Being Amber (2 page)

“Would you like a design or a plain band?” A young man asked as he looked at her paperwork and picked the amber-colored ink bottle from it’s place in the neatly ordered row of class colors.

“Band,” Jaci said vacantly.

He paused and met her eyes, opening his mouth as if he was going to say something. Then, his gaze flicked over to the surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling and abruptly closed it, busying himself again with his work.

As he tattooed the one-inch yellow-orange band around her wrist, Jaci screamed inside. She lost her bearings as the room around her caved in on itself, receded to a pinpoint far, far away. Anger and panic rose within her as she sat rooted in a state of catatonic frenzy. Only the vibrating sting of the tattoo needle marking her wrist tethered her to the reality of her surroundings.

“Can I have your left palm please?”

Jaci looked at the man. Had he been talking to her? “What?”

“I have to give you your code,” he said softly. “Everyone in the Amber Zone has one.” He gave Jaci a glimpse of the code on his palm, and then her eyes traveled to his wrist. He was an Amber. She hadn’t even noticed.

Jaci gave the man her hand. She didn’t ask what the code was for. She didn’t watch as the sting of the needle pricked the sensitive skin of her palm. She didn’t care.

When the tattoos were completed, she was ushered to the waiting transport bus that would take her and her duffel bag to their new home.

The border that separated the Sapphire Zone from the Amber Zone was heavily guarded. Only Ambers with the correct clearance, ones that worked outside the Amber Zone, could pass into Sapphire.

Being raised as a Sapphire, one class up from Amber, Jaci never had any contact with Ambers before. She’d been educated early that there was no color mixing. Ambers were inferior human beings, weak, stupid, and riddled with disease.

Now, she was one of them.

The transport driver had a serious case of diarrhea of the mouth and either didn’t notice or didn’t care that Jaci was barely there. She watched the beauty of the Sapphire Zone disappear behind her while he droned on cheerfully with need-to-know Amber Zone facts.

As they approached the ugly high-rise buildings of Circle City, the driver’s annoying buzz of words continued to permeate the protective barrier she tried to erect around herself.

“…twenty story high rise that looks exactly like buildings one through twenty-eight. The buildings themselves were built specifically for housing single Ambers. They form a huge circle enclosing an entire city within the ring. You won’t need transportation. Everything you’re going to need is within Circle City. When you get married, you’ll be transferred to a town house or condo in the Amber Zone, but outside of Circle City.”

The transport pulled up to building seventeen. Jaci exited, escaping the talkative driver, and walked in. She wove her way through the crowded lobby to the elevator and then rode it up to the fourth floor. The door opened to a congested hallway. She walked through small huddles of people, like a rat in a maze, confused and not quite sure where she was going. Then she stopped short, and for a second, stared at the door of her new home. She tried the knob. It was locked. She stood for a moment longer, having trouble keeping it together while trying to remain invisible amidst the crowd of people. She fought an explosion of tears and frustration as she stared at the metal 404 directly in front of her. Then she sighted the scanner on the left side of the door. She placed her hand on it. The scanner registered the new tattooed code on her palm, and a small
click
sounded as the lock mechanism released.

Jaci exhaled the breath she’d been holding, and stepped in. She surveyed her new home, a studio apartment with a small galley kitchen and a bathroom. The entire space was about the size of the family room at her parents’ house. Being a single Amber meant she would be stuffed in and vacuum packed so she took up as little space as possible.

Jaci closed the door behind her and stood frozen just inside the doorway, taking the room in. White, it was all stark white, impersonal, sterile. One large bed centered on the wall of the living space monopolized the room. There were night tables on each side. Clothes, pictures and other personal items were strewn over the area closest to the large window at the far end of the room.

A huff of air escaped her as realization dawned in Jaci’s mind. She would not be in this small space alone. Another person already lived there. But there was only one bed. It didn’t make sense. She glanced to the side nearest to where she stood, to what she assumed was her side of the room. She was closest to the exit and the door entering the bathroom was on the other side of her night table.

A small flat screen hung on the wall opposite the bed, and two chairs were tucked into a small round dining table near the counter that delineated the kitchen from the living space. The kitchen was small and narrow, taking up the back wall of the apartment by the entrance. It contained all the basics, a tiny fridge, a sink, and a two-burner stove.

When she got enough strength and courage together, she needed to call her mother with a list of things to send from her bedroom. She wouldn’t call now. She couldn’t face it. If she heard her mother’s voice, she would break down. She was barely keeping it together as it was.

All her parents would be told was that she’d been designated an Amber. They would have to endure her swift, brutal removal just like she would. That’s how it had always been done when someone’s designation changed, a clean break away from everything and everyone they’d known in their lives.

Two visits a year. That’s all she would be allowed to have to her parents’ zone. Over the years, Jaci knew of some Sapphire kids who’d subsequently been designated Ambers. It wasn’t unusual for them to stop visiting after a while. Maybe their families made them feel inferior, or maybe they realized they didn’t belong anymore. It didn’t matter that there was nothing she could have done better to change her designation. Bottom line was that she didn’t make the cut, and she would merely be a satellite member of her family from now on.

A compad sat on the counter to her left. Glancing down at the large envelope she held, she lifted the flap and pulled the papers free. She searched scleroderma, bracing herself for the results, fully knowing that since it was an Automatic Disqualifier the information she found would be bad. She scanned the list of sites brought up by the search and touched the screen to get to the site she chose. Focusing on the article, she let her eyes skip quickly over the information. Scleroderma. An autoimmune disorder meaning that the body attacks itself. Genetically linked. No cure. Thirty-four percent death rate within ten years of first symptoms. Significant and intensive long-term care for those afflicted. Tissues of the body hardened and froze, essentially trapping the person inside his or her own skin.

“Shit.”

She exhaled softly. It made sense. Automatic Disqualifiers weren’t diseases that killed efficiently. The Gov didn’t mind the quick killers. Automatic Disqualifiers were the conditions that killed ever so slowly, leaving the afflicted person in need of extensive treatment and long-term care.

The bandage over the newly tattooed amber band around her wrist caught her attention. She ran her finger over it, feeling the sensitivity of her skin beneath. She’d been planning on getting a sapphire daisy chain as her designation tattoo. Plain bands were for her parents’ generation. There were options now since the Gov loosened its restrictions. Simple designs were allowed instead of only a solid band. She’d been so blindsided at the time she didn’t even look at the available amber designs.

Somehow, Jaci never actually believed this could happen to her, that she’d be designated Amber. Before she received her summons to appear for her designation, she daydreamed that her testing showed her to be so genetically clean that she was designated a Diamond. Those perfect people with the ideal mixture of good genes and the absence of bad, were instantly immersed in a life of privilege and pampering. It was like winning a lottery. She supposed a lot of people had that fantasy. However, she’d totally dismissed the thought that there was even a possibility of being designated an Amber.

Jaci walked over to the window at the far end of the apartment. It offered a bird’s eye view of the curious circular city. The day was gray and stormy, suiting her dire mood and doomed life.

It was quiet and still in the shadowy room as she stared out the window, brooding. Now that the influx of new information slowed, her mind started processing other things. Things she hadn’t dealt with yet because everything happened so fast.

Significant things.

Devastating things.

A tear overflowed the lower lid of her eye and streamed down her face. She tried to swallow down the tight knot in her throat as she focused on her reflection in the window. But the hard-core reality of her new life suddenly inundated her, impacting with full force and striking a blow so deeply that it cut her to her very soul. Her suffering flourished, becoming palpable to her, chilling the air and seeping into her skin. The mere beginnings of it laid waste to her insides.

Goose bumps rose on her flesh. She was an Amber now, and for the rest of her life until the day she died of that god-awful disease.

Her friends and family were gone, suddenly blinked right out of her life. She was alone, utterly alone here. Her stomach swam.

She was scared.

Thunder rolled deep and ominous in her ears, vibrating the windowsill. The colorless gray of the sky was the perfect backdrop to the tiny drops of rain that landed and gathered together on the glass, forming trails that flowed down like teardrops. The window cried with her.

“I’ll never have a baby,” she whispered into the silence of the room. Tomorrow she’d be sterilized.

Suppressing the pandemonium of feelings trying to crash out of her was futile. Disjointed fragments of thoughts and fears flew at her, and utter grief and pain raced unbridled through her mind. She felt violent, wanting to throw something, smash anything into tiny pieces.

A primal moan rose up from the depths of her soul and burst through her mouth, filling the room as she sank to her knees. Now, all she had was the wait for her defective gene to kick in, to make her pathetic and helpless, a prisoner within her own skin, before it finally finished her off. In the course of one afternoon, she’d lost everything. Even her life had been shortened significantly with the knowledge of the deadly gene she carried. Rage and despair came from so deep within her gut that she felt like she was going to throw up between the wrenching sobs. She cried, pounded and screamed an entire pathetic performance for an audience of none until there was nothing left in her. The feel of the cold floor on her face was the only thing she registered as she collapsed the rest of the way, settling into a shivering heap on the hard tiles. She curled in on herself.

Jaci remained there sorting through all of it in her head as the hours passed. Her cheek resting on the floor was cool and wet from the tears she’d released and let fall unchecked. It felt good against the humid, New Atlanta summer heat.

Finally, trembling, she lifted herself to her knees, then to her feet, and got into bed. She lay there with her eyes open, but not noticing dusk’s shadows overtake the room. Hours of monotonous, opaque blackness enveloped her as she lay awake through the night. Sleep wouldn’t come.

Jaci thought seriously about committing suicide. There wasn’t anything left for her. She would spend the rest of her days waiting to be diagnosed with the first symptoms of the debilitating illness that would eventually kill her. She doubted a day would ever pass in her life that she didn’t feel like she was waiting to die.

If she killed herself, there would be no impact on any other person in the world. Nobody would miss her now.

She thought about others who found their lives too hard, the pathetic throng of people who slouched in the plastic chairs of the waiting room for the Gov Assisted Suicide Program, GASP. Jaci felt sick thinking of the brick smoke stacks of the cremating ovens behind the building. The acrid smoke released from the burning bodies saturated the air with a revolting smell. GASP ensured a quick, painless exit for those who sought it. But Jaci would be damned if she was going to let the Gov take that last act from her.

Lying in the dense gloom of her new home, her mind frantically groped for a foothold, something to reassure, to comfort. But, the same hopeless thoughts rolled through her mind like booms of thunder refusing to be ignored.

Near dawn, Jaci fell into a half sleep, her mind still running through her new circumstances, still seeking a way to end her life. A pleasant way. A way that she would actually have the courage to follow through with.

When she opened her eyes again, a stream of sunlight slanted through the window. She glanced at the clock on her roommate’s nightstand. About a half hour remained before she was required to report to the transport.