Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1.

Category A.

I repeat it to myself as I stare at my reflection in the mirror.

Category A.

I frown, my taut forehead becoming a series of deep furrows, dark slashes across ruddy pink flesh.

Category A.

The mirror starts to fog, clouding my reflection.  A wipe from my sleeve distorts the image.  My reflection is distorted anyway.   I am not how I appear.

My eyes are not my own.

My hair is not my own.

My skin is altered, plucked, dyed, and bleached.  Its pink, rosy complexion has been reconfigured.

I am a Category A.

But I don’t appear to be.

None of us do.

Don’t get me wrong, I am lucky to be a Category A.  I could have been born as a ‘Negative’.  Negatives are as near frequent as their numerical counterpart, -0, after the Pandemonium Situation that began in 2095.  The mass slaughter, the genocide of millions, all based on appearance and heritage.  If you didn’t fit the profile, you were deemed to be a Negative and were annihilated.

Every Juvenile in Community is taught about the evil and atrocities that occurred during those years.  Unfiltered and graphic snapshots and simulations of the war are fed into your Visual Education Oculars during Culturalisation and Collectivism.  You can’t even close your eyes to avoid witnessing and reliving the horrors.  If you blink too long, a siren sounds and the Instructors are able to administer Physical Education.  You see the war, feel it, and have it absorbed into your psyche.  You learn your place.

Rigorous Ethnic Cleansing they had labelled the killing in the past, when it was stopped by the Allied Forces of the 20^th Century.  They renamed the genocide the Holocaust.  However this time, there were no Allied Forces there to run in, all guns blazing, and save the day.  The cull was more aggressive, calculated and horrific.  Fuelled by discomfort in the lower classes, it started in the country formally known as England, spreading like a virus across Former Europe.  It was ruthless, brutal and violent.  Entire nations were destroyed.  Death.  War.  Destruction.

After fifteen and a half years of hell, peace came.  Recategorisation under a safe and controlled regime.  Everyone was equal, if you fitted specific criteria.  Everyone was safe, all protected by the shiny, new establishment of Community.

Unless you looked like them.  The ones who began the uprisings that led to the horrors of 2095.

Blondes.  They called them the Aryan Race. They were named by the radicalised Neo-Nazis, who believed that these people were a race of supreme, higher beings and that everyone else should bow down to them, surrender or be killed.

Blondes.  Aryans.  They executed them in droves, in the years following the end of the Pandemonium Situation, when Community came to power.

Aryans.  Blondes.  Blue eyes, apple blossom, flushed skin. Almost all wiped out, punished for their physical link to the past.

Some of them, those deemed too weak or without any political or disruptive tendencies were allowed to be Reintegrated into Community, with the precursor that they remain camouflaged and anonymous to others around them.

It can be hard to mask it.  The blonde hair and blue eyes, the sharp Aryan features.  Wigs and plastic surgery, contact lenses and dyes help to deceive the majority of people in Community.  Hidden, concealed, and allowed to assimilate within Community.

Recategorised: Aryan.

Category A.

I am a Category A.

My name is Erina and I am a category A.