1
Ksara
The lights scream.
Gold. Blinding, brutal gold, reflecting off every polished surface until the Grand Celestial Hall becomes a kaleidoscope of refracted wealth. My eyes water. I blink hard, trying to anchor myself, but the air itself feels wrong. Synthetic perfume hangs thick as radiation, a cloying cocktail of imported florals that never grew in soil, never knew sunlight. Beneath it, sharper: ozone from the force fields humming at every doorway. The ionic charge makes my teeth ache.
I press my palm flat against the nearest column, seeking something solid. The marble feels cold. Dead. Quarried from some moon stripped bare a century ago, dragged across space to prove a Minister's taste. No veins of iron. No fossilized memory of ancient seas.
My stomach lurches, a sickening roll that starts deep in my gut and rises like a wave. The sensation is visceral, almost physical, as if my body itself is rejecting this place, these people, this entire manufactured spectacle. I swallow hard against thebile threatening to climb my throat, tasting the champagne I'd barely sipped earlier, now turned sour with anxiety.
"Stand straight." The command comes sharp and immediate, barely loud enough to qualify as a whisper but carrying all the force of a shouted order.
Mother's voice cuts through the noise, a scalpel wrapped in silk. Her fingers find the small of my back, sharp nails digging through the thin fabric of my gown. She yanks the draping higher, adjusting the fall of iridescent cloth across my hips with the precision of an engineer correcting a faulty circuit.
"Your posture is atrocious," she murmurs, smile fixed, teeth gleaming as she waves to someone across the room. "And for god's sake, stop looking like you're about to vomit on the Chancellor's shoes."
I force my spine straighter. The dress constricts, a second skin of woven starlight designed to cling, to display, to advertise. The fabric shifts colors with my body heat, currently cycling through shades of rose gold and copper. Mother chose it specifically.Warm tones, Ksara. You need to look fertile. Abundant.
The word makes my skin crawl.
"Smile." Her nails press harder, a warning. "You are the face of the harvest."
I smile. The muscles in my cheeks pull tight, aching within seconds. Around us, the ball churns with motion. Delegates from a hundred systems, their bodies augmented, their faces lifted, their clothes embedded with micro-projections that shift and shimmer. I catch fragments of conversation, each one a performance:
"Did you see the latest reports? The grain yields on Theta-9 exceeded initial projections by a full seventeen percent. Seventeen! They're calling it the miracle harvest."
"Yes, yes, and Demeter's latest cultivar, the radiation-resistant strain she unveiled last quarter, it actually survived the radiation storms on Kepler-62f. Three full cycles of exposure. Absolutely remarkable work. Revolutionary, even."
"Is that her daughter standing there? The young one? I heard she's the one with the gift. The bio-kinesis. They say she can make dead soil bloom with a touch."
"Really? Just by touching it? Extraordinary. I wonder what her breeding index is..."
I am not a person here. I am a product demonstration. A living catalog entry. A genetic prospectus wrapped in iridescent fabric, waiting to be appraised, evaluated, and assigned a value in whatever currency these people trade in. My mother's greatest achievement, walking on two legs and smiling on command.
Mother steers me forward, her hand clamped around my elbow. We move through the crowd like a ship cutting water, her presence parting the masses. High Minister Demeter, Bio-Genesis Architect, savior of seventeen colony worlds. My mother. Everywhere we pass, heads turn. Hands extend. She takes them all, dispensing careful smiles and measured words.
I focus on breathing, on the simple mechanical act of pulling air into my lungs and releasing it again.
In. The synthetic perfume from a passing woman coats my tongue, leaves a chemical sweetness in the back of my throat. Manufactured jasmine. Simulated vanilla. Nothing real has touched that scent.
Out. The force fields maintaining the atmospheric bubble hum against my eardrums, a constant high-pitched whine that most people here probably don't even notice anymore. White noise to them. Torture to me.
In. Somewhere, beneath all these layers of processed metal and carefully calibrated false atmosphere, beneath the polished floors and the climate-controlled air and the projectedstarscapes on the walls, there must be something alive. Something green. Something growing. Real soil. Real roots. Something that doesn't need an oxygen generator to exist.
Out. I search for it with my senses, that part of me Mother calls mygift, but all I feel is the deadness of it all. Sterile. Artificial. Empty.
"Minister Demeter, an honor."
A man materializes in front of us, his suit projecting a slow rotation of his family crest. Gold rings crowd his fingers. His eyes skip over my mother and land on me, pupils dilating as some neural implant feeds him data. My height. My age. My genetic markers, probably.
My worth.
"Councilor Petros." Mother's voice warms by exactly three degrees. "How generous of you to attend."
"I wouldn't miss it." His smile stretches wide, too many teeth. "And this must be Ksara. I've heard extraordinary things."
"My daughter, yes." She nudges me forward.
