Short Stories

Created

My name is Raine; I was born December third, seventeen years ago. I have nine birth parents but have only met four of them. The parents I grew up with did not conceive me, but did pay for me. My name is Raine, and I was genetically created.

Nineteen years ago my mother Diana Parks and my father Chris Parks learned that they could not conceive on their own after six years of trying; including four miscarriages. When they went to get tested on their ability to have a surrogate carry their child, they were told the combination of their DNA would mix into something unstable and bring about a great deal of birth defects.

This news made them both angry enough that they came up with an idea; mix the right bits of DNA together, and genetically design the perfect baby. So with their great amount of power and money, they went about doing just that.

Parent number one; Michael – used more of his brain than Einstein himself. Parent number two; Gisele – her skin the most radiant and flawless you’d ever seen, with a metabolism and level of fitness people would kill for. Parent number three; Courtney – perfect blue eyes, silkiest brown locks and the facial structure of a Goddess. Parent number four; Richard – the one with not a single familial ancestor with internal organ problems. Parent number five; Chloe – creative beyond the imagination in all manners, including vocally, sketching, writing, painting and photography. Parent number six; William – the only man in the world to have never filed a single sport. Parent number seven; Lori – a woman with a personality of champions. Parent number eight; Jackson – one of the few living males to have a universal blood type of the rarest kind. And parent number nine; Victor – the most persuasive puzzle solver of his day, with not a single mystery unsolved.

Nine parents that gave me my beauty, my charisma, my great health, my personality, my physique, my creativity, my active lifestyle, my blood, and my intelligence. Nine traits that made me the perfect human being my parents created me to be, yet I was still broken.

The date was December seventeenth, eight days before Christmas, and there was a blizzard going on outside my window. It was nine in the morning and I sat before my vanity dresser staring at my reflection the mirror.

In eight hours my parents were escorting me to one of their socialite friends’ Christmas parties. All of my parents’ friends were high-to-do socialites of the wealthiest kind. They told me every party was a way to introduce me to a boy my age of good breeding, the right breeding, but of course none of them were good enough for my parents. I was perfect and they weren’t.

Eventually they’d be happy with someone close to perfect, which would be easy enough to find. People loved me; I was the one who had trouble reciprocating. I had absolutely everything a normal person would dream of, but trouble was, I wasn’t normal, being designed made me different.

Running a brush through my dark brown locks, I stood up and walked over to the window. A ghost of a smile crossed my face as I watched the cold, white snow fall. Winter was one thing that always made me happy; the whole season had a real beauty. There was just something fascinating about how no two snowflakes were ever the same, so unique, so inhuman – where people were constantly trying to find a way to clone things.

Laying my head against the frozen glass window, I closed my eyes. That’s when I heard the loud crash coming from the nearest kitchen. Peace in my life would never last, especially since I was home alone, with just a security alarm and a whole lot of space.

A low level of fear hummed through me, as I grabbed a letter opener from my drawer, not the best of weapons, but it would have to do. Tiptoeing down the hall passed three doors, I stopped at the fourth. Sucking in a deep breath, I quick-stepped around the corner and came face to face with a greasy haired boy in a leather jacket sitting atop my counter.