singleton twin feels when she first sees the empty bit of pillow beside her, was too much for Sarah to handle. She knew that it was going to be her waking up in the recovery room, feeling the horror of sudden loneliness, and fell into hysteria. She broke down, and Julie knew exactly what was going on. They couldn’t keep themselves together, and were immediately escorted out of the room, sobbing a terrible song of despair. We never saw them again. It was a shame too, because, like Cleo and Jane, they loved each other so dearly.
The rest of our walk to school was silent, and classes presumed as usual.
. . . . .
(unofficial title). OK, so you know that "to play" "to combust" are verb infinitives, right? Of course... so basically the rule is that the adverb - "quickly" "rashly" "uselessly", whatever - should not be put in the middle. Therefore when you wrote "giving them the ability to not only combust" you kinda broke this rule 
Gender:
Points: 977
Reviews: 3