“Then why are we here?” Elara asked.
Being CLEAR meant you went to work, hugged your children, and lived normally. Being UNSTABLE meant a grey van arrived within the hour to take you to a Reorientation Facility. You weren't sick. You were pre-sick . And pre-sickness was a civic threat.
At the Facility, she joined a ward of other UNSTABLES. A man named Corin who’d been flagged for “pre-organ dissonance.” A teenager named Jaya with “pre-synaptic echo.” An elderly woman, Mira, who’d been UNSTABLE for fourteen years—her biomarker kept shifting, never quite manifesting into anything real. infraexams
And sometimes—not always, but sometimes—the officers shrug and drive away.
The grey van arrived in twenty-three minutes, not an hour. They were getting faster. Two Reorientation Officers in matte grey uniforms helped her into the back, not ungently. They'd done this thousands of times. “Then why are we here
In the polished, white-walled city of Veridia, citizens never got sick. Not because they were healthy, but because sickness was redefined out of existence.
“The mirror’s a liar,” Mira whispered on Elara’s third night. “Not malicious. Just… overeager. It sees patterns everywhere. A slight tremor in your protein folding? PRE-PARKINSON’S. A weird neural firing during REM sleep? PRE-SCHIZOPHRENIA. But most of it never happens. The body corrects itself. It always has.” You weren't sick
Elara, a 34-year-old linguist, had been CLEAR for 2,847 consecutive days. She trusted her infraexams the way she trusted gravity. Each morning, she stood before the mirror, placed her palms on the cool sensor pads, and watched the blue light pulse over her body like a gentle tide.