NOT SUITABLE
There was a time before jealousy. A time of happiness or at least quiet contentment.
And now there was this.
Looking around at everyone else wearing their Suits. Sleek, boxy, fitted, loose, every style and color and type worn with the unselfconscious ease of personal excellence. Of knowing they were wearing personal armor and strength and flight and immortality all tailored to their particular gene structure.
Even the ugliest eyesore Suits were beyond his reach.
“Bad genes.” That’s what he was told. Blunt and casually cruel. As though destroying dreams was just another everyday thing.
An Unsuitable. That’s what he was. Him and a handful of others. A minority segment of the population that were by turns pitied and reviled.
Cosmic rays. Contact with forever chemicals. Some terrible mix of events that happened pre-conception. All the different ways that a gene structure could be so damaged as to make someone forever Unsuitable.
He remembered lining up with the other Aged Tens. All excitedly describing what colors and styles they would turn their Suits once fitted. Planning where they would fly and what they would do. The Suit feats that they would accomplish.
Everyone secretly fearing that they would be found Unsuitable. Loudly boasting to cover up the sense of dread.
He’d been the only Unsuitable in his Sector that year. The only one hunching his shoulders under the weight of looks and whispers and unwanted notoriety.
It had been near unbearable but there was nothing he could do about it. His genes were what made him Unsuitable. But they were also what made up his body and being.
He’d looked at the research. A desperate and sad kid that suddenly had no friends as everyone else was exploring the wonders and joys of Suit life. He’d had plenty of free time on his hands to look things up.
There was no changing his Unsuitable status. Science had attempted to make changes. To rewrite genes, to splice in changes, to delete the bad and promote the good. A lot of people had volunteered to die in horrible ways before experimentation had been made illegal.
Some people couldn’t bear to live as an Unsuitable. They were a demographic with a high instance of suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.
He’d even had thoughts before. When he looked around the dinner table at his family in their Suits. When he went to school and no one wanted to get close to him. When those around him were warned about his “delicate constitution” and treated him as if he could be broken by a hard look.
From the time he was ten years old, he had felt as though all his dreams had died. Because in a world of wonder and joy, he was found to be Unsuitable for any of it.
He was a normal human in a world populated by gods. That’s how it had been described on the Not Suitable website. Gods and humans.
It wasn’t that he was defective. His genes were perfectly fine. Look at him. Two arms, two legs, a face, a body… he was completely and normally human.
It wasn’t his fault that his genes refused to accept fusion with a Suit.
It was something that had been done to him before he was born. Likely before he was even conceived. Some unlucky turn of events that resulted in the mutation of the cells that had become him.
He didn’t envy what he didn’t have. He was jealous of the opportunities that had been taken from him.
He was Unsuitable, but he was alive.
=END=
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