The Genetic Code

Chapter 9

The room is small, white walls on all four sides. In the middle of the room sits a chair at a table made of metal, with numerous instruments sprawled across it. Julia sits me down on the chair, then takes my thumb and presses it against an acrylic tablet on the table. It glows blue under the impression of my thumb.

With one hand holding my thumb in place, she uses her other to pivot my head straight so that I'm staring straight at a black spot on the opposite wall.

"Look at the mark. Keep your head still," she instructs in a monotone voice. Blue beams of light seem to project out of thin air and shine at different points on my face before disappearing again. Suddenly a huge screen projection appears before my eyes, on the opposite wall. It displays a 3-D digital construction of a girl's head: a long face with high cheekbones, round hazel eyes that drooped downwards slightly, thick arched eyebrows, a narrow straight nose and thin pink lips; next to my personal information.

"Juliette Aldaine. Gender: Female. Age: Sixteen. Predetermined Status: Normal." The system announces in a sharp mechanical voice that comes from nowhere and everywhere. With that, Julia removes my thumb from the tablet and the projection vanishes.

"I'll take your blood sample now. Don't move."

She picks up one tool out of the array of instruments that look like Chinese torture devices. It's a syringe with a test tube connected at the back. She cleans the needle with some alcohol and rubs some sort of cool gel on the fleshy part of my arm. Unintentionally my arm begins to shiver.

This was it. She would pierce the needle into my skin and penetrate straight into the truth. My blood would gush out and she would see how it's contaminated. Then she would scream and ask why I didn't tell her earlier so she could've better protected herself against getting infected by my virus.

"You scared of needles or something?"

"Huh?"

"You're shaking like a dog about to get spayed. Hold still, will you?"

"Oh... sorry."

"Don't worry, you won't feel a thing. The gel should take effect any time now." As soon as the words leave her lips, I instantly feel the nerves in my arm go numb.

That familiar hollow feeling of dread deepens in my gut. It's too late to turn back now, my last chance of escape was back in that waiting area. Now, all I can do is watch in agonizing silence as she inserts the needle into my arm and draws out the living proof of my lies.

I'm somehow shocked to see that the liquid filling the test tube is just... blood. Red blood. Clean red blood like anyone else's. There's no streaks of soot or black inkiness as I had expected to see.

After the test tube is filled with my blood and the needle is removed from my arm, Julia clicks a trigger and the sealed test tube is ejected out of the mechanism. She presses gauze down on my arm, gesturing for me to hold it in place.

"Stay here. I'll analyze your blood sample and be right back, the results should be immediate. Don't touch anything." With that, she takes the capsule of my substantiation and disappears through another retina-activated door.

I'm getting really curious as to what's up with this place's fetish with doors after doors of locked doors.

***

At first I thought it was just my imagination.

I deduced that it was my anxiety making me feel like she was taking way longer than she was supposed to. But ten minutes passed, fifteen, then twenty, and I knew it wasn't just in my head. Most of the others were in and out under five minutes.

She was probably scrutinizing my genes, wondering why my result didn't match those of my "parents'". And that twinge of hope I had harbored in a corner of my heart was extinguished. Who was I kidding? Even with all the hope in the world, I can't change my DNA. I had already mentally prepared myself for this — so why did it still feel like such a crushing feat? My eyes burned with liquid resentment, but I held them back with all my will. Because I knew that once I started, the tears wouldn't stop pouring from my eyes until the last drop was drained out of me. I had to at least survive walking back home, seeing my parents' faces for one last time holding the same earnest love, before the look in their eyes transformed into pure disgust.

Eventually, Julia came back into the testing room with a puzzled look on her face. I turn my eyes away.

"I'm sorry, there was some... abnormality... with your result. I'll have to take another sample."

What was the point? That 'abnormality' is the truth. But I silently outstretch my arm anyway. She picks up a new syringe and begins to retake my blood.

Under her breath, I hear her mutter, "What's up with these kids? Maybe it's something wrong with the serum... Twice in a row..."

She disappears back through the door and leaves me to ponder on her strange words. Twice in a row? As in, two testing candidates in a row getting an 'abnormality'? That would mean that the person before me...

I think to that moment back in the waiting area. Kera storming out with that terrified look in her eyes and Julia's troubled look before concealing it with nonchalance. There's no way.

But what else could she mean? It did add up: Julia's strange words and their strange behaviors just now. But how could someone like Kera, who has come from generations of pure genes — whose own great-great-grandmother was the one who created this test and started this whole system of classism in the first place — be any less than Perfect? If anything, genes only improve over time, not the reverse.

Diverting from your foreseen gene status is an unheard of phenomenon. Children tend to follow the pattern of inheritance, retaining the same gene status as their parents are coded. Marrying outside of gene status is shunned upon, since people want to keep genes as pure as possible, without contaminating your family line with genes of a lower status. If you marry out of your gene status, it is undeniable that one party will be stooping down to an inferior caliber. Only the rare few of Borders may exceptionally divert from their parent gene and be coded as Perfect, and that's if their parental genes were already close to Perfect.

Or of course there are those horror stories of unknowing Normals who undergo The Test and find themselves harboring a mutant tag of DNA which condemns them to the label of "Invalid".

Soon, Julia returns to the room.

"I used a fresh batch of serum, and the results were the same. So I guess they're accurate..." she speaks slowly. Her head is cocked to the side, as she looks at me, not with the same troubled look, but with something more akin to a curious amusement, like she's staring at some interesting animal at the zoo. That just serves to make me even more concerned.

"C-Can I... go now?"

"Yeah, you can leave. Results are out tomorrow," she says in that similar slow, unsure voice as she continues to stare at me in curiosity. I quickly avert her gaze, get up from the chair and walk briskly out of the room, wanting to leave this place as soon as possible.

As I'm walking out of the door, I hear her mutter, "I guess you'll find out then."