Brave New Girl (Brave New Girl #1)
Rachel Vincent
To the girl I used to be (and the millions out there like her), who wanted so desperately to be different, yet feel like she belonged
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I thought every girl in the world looked just like me, because that’s how it is in the nurseries. The only female faces I saw that weren’t identical to mine belonged to our nannies, who all looked just like one another, and I believed that when I grew up my face would match theirs.
The day I was promoted from Dahlia 3 to Dahlia 4, my class went to live in the primary dormitory and got to eat in the cafeteria with other kids for the first time. My mind was blown. We couldn’t read yet, but we all recognized the names printed on the other kids’ uniforms because we’d been staring at them on our own clothes all our lives.
The names are all the same, of course. It’s the numbers that matter. The numbers and the faces. That first day in the primary cafeteria, most of us were too stunned to eat much. Poppy 4, my best friend, kept talking about the other faces. The year-five girls all had pale curls and a bunch of little spots on their faces, which our nanny called freckles. The year sixes had brown skin and long, straight black hair.
Poppy wanted freckles so badly.
And the boys. We’d seen the year-four boys in the nursery, of course, but the fives and sixes looked as different from the boys we knew as their female counterparts looked from us. That was before we understood about the preservation and equal distribution of genetic traits. All we knew was that in a cafeteria full of four-, five-, and six-year-olds, we were seeing six completely different faces.
Our worldview had just exploded.
But while Poppy stared at face after face full of freckles and Violet reached out to touch each head of smooth, straight hair that passed our table, I studied every uniform I could see, searching for a series of letters that matched my own. Somewhere in that crowd of hundreds of primary-school-aged kids there was a girl named Dahlia 5. She wouldn’t look like me, of course. She would look like all the other year fives. But even as a four-year-old, I understood that Dahlia 5 and I were alike on a much more fundamental level.
Hours earlier, she’d been Dahlia 4. She’d been me. And in another year, I would be her. I thought that if I could find her, I would be looking into my own future.
I’ve never been more wrong about anything in my life.
My tomatoes smell so good. They are red and ripe and firm, and I would love to pull one from its vine and bite into it like an apple. But I won’t, because hydroponic gardeners grow vegetables for the city, not for themselves.
“Why do you always do that?” Sorrel 16 stares at my left hand where it’s folded over the edge of the flood table, my fingers dangling in the water. There’s a pH tester on the table—it looks like a fat pen—but I rarely use it.
“Dahlia thinks she can tell the pH balance of the water just by touching it,” Poppy 16 answers for me, leaning around her own vines to whisper as our instructor wanders closer.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Though my skill doesn’t actually come from touching the water; it comes from watching the plants closely. I’m not supposed to take personal pride in the fact that my tomatoes are the brightest, firmest fruit in our class, but I can’t figure out how not to. The best I can do is try to hide my pleasure from our instructor. And from the cameras.
My favorite of the tomatoes we’ve grown so far are the fat red beefsteaks, just begging to be sliced and layered onto a soy burger or a turkey BLT. But I also have a soft spot for the Italian plum variety and the vibrant yellow pear tomatoes, which are about the size of my thumb but bulbous on one end.
Sometimes I wish I could tell the cooks that tomatoes are not all alike. But my job is not to design recipes or cook food. My job is to grow vegetables. At least, it will be when my class graduates and joins the trade labor division. As members of the hydroponic gardening union, we will grow vegetables for the city of Lakeview. That’s been our fate since before our genome was commissioned by Management.
“Okay, genius.” Violet peeks at me from between her vines. Her station is diagonally across from mine, next to Poppy’s and opposite Sorrel’s in our workstation cube. “What am I doing wrong, then?” she whispers.
Her leaves are curling up at the tips, and her stems have a faint reddish cast. “Magnesium deficiency. Your pH is too low.”
“That’s not possible,” Violet whispers. “I checked the pH yesterday.”
“Check again.” I hand her the pH tester and she dips it into the water in her flood tray. Her eyes narrow and her jaw clenches. I recognize her frustration because I see that very expression in the mirror every single day. Not that I need a mirror to know what I look like. All I have to do is look around the room.
All twenty students in the year-sixteen girls’ hydroponic gardening class have the same brown hair, brown eyes, and fair skin. We are all right-handed. We all have prominent, unattached earlobes and second toes that are longer than the first, and we can all roll our tongues. If I were to step into any of the other trade labor classrooms—electrical, plumbing, cooking, sewing, carpentry, mechanics, landscape gardening, and many, many others—I would see twenty more identical faces and bodies, differentiated from mine only by the bar codes on their wrists and the names on their uniforms. Names like Anise and Julienne. Cornice and Fascia. Gusset and Muslin.
All the girls in the year-sixteen trade labor division were cloned from a single genome designed by a genetic engineer to be healthy, hardy, and smart. And we are.
But some of us are also lazy. Like Violet.
“Dahlia 16!” our instructor, Sorrel 32, calls from across the room.
I freeze as her standard-issue instructor shoes clack closer. Her hand lands on my shoulder and I hold my breath. We’re not supposed to talk to our friends during class.
“These Italian plums are gorgeous! When did you start them?” Sorrel 32 lifts the tag dangling from one of my vines and her eyes widen. “Is this an error?” She taps the date on my tag. “These vines can’t be only six weeks old.”
“They are. I started them on the same day as everyone else.” And she must know that. She’s been in class every day, including the day we started this tomato unit.
“None of the others are ready to harvest.” Her gaze roams the hydroponic greenhouse, skimming tomatoes in various stages of growth. Mine are the most mature. “This is very good work, Dahlia 16.”
“I work for the glory of the city,” I tell her. But inside I am buzzing with toxic pride. Tomatoes are my favorite, and evidently they like me as much as I like them.