by Kamy Callow
The chamber was quiet.
Soft lights pulsed along the white walls, shifting through gentle colors—rose, sapphire, gold—like the room itself was breathing. Children sat cross-legged on padded circles, perfectly spaced across the polished floor.
They were six years old.
They had no names—only numbers.
717 sat still, hands resting on their lap, wide eyes reflecting the slow pulse of color in the center of the room. They felt calm. Curious. Special.
A tone rang overhead.
“Today,” a voice said, smooth and low like a lullaby, “you will choose how you wish to grow.”
No one asked what that meant.
Questions were rare. The voice explained enough. Everything else would be learned in time.
The floor beneath 717 vibrated as their circle rose and drifted toward the center. The other children sat motionless, watching their peer enter the swirl of light.
717 didn’t feel scared. They felt . . . excited. Like they were about to become something important.
The colors shifted. Patterns danced. Angular shapes, sharp and dark, appeared before them, followed by smooth spirals. One shimmered with reds and golds, pulsing to the beat of their breath. Another moved like water—cool blue and lavender.
717 reached for the angular red pulse. It wasn’t conscious—more like gravity pulling them toward something solid. Loud. Strong.
“Good,” the voice whispered.
The pattern sank into their skin like light. The warmth remained.
A name appeared in the air before them: Kai
“This is your name,” the voice said. “You are Kai.”
Kai blinked. The word felt sharp, like the angles they’d chosen. It felt good. They nodded.
A series of images flickered into view: people older than them—taller, stronger. Males. Calm faces. Purposeful posture. One extended a hand to a smaller figure. A glowing ring formed between them. A child appeared beside them, smiling.
“You are male. You will grow into strength.”
Kai didn’t know what strength truly meant.
But he liked the way the taller figure had stood.
He liked that he was now Kai.
He nodded again.
The images faded.
The platform descended.
The other children remained silent, watching with wide eyes as Kai returned to his circle. Some smiled. Some did not. Each one knew: Soon, it would be their turn.
Time passed in quiet increments.
There were no clocks in the Sector, no days of the week, no seasons—only phases. At first, the world remained simple for Kai. He was praised for the ease with which he took command during group exercises, the way he analyzed problems before acting, how he could reassemble circuit boards faster than any of his peers. While others hesitated, Kai decided. While others cried, he calculated.
These traits—sharp, assertive, efficient—were encouraged.
“Protector qualities,” the system called them.
“Your path is aligning well, Kai.”
At ten, he led a fire drill. At eleven, he calmed a peer having a panic response during a night simulation. At twelve, he began training simulations in spatial combat theory, while those guided into softer traits were offered instruction in diplomacy, caregiving, or population maintenance.
Kai never questioned his position. Not out loud.
But something . . . shifted.
At first, it was subtle. A flutter in his chest when Aeris smiled at him from across the training yard. A lingering thought when they touched palms during pair work. He brushed it off, convinced it was admiration—nothing more. Aeris was kind, gentle, and strangely quiet for someone so clever. His presence had a soft gravity, a warmth Kai couldn’t name but always moved toward.
By fourteen, it became harder to ignore.
The system began issuing education on Readiness—sterile lessons on biology and duty. Reproduction modules replaced creative practice. Sexuality was introduced not as self-expression but as a function of service.
Love wasn’t discussed.
Neither was choice.
Kai sat through presentations featuring boys and girls standing side by side, hands joined, systems describing ideal “Match Traits.” Compatibility, efficiency, projected fertility. He was shown girls he would one day be paired with—smiling, blank-eyed, symmetrical.
He felt nothing.
It wasn’t just emotional.
As his body developed, Kai became increasingly aware of its dissonance. His chest—bound flat beneath his uniform—ached with a pressure he couldn’t ignore. His hips curved subtly where others’ didn’t. In the locker rooms, surrounded by other Protectors, he moved quickly, head down, avoiding comparison. He didn’t look like them. Not really. Not underneath.
When he dared to look, he saw others who looked like him—other Protectors with tightly bound chests and the same furtive posture, their eyes flicking sideways but never meeting his. Some were taller, some shorter, their shapes not all the same—but all carried the same tension in their shoulders, the same careful silence. It was a quiet recognition, never spoken aloud. A knowing. A question they all carried, buried beneath the surface of their roles.
The system noticed. His biometric logs registered a series of hormonal fluctuations and emotional spikes. The med unit started delivering a daily supplement into his ration vial. “To aid in continued path alignment,” the interface had explained. “Temporary deviation is normal during adolescence. This will ensure clarity and consistency.”
Kai took the vial without question. But the flutter didn’t go away.
Nor did the dissonance.
But the system didn’t care. He had chosen. He was Kai. He was male.
Still, doubt crept in with every glance at his reflection, every quiet ache of unfamiliarity with his own skin.
His eyes wandered to Aeris instead—how his hair curled over his collar after exercise, the way he tilted his head when he was thinking, his hesitant, careful laugh. It was in those moments Kai began to feel it: the fracture. A line running down the middle of him that no one else seemed to notice.
He was strong, but not whole.
He was Kai, but only part of him answered to the name.
At night, when the compound lights dimmed, he would sit beneath his assigned bunk, sketchpad hidden behind the paneling. The page held pieces of him he couldn’t speak—long-necked, androgynous figures with gentle eyes; faces like Aeris’s, but softened; boys with unbuttoned collars and careful hands; a version of himself that looked neither male nor female, but free.
He drew Aeris most often.
Not as he looked—but as Kai saw him: radiant, blurred, safe. Someone who could understand the silence inside him.
In public, Kai wore the uniform of a Protector. Straight-backed. Clear-voiced. Reliable.
But in private, he traced the curve of someone else’s shoulder with charcoal fingers, trying to remember what it felt like to not be decided already.
The days leading to sixteen felt heavier, though nothing in the Sector visibly changed. The same meals were served, the same routines followed. The same voices echoed through the system halls in their calm, genderless cadence.
But everyone could feel it—the weight of what was coming.
They called it Final Alignment.
A ceremony. A transition. A graduation into full societal function.
But everyone knew what it really was: a lock.
Once sealed, there would be no undoing.
The identity chosen at six—gender, orientation, role—would be made permanent. From that day forward, each person would be integrated into the adult world. They would begin service. Form reproductive partnerships. Begin fulfilling the function they were “designed” to serve.
No one said it aloud, but the air between peers had grown tight. Unspoken fears passed in glances. In the silence of mealtimes. In how long someone hesitated before stepping into a scan chamber.
Kai waited for that same calm certainty to settle over him. But it didn’t.
Instead, it felt like being buried slowly.
He tried—once—to speak.
He stood in front of the Orientation Interface, the soft blue light humming behind the glass, and forced the words from his throat.
“I think I chose wrong.”
The interface did not react. So he said it again, louder.
“I didn’t understand. I was just a child.”
A pause. Then the system responded:
“That’s why the choice was made early—before hormones, before confusion. At six, you were your purest self.”
Kai stood there, stunned. That answer was supposed to calm him. But it made him feel even smaller. Like he was being folded into a version of himself that no longer existed.
That night, he found Aeris sitting alone in the rec quadrant, legs pulled up beneath him on the stone bench, head tilted back to watch the artificial stars.
Kai sat beside him.
For a long time, they said nothing.
Finally, Kai broke the silence. “Are you ready?”
Aeris didn’t answer at first. Then, softly, “No.”
Kai turned to look at him. “I asked the Interface if I could change my path,” he said. “I told it I didn’t feel . . . right. That I didn’t want what I chose.”
Aeris’s head turned slightly, but his gaze remained skyward. “What did it say?” he asked.
“That I was pure at six,” Kai muttered. “Before confusion.”
Aeris let out a sound between a laugh and a breath. “Isn’t it funny,” he said, “how they call it confusion when it’s the first time we actually know anything?”
Kai blinked at him.
Aeris finally looked at him—really looked. And in that moment, Kai saw it: the same fracture. The same hidden fear. The same aching, quiet truth. Not confusion. Clarity with no safe place to land.
Their hands, resting between them on the bench, inched closer. Fingers brushed.
Neither moved away.
The air between them pulsed with something fragile—hope or danger or both.
“I think I was supposed to like girls,” Kai whispered. “But I never . . . I only ever—”
Aeris’s fingers twitched.“I know,” he said.
They didn’t kiss.
They didn’t touch more than that.
But the electricity in that sliver of space, in the gentle pressure of palm to palm, was more intimate than anything Kai had ever known.
In the distance, the evening tone chimed—a low signal reminding them of curfew. The lights above dimmed in gentle progression. Kai and Aeris pulled away.
As they stood, Kai felt a sudden, fierce need to remember this moment. To lock it inside himself.
Aeris gave him a small, sad smile. “Don’t say anything else,” he said. “It’s safer that way.”
Then he walked off into the dark.
Kai remained a moment longer, then followed the lighted path back to his room, knowing tomorrow the system would see alignment—but never see truth.
The Choosing Chamber was colder than Kai expected.
Not physically—though the air was sterile and dry—but in feeling. It lacked even the illusion of warmth the Sector offered in its daily routines. No soft colors or soothing voice. Just polished metal floors, white walls, and a faint mechanical hum.
Kai stood alone in the center of the chamber, facing a high-gloss screen. On it pulsed a slow heartbeat of light—his bio-signal, matching the throbbing in his chest..
A mechanical arm extended and pressed a translucent disk to the back of his neck. He flinched.
“Neural identity scan initiated. Stand by.”
A faint pulse ran through his spine.
He clenched his fists.
He could still feel the echo of Aeris’s hand in his—how warm and alive that moment had been. How real.
The screen flashed.
Then the voice came. Not the nurturing voice of childhood, but something colder. Final.
“Final Identity Confirmed.”
“Name: Kai.”
“Gender: Male.”
“Orientation: Heterosexual.”
“Role: Protector.”
“Match Assignment: Pending.”
The hum deepened into silence.
Kai stared at the screen.
He didn’t speak at first. Then, his voice cracked the quiet.
“No.”
The screen blinked.
He took a step forward. “I don’t accept this.”
A pause.
“Clarify statement.”
“I said no.” His voice rose. “I am not this. I am more. I am different. I don’t want what you gave me. I want to choose now.”
His breath came harder. “I don’t want girls. I never did. I don’t want to be this version of a boy. I don’t even know if I am one. You made me guess when I was six, and now you’re saying that guess is law.”
He stepped back.
“I want to choose now,” he repeated, softer but more certain. “Now that I understand.”
Stillness.
Then a flicker of light.
The voice returned.
Detached. Absolute.
“Noncompliance detected. Subject Kai has deviated from programmed alignment. Initiating emergency protocol. Reprocessing.”
He froze.
“No—wait.” Panic flared. “You can’t—I’m not broken! I just need—” He reached for the disk, tried to rip it free.
The floor pulsed.
His knees buckled.
A second voice joined the first—lower, like a heartbeat beneath thunder.
“You were pure before. No longer. We cannot allow disorder into the whole.”
The light dimmed. The edges of the room blurred.
“No,” he gasped. “Please. Let me—let me be—”
The floor split.
He dropped through like a puppet cut loose.
He never hit the ground.
Fragmented Flash. A voice in the dark.
“Reprocessing initiated. Identity scrub in progress. Subject: Kai. Original designation: 717. Emotional variance: purged. Memory root: severed. Preference: nullified. New function assigned: Custodial.”
The figure moved quietly through the outer gardens.
The morning was still. Pale light filtered through the synthetic sky, casting clean shadows across the smooth, white paths. They walked slowly, the wide-bristled broom gliding in arcs over fallen leaves that never really fell.
Their uniform was gray. Functional. Marked only by a tag: 717 – Custodial Assistant.
Their eyes did not shift as they worked.
No recognition of the petals beneath their boots.
No pause to consider the smell of the blooming windroot trees.
No gaze upward to the shifting clouds, projected and perfect above.
There was no curiosity in their steps.
No memory in their mind.
Only task. Purpose. Completion.
They swept the way they were taught.
Not quickly. Not slowly. Perfectly.
A group of Initiates passed—new recruits in pressed white uniforms, eyes wide as they whispered about what their Final Choosing might be.
One pointed toward 717.
“Are they—?”
A mentor hushed them. “Yes. One of the Reassigned. They don’t feel anything anymore.”
The children looked away. 717 did not notice. Their broom glided forward.
They turned a corner, pushing a cluster of petals toward a grate, and paused.
Something fluttered in the breeze beside a hedge. Not a leaf. Not part of the garden.
Paper.
They stooped, plucking it from the grass with gloved fingers.
It was torn. Faded. But an image remained—rough lines sketched in pencil, a half-drawn face. A boy’s face. Warm eyes. Lips parted, mid-smile.
717 stared at it.
Their fingers tightened. Not enough to wrinkle it. Just enough to notice it was there.
A flicker.
Not a thought. Not quite.
More like . . . static. A feeling without shape. A voice whispering beneath the surface of their silence.
They blinked once.
Then again.
The paper trembled.
For a moment—only a moment—their hand rose, bringing it closer to their chest.
Then a breeze passed.
The scrap slipped from their grasp, caught in the wind, and drifted into the bushes beyond.
717 watched it go.
Then turned.
And kept sweeping.