An Angel by Any Other Name

Chapter Two: Singularity

In my youth, I was an odd child. My drawings consisted of blank pages with scarcely applied streaks of yellow. I would often speak of myself and my family as being the same unit rather than separate individuals. I was anxiously attached to my mother. When pulled away from her, I would cry and scream about how cold it was, and the pain of her touch being severed from me. I was told that I acted like it caused me physical pain to be apart from her. Daycare was a messy ordeal. I adjusted after a few months, but until I adjusted, it was a battle every morning to tear me away from her. Once I was torn from her, I was inconsolable. I was diagnosed with separation anxiety at the age of five. My school counselors assumed it was the result of my parents having been divorced. My father was out of the picture as soon as the paperwork was officiated, so the easiest explanation was that I was scared she'd abandon me as well. My mother never seemed to believe that explanation, though. She said I had always been like this.

The truely interesting circumstance of my youth was my very birth. The case of my mother's pregnancy was the first recorded case of parthenogenesis in human beings, besides the heavily-debated Virgin Mary. Since my birth, I was intensively put through test after test to discover if my mother had just lied about not having had a sexual partner. I'm not sure what to believe. It was first suggested in 3026, when I was born, but there was heavy debating and disagreement. Twenty-two years later, however, most scientists have reluctantly agreed on this odd circumstance of my birth. As such, I've had complications that had not been predicted but also make sense in such a case.

In parthenogenesis, the mother duplicates her egg and uses it in place of a sperm. It usually only occurs in plants and lizards such as the common pest, the New Mexico Whiptail. I feel the New Mexico Whiptail is easier to find naturally than most plants in the current climate, but I enjoy researching the way things used to be.

Aside from the scientific debates, my birth stirred discontent and anger amongst the general, already-disturbed public. To some, it signaled our species being at a critical population point, in which the body deemed it necessary for females to produce entirely on their own. Some politicians met this idea with excitement, claiming it meant we'd eventually be a female-only species, much similar to the lizards that littered the streets. Some politicians used the same point with fear, afraid of males becoming obsolete and disappearing entirely.

To others, my mother's parthenogenetic pregnancy meant The End was coming. They didn't meet this idea with fear, no. Rather, they met it with an alarming excitement and thrill. Various religious groups and cults began shouting their spiels from every hilltop and balcony, on every radio station and television set. Others were afraid of my birth having been under the same understood circumstance of their idol, and declared it a falsity. They labeled my mother a whore trying to cover up an affair, and shamed her, for if my birth was truely by parthenogenesis, they had never consummated their wedding, but they believed she had to of had intercourse with someone.

For my entire existence thus far, it had been impossible for any human being to escape the news of my existence.

And yet, amongst others, I felt invisible as a person. Everyone knew of me, everyone had seen my face. The world had watched me grow up. Yet no one saw me. I was only ever the Beacon or the Harbringer. A lab rat, or a bird in a gilded cage to be observed at it's own expense.

I had become a world-wide circus act.

I found comfort in the solace of gardens. In this post-The Great Fire world, plants were scarce. Most were rendered unable to survive the scorching temperatures of the world, even after most of the surviving population fled with the precious cargo of seeds to the Northern regions. However, within the carefully-constructed metal greenhouses in Ouranos, they could thrive. It was as if they had truely belonged there from the start, in their manmade abodes.

Plants don't gossip or interrogate you. They don't force a meaning onto you, or expect anything of you. They're quite helpless, really. They sit in one spot, their limbs slowly moving to reach out to the light, and roots ever-searching for water. They live a simple life of searching for sustenance, reproducing, and dying.

Everyday, I'd thank my mother for her generosity in buying me the seeds for my own little spot in Ouranos. My plants didn't provide fruit, vegetables, or much else of value. They expected nothing of me, and I expected nothing of them.

They were just lilies, providing me something to talk to, and I was just the girl providing water.