Dream Come True

Chapter 3

The shock was like a piercing glass through his heart as his mind tried to reconcile the horrible reality with his happier expectations. Balder expected that all he would need to do was apologize and confess his feelings, that she would run into his arms, thrilled with the prospect of being his girlfriend.

"What...How..." he started to say, hesitant about which question to ask first.

"A month after you left, there was a quarantine incident," his father said hesitantly. "A few rich kids from Santorna7 broke the quarantine without anyone being the wiser. Apparently, Rose somehow came into contact with them or visited the same place as them. Either way, she caught Santona, a common disease on Santorna7, which is quite manageable there. But..."

"But what?" Balder asked, his impatience and fear mixing in his chest into a potent mixture just waiting to explode. "How is my Rose?"

"You know how bad her immunity to interplanetary diseases is..." Jonathan said cautiously. "She got extremely sick. They even had to install artificial lungs to help her breathe... and quite a few other internal organs suffered..."

"But she is okay now?" Balder inquired hopefully. "Surely, with the advanced technology available to us, there was a way to stabilize her condition?"

"She is stable," his mother said in a tone that didn't give a positive meaning to the word. "She has been transferred to the Castle of Doom."

Marigold lowered her eyes as she said that to avoid seeing pain darken her son's bright blue eyes, which were always full of wonder. It was hard, but she understood he had the right to know the truth, and Jonathan was taking too long prolonging his pain.

"They did what?" Balder screamed as all the horror stories he heard about the place rushed back to him in one towering wave, crushing all his hopes.

"Son, you know very well that after the Cyborg Wars, the government can't afford anything like that to ever happen again," Jonathan said, putting a hand on his son's shoulder.

"What could possibly be the percentage for her parents to refuse to take responsibility for her, for them to accept her being decommissioned, thrown away like she didn't matter?" Balder questioned with unhinged bitterness.

"She is sixty percent enhanced," Jonathan said, unsure how to help his son accept the facts and move on with his life. "You know as well as I do that anything beyond fifty percent is too much. It's too risky. Some cyborgs that fought against humans in the war were only fifty percent enhanced, and they wreaked havoc on our ranks. The new law states that if it's under seventy percent, it's the guardians' right to decide. That's already way too generous, considering the bloodshed that happened all those years back."

Balder closed his eyes to stop himself from showing the anger and frustration his father's words caused him. It felt like he was defending the unfair law, like he was saying forty or thirty percent of humanity didn't matter when, in his mind, even one percent of Rose being Rose mattered more than the whole universe.

Furthermore, Cyborg Wars didn't happen because they were cyborgs. It occurred because they were individuals who wanted equal rights and wanted to be treated fairly. When denied those rights, they lashed out, like anyone would have, biological organism or not.

"She is still their daughter!" Balder said through clenched teeth. "How could they do that to her?"

"In their minds, she is no longer a biological life form. She is no longer alive," Marigold said through tears. "They thought the best thing for them and her would be to forcefully shut her down."

"How could that be the best thing for Rose?" Balder roared, his throat becoming hoarse from all the yelling he had been doing. "She can still exist. Even the tiniest part of her is so much better than most people, especially her hypocritical parents."