24EDIT: 11/25/15 idk what happened in my life that made me hate myself so much but i decided to rewrite this
its posted here its the only thing ive updated in likr a year
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A melon ball zings past my ear and behind me I can hear both Viv and Ere snickering under their breath. To my left Avi is trying to take off his shoes without reaching under the table, but failing to be inconspicuous about it. In front of me, Dad has drained his second glass of wine and has resorted to playing games on his phone. To my right, Syl sits straight-backed with her hands in her lap.
My dress was not made for a woman of my girth. If boredom does not kill me first I am going to suffocate to death.
On the podium not fifteen feet away, an overly energetic woman in a sickeningly orange wig seems to be wrapping up the end of her "introductions and whatnot", but in the past hour I have trained myself not to elevate my hopes anywhere beyond the level of drudging compliance. There's this disgusting thing some human beings love, and it is the sound of their own voice. And there's also this thing the same people like to do, talking and talking and talking and making your audience think you've finished, only to turn around with "but then"s and "there's more". These are the sort of people who think they are actually being entertaining, and that the drowsy silence they receive is actually thunderous applause. This is the woman who has been speaking for sixty minutes about the contributions of companies to the point of making said company's ambassadors fall asleep — I observe with a glance towards the table of Gemiinii Tech employees. I'd feel sorry for them except I'm too busy feeling sorry for myself.
Attempting to sigh (failing due to the surprising constrictive properties of sequined purple silk), I turn myself around in my chair and resign to watching a thirteen-year-old catapult melon balls. For whatever reason the caterers had thought it a good idea to give every guest a cup of perfectly spherical pieces of fruit and I realize, with some shame, that Viv had stolen mine right from underneath my nose for extra ammo.
Fling. Plop. Melon orb number thirty-two (according to Ere, who has been counting) lands in Dr. Talwar's wineglass.
I am so, so bored.
After what seems like an hour more, it seems as if Orange Wig has finished for good and steps down from the stage — to which you can pretty much feel the audience's boredom slip off and their anticipation jump on again. Dad drops his phone on the ground, but since four hundred of the smartest eyes in the world are now on him, he doesn't stoop down to pick it up.
"Come on, kids," he calls to us over the applause, even though we're already up and following him. He adjusts his already-perfect tie.
An assistant leads us to a row of chairs behind the podium, and from oldest to youngest we sit down. Me, Syl, Avi, Viv, and Ere. I give them a cursory glance, and to some, glares. Ere's leg won't stop bouncing — he's nervous just sitting in front of so many people. Viv's blond hair has completely broken free of every layer of hairspray forced onto it, and is about as frizzy as it was before the treatment. She's slumping in her chair and blowing at it, and I motion for her to stop. Avi, as I observe pointedly, had succeeded earlier in taking off one shoe but not the other, and currently sits cross-armed with one shoe on and the other foot bare. Syl's green almond-shaped eyes, set off by smokey eyeshadow, stare forward with all the coolness of a woman. She meets my gaze subtly, inquisitively, and I'm reminded that she's barely a teen. Maybe she is older than the rest by four minutes and thirteen seconds, maybe she does hold herself like she was there to watch the Great Wall of China rise, but she's still a kid. Just like they're all just kids.
They're not ready for this, something tells me as my gaze lands on a very certain visitor, a skeletal man in a dustless white suit and black bowtie. His eyes, touching mine, are the color of plastic and the texture of steel.
I turn my head away.
Dad's just now stepping up to the podium, his hands clasped together as he likes to do when anxious — which doesn't happen often. The applause from the audience dies down to perfect hush as he adjusts the tiny, yet powerful microphone on his suit lapel and clears his throat.
"Thank you, Molly, for that...eloquent speech," he says first, obviously being careful with his English pronunciation and struggling to not lie at the same time. He succeeds, but only by a hair. From her seat in the front, Orange Wig Molly beams. Dad clears his throat again and breathes in. "Anyway..."
In a single inhale, I see my father straighten his back and suddenly, unexplainably become something...more. He shifts his stance and his broad shoulders relax, and when he speaks again, his young voice resonates with pure force of will. "I was asked to come here before you, some of the greatest thinking minds in the world, twenty years ago, but declined. Some of you know me and my projects personally...others, maybe just rumors. A lot of you probably don't even know my name, but you'll recognize my work." He straightens even taller — an impressive feat for a man of five foot four — before inclining his chin and speaking again. A bit louder this time.
"My name is Adonai Ben-David and I am thirty-nine years old. I grew up in a minimum-wage family in Jerusalem and graduated high school when I was twelve. When I was thirteen, I began my studies in genetic engineering and also programmed my first video game. Some of you might recognize it."
He raises his hand and gives a sharp little motion with his first two fingers, and around us on the walls, images of an ancient stone city rise into sight. The dimming hall is suddenly veiled in the subtle, opening chord of a symphony, fading and shaping itself as the lights go down and the city surrounds us. A bell sounds; on the main screen, the camera pans down on a cloaked figure standing in an alley. I don't even need to look up to know what the audience is seeing — the figure's shadowed face, her tilted chin, and bright green almond eyes.
The figure takes off running. With a new chord the buildings seem to melt into a sea and the cloaked girl dives in — vanishing into bubbles and the shadows of an underwater cliff. Then a shadow flits by, silhouetted by the marbled sunlight that filters through the water, and at first you think it's the girl again, but it's not. It's a blur of brown-blue skin and black hair and bare feet and suddenly a fierce blue eye before another bell sounds, and the eye blinks.
When it opens again it's gold, and softer, and shining with light. The music shapes into trumpets and battle-like fanfare; and as the camera pans out we see a girl in high white boots and golden regalia striding to the beat of the drums, through the bannered marble hallways of a palace.
And just like that, the scene and the character changes again, reaching for a chair, tearing off her golden cape — until we see a small hunched figure at a desk, writing furiously with a red quill pen. He leaps to his feet and rips back the scarlet curtain behind him, and the only thing the audience can see is the glowing eyes of a giant dragon before the screens go dark.
Only a word is left, hovering in the midst of a lone piano chord. H4V3N.
The lights come partially back on, letting us see the mostly wide-eyed expressions on the audience's face. Dad flicks his hand again and a news clip comes up now, with a date that's older than I am. There's a dark-haired boy, dressed in slacks and a white polo shirt not unlike the ones he loves so much now, sitting with his fingers laced and one leg bouncing. "So, officially," says the woman across from him, "you are one of the youngest people to ever make it into global fame on the videogaming platforms."
"That is correct, yes," younger Dad replies in heavily-accented but confident English, and a small smile.
"How does it feel? Overwhelming? Crazy? Weird?"
The boy seems to think for a second before he just shrugs and gives a little laugh. "I don't know. Good, I guess."
"Just good?"
"Yes."
The video clip flicks off and in real time, Dad takes the podium again. "As you can see, and as some of you already knew," he continues, "my most well-known achievement so far was the programming and production of the videogame H4V3N. Critics said it took the world by storm, that it...revolutionized the way videogames were produced."
He steps away from the podium and begins to pace the stage.
"See, the concept of H4V3N wasn't just to create another adventure-suspense game. My goal was to write a story that the players could write for themselves — a choose-your-own-adventure game, in a way. As you progressed through the game, you became responsible for your own choices and suffered the consequences. H4V3N wasn't just about knowing a quest and fulfilling it — it was a game that relied on discipline, on strategy, on creativity, but not how the others did it. You made your own choices. With some cues, nonetheless, but at the highest difficulty level, your choices of inventory items in level one could throw your entire quest off. If one of your avatars died, your other questmembers would react and would have to work around it. You could change setting, avatar characteristics, even game layout to an extent that had never been seen before. Your limit was your imagination."
Dad stops pacing and sticks his hands in his pockets, with a smile. "And they liked it. I liked it. We needed something new, something that wouldn't just entrap the mind, but stimulate it. So that's what I did. I wrote a game that you could write yourself, and it was a hit.
"And interestingly enough, that's what inspired me to begin studying genetics."
That's when he gestures to me, and as rehearsed, I stand and take a step forward into the spotlight. "This is my daughter, Dea," he announces, the pride in his voice evident. "Some of you, again, might know her. She is my first attempt at what used to be unthinkable, the act of human cloning. Her source DNA was a close friend of mine, Esther Abiola, who I met during my stay in East Africa."
A single photo appears above me of my dad and a young Nigerian woman, both in their late teens, both draped in white linen to shield them from the glaring sun. The girl is thinner than I am but even still bears an uncanny mirroring of my features — or more accurately, I uncannily mirror hers. Mom. The only other difference between us is that she has...had no right arm.
Dad's quiet for a few seconds and takes a sharp breath in before speaking again. "Esther's one dream in life was to defend the people she loved. But, having lost her arm at the age of nine...it became difficult for her to do that."
His voice is very quiet now, a bare whisper that makes me feel as if I am floating above the stage.
"I was at her side as she died, from a bullet wound right about there." Pushing his jacket aside, he points to a spot to the right of his navel. "Her last wish was that she could've done better, that she could've protected the people she loved."
So you created me, I want to say, just as I've always wanted to say, but I can't. Just as I've never been able to.
The audience, in the same way, is stone silent.
"Three years later, around my nineteenth birthday, Dea was born," Dad says with the same reverence for the day that he might've had if Mom herself had given birth to me, instead of Dad pulling me from the incubation orb in his lab. "But as she grew, and began to speak, and walk, and do everything else a normal child would, attention began swarming back to me. I was even invited here, but I declined. I knew what you'd do. I've seen it before. Dea is my daughter, and I hated the thought of the media forcing my daughter into places that she didn't want to go, into questions that even I don't know the answer to. Not while that young."
He inhales and looks to me. He's close enough that he can hold out his hand to me, and without a word I accept it. I haven't held his hand since I was eight.
"When I felt Dea was old enough — " Dad turns back to the crowd " — she was seven — I told her about her new siblings."
All eyes have gone to the four thirteen-year-olds behind us, every one of them suddenly awake and perfectly still. Hesitantly, Dad motions for them to stand up and continues once more.
"During the production of H4V3N," he said, "I, like the teenager I was, grew curious about things. What if, just as you'd personalize your own avatar in the game, you could…write a person from scratch? Personalize them? Admittedly, Dea helped me test the equipment with her birth — not to say that I don't love you equally, cupcake, I just mean…well, you know."
I can't help but roll my eyes. "Yeah Dad, of course I know."
This raises a few chuckles from the audience, and a couple scattered "aww"s. My dad squeezes my hand, then lets go and takes a few steps towards my younger siblings.
"Anyway," he says, "I tried it. And I don't regret it. I've been careful to not let this out yet to the public and you, the three, four hundred of you listening to me right now, are the only witnesses to this. And if you are, it is because I trust that you have the ability to comprehend them and to respond accordingly. For twenty years with Dea, thirteen for the younger ones, I have kept silent to you about them, even through your pleading.
"Well," he spreads out his arms before dropping them to his sides, and I can almost think his voice sounds...defeated. "Here they are. The first synthetically conceived human beings in the history of the world."
There's a silence stretching across the hall now, and even I can't decipher it. My palms have suddenly become damp with sweat and I try to subtly wipe them off on my skirt, but silk does a rather poor job of absorbing body fluids. I cast a subtle glance back to my younger siblings; it's as if they're carved of ice.
I turn my head and meet the steely plastic eyes that, ever since we stepped up here, haven't blinked.
That's when he raises his hands and begins to clap — a hollow, slow clap that rings like a shout in a cave. One clap, then two, and then a few other people join in. Eventually the entire hall is applauding and though Syl, Avi, Viv and Ere seem to be relaxing, I don't know what to do. Dad's smiling, but he's good at hiding things. Either that or it's hard to tell how much he's showing.
I try to smile. On the outside it works. Inside, I'm numb.
The man with the plastic eyes seems to know.
Not entirely sure what this is, but it's been a work in progress and I'm trying to get it done before the end of this year. This is honestly all I've got, but I'm hoping that posting it publicly will pressure me into writing a bit more...regularly.