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Battling the age old fight. The struggle of being different. Yet, who’s the one to say I’m not the normal one? I could hear the gentle whoop of plasma guns as they fired into the air, the recruits trying their best to contain the ever growing mob that surrounded the sleek, black car as it zoomed through the streets. It was a miracle I’d made it this far. 20 Earth years of absolute Hell. Years in a cell of a roomed – holed up within my own mind. I devoured age-old literature, Miller, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Dante. Emerson once said, “It is great to be misunderstood.” It seems, if these words ring true, then I am the queen of the unique, of the great, of the misunderstood.

Everyone, the government, the people, my handlers – they are about what I am, not who I am. To them, even to my creator, I am just a science experiment. They regard me with as much respect as some kid’s baking soda volcano.

Yuri, my creator, or father, as I called him, worked as a geneticist in Switzerland. He’d been one of the scientists who was allotted the old budget for the CERN Hadron collider when it was destroyed by a mentally ill scientist who believed he’d been given the task of destroying the collider to save the world. Long story short, he, along with 200 others died in the explosion, leaving millions of dollars without a place go. Yuri requested the money and four years, a lot of arguing and debating later, I was born. Since then, I’ve been deemed the “Test Tube Baby from Hell.” I’ve had a countless number of people tell me was and always will be an abomination. What I am, upon sight, is very unclear. I look too slender, too powerful, to be human, like an Tarahumara tribal woman. My skin glimmers with an odd caramel sheen, as if there’s light within me, pouring out.

That day, that day when the crowd seemed louder, roudier than ever, I had been on my way to see Britain’s new Prime Minister in order to show off the progress Yuri had been making. I would have been inspected, flirted with, respected, and above all else, feared. Had it not been for test #2, I might have died of boredom. Before I received the name of Lily, I’d been referred to as test #1. Yuri was above everything else, a lover of nature, and he often compared me to flowers, so it only seemed fitting that I be given such a name. My name became widely known and people began burning flowers to protest my existence. Had the protesters known about #2, they’d have burned a lot more. Test #2 was not of my kind, or any other.

When I first saw his face, it appeared next to my window in a flash of pale light. Screams erupted and I heard gun firing off frantically as the door to the car was ripped off. Energy pulses faded away as they neared the odd looking apparition that picked my shocked body up. He carried me out swiftly as my handlers scrambled to fire. All I could hear was Serena yelling, “Juniper! Juniper!” I slipped quickly into a dormant state as chaos ensued all around me.

I blinked awake in my bedroom in Yuri’s research building, the faces of Yuri and test #2 peered down at me. Yuri nodded to me, tilted his head, and walked away. He started explaining that the creature standing over me was test #2, also known as Jag. He’d been modeled after a Jaguar, small, sleek, fast, and he’d taken his name sake from them. When he moved to help me up, the grace he possessed seem to almost visibly seep from him. He moved quickly, efficiently, and beautifully. His face seemed angular, sharp, defined. I wanted to reach out and touch him just to be sure he was even real.

We were, in essence, man, perfected. For that we were hated. Hated beyond compare by all men. Loathed for our exotic, other-worldly abilities and looks. We were so different from what normal humans had grown accustomed to that they could muster nothing but spite. We scared them senseless.

Yuri understood this better than either myself or Jag ever would. It was his unique love for us, his uncanny understanding of how we felt and what we thought that truly fueled his decision to use us as he did. We trusted him with everything we could, and he used that. He could do to us and with us as he pleased. His odd, phenomenal master plan may have ended in catastrophe, but it’s because of him I still stand today, that I even exist. He could have asked me to commit genocide, and in my blissfully willful state, I would have done so with a smile.

When Yuri sat me and Jag down, we were still within the stage of infancy. We’d been created to outlive most humans but Yuri couldn’t have fathomed how long we’d make it. Yuri may not have been a raconteur, but he could captivate my mind with his ideas and thoughts. The tale he spun as we sat there blew my mind.

“Think with me,” he told us, our brightly colored eyes peering into him. “Think of a world where you’re accepted. Imagine, my young creations, a place were you aren’t yelled at, criticized, hated.”

I’d dreamed of a world like that time and time again. My mind had run through so many scenarios where I am accepted it’d eventually become numb. Yet, within me, I knew we were too powerful, too different.

“There is a man who is running for the position of President of the United Nations of North America, UNNA. His name is Daniel Crowe. Lily, when you met him, he was quite impressed by my work. He even offered me a small chunk of the Republic of Canada to set up a colony for my creations so that all of you can live in peace and harmony. The only problem is, his opponent is more likely to win.”

“We… Need to… Eliminate this opponent.”

Like children, innocent and gullible, we nodded, not fully processing the task he had taxed us with. It seemed as if he’d merely told us to fetch a pan of cookies from the oven. As I remember those moments after he spoke, I got a glimpse of how different Jag and I truly seemed. Yuri had created him to be able to blend in, but he’d made Jag’s emotional capabilities less than mine. Jag could feel, but only to an extent. Yuri had created the next generation of spy.

It was because of Jag’s willingness to follow orders, to be told what to do, that he stood apart from me. I’d been created headstrong and determined. I was free and he wasn’t. Later, when we began talking about the logistics of it all, the how, the where, the when. I began to question my own judgment, I even questioned Yuri’s. The world taught me that killing was bad and Yuri had told me to listen to the world (as to better understand it). Yet, here he stood, planning the demise of a man with a family, with a life, with a future, a past, and a present. Here he was, destroying everything I’d built up within my mind. Yuri didn’t want me to be there if I didn’t have to. Jag should have been able to do, but he didn’t develop the same type of supernatural skills I did.

Jag had an allure that no one else did, people were drawn to him. He was super strong and too fast to be real. He could sense the moods around him to get a feel of what’s going on and he could generate energy shields that made things just bounce off of him. Sadly, he didn’t gain my extraordinary ability. To understand what I can do, one must look at the brain as if it’s a computer and myself as a hacker. I can take the conscious mind and make it believe anything I want. Yuri needed me to turn the two of us invisible to the world. I made it so that as we stepped past a person we were nothing but a shimmer of air, a random thought that conquers any idea of what might have been there. We didn’t exist within the minds of others. The concept of us was essentially gone.

With such a power, I was a prize. With such a power, I was hunted.

Lily Moring's Story