NOVEL WEB Chapter Six: Past & Present
That morning, I skipped all my usual routines.
The minutes my alarm went off, I was already out of bed, and heading for my beanbag. I didn’t stop to grab my usual cup of shitty lukewarm coffee or grab one of the many repackaged varieties of the same genetically engineered soy that passed for nutrition. Hell, I didn’t even pull on any of my six identical sets of SynthLinen™ tracksuits, which were basically the only new clothing I had received since I moved out with only a boxful of possessions and the clothes on my back. I didn’t even bother to check the news. It was a good day. School was out, as I couldn’t remote in for the first aid course that the school was required to give students my age.
It was pointless filler, considering that most students were earmarked to spend their entire lives within a corporate arcology, where the company would give you a biomonitor implant anyway so that they could micromanage your health in addition to the rest of your existence. I still had a scar on my right arm where mine had been surgically removed when I got evicted from my family quarters after having very nearly been beaten to death by my own parents. The surgery had been charged to me afterwards, or rather had been added to my total lifetime debt that would then be charged to the feds when I inevitably died without paying it off, resulting in taxpayer money flowing into corporate hands, and not into things that benefited the wider population.
My parents had obviously refused to pay for the medical procedure, or for my care after beating me half to death. Since it was on corporate territory, it was also not criminally prosecuted, and the only consequence was a slight slap on the wrist from HR for causing a potential PR issue for the company. They’d made all this clear in the message they left for me with the corporate affairs manager who had calmly explained all of this to me without so much as a pitiful smile. The message had said enough that she really didn’t need to devote any time to feeling emotion for an ex-dependant of a corporate asset.
How they had said I was useless, that I was a disease, that they should have known both their children would…would…
Fuck me, I would never escape that moment. There was no hesitation before they turned on me. That morning, there was unconditional love, and in just a matter of minutes, love had been replaced with rage and disgust. I knew they had been into some questionable politics, but I didn’t expect them to go as far as they did in that moment. They hadn’t even been this bad when
I wish I had known where my sister had disappeared to after she left home. When she left, she cut off everyone, including me. I don’t know if it was because she feared mum and dad would try and use me to get through to her, or whether she thought I was like them, but whatever she had thought, it had resulted in her cutting me out of her life with surgical precision. Not even social services had been able to contact her, and with the foster system overflowing, the only place left for me was the welfare blocks.
I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t do that. She escaped them the minute they wanted to make her do what they wanted, rather than let her live her life. I understood that much, even if my parents had refused to tell me why they disapproved of Dannie’s love life, or what they had argued about that night she ran away. I had never been able to bring myself to contact her. I didn’t even know if she would accept me, let alone want anything to do with me. My parents had simply told me to never speak of her again, and had given their side of the story, which I now suspected to be less than the truth.
I shook my head and tried to focus back on the present. Tonight, I’d be meeting Alice’s parents, and we’d already agreed via text that we were going to tell them that we were together. Somehow, I’d manage to be in a relationship with another girl without telling her that I was the way I was. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to do this forever. Eventually, the truth would come out, she’d find out I was trans, that I looked the way I did, and she’d reject me like everyone else who had found out the truth.
Well, I mean, almost everyone. Sarah knew I was trans, and it was on my record. When I had been picked up after getting evicted, I had already gone through all the steps of changing my legal identity. If you could say anything about modern bureaucracy, it was safe to call it non-discriminating. Everyone had to do the same level of redundant paperwork, DNA verification, identity chip registration, form filling, and frontal lobe torture to get welfare allocation. They didn’t give a jot whether you thought you were a dog; it all ended with you in an easily monitored and controlled living situation where they could keep you alive, fed, and without any way to cause trouble for the real citizens. The ones who worked for a living.
In my case, it wasn’t voluntary. I had been given two options. Either get put in the foster care system- where I would probably be fostered to one of the biomed companies to use as a test subject, this being the way the world worked- or I could live in a depressing hole of a suburb and maybe have a chance at a life after I left school where I still had all my organs. Hell of a choice, right?
I shook my head again, and grabbed the headset before I could get pulled into any more mental rabbit holes of doom and gloom. Tonight, I was going to be happy. I was going to be me. And I was going to wear the best damn dress I could find for my VR avatar. I didn’t have much money, but at this rate, it was going to take the rest of my life to save up enough to even get a black-market surgeon to do my surgeries. Let alone one who wasn’t going to sell me as spare parts if I was lucky.
Pulling on my headset, I leaned back in my beanbag, and smiled. I was going shopping. And if there was one thing humans had perfected in past 189 years of internet communications, it was buying shit online.
The white faded from my eyes, and I found myself standing inside a passable recreation of a 21st century shopping mall. Malls like this were pretty much extinct in the real world, having been largely supplanted by the virtual fashion industry. Most designer clothing nowadays was either bought from one of the exclusive boutique stores that almost exclusively catered to people with an actual bank account or were overlaid over your clothing via augmented reality. If the clothing was real, it was easier and less time consuming to buy it online. The last of the big real-world outlets had gone under during the third major pandemic to hit in the last century, partly because of the lockdowns, but also due to the significant drop in the global population.
Or was it pandemic number four? I was always bad with that part of my history.
I had been given the link to this particular marketplace by Becky, back around when we had first met. She had tried to organise a girl’s day out, a hard thing to do when a member of your friendship group is an individual you’ve never met and who cannot ever actually meet you in person the way she is. She and Jaime had tried to convince me that it’d be fine, and that it wouldn’t hurt to go out shopping just one time, but then I told her about my living situation, and she immediately winced really, really hard. I couldn’t blame her. I was literally penniless. Even my allowance was essentially government funbucks that could be easily tracked and credited back to me later down the line if I happened to be earning an actual income.
Ironically, looking around at the simulation, I couldn’t really see the point of it all. What was meant to make shopping easier- shop from the comfort of your home!- was being dressed up as a virtual environment, which you still had to walk around, and which included pointless features such as virtual coffee shops (which would order your coffee and/or food to be delivered via drone to your actual address while you sipped your virtual latte that simulated the experience right down to the molecular level, but was still very much fake).
The only real advantage slowing down the consumer’s shopping process had was to force you to walk past the advertising that was plastered all over the virtual environment. And making it period accurate to the last century was pointless when more than half the stores were selling products that didn’t exist back then or had window advertisements for the latest and greatest in cybernetic implants. It was all a distraction, wool over the eyes of the consumer.
…dear god, I was getting pretentious in the edgiest fucking ways today, holy shit. I shook my head, and continued window shopping. I eventually settled on some cheap avatar skin from a few years back that was being sold at a community-listed market (which I guess was what passed for an old-fashioned thrift store in today’s digital world). It wasn’t anything special, just a black synth-cotton skirt, a plain white blouse, and a jacket that claimed to have the exact surface properties of actual leather from an actual animal’s hide (which I found dubious given the use of dated rendering software in the metadata, and the insanely low pricing of a couple hundred creds for the entire ensemble), but it was better than showing up in a outfit better suited for crawling through fantasy dungeons, or the small selection of anime-inspired skins I’d gotten for a pittance a few years ago. Really, I was lucky to find something that’d give my girlfriend’s parents a good impression and not send them scrambling to find a better suitor for Alice.
Speaking of which, I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to tell her I was trans, and not only that, but that I was still pre-transition. I resolved to tell her as soon as I was sure that her parents weren’t going to reject her for dating a trans girl. Which was hopefully a given since she was apparently openly out as a lesbian to them, but that wasn’t exactly certain in today’s world. A lot of the resentment of the resource wars towards the wastefulness of the late 21st and early 22nd century’s culture of extravagance had largely shifted from being aimed at the rich and wealthy to being aimed at those who had the resources to not just support themselves and their family, but to change their bodies to be in line with their identity.
The fact was that in a world of over sixteen billion, where resources were spent, where a sixty percent employment like that of Neo Sydney was considered to be on the high end, and where the world just seemed to be decaying with every passing day- more concerned with making the wealthy more wealthy and segregating the poor into places where they could quietly die off- being trans was seen as having aspirations beyond your class, and being one of the wasteful gluttons who ruled the world.
I was hoping that the fact Alice’s parents were amongst those in the upper crust was at least a good sign. Or was at least going to mean that their reaction would be more aimed at my financials than at my gender identity.
Sometimes being a nihilist sucked. Right now, was one of those times.
