“You all look so amazing!” Iris said to her friends. “Nothing like what I thought you would. Not that I know what people are supposed to look like anyway.” Her friends laughed. “Hera, what color is your hair, it’s beautiful!”

Hera signed her answer for Aesthesis to translate. “It’s called red.”

“That’s what ‘red’ is? I love it!”

“Can’t you speak now?” Nervosa asked Hera.

Hera signed her answer again. “She can hear now, but speaking will take some time.” Aesthesis waited for the next sentence. “She heard her own sounds today, though. Her own voice. She doesn’t know what any of the sounds of language mean yet, so you’ll need to make sure she can still read your lips, at least for now.” The group watched as Hera’s hands quickly moved through the next sentence. “What about you, Nervosa? Does feeling feel, you know, weird?”

“Totally. Putting on my clothes this morning was the strangest thing. It was like, I don’t know, heavy? Is that the right word? But I like the way my shirt feels.”

“What’s the most surprising thing you’ve felt, so far?”

“Chomper! His fur is so, like, I’m not sure how to say it, it’s what I imagined when I read about warmth and softness. It’s like touching joy, if that makes sense.”

“Totally,” Iris said. “Dogs are the one thing so far that look pretty much like I imagined them.”

“What about you, Aesthesis? What’s been the best thing for you so far?”

“I finally understand all the excitement around birthday parties,” she said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure I gained like a hundred pounds from all the cake and ice cream I ate last night! Taste is by far my favorite sense.”

“Oh, girl, you have no idea. Wait until you finally get to taste pizza.”

“And tacos!”

The group laughed together, enjoying their collective celebration, before Hera signed a question.

“She wants to know if anyone has heard from Olfa.”

They all looked at each other. No one had.

“I wonder where she could be?”

“We should check the library,” Hera signed. The group laughed together and continued to share stories of their new experiences.

On a grassy berm, just outside of the park where her friends were celebrating their 18th birthdays, Olfa sat alone, holding a solitary wildflower to her nose.

It had all been so… overwhelming. She’d knew it was supposed to be, but it was also explained to her from as far back as she could remember that The Sensing was a gift, not a curse. A sacred rite of passage that all young people looked forward to; A final gift, given to them by Mother. It signaled completion, that they were fully-realized beings, ready to start the next stage of their lives. To work, to marry, to procreate.

She also knew that was bullshit.

Olfa, as far back as anyone could remember, was curious. That’s what her father had called her: His “Curious Girl.” While her friends were happy to play and read and laugh and dance—to be kids—Olfa would often sneak away for long walks on her own. She would explore. Observe. Learn.

It was on one of these secret walks that it started to rain and she ducked into the library. It was empty, save for a lone librarian putting away books, and and elderly man in an ancient leather chair trying to read without falling asleep. She had never been to a library before that moment and she immediately felt she never wanted to be anywhere else. It was magic. Where she had only ever known the aesthetically sterile and stagnant nature of The Connection, she marveled at the various shapes and sizes of real, tangible books. Their weight, the way the pages felt as she ran her fingers across them, the gentle ruffle of the page. Where The Connection was limited to the same small, glass and ceramic handheld unit, books varied in size and shape and look depending on the information they contained, the year they were made, the cost of the supplies and available technology at the time dictating so many manufacturing choices (facts she learned from, of course, a book about making books). The Connection gave citizens instant access to everything at all times. Olfa hated that. It created a fear inside her that if she could access everything all at once that she was never really looking deeply at any one thing. It was all too much. Moreover, The Connection was constantly booping and bleeping and raising little red balloons to alert her to new distractions. “How could one ever think deeply using one of these things?” she thought.

Books, on the other hand, were just… books.

They did one thing. Two if there was a spider (an added benefit she discovered while looking in a particularly untraveled area of the library). Conversely, The Connection was run by Mother, and even at a young age, Olfa realized that whoever controls Mother controls information, and that intangible information is changeable information. So, there she spent her time, days upon days, months upon months, years upon years. If her father needed her he simply booped the Librarian via Connection (knowing that Olfa rarely took her’s out of her pocket).

Her friends would some time visit, but would quickly tire of the silence. That was okay with Olfa. They were really only friends of proximity. That’s the way it worked. Born into a Quintet, the girls were more like sisters than friends. They had just always been together for things. School, birthday parties, play-dates, doctor appointments, vaccinations, and the Connection Ceremony, when they were plugged into Mother. Some Quintlings didn’t get on at all, some would go as far as cohabitation. It largely depended on the personalities of their parents.

She wasn’t ready for anything like that. And her father was not one to push it. Olfa’s mother had passed when she was young, and her father was just to the well-adjusted side of anti-social. So, she got used to being alone. And the library provided friendship, warmth, knowledge, therapy.

It also provided something difficult to find under the ever-watchful eye of Mother: Truth.

Olfa remembered the day. It was gorgeous outside. No clouds, not too warm or too cold, spring flowers in full bloom (which meant nothing to her at the time). Whereas everyone else was excited to spend a perfect day outside, Olfa looked at it as a chance to get an already largely-unvisited library even more to herself. And she needed to be by herself is she was going to find out what was in the forbidden area.

She had noticed the area years before—a section marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was only because Big George, a member of the custodial staff, inadvertently left the door open that she saw that it was not an office or store room at all, but a hidden section full of more books.

Why were they back there?

What secrets did they hold?

The Curious Girl was determined to do what she did best. For months she waited for just the right time, but there always seemed to be someone around, some sound in the next section, some Connection device booping or buzzing at the wrong time. She chickened out—until that perfect, gorgeous day, that is.

She knew what she’d found before she even started reading.

The History.

The Time Before.

Some truths are well-received. Some are difficult to hear, but necessary. Some, though, bounce back and forth between the desire to know more and the wish to go back to ignorance. That’s where she’d found herself since that day.

She couldn’t escape it, though. It didn’t work that way. So she lived with the burden, the weight of it.

That it wasn’t always this way: The Connection; Mother; The Sensing; Quintlings. None of it.

Once, before, things happened naturally. Couples mated, children were born, friendships and relationships blossomed and faded within the boundaries of natural progression. Knowledge was sought, or not, based on myriad natural progressions of real life.

Before Mother.

Olfa sat on the grass, having now turned 18, having been finally granted her last of the five senses: Smell.

She wasn’t a fan. Not yet, at least. It added too much, too quickly. She loved routine, sameness, stability. That had all been flipped and turned inside out. All of the sudden her house was filled with unfamiliar scents for which she had no previous experience. She didn’t know if coffee smelled delicious or putrid. If what was making her hungry was the scent of bacon or wet dog. Her father warned her, said that The Sensing can be particularly difficult for autistic quintlings, but that the sense-fog would start to lift with time. Her first trip outside—into the three-dimensional haze of infinite scents—made her father’s claim seem dubious. She wanted to get back in bed, to cover her face.

But no. She couldn’t. It didn’t work that way.

So she walked toward the park where she knew her quintmates would be.

There was one blessing: She liked flowers. That was the one scent that, so far, seemed to make it all worth while. She decided she’d have them around all the time. She made a note to check out a book on growing them.

In fact, she thought, maybe she’d go to the library that very minute!

No. She knew she should do the “right thing” and join the rest of her Quintet and discuss their newfound powers, enjoy the day.

So, she stood, looked around, and saw them a few hundred feet away, still in the park.

She wondered what they’d do with the knowledge. How would they react? Would they resent her if she told them? If she let them know the truth: That the very systems that were created, the very method in which they were conceived, birthed, raised, taught, was all artificial. Would they want to know that they had been robbed? That each of them losing one of the five senses was simply a glitch in the software? That, had children still been allowed to be created naturally, save for rare birth defects, they would be allowed all of the gifts they rightfully owned.

Could they stand up against Mother? Could they start a rebellion, bring down the Matriarchy?

Could she?

Olfa looked at her friends. She saw Iris tilt her head back in laughter.

No. She would let them be. What good would it do them now?

She picked another wildflower and lifted it to her nose as she started walking toward the group.