Defective Realms

Hope

"I may apologize once again." Nora ties around me another blanket.

"Next week I am going to fix this. It's a promise." This week our apartment won't be provided heat and electricity because of Nora's payment delay and I swear I can see the stalactites climbing their way down from the ceiling.

No matter how many hot teas I force down my throught, the place isn't getting any warmer. "I will try the sleep treatment. And so should you. Goodnight." Cold makes me more sleepy and under all these blankets it is the only thing I could comfortably do. Behind me Nora leaves again, probably to call the Social Care Department, spending our very last coins for this month and request an expanse in our debtline.

She won't make it, yet she's been trying all afternoon. This looks totally futile to me, but I know that hadn't it been for her, I would have been abandoned in the streets, pleading for a piece of rotten bread. My bed would have been a carton box and I would be an easy prey, like all these Aluminium Genetic ID citizens. The thought alone makes me shiver more than this cold room ever will. It is her stubborness that reached us till here and will still do so, until I will be able to work properly.

Copper and Aluminium Genetic ID people are not allowed to work before they are judged to be competent. People like us, mostly with genetic predispositions in various diseases, are considered to be very expensive workers. That's because in the future we might or indeed present the disadvantages our DNA has revealed since our birth. Something like that will be costly for corporations and government, funding workers with money and day-offs, that can actually not work and be considered as useless.

The only way I can succeed not falling in this black hole, is when I reach 4th grade, where my practical in BioGold will end and I will gain my certificate. I should be gratefull that a person like me has access in the educational system, despite my genetic profile. But sometimes I feel like something is wrong. And then there are these people.

The afternoon people with this rage, this complaint I sometimes feel when I spend cold days like this one, these feelings that deserve to others than simple citizens, the high class ones, even the government. But when I try to understand the people who fight them, when I try to mimic the boiling hate they release, I find nothing inside me but impassiveness. I am not a rebel, or a system's person. I am just someone who wans to cope with her studies. Someone who yearns for recognition in academics, be hired by BioGold and gain a position in their investigation industry. It's the same system that leaves me freeze here that will tomorrow give me an opportunity to survive.

Maybe that's why I will never be like these people. Because I can conform to the laws and demands of this society. Pull myself together, no matter how tight it has to be, so that I can cope with what they need me to become. A tool in their mechanism.

To obey means to win.

February mornings are inevitably unpleasant when you wake up in polar temperatures as if you are a refrigerator citizen. In the kitchen Nora has prepared hot tea and toasted butter bread. I lazily join her, while she is listening fully concentrated to the news from our old radio.

Their main theme is the increased ill population, financial difficulties and how government is doing its best to overcome this. Once again I neglect the noisy reporter and focus on my breakfast. Maybe tomorrow I will be deprived of it too. "No school today?" she asks without moving her glance from the radio, as if it would offer her the answer to our problems. I wonder how she can find interesting all this recycling shit. It only brings me unaffordable headache. "Saturdays are free." I remind her.

Her unstoppable shifts make her lose sense of time. I learned it the hard way, when she had been overworking for three days nonstop and finally collapsed. Since then, she's been having strange times, where she can not recognize wheather it is day or night, or when it is the right time to sleep and eat. While having to help her get in shape again, I almost lost it in the idea of her dying or even worse being unable to help the 14-year-old me.