This story is my take on how the Uglies world began. None of the characters from the books will appear, but you might meet some of their ancestors.
This is my first story. Normally, I write regular fic, but I decided to give fanfic a shot… Reviews and constructive criticism are appreciated. Flames are… not. Thanks a lot to my amazing beta, Infinite Rhapsody. Go check out her stories!
CHAPTER ONE
When I was little, my mother used to tell me that an angel had carried me down from Heaven, into her arms. I believed her, at least until religion was banned, when I was six.
When I was little, my father used to read me bedtime stories. That was my favorite part of the day, at least until I was shipped away from my parents to a government school when I was nine.
When I was little, I used to think the world was perfect. That was until I noticed the Government carting away people who spoke their thoughts, and the small, evil eyes of our leader, and the pictures of cities we had nuked in our frenzied attempt to control the world. I was twelve.
Young children always think their childhood was the best time in their life.
That ended with the atomic bomb in 1945, with the hydrogen bomb in 1952, with antimatter in 1995, with the Bohrian laser ray in 2014.
Mankind keeps finding ways to destroy itself.
Tell me about when I was little. Tell me about when I was small.
Tell me about the assassination of President Donovan, leading to anarchy and eventually to our current leader's dictatorship, the nameless Master, in 2053, when I was three. Tell me about the European H-bomb attack of 2058 when I was eight. Tell me about the Battle of Chicago and the massacre at Paris. Tell me about when I was little. Tell me about when I was small.
Children are so sentimental sometimes.
* * *
My story started at midnight on New Year's Day, 2050.
Doctors and nurse congratulated my mother and shook my father's hand, proclaiming that I would surely be special with a birthdate like that. My parents watched as I kicked and screamed, a pale-skinned brunette baby, face screwed up with the force of my cries.
They should have taken the hint. Even a baby can tell when the world they're coming into is a horrible, twisted, my-God-what-has-gone-wrong-here world.
My earliest memory is a bomb raid. I remember rushing, rushing down into the cellar in my mother's arms; reverberations from the nukes getting dropped on top of us; rustles from the radiation suits; the insistent smell of smoke. I remember coming out hours later to a world of destruction, helper robots attempting to salvage the city, grasping blackened wood and twisted metal in their unfeeling claws.
And smoke. Always smoke.
There were the nukes and the anthrax dirty bombs and the Bohrian laser and the Battle of Chicago that left the Windy City a radioactive, soupy Hades.
I had an aunt that lived there.
At least, I used to.
I grew older, my birthdays and Christmases punctuated by wars and lockdowns at school and a gradual loss of my Constitutional rights.
There were the hydrogen bombs and the antimatter annihilation of Washington, D.C. and the Philadelphia riots and the Boston massacre.
Then there was the slow take-over of the Master and his men, and the forcing of all children into the government schools. The massacres of all over the age of sixteen.
Through all this, the government tried to assure us that we were safe and happy and innocent, like ignorant, blind sheep on a cute television sitcom. Young, rebellious Uglies. At school, they told us how cool wallscreens were and how stupid the enemy was and how interesting geometry was and how nice it would be when we turned sixteen and went through a genetically modifying surgery to make us beautiful and healthy. To make us mindless servants of them. Beautiful, happy, yet completely clueless Pretties. They told us to always mind the warden bots and to never airboard at night. They told us the world was perfect. They told us America was a utopia.
I never listened to my teachers.
Especially when I grew up.
* * *
I was three months from sixteen, from coming of age, from the operation. I should have been hugely excited, but instead, I was restless, easily annoyed. I grew gradually apart from the few friends I had. I still went out tricking at night, airboarding past the warden station and making the silly bots chase me back to the teen dorms, going to the mod section of town, prowling past senseless robots and setting off fire alarms at my leisure.
But it wasn't enough. It never was.
Ninety, sixty, thirty, twenty, ten days left. I wasn't sure how I should spend my last ten days as an un-Surged, rebellious Ugly. I tried to read my favorite old books on my handheld tablet, but they made me impatient. Everything was always full of happiness and hope even in the darkest moments of the e-books. There were hardly any deaths at all and the main characters always got what they wanted: fame, love, a long life. A happy ending.
Truth to tell, I was jealous of their happiness. Everyone I asked always said they were happy, but you could see it in their eyes, that slight veiled, guarded, cloudy look. Shifty eyes, trying to get out of the question, not wanting to have the Government's Intelligence team down upon their heads if they answered the wrong way.
Intelligence were a world unto themselves. Changed beyond the normal surgery, they were inhumanly strong and fast, with infrared vision, map overlays, and so many other electrical mods that they could be closer to robot than human. (No one had ever found out that I knew of. No one had ever survived finding out, in any case.) We called them Specials. They were hand-picked from the new, sixteen-year-old Surged, supposedly the trickiest and the smartest of us. Even though Specials had super strength, speed, and a monthly paycheck five digits long, no one wanted to be an Special. They were too frightening, too unknown. And, of course, they served the Government. Hatred of our leaders was a secret yet deep-rooted feeling in all of us, one we were afraid to mention.
The day my world imploded was my sixteenth birthday. It began in the morning.
"Seven hundred hours! Seven hundred hours!" squeaked my alarm clock, standing on my bedside table amidst a disorganized clutter—clothes credits, thumb drives, all sorts of useless doodads. "Seven hundred hours!"
"Shut up," I mumbled blearily, turning over on the lumpy, dorm-issued mattress.
The alarm only increased in pitch. "Seven hundred hours! Seven hundred hours!"
"I'm getting up," I grunted, reluctantly dragging myself off the old, rickety metal bed. I stood and stretched, gesturing with my index finger to open up my wallscreen and key it to Mirror. One wall in my small bedroom flickered to life, showing itself only as a reflective surface. I gazed at my reflection for only a few seconds before keying the wallscreen to a list of my assignments. It hurt to look at my face; my ivory skin, dark, long brown hair, and short stature was less than average compared most of the beauties who graced the halls of the dorms. They were the popular ones, the teacher's pets, the cliques and the admired. The rest of us, looked down upon by them, were the nerds and the tricky, the sarcastic and the featherbrained. The ones, society said, that were colorless and drab. The ones, we shot back, that had real character.
I shook my head as if to chase away all my thoughts about the divide. Sixteen-year-olds shouldn't have to worry about all this, I told myself. All we need to think about is the mod operation. The mod operation is today. Today I will change who I am, will have DNA-altering chemicals pumped through my blood so I can look beautiful, just like everyone else. Today I will have software implanted in my brain that makes sure I behave like a perfect little sheep, a servant to the Master, and I will have perpetual antibiotics injected into all my cells like tiny cleaner bots so I live a long, healthy life.
Today I will be guaranteed a happy ending.
So long as I play by the rules.
I shrugged into my generic gov-issued, scratchy uniform of nondescript blue denim jeans and synthcotton white blouse. My hair was impossible, as usual, so I pulled it up into a ponytail, chewed a toothpaste tablet, and washed my face. I threw all my worldly belongings (my handheld computer, a hair band, a pair of gold earrings, a synthwool scarf and the junk on my bedside table) into my small black schoolbag. I pulled on a pair of old running shoes and walked to the door. Before leaving, I turned around and looked once more at my sorry dorm, gray walls and blank wallscreen, beat-up carpet and old 2043 terminal, empty closet and flimsy metal bed with its messy covers.
I was moving on to a new place, a new station, a new life.
I wasn't so sure I wanted to, though.
My dorm room was dirty, scruffy, and abused by who knew how many teenagers. It was claustrophobic, dingy; the east wall had a strange brown stain. The terminal was so old it didn't even connect to the nets. There were sometimes mice, which was odd, because all our teachers had told us they were extinct. It was frigid in the winter months and stifling in the summer. It was stuffy and empty, depressing and drab.
I loved the place.
I had a strange desire to hide inside the room and never come out. I wanted to stay in a place that was known and until now, hated; in a place I'd lived longer in than my own home, in a place that I had loathed all my life. I wanted to cling to familiarity.
But I could not.
A servebot came to the door and tugged my arm with its titanium claw. "Come. It is time for you to go for the modification surgery," it squawked in its electronic voice.
"To leave life as I know it, you mean," I corrected bleakly. "To go for something new, and frightening, and painful. To leave for a surgery that has a sixty percent fatality rate. To get my bones ground up and replaced with metal rods. To get my very genes altered so I don't look like a scrawny teenager. All in all, to leave my life in the fickle hands of the government."
"You have exceeded this unit's language capacity," was the bot's reply.
Stupid bot. Stupid dorm. Stupid surgery. "I'm not surprised. You servebots don't know anything past computer chips and fetching things and cleaning dorm rooms. You don't know anything past what some technician programmed into your electronic head. This world is beyond repair!"
The bot did nothing but repeat its automatic message.
"All right, I'm coming. That too hard for you?" I shouldered my bag and trudged out into the dingy hallway.
"You have exceeded this unit's language capacity."
"Oh, shut up."
"You have exceeded—"
"Servebot off," I said in exasperation.
This, at least, the bot understood. Its flashing lights went dark and the arms retreated inside the spherical body. It was still supported on the underground gravgrid, so, thankfully, the heavy, hovering robot didn't fall to the floor.
"Goodbye," I muttered. I stepped past the non-functional bot and down the hallway. Younger kids opened their doors and stared at me in surprise. She's a sixteen-year-old! She's going for the mod Surge! I can't wait till I'm sixteen! The little kids whispered in awe. I smiled weakly at them, but judging by the puzzled looks in their eyes, I had grinned in a twisted, scowling way. I couldn't help it. I'd waited years and years for the operation, and now…with the little kids admiring me…five hours away from beauty, a long life, a happy ending…I wasn't sure. Was it that I was scared that the Surge would be painful? Was it that I was scared that I would be one of the sixty percent that died from the modifications? Was it that I was scared to start a new chapter in my life? I didn't know. I smiled-slash-grimaced again as I came to the end of the hallway.
I stepped out the automatic door into stifling heat. The world was like a giant's oven. I vaguely remembered that our city used to be called Sattle or something, that it had been one of the rainiest and coldest cities in the old country, the United States of America. That was before global warming, of course. Now the whole world was blazing hot.
There used to be polar icecaps and something called snow. There used to be temperate climates and even rain forests.
Not anymore.
I shoved the thought of the heat behind me. That action wasn't really voluntary—my musings on temperature had been chased out by nerve-racking adrenaline as soon as I saw the robotic groundcar come to take me to the hospital. I resisted the urge to bite my nails as I walked up to the car on shaky legs.
I was five hours away from pain. I was five hours away from changing who I was. I was five hours away from a guaranteed happy ending.
I reached for the handle of the door and pulled it open. I climbed in with some difficulty (the car was made for people with much longer legs) and shut the hatch behind me. I began to insert my citizen's interface card into the slot in front of me to send information to the car's computer about me, my surgery, and the route to the hospital. Just as the card neared the slot, a large hand darted quick as though to cover my own.
* * *
Note: I know a lot of things in this story don't match up with the Uglies world exactly, but you have to remember, this takes place at the formation of it, so not everything will be the exact same.
And of course, if you've taken the time to read this chapter, you minus as well review. Just click that button down there. Reviews fuel my imagination. :)
-Aelyra