Unwritten

Written by Lauren Zheng from Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute, Canada

How pointless this lifespan exam is. They needn’t remind me how long I’ll live: Mother does that enough. Yours is a long road, Fiora, and my part of it is almost over. My only wish is to see you into a prestigious medical school. 

The waiting room chair creaks as I shift, its leather peeling onto my pristine pleated skirt. Focus, Fiora. I reglue my eyes to my textbook on molecular biology.

A flash of scarlet draws my gaze to the girl leaving the doctor’s room, bright dress swishing. I remember seeing her and her friends around the neighborhood, raucous and reckless, always laughing. Why am I stuck studying while they play? An eight-year-old Fiora once demanded. I’m not even allowed to write my stories!

Their parents can provide for them through their entire two-decade lifespans. But I… Under the sternness, Mother sounded almost wistful. You must sacrifice some joy now, bunny; you have two hundred years to win it back. 

Focus. Except - that girl took the lifespan exam after me. So why am I still waiting for my results?

Mother, straight-backed beside me, squeezes my arm and rises. “Keep studying.” 

“Fiora Ellis?” a soft voice calls from the doctor’s office.

I follow Mother into the room.

“Surely you’ve made a mistake.” Mother has my arm in a death grip, like how we used to cross the road together when I was a child.

“I- I wish we did,” the young doctor manages. Round, thin-framed glasses and a small pointed face, she seems far too young to have finished medical school at all. “But it’s the birth-doctor who erred. They- we’ve made major advances in lifespan-evaluation technology over the last fifteen years.”

It rushes at me, like the surge of cold air upon walking into this hospital. I will never get to where this doctor is. I may not even outlive Mother.

The molecular biology textbook is a dead weight in my hand. “How long?”

“Oh.” The doctor stares at her monitor. “Approximately two years.”

I am Fiora Anne Ellis; my lifespan is not two hundred years but seventeen, and I spent most of this short life poring dutifully over medical texts.

I laugh quietly, hysterically. Maybe I’ll rip up all my notes and diagrams, delete all my documents. Maybe I’ll leave just one blank file, and in it, I’ll write a book.

The weak sliver of sunlight on my ceiling brightens as dawn comes. Usually, I’d be studying furiously. That birth-doctor really screwed me over. If I’d known my lifespan, at least my goals, my world, wouldn’t have been shattered. And I would have been free to laugh with friends, run wild at midnight, write my stories.

You still can, can’t you? The light through my curtains whispers. 

Can I? Make my peace with all the time I lost, everything I’ll never be?

I throw off the covers. Open my laptop. Create that empty document. 

My door swings open. “Morning, bunny,” Mother chirps.

I hastily shut my laptop and stare at her. Though her eyes are so red she must not have slept, she beams. “You’re a volunteer at the Laboratory.”

My voice is thick with sleep and uncaught dreams. “Not the most prestigious one in the country?”

“Oh, yes.” Mother glows like the dawn. “My colleague has a collaboration with them on robotic surgery. One of his partners is part of a project developing a cure for a short lifespan. I contacted him last night about your situation, and Fiora - he agreed to include you in their trials! You’ll live, and you’ll learn from the world’s best medical minds.”

“Do- do we know it’ll work?” Because if it doesn’t, I’ll lose both my life and any chance of enjoying it.

A shadow flits across the sun that is Mother’s face, but she smiles. “With your help, bunny, there is no chance of failure.”

I rest my fingers on the warm surface of my laptop for a heartbeat. The blank document thrums beneath until I rise and dress for the Laboratory.

My bedroom spins as I fall into my chair. The desk is illuminated only by sunset and streetlight through the window, but I’m too tired to turn on my lamp.

Three hundred fifty days at the Laboratory. Immaculate equipment, meticulous testing, soft-spoken nurses, brisk-voiced doctors, an atmosphere professional and passionate. I should relish every second of it. Should. 

I open my laptop with cold fingers. As dizziness comes more frequently, as I lose sleep and weight, I find myself opening that blank document over and over. Every night falls like the loss of something precious. You’ll die with an empty document and an empty life.

I refuse.

“Fiora?” Mother switches on the light, blinding me. “Rest. Laboratory tomorrow, remember?”

I move to shut my laptop - and stop. If I die in a day, this is not how I want to spend my last night.

“I’m not going,” I whisper.

“I know you feel unwell, bunny, but your presence is crucial-”

“Mother, just let me-” The word swells on my lips - heavy, forbidden, bittersweet. “-write.” 

The room spins faster as if trying to escape from Mother’s stare.

“You still chase that ridiculous dream?”

“I have days to-”

“You have decades! To live, to succeed-”

My throat closes, and I can’t breathe, but I must make her understand-

The bedroom crashes into darkness.

I pant, leaning against the bathroom wall to steady myself. 

The cure is made! Mother’s cry rebounds through my mind, the first words I heard when I awoke in the Laboratory.

I’m saved.

I gather my strength to return to my sickroom, but stop short at murmurs in the corridor: “I must make sure you’re aware, Mrs. Ellis.” It’s the voice of the principal doctor of the project. “The cure will spare nothing.”

“I am aware.” Mother’s quiet confidence overrides even him.

“I’m so sorry. We thought we’d have another year, but she’s deteriorated too fast.”

“You worked wonders. The gap medicine leaves, my research will fill.”

What? I’m steeling myself to demand answers when Mother adds - “Fiora needn’t know. It’ll only upset her.”

But I do need to know.

As we enter our apartment, I cling to Mother for support. When I regain my balance, her keys wink in my cold palm. She doesn’t notice. What have I become?

Later, the floorboards chill my bare feet as I creep to Mother’s study. It’s past midnight, but she sleeps light. If excuse A fails, I have excuse B, I remind myself.

I fumble with the keys. The jingle feels damning, but her door swings open at last. Blue light already fills the room. I pad to her computer and hit enter. It can’t be this easy, can it?

The screen saver fades into a video: me at my desk, barely out of toddlerhood, writing furiously with simplified diagrams strewn around me. I was that young? I collapse into the white, straight-backed chair, heart clenching: I see Mother in the same position, etching these past fifteen years into her mind because nothing will ever be the same.

I click into another video. A third. A fourth.

Some show my achievements - certificates from the mail, or being presented with awards. In many of the videos, I’m bent over my papers, a relentless light in my eyes - the same light I know so well in Mother, but I never thought I had. What I remember, in fact, is my precious colored pens in each hand, as I spin stories for each hue - and as my work lies forgotten. But this strange montage tells a different story. Here, I’m the prodigy that Mother wishes me to become.

I click on one last video.

The girl in the black dress is not me.

She has my face, but I never achieved that waist despite Mother’s strict regime. I never captured that girl's elegance as she floats up the stairs to a podium before thousands. And I never won the gold medal at the International Biology Olympiad, the medal now being placed on that radiant girl.

And if this video isn't of me, none of the previous ones was either.

“Look at what you could be, bunny.”

I nearly fall off the chair. Mother stands at the door, mouth kind and eyes gleaming.

“Who is that?” I whisper.

“Your digital twin. I have trained her neural network in a simulated world for… oh, a little over five years now.”

The pieces slide together. The cure will spare nothing. Permanent amnesia - a side effect of this stage of the cure. All my memories wiped. But Mother doesn’t care, because she has a backup.

Something spreads through the shock like an infection through a bloodstream. Something like fury. “You’ll scoop out my brain and replace it.”

Mother sighs, like I received another “honourable mention” in a contest. “When you were myopic, and laser surgery corrected it, was that replacing your eyes? If you dislike your appearance and undergo modifications, is that replacing your face? This won’t be a replacement - it’ll be an improvement.”

“Improvement? Can it dream? Does it want to write?”

Mother scrutinizes me for a long breath. I feel old Fiora writhe inside me, wracking her mind to bring the approving light back into Mother’s eyes. I ignore her.

“I suppose the disease is inherited. I… dreamt, as you call it, too. I was sometimes a photographer, often a painter, even a self-named artisan. I once made a dress out of wire and flowers. I dreamt until I woke up and found that I was twenty, with nowhere to go.”

An artistic side to Mother. I can’t imagine. How little I know about my parent.

“I tried to cull the urge from you early, but… well, I’m certain the twin has overcome it.”

“That’s why it won’t be me!”

“Of course it will,” Mother replies, softer. “I love you, Fiora. I wouldn’t make you into something else.”

But you will.

“Besides, don’t you want this? You’ve struggled for long enough.”

Unable to focus, unable to reach higher, always good but not good enough.

“Think on it.” Mother turns to the door. “Goodnight, my bunny.”

Relentless white light through my eyelids, scratchy sheets on my skin. Too familiar. I must have been brought to the Laboratory after collapsing this morning.

“Ah. Here she is.” My newly opened eyes find the principal doctor's strained face. “Fiora, I’m sure your mother has explained that-”

“The side effect. She knows.” Mother’s voice comes crisp and taut. “Fiora, bunny, listen. They must perform the surgery now. You- you don’t have much time.”

“I see you’ve turned sixteen today,” the doctor goes on. “Do you consent to this operation?”

I thought I had more time. The elegant, successful girl in the black dress dances in the laboratory lights, medal glittering. In the glare, I see the empty document on my laptop. So much I want to do, so much I need to say, but I-

“She doesn’t have a choice,” Mother snaps.

Could I have been a writer, a poet, an artist? Could I have been content with my sixteen years? Could my happy memories have been more than the feel of a certificate or the sound of applause?

All I know is that I never had a choice.

Because Mother took it all, leaving me a single path. Even now she’s edging, pushing, shoving me down that road.

My thoughts slide, my vision slips. Time. Always out of time. Maybe the question isn’t how to wrangle the universe into giving me more, but how to make it worth something.

I meet the doctor’s eyes.

“No,” I say.

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying!” Mother’s facade cracks in all directions, terrifying to watch, like the lush peak of a mountain falling away as magma pours. “Listen, Fiora! If you don’t- if you- you’re going to die!”

But I’ll die either way.

Better let my body rest than have it used by that radiant prodigy who never wanted to write.

“No,” I whisper. “Mother-”

“Do it!” Mother screams at the doctors. “Save her!”

I wanted to apologize, to explain, to say goodbye. But we are both too far gone.

“You’re still alive, Momma,” I breathe.

And I fall back into soft darkness.

Three girls, slim and pale, perch straight-backed on the elegant cushioned stools of a small, reputable cafe. One of them says something, and they all laugh uproariously, scattering crumbs over pristine pleated skirts.

A few tables over, a woman mechanically sips her tea. They’re in her daughter’s school cohort. One of them, she’s been told, has three hundred years to live.

Fiora would have been seventeen tomorrow. Maybe she could have finished her book. What would she write, given the chance? The woman can’t imagine. How little she knows her daughter.

For the past thirty minutes, she’s listened to the noisy, free chatter of those three girls.  A year ago, one of them took up crocheting. Another tried rock-climbing. A third adopted a cockatiel.

When she arrives home, she sits in her white, straight-backed chair and opens her computer. Two digital twins await.

She trained the second in the weeks following… Fiora. A version of what her daughter could be, had she been free to… live. 

The woman asks both twins. What if you were…

I would be angry, replies the first twin, the successful one, voice crisp and logical. You still could have saved me. Slicing through her with the surgeon’s knife Fiora will never wield.

The other response takes longer.

I don’t know, says the second twin at last, the happy one, the one with Fiora’s eyes. I wanted to write. You took that away. I might not have forgiven you. But I would want you to… live a little.

I don’t know how, the woman wants to say. But the first step is clear.

She is crying, she realizes, but that can’t be right. Crying is for when you break a bone, or argue with a friend. Not this burn, this suffocation… not this.

The first twin is the first to go. No explosion, no final words. Click, then gone.

She could keep the second twin. She wants to, oh, she wants to.

But it’s only another version of what she thought Fiora might want. Not the truth, either.

Goodnight, my bunny. 

Click.

Dust mites dance in golden light on the morning of Fiora’s seventeenth birthday. The woman watches them flutter as she cleans their house.

You’re still alive.

She unearths an old canvas. Dust clumps in great drifts to the back. Strokes of emerald and moss and pine, indigo and sapphire and silver, end in an expanse of white. She once sat in the woods and painted, nineteen years ago, perhaps the last time she felt alive. Then she returned home and read rejection letter after rejection letter from every university she applied to. Then she destroyed all her projects.

But she left this one. And for nineteen years, she never touched it.

You still can, can’t you? Fiora’s voice whispers.

Can she? Brush off the dust, buy paint and brushes, finish the painting and find herself?

She dresses. Picks up her wallet. And heads to the nearest art supply store.