Dystopia

He ran his hands through the hot tap, holding them there and scrubbing them until they bled, and the skin around his fingers bubbled raw red like a huge blister.

3 down, just one to go.

Will all the water in the ocean wash this blood from my hands?
He took an inhalation which blew up his insides to twice their original size, and the door neatly slipped open as he neared it. He returned to his seat �" carriage A (restricted access for Identity Class 12 or below) �" and once accommodated, cursed under his breath when the password scanner on his iScreen Pro denied his suppurated fingerprints access first time round. Second time, however, the device unlocked, and displayed the article he’d been reading in Hello ID! magazine. It was a charity appeal for a girl in Class 145, who was so unoriginal she passed herself on the street at least ten times a day.

He wrinkled his nose with distaste, and firmly flicked the page forwards.

The next article photographed Jemma Myers. She was an Identity. It was demanding to find a magazine without her inside. He zoomed in on the image of her, his dead eyes never having been more open. He zoomed in on how her tanned skin was golden and how her hair was so shiny the sun reflected upon it in little ringlets which resembled halos upon her skull. How her eyes were whirlpools of the Mediterranean ocean and her nose the seamless balance between button and ski-slope. How her cheekbones were so high they casted shadows upon her perfect, pretty little face. And then the clothes: every garment branded, labelled, handpicked, and would never be worn again after an outing. Some would say she was beautiful, but he wouldn’t �" he would say she was art. And art isn’t supposed to be beautiful, it’s supposed to make you feel something.

Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.

The longing he felt to one day be photographed in Hello ID! magazine could only be described as an obsession. His eyes adopted a faraway gaze; one which he didn’t know at the time would never come home again, and fixated upon the sights before him. The train glided past the resplendently sumptuous WSOCC Building (World State Organisation of Child Classification), characterised by the distinctive mirrored bricks which exulted opulence without even trying, where he and everyone on the train and everyone in the world had first began �" even Jemma. He wondered if a happy couple were using their life savings to purchase a Class 1 child �" an Identity �" right this second. A future Jemma. And he thought of the millions of poorer Class children that would be being distributed, thousands of clones separated to mothers all over, only to grow up to one day have their photo in a Class 145 charity appeal. He thought about how many clones (or ‘Sisters’) the charity appeal girl would have to kill in order to become an Identity, and how his mere four seemed auspicious in comparison.

The train arrived at a smooth stop, his stop, the stop he needed to stop at to find the last one; the last ‘Brother’. The other three had been easy �" give him a challenge! And with this one last stop, he would have fame, and class, and finally an identity. He would finally be unique.

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t �" a brother’s murder.