INVALID

The child was born at 8:47 PM, screaming. Not the thin, reedy cry they told you to expect from a faith birth, but a full, furious howl. My mother, sweaty and shaking on the kitchen floor, laughed through her tears when she heard it. My father, who had been timing her contractions on his old analog watch because we couldn't afford a med-monitor, cut the cord with sterilized kitchen shears. No doctor. No sequencer. No geneticist standing by with a clipboard to grade him on arrival. I was six years old, holding my mother's hand, and I watched my brother come into the world the way humans had done for 200,000 years. It was messy and loud and bloody and perfect. We named him Eli. The nurse who came the next morning for the mandatory registration was polite about it. She had that soft, practiced smile they teach them for dealing with people like us. "Home birth," she said, tapping it into her tablet. "Faith birth. Parents understand the implications?" My mother, still pale, nodded. "We understand." The nurse took a single drop of blood from Eli's heel. She didn't even look at him while the portable sequencer did its work. Three seconds later, her tablet made a sound I will never forget. Not a beep. A sigh. INVALID. Red letters across the screen. Eli Rowe. Male. 3.4kg. 89% probability of myopia. 63% probability of anxiety disorder. 41% probability of congenital heart defect - ventricular septal defect, minor, correctable but flagged. 17% probability of ADD. Life expectancy: 78.2 years, below optimal. Genetic Quota Score: 41/100. Classification: Faith Birth. Ineligible for federal licensing, Tier-1 education, military service, space program. She printed the certificate and handed it to my mother. The paper was thinner than the one I got when I was born. Cheaper. "Welcome to the world, Eli," she said, still smiling. "A health visitor will be by to discuss cardiac monitoring options. And you'll want to start saving for private insurance, his heart..." She left the rest unsaid. I looked down at my little brother. His eyes were still sealed shut, his fists clenched. He didn't know that in that moment, in a database in Geneva, a door had closed that would never open again. In my parents' generation, they called them God Children. Now we were just called Invalids, In-Valids. Not valid. Not real. I was an Invalid too. Born three years before Eli, before my parents even knew what a GQ score was. My myopia had already started by then, a pair of thick glasses perched on my nose. That night, my father sat me down at our kitchen table. On the table he put two things: my school report, and Eli's red-stamped certificate. "Vincent," he said — not my name, but close enough, "in this house, we don't use that word. Do you understand me?" I nodded, though I didn't. "They built a world that says it can tell the whole story from the first chapter," he said, touching Eli's certificate. "Your job is to teach your brother how to write his own ending." Outside our window, across the valley, the lights of the Helios Complex glowed white and clean. That's where the Valids went. The perfect children, sequenced and spliced and polished before they were even born, with their 140 IQs and their 100-year life expectancies and their perfect hearts that would never break. At six, I didn't hate them yet. I just wanted to be there. At six, I didn't know that twenty years later, my brother and I would burn it to the ground to get off this planet.