You can buy this story here: Equality: Genesis Written Edition
Art Edition (art by MGChaser) available here: Equality: Genesis Art Edition
Voiced Edition (VA by Sycllas) available here: Equality: Genesis Voiced Edition
Multi-Media (Art AND VA) available here: Equality: Genesis Multi-Media Edition
In the year 203X
1.) An introduction, and my school years.
My name is Genesis, and I’m the fastest human being in the history of the world. I’m also the strongest; at least my lower body is. That’s not to say my upper half is shabby, I can give all but the biggest of men a run for their money. If you had known me five years ago, that would come off as some kind of sick joke. It still feels like yesterday sometimes, when I was confined to a wheelchair.
I remember the day it happened so distinctly: the evening my parents sat down on my bed and told me I was “special”. It was an adjective I came to hate, for a long time at least. The real truth was I was suffering from muscular dystrophy, but my parents didn’t have the courage to tell me that. How could they anyway? Their 10 year old daughter, sister to the high school quarterback all-star, and two equally athletic sisters; it seemed encoded in my DNA that I would also be a superstar, but reality was the opposite. Instead of growing into a healthy, able-bodied woman during puberty, I was going to literally waste away.
The truth was, while my siblings inherited traits that gave them strong, agile bodies, my genetic makeup was missing vital sequences of DNA to naturally develop my muscles. Three years after that talk on my bed, I was in a wheelchair.
Life became a living hell for me. While none of my classmates had the audacity to pick on me or bully me, their stares alone pierced my heart. The way they looked with a mixture of pity of disgust – it drove me to tears when I came home. I was sectioned off to “special” classes, given a “special” caretaker, and refined to the “special” lunch table. As much as I understood the plight of the other “special” students, my mind wasn’t like theirs’. I had no friends, which obviously led me to feel alone and isolated.
When I became older, I was allowed to integrate into the “normal” classes. I didn’t really understand the point. I was always accompanied by my “special” aide, who had to wheel me everywhere, help me eat, and even assist me in using the bathroom. It was humiliating. In hindsight I appreciate everything she did for me, but at the time I actually resented her. I feel awful for ever harboring those emotions, but she was the biggest reminder that I was “special”; that I needed help because I was broken.
The worst day of my life was when I used my cell phone to do some research on my condition. Within a matter of moments from opening a few articles, I learned that there was no hope. Every muscle in my body would continue to waste away, eventually including my heart. I would not live past 30 except by some divine miracle. I would likely die a few years before that. Even if I did make it that long, it would be a life completely dependent on others, yet fully isolated from life’s pleasures – a paradox whose wicked irony was lost on me until I became older.
I was 14 at the time I performed the research, and could not believe that I was effectively middle aged. Cruelly, the bottom of that web page had a related article predicting that my peers would be the first generation to have a life expectancy over 100.
I missed the following week of classes simply because I could not stop crying. Secretly, I wanted nothing more than to die. The thought of my already deformed arms becoming more pathetic, my face growing more lopsided; the fact that I’d soon be unable to feed myself at all unless my limbs were cut off and my family bought extremely expensive prosthetic replacements… Replacements that weren’t covered by health insurance, and would require them to go into debt… Limbs that would be wasted when my heart gave out in a decade anyways… It was too much to bare.
Only out of respect for my family was I able to soldier through the next few years of my life. Things became progressively worse. I relied on my parents more and more for everything. Bathing, clothing, even eating; there was seemingly nothing I could do anymore. Nothing except to watch television and think; and my mind was too addled for the latter to do me much good.
I don’t really remember much of a single school lecture, as all I could think about was the kids around me. Internally, I was seething with jealousy. Not a single one of them would ever dare be my friend. I felt like a disgusting monster, a mistake of nature.
While the grade-school years presented my classmates with myriad first experiences: sports, fights, dances, love, hugs, kisses (and what those lead into), hopes, dreams, fears… I was left with what felt like a hollow shell of an existence. Nobody would ever feel romantically for me, and I couldn’t even blame them.
I think what startled me the most in my experience during school was the way nobody would look me in the eyes. The further my condition progressed, the worse it became. When the condition first started, kids would stare at me, then hide their faces when I looked back. Then it got worse, and they stared for a shorter length of time, their gazes hiding more quickly. More time passed, and they only snuck peeks, never lingering for long. By the time puberty had begun to transform them, they rarely ever looked me in the eyes. At best, some of the nicest, most outgoing girls would sputter out an awkward and forced “Hi there” before quickly growing nervous and leaving.
If this were a Hollywood movie, this would be the part where some popular jock has a fall-from-grace, and seeks my companionship, eventually resulting in our love. If it were a story on the internet, some nerdy, out of shape guy would give up on normal girls and try his luck with me. If it were a newspaper article, then I’d find love with someone else who was “special”. I wish I had story like that to add here. The truth is: I don’t. I never, ever made a single friend throughout the course of my grade school career. (Except for my caretakers, but I didn’t realize they were friends until much later.)
A few years later I graduated high school. The truth is, I don’t think I deserved to. I barely completed any of my work, and the work ‘I’ did was almost entirely done by either my state-appointed “special” aide, or a family member.
I had to desperately beg my parents to not send me to college. They wouldn’t listen to my reasoning that if I was going to die in a decade, there was no point in spending four years of that time and their money on education. I became paranoid, taking their gesture of kindness for some kind of trick to get rid of me. To not have to clothe me, bathe me, feed me. To not have to hear my distorted voice. To not have to watch their daughter literally and metaphorically waste away while their other three children became stronger, smarter, and more successful. Fortunately, I managed to convince them to let me stay home.
2.) In which I was given a chance at life.
The next few months were agonizing. I had no friends. No real hobbies. Nothing I could do productively with the short amount time I held in life (In truth, there were things I could’ve done, but I wasn’t given the emotional tools to understand that). There were zero possible jobs I could realistically perform, and frankly, the prospect of spending any of those remaining 8-12 years working seemed absurd. So… I just watched television.
Then one day, everything changed. That day caused me the second most anxiety of any single date (the first being when I discovered my life expectancy). A pair of pleasant looking people wearing business casual attire, a man and a woman, arrived at the front door. They explained they were with a bio-tech research firm called Equality who were seeking a willing participant for an experimental treatment for muscular dystrophy. Equality’s mission statement was simple, if not a bit morally high-horsed: they wanted to use medical research to bring physical equality to all human beings. Treating diseases like my own was one of the more obvious targets.
My parents were skeptical, but I begged (more like screamed, cussed, swore, and threatened as loud as my diminished lungs possibly could) to let them run any experiment they wanted on me. At best I would be cured. At worst, I’d be freed from this existence, and my death could possibly help save others with this ailment. Reluctantly, my parents agreed to let me at least meet the science team and hear their proposal.
The researchers were extremely nice. I could tell they were desperate for someone to accept their deal. There would be no compensation beyond the free treatment and physical therapy if it was a success, plus there was a very real possibility I’d die.
There was one other thing; something that they seemed concerned about my reaction to. They showed me a picture of an x-ray of a mouse’s legs. The left side had small deposits of white, indicating the limb’s muscularity was underdeveloped. On the right frame was a tremendous white mass, multiple times larger than the left’s. I was told that this was the same mouse, before and after the treatment. The mouse originally had muscular dystrophy that was analogous to my own. They then produced a third image, which shows what a regular mouse’s legs looked like – it seemed to have half the mass of the after picture.
The scientists then explained that they simply did not know any other way to cure the mice from muscular dystrophy. They had successfully replicated the experiment a few times, but it only worked by changing the genetic sequence in such a way that the body overcompensated how much muscle was produced—always creating roughly twice as much as there should normally be. Every time they tried to alter the sequence to prevent this overcompensation, the treatment failed in numerous ways.
In other words: if the therapy was a success, the baseline mass of my muscles would swell to approximately twice of what they were ‘supposed’ to be if they never had muscular dystrophy. I was warned that any strenuous exercise would make those muscles even larger.
It was surprising to me how the scientists thought this was some kind of huge disadvantage that would dissuade me from undergoing the treatment; that becoming jacked without effort (and even more jacked with) was a drawback.
Today, in reflection, I can understand why they thought this way. The vast majority of women do not want to be big. They fear being larger than their man; possessing muscles that only a bodybuilder could surpass would be a huge disadvantage, lowering the potential pool of mates by a huge margin.
To an 18 year old with arms so shriveled that she couldn’t bring a fork to her mouth, that was the least of my concerns. If anything, I dreamed of becoming The Hulk; that in a bout of rage I would turn into a giant green monster bursting with muscle. I wanted to throw cars around and leap hundreds of feet into the air. I wanted to never sit in a chair again for the rest of my life. I wanted to never stop moving.
My parents on the other hand wanted me to ‘sleep on’ the decision. I refused. They tried to forcefully take me back home (which wasn’t much of a struggle at all since I entirely relied on them to go anywhere), but I relented. I screamed as loud as my weak vocal chords allowed me to. I begged the scientists who watched with mixed expressions, petrified with doubts of their own on how to react. Desperate, my mind quickly came up with a solution – I yelled with as much clarity as I could muster: “Call the police! I am 18 years old and am being kidnapped! This is illegal! I am an adult with free will and I demand to remain here!”
To this day I’m not actually entirely certain how technically accurate that claim was, but regardless my voice was heard. The scientists quickly sprung into action, and my parents stopped, frozen in motion. How could they possibly deny me this? One scientist produced her phone, began a recording, and asked me if I was giving verbal consent to relocate me away from my parents, to which I hastily agreed.
That was the last time I saw them for the next few months.
3.) In which hope was poured into the hollow shell of my existence.
I don’t remember much of the treatment itself. Before the operation, the staff all thanked me personally. Thus was particularly memorable because it was the first time in over a decade someone had earnestly done so. The last before that must have been when I was very young, six years old or so, and did some small task for my parents.
It was a transcendental moment: meeting these potential saviors. Their faces had the same emotion as my own. Everyone in the room, including myself, wanted nothing more than for this treatment to work. For the first time, people staring at me was a positive thing.
After signing a tremendous number of forms (I’m unsure if they were even legally binding since this treatment was clearly not sanctioned for human testing yet) I was prepped for surgery. They offered to let me think it over, to give me a night of eating hand-fed cookies, cake and ice-cream; a night of pampering and decadence – a last hurrah in case something went wrong (though they never admitted that). I vehemently declined the offer, begging for them to not let me spend another day in my dying body.
They must have been impressed by my gusto, because the operation was performed that very night.
The surgery’s recovery was initially very slow. I was bedridden for a long time, so long that I lost track. It could have been a few days, or a few weeks – I really couldn’t tell. When you’re confined to one place like that, time becomes something of a tunnel you phase through in alternating spurts of extreme haste and sluggishness.
Despite this, I was alive. Not only was I alive, but for the first time in a decade, I felt as if I was getting… stronger. At some point it became easier to breathe. I could control the passage of air, holding my breath for a short while. A nearby mirror revealed that my face was no longer lopsided, as the flesh had regained its proper tautness. Over time, the heart-rate monitor to my side became more stable, less erratic. Soon, I could move my head more freely. Eventually, one day, I moved my legs. Not just slightly and jerkily, but moved them with a smooth, controlled motion. This in turn caused my heart-rate to skyrocket so quickly from excitement that two nurses burst into my room.
It was around this point that things started picking up. I could now feed myself with relative ease, and my appetite was skyrocketing. The doctors assured me this was a good thing, and constantly provided optimally nutrient balanced food whenever my hunger pangs flared. I treated eating like it was my job; not a morsel was ever left on my plate. I knew that my body needed sustenance to repair itself, to reverse the damage caused by years of genetic defect.
The doctors brought in a strange machine that massaged my legs. At the time I didn’t understand what it was for, but later I would learn that it was a device used to stimulate muscle growth in bedridden patients. It was official: I was becoming stronger every day.
I wanted to help this process along, so I would intentionally move my arms and legs around, performing a makeshift kind of exercise. I couldn’t believe it, I was actually intentionally working out in my own way.
From this point on, I started looking at life in a new way. Everything became more vibrant and full of life. When I watched television, I was no longer depressed at how I would never do any of those things; instead I was filled with hope. Hope that I would have a working body that could explore the world and live life.
Another week or so passed (I really wish I had kept better track of time during my recovery, but as I said, my perception of things was distorted.) and eventually it was time for me to try and walk. It was rough, and as much as I wish I could report success at my first attempt, it was actually a failure. Despite this, I actually stood on my own two feet, without the help of machinery or someone else, something that had been impossible for years. That night I was filled with determination. I ate more than ever, and performed my makeshift exercises.
A few days later, I finally walked. It was a moment so exciting that I burst into tears, as did many of the people around me. I only wish my parents and siblings could see what happened. Despite the overwhelming triumph welling within me, I felt both guilty and angry that they weren’t there. Part of me was still furious that they would’ve prevented me from getting this treatment; another part missed them, and knew that ultimately they loved me.
Despite my misgivings about my family, my life became a true upward spiral from this point on. Each day I became a little more independent. Soon I was dressing myself, going for walks, and as embarrassing as it is to admit: finally using the restroom and bathing without any assistance.
My body was slowly filling out. It seemed like each day my thin, twig-like limbs increased in size. A week later, I was walking around the facility, greeting people, and watching on as they performed research. My mind was stimulated, and I realized that I was no longer going to die at 30; instead, I was going to be one of the kids from my generation projected to live until 120.
It was at that revelation I made my decision: I was going to make the most of my life. As soon as I was healthy enough, I was going to go to college. I was going to nourish my mind, and learn how to contribute towards the same research that saved my life. I was going to cherish my body, nurture it, and make it stronger. I was finally given a chance at life, and I was going to make the most of it. I was going to become as intelligent and fit as I possibly could!
You can buy this story here: Equality: Genesis Written Edition
Art Edition (art by MGChaser) available here: Equality: Genesis Art Edition
Voiced Edition (VA by Sycllas) available here: Equality: Genesis Voiced Edition
Multi-Media (Art AND VA) available here: Equality: Genesis Multi-Media Edition