I remember everything.
That's the reason I can tell the story as I can, but also the reason that I lived it in the first place. The reason I re-live it every day. Mine is a memory so photographic that it blurs into a film, no longer memory at all but living, the echo of a time when living meant something. Means something: I am there now, but then I am also here. But how to tell to one who doesn't see, who doesn't share the vision that I have? Where to begin, when it all happens at once?
It is the time that I first learnt what we are. Gifted, they call us. All of us are Gifted, and yet gifts come in many shapes and sizes. On the one hand, there are the successes. Men who could fly, women who could turn invisible; they are quickly signed up by the government and military, enjoying lucrative careers on the back of their talents.
On the other hand, there are us. Not every mutation is exciting, or even glamorous: red hair and blue eyes are both commonplace, so Lily's red eyes were relatively mundane. Amongst the publicity of increasing Gifted numbers, however, they still marked her out as different. The men in black had still come for her.
In the past, abnormalities had not been celebrated. Children of inbreeding were frequently born with additional digits, yet they weren't considered a miracle. They weren't held up by the media as a saviour. Once the Gifted began to come forward, however, their changes were celebrated. These were the ones with attractive gifts, useful abilities. The ones we could accept. As the world greeted our new supermen with open arms, the others were ushered quietly away as they slept.
If the body can mutate in one way, it can mutate in another. For every infant granted powers, another was born with defects. For every blessing, there was somewhere a curse. Whilst the government could make use of the former, drafting them into secret operations to harness their strengths, the latter were also their concern.
It is 2084. It begins with a federal register of mutants, checks into our backgrounds, agents keeping tabs on any perceived to be threats. Then come the protests. A child of ten, I am kept in the house for days, my parents terrified by the marching and shouting outside. People do not trust this invasion of privacy, even in the name of national security. I have no idea what the banners mean. I hide under my bed, fearing the rioters who erupt when the police arrive to shut them down.
A decade later, I now know they were fighting for my freedom. Mutations don't kill people, their slogans had argued. People kill people. The government had soon put a stop to their unrest, creating a new agency to deal with mutant affairs. With their new tactics of silence and abduction, they removed us from the public eye. Open registration was replaced by shadowy operations; monitoring potential threats was replaced their complete removal. Integration became isolation.
"I'm Adam", the new boy says, offering his hand. I shake it. "Shapeshifter."
We were isolated from society, but that didn't mean I was alone. Dozens of other mutants had been taken to this facility, each of them deemed useless or dangerous. Young Gifted with potential were taken to government academies to be trained up. Our keepers pretended that was what this was, in an attempt to keep us docile, and provided us with a programme of lessons to engage our brains.
In reality, we all know this is a prison we can never leave. The lessons are unlike those taught to normal children, more like the tasks given to chimpanzees in labs. The agents aren't training us up: they are observing us, experimenting. We are still of some use.
"Sandra," I reply. "That sounds like a positive gift, though. Why did they send you here?"
"It was a one-time thing." He smiles, and I notice how handsome he is. "I pulled one shape, but then the wind changed. I'm stuck like this."
