It wasn’t far and Leigh was running a bit early so she kept her speed low and enjoyed the flight, going through a series of practiced hover-board maneuvers, twisting, turning and looping through the air. She didn’t know when she’d be on Earth again and although she didn’t know what it would feel like to miss Earth, she was sure she would. The UEG invested heavily into creating a sense of home when it came to Earth, something worth protecting, and Leigh wasn’t loathe to admit that it worked. Her family and the few friends she’d made through her life were here, it was where she grew up, it was… precious. Just like that, Leigh found herself dealing with unnecessary emotions once again. She’d put off saying goodbye to Vinnya and Mikah as long as she could, but the thought of not being on the same planet as them for years on end made her bring up their profiles. Leigh had checked in on them earlier and sent her congratulations to each of them for getting into Second and Third Academies. Leigh hadn’t wanted to talk to them earlier, knowing that her Rank history was readily available to anyone who wanted it, but the nostalgia of the moment made her earlier reluctance seem frivolous.

In seconds, she had the two of them on a three-way vid-chat.

“Lee-Lee!” Mikah sing-songed and had Leigh laughing in seconds.

He hadn’t called her that in years, not since they were little kids. They had met in person when his parents had still been stationed in her region, but had kept in contact virtually over the years. Mikah was still more athletically inclined than her so they’d often overlaid themselves via CHIP in order to train together. Vinnya, on the other hand, was more of a people person. She could charm her way into and out of any situation she wanted, including the very tight-knit, exclusive friendship Mikah and Leigh had once shared. The three of them had grown close over the years and although they only talked for about five minutes, promising to keep in touch, Leigh’s spirits were vastly lifted.

When her mother’s part of the presentation was over, she contacted Leigh via her CHIP. Leigh in turn, could still see her mother in the conference overlay, standing silently behind her father as he animatedly went on about the new track distribution particles. They couldn’t vid-chat without other people becoming aware of it, but her mother spent the next ten minutes vid-chatting with Leigh about this and that until Leigh reached the Center. Her mother apologized for not being able to congratulate her in person, but promised she’d make it to Leigh’s graduation, even if Leigh ended up in Ehien like her brother. Her mother joked she was due for a serious vacation anyway. Leigh wondered if her mother realized that her graduation was still three years away, but then remembered that at 352, she’d probably consider three years the way Leigh considered three months. Having said her goodbyes to everyone that mattered to her on Earth, Leigh closed out of her social overlays.

She approached the 275th Center and handed route control over to her CHIP so as not to interfere with the heavy traffic around the area. The 275th Center wasn’t nearly as big or as awe-inspiring as the Berlin Center had been, but it was fascinating nonetheless. Millions of people worked in the stacks that towered over her. There were bridges that connected many of the stacks, some of them in constant movement, adjusting to the demands of traffic as needed. Most people chose the simple way of traveling, which meant thousands upon thousands of personal levitation disks and hover-boards zipping this way and that in orchestrated chaos. On the off chance that people needed to carry something big and bulky along with them, they’d simply bring additional thrusters to levitate a bigger disk. A much rarer travel option was the transportation unit, reserved for either very long distances or delicate and volatile cargo. Appearance-wise, it resembled a housing unit, modeled to look like a aerodynamic pill. However, as the transportation units had separate travel lanes at a much higher altitude, you tended not to see them unless they were loading or unloading.

Leigh enjoyed the sight, letting her CHIP guide her towards the UEF headquarters. The knowledge of what was about to take place was both exciting and daunting. She’d dreamed of the First Academy modifications for years, and now it was finally going to happen. Excitement was about to overwhelm her when she reminded herself on how she’d attained her spot. It didn’t take long for guilt to completely obliterate joy and by the time she reached the entrance to HQ, she was sober once more. The attendants processed her in short order, giving her preference as a First Academy Select. Their congratulations were undeserved and each time she heard one, she felt like an impostor.

The first thing they did was lead her into a room full of labcoat-wearing technicians who directed her toward a shower stall. Knowing what was about to come, Leigh ran a hand over her dirty blonde locks one last time before activating the water. The initial spray was relatively harmless, sporting the same jasmine scent she’d always preferred, but as the second phase of the cycle began, she watched in resignation as all of her hair was completely washed away. Her eyebrows, the hair on her arms, her legs, her head… everywhere, in less than a minute, the hair-corroding solution had completely stripped it away. Leigh sighed and then watched as the next solution also took the top couple of layers of her skin, leaving her a pale, tan-less white. Next, she was directed to rinse her mouth out with the solution; it tasted acidically sweet. Finally, they released her to the next step in the process, her uterectomy.

Feeling more naked than ever before, Leigh was directed into the next room full of anonymous labcoats. They directed her to lay on a cold metal bed and she wondered about the procedure ahead of her. She’d seen documentaries about it, the evolution of human procreation, but she had no idea what to expect. Her uterus would be taken out and kept alive to mature in a machine until the time she chose to have children. It had been centuries since humans had carried their own offspring, but she still wondered if there would be a sense of loss afterward. Leigh wasn’t given much time to consider the subject, as she was tranqued for the second time that day. It only felt like moments later, but when she woke up, Leigh’s upgraded CHIP told her it had been almost an hour since she’d entered the room.

The technicians had taken advantage of the operation to give her CHIP a major overhaul. The overlay was noticeably different, but Leigh wouldn’t have a chance to investigate all of the new First-Academy-exclusive features until much later. For starters, she knew its processing capability was at least one thousand times higher than it had been an hour ago. Things she’d considered fast before were now immediate. Its first alert was the recovery status of her uterus, currently at 18%, and the slight organ reorganization it had caused in her body. Leigh lay a hand on her belly, trying to see if she felt any different. There were no visible scars from the operation and when they ushered her over to the next procedure, she decided that if anything, she only felt lighter after the removal. In a sense, having her reproductive organs preserved for when she needed them was a relief.

The next procedure involved another cold metal table. She was directed to lay on it, arms and legs splayed out while a machine scanned her. It was an uncomfortable sensation, like a sheet of ice was slowly rolling through her body, both inside and out, but she knew that there was worse to come. The invasive full-body scan took over ten minutes and mapped out every single proton, neutron, and electron present in her body. It was the reason all her hair, with its impurities, needed to be eliminated first. The cloning procedure for which the scan was necessary was incredibly expensive, and in order to preserve resources, the UEF only stored the necessary information for those it deemed irreplaceable. Leigh wasn’t irreplaceable yet, but as a First Academy Select, she soon would be. The sheer number resources the UEF would pump into her and her education over the next three years was simply terrifying. The UEF knew it too, otherwise her data wouldn’t be stored in the first place. Leigh couldn’t help thinking that if the terrorist attack had taken place a day later after the original First Academy Selects had already been scanned and mapped, then her death would have eventually been just as final as theirs turned out to be. Now, the UEF had the option to clone her if she died. Human rights laws stipulated there could only ever be one of her at a time, but as long as she was useful to the UEF, she’d essentially been immortalized.

Mapping her brain came next. Unlike all the other procedures, Leigh couldn’t even feel it taking place. All she had to do was put on a helmet and wait. They told her that electrical impulses were being sent through her brain to illuminate the synaptic pathways, so she’d expected some kind of pain or discomfort, but there was none to be had. The only inconvenience of the mapping procedure was how long it took. She had to sit still between six and ten hours, depending on how easy her brain was to map. During this time, they had her perform a series of activities, mostly sitting still and watching and reacting to some kind of sensory stimuli. In the end, it took over eight and a half hours to map her brain, above average, but not Earth-shatteringly long. Still, she knew worse was still to come.

Next, she had a chance to rest again as they once more tranqued her, this time in order to surgically install the suit core into the back of her neck. This surgery was a lot more complicated than the first and, in her case, took over six hours to perform. Although the back of her neck felt a bit sore afterward, she was otherwise completely fine and well-rested. She sighed. After sixteen hours, she was down to the last procedure, the nanite infusion. Although the suit function was the most famous First Academy perk, it did not work without the nanite, or energy-matter, infusion. The suit core was just a piece of dead material without it. Leigh sighed again. The only problem: it was known to be the most painful experience imaginable. In the first couple of generations of suit implementation, there had even been a high risk of death. Luckily, that wasn’t the case anymore, but Leigh was still not looking forward to it.

She was led into another room, with another empty, metal table. After spending almost an entire day naked in front of strangers, she barely registered the discomfort as she lay down. Her heartbeat started to accelerate until a new CHIP function revealed itself and forcefully hijacked her breathing in order to calm her heartbeat down. The sensation was disconcerting, but Leigh appreciated not having to go into the procedure in a distressed state. Unlike the others, she couldn’t be tranqued for this one; they needed to know her lucid limit for nanites. The general rule was, the more, the better, but everyone had a threshold after which the benefits no longer outweighed the drawbacks. Some people lost motor function while others lost brain functions or underwent a complete personality change. In order to avoid any of these complications, the procedure had to take place completely untranqued. No painkillers, nothing.

“Are you ready?” one of the labcoats suddenly asked.

Leigh flinched before nodding tersely. She tried to relax her body, sensing that a rigid stance was not going to be particularly helpful in this situation, but before she could convince her body of that fact, the infusion had already started. At first it was just pain, pure and simple pain. It came slowly, trickling in through the dozens of needles the labcoats had tacked to her veins. Then, it was fire. Leigh tried to stay still, but she slowly lost control of her body. This was nothing like the pain she’d felt over the medical nanites. The labcoats had told her to keep going for as long as she could. They’d told her that if she could still muster the will to scream, then she could still take more. When they’d her told that they would keep pumping her with nanites until she stopped screaming, she hadn’t considered the fact that she’d have to start first. First it was tears, then it was twitches and later she was kicking, screaming and crying, but she didn’t stop them. She could take more pain, she had to. She deserved to. The more nanites she was able to convince her body to process, the stronger her Energy Suit could become. After all that had happened, that had led her to be in this position, she had to endure.

Five minutes, that’s all it took for her endurance to be filed away to nothing. The pain was unimaginable, unending, unrelenting. Leigh just wanted to give in, to have it stop. She’d walked into the HQ numb, but the pain was washing away the numbness, revealing the real, raw emotions she’d tried to hide. This was the path she’d always wanted in her life; the terrorist attack had guaranteed and soiled it at the same time. She wouldn’t be able to experience it through the lens of excitement and accomplishment that she wanted. It was a filthy thing she’d won and she wasn’t sure she wanted it, not if she’d have to keep going through pain like this for the rest of her life, for something she would always feel guilty for. Maybe it was best that she didn’t go, didn’t take someone else’s spot. The pain chased these thoughts to the forefront of her mind, muddling everything together until she didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. The only certainty, the only reality she could cling to, was pain.

Leigh cried until she didn’t anymore. She was spent, she didn’t want it anymore. She wouldn’t be able to do Leigh Adams justice. After all, she was a fake, she’d never be able to do anyone justice, not even herself. Her tears were soon spent along with the rest of her. She still screamed, but she didn’t know what for and so she stopped. Her screams no longer echoed through the room and she was about to call an end to everything when the pain cleared just enough for her to realize what she was doing. She was giving up. If she could give up, then she could still go on. Gritting her teeth, Leigh started screaming again, telling herself she wasn’t a quitter as the pain started up again with renewed vigor. She was not a quitter, not now, not ever.

Her tears were dried up, her throat was raw from her screams, her body was bruised from the convulsions that racked it repeatedly, but she didn’t quit. She kept going until she realized that yesterday, she would have already quit. Yesterday, it had still been all about herself, but now she was fighting for something so much bigger than herself. If she quit now, she was doing them and their deaths a disservice and that was something she could never do. And so, the pain continued, on and on and on. The pain taught her a valuable lesson. Human strength came from within, but it was a strength that could only be unleashed through emotion. If she didn’t let herself feel them, she would never become as strong as she needed to be to become deserving.

V’or Chocobo von Nielsheim

Vox’en Dicit

Flavio Antonio Genialus

Jake Herbert Isaya

Sassano Peti’dal Anadini

Simone Raodin Calderari

Leigh Anna Adams