Shades of Gray

Author : Renee Leyburn

I dream things before they happen to me. I dreamed the day I will die. From what I hear tell, the foresight is a side effect of the genetic selection and enhancement process that was used when my parents decided to have a child. I don’t know all the delicate ins and outs, all I know is that I’m not allowed in casinos, that I have to wear a special armband everywhere I go so that I can be identified, and that I’m viciously aware of how I will meet my demise.

So much for luck. So much for “you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.”

Some people call this thing a gift. I call it a disease. When I was a boy I thought that I was normal. I thought that everybody was like me. When I hit puberty and the dreams started coming more often, began to be more far-reaching, people started to treat me differently. The future is inescapable and people don’t want to hear about the bad things that are going to happen to them. They want to go on with their lives, dumbly unaware, pretending like they are happy.

There aren’t that many more like me, but there are enough that lately there’s been quite a lot of talk about the need to fix the “flaw” in the genetic enhancement process that created us. They don’t want types like me to get too common. Never mind that the exact same process created them and it’s just a fluke that their futures assault me in my sleep instead of the other way around. Never mind that I never asked for this. Never mind that their future is already what it is, whether they hear about it from someone or not.

Never mind that most of the things I see are not even supposed to be about anybody else. They’re just about me. It’s all about me. It’s all about how my life will go, no matter what I do. It’s all about how this is out of my hands. Last night it was all about how in a moment five hooded men are going to break down the door to my apartment and purge the world of whatever influence they think I have. So much for luck. So much for the gift.

So much for the good of humanity.