Blame The Artificial Genes- By Twix

Prologue

My parents were scientists. They met at a convention in New York, and described it as love at first sight. Soon after the wedding, they began work on genetic enhancement. They made a drug that gave the taker excelled senses. But they were shunned by other scientists, who said that it was too risky.

I agree.

Yet, my parents were all about the fame. So they took the drug themselves, and moved where they knew the other scientists couldn't find them. Three years into their marriage, my mother fell pregnant with me. I think that that was the first time she ever doubted the beneficial side of genetic enhancement in our lives. But all doubts were erased when the neighbours commented on how perfect their child was going to be. How smart and beautiful, just like their parents. I guess she got sucked into the whole fame thing again, and my father never really cared about anything else.

On the 7th of January I was born. They chose the date themselves, injecting my mother with a drug that made the labour artificial. Everything about my birth was artificial. As was expected, I was beautiful. More than beautiful, I was stunning. The very sound of my cries drove the nurses to tears.

My parents were ecstatic. Not only had they successfully altered and enhanced themselves, but they had given birth to a perfect child. You could say that they were proud, but I just think that they were smug.

As I grew, my parents continued to inject me with their 'magic formula'. It never crossed their minds that what they were doing to me was irreversible. With them it was easy; they found that if they stopped taking the drugs monthly that they would return back to normal. Of course, they never tried this on me. So when they decided that they wanted to be like everybody else, they never expected that the effects of what they did to me could never be cured.

It all happened on the day my younger sister was born.

She was far from perfect. I remember the day clearly, though I was only one. The genetic enhancement altered my memory, making it photographic. Anyways, she was... ordinary. Completely ordinary. Not beautiful, not smart. Her cries did not bring anyone to tears- in fact, they were annoying.

My parents were overjoyed.

Yes, I guess you expected them to be horrified. But, when my mother was pregnant with my sister she came to the conclusion that she wanted to be like everyone else. My father, who loved my mother more than anything in the world, agreed to make her happy. So we stopped taking the drugs and favoured a life in California.

My sister never had any side effects; she was a happy, ordinary kid. And my parents were proud of her, amazingly proud. More proud of her than they were of me.

Why?

Because, unlike their darling Hope, I unlawfully inherited my horrid enhancements. No drug they came up with could change me, they just made it worse. I topped all my classes from a young age, outshining my sister by miles. Yes, we were in the same grade- we were only twelve months apart. One day my parents just decided that they had had enough. They sat me down and ordered me to stop. To conceal my beauty, to stop answering questions in class, they demanded that I pretended that I had a problem with my lungs so I could not play sport. They blamed me for what they did. They said that they wished that they never had me, and that if I ever slipped up I would be disowned. I was only eight at the time, and I didn't want to leave my family, so I accepted.

It was all fine until I reached puberty. Hope went through it the same way as everyone else, acne, mood swings. She got her period at the age of thirteen, which is completely normal. I, on the other hand, never got acne. I started my period at the age of fifteen, but no one even noticed the signs. I think that they still didn't understand that I had developed; they probably just decided that I couldn't conceive a child. Funny really, their ignorance.

And if you think that that was the worst of it you're wrong. On the day of my sixteenth birthday, I was lounging about in the pool in our backyard. That is, until my sister started screaming like a bloody banshee. My mother came out and froze. Turns out I was glowing, literally glowing. Scary right? But I was used to that sort of thing; you ever really knew what the damn drugs my parents injected in me would do.

The sad thing is that my light bulb trick didn't really go well with Hope. She was popular, a cheerleader of sorts. She was everything a California girl was supposed to be, blonde hair, tan skin and blue eyes. I guess she just couldn't stand the fact that her sister was a freak. So she ran away with her boyfriend, and never came back. My parents were devastated.

The next thing I know we were moving to Italy.

My mother got pregnant again, hoping to mend the loss of her favourite daughter. My baby brother was born ten months after Hope's disappearance.

He died the same day.

To top it all off, a day after a parcel arrived on our doorstep. Hope and her boyfriend had been killed in a car accident. It turns out that she eloped with the guy, and got pregnant. Oh stupid, reckless Hope. Her daughter survived though, and we were the only living descendents.

She would be arriving in a week.

This didn't go down too well with my parents. In fact, they committed suicide. Yeah, rash much? I guess the loss of Hope, and then Brandon, was too much. Oh well, back to the story. So they left me, sixteen and in the middle of my second year of high school, with my niece and a bank full of money.

I wasn't too desolate. If you had lived the life I had you wouldn't particularly like your parents either.

Hope's daughter came two days after the funeral. She was only ten days old, since they had been driving back from the hospital when they crashed. Rather sad actually. They named her Leonora Fleur- I have no idea what they were smoking. So I changed it to Darcy, Darcy Fleur. See? I left one of the names in. But, who really wants to be called Leonora?

So Darcy and I moved to a small town in America once she reached the age of one. I began the end of my junior year, and put Darcy in day care.

This is where my story starts.