Tuesday, she says, was the most flattering day. Lower cortisol levels in caregivers. Better neural receptivity in infants. Higher lifelong compliance. She recites it the way women in the old world once recited birth stories—reverent, intimate, as if the date itself reached into the flesh and shaped what emerged.
I nod when she says it. I always nod. But privately, I've never understood how a day could replace blood, or breath, or breaking.
I was released from Glass Ward Seven at exactly ten o'clock in the morning. The ward smelled faintly of antiseptic and orchids—synthetic, of course. Everything beautiful here is deliberate. My skin was already calibrated to optimal tone. My bones aligned within approved symmetry thresholds. My lungs filled without panic, without pain, without the shock of cold air tearing into a body that had never been used before.
No screaming. No tearing. No woman split open to make room for me.
That was the triumph of it.
That was the cost.
Eirene calls this progress.
The city rises outside our apartment in smooth, pale curves, its towers layered like sculpted porcelain. Nothing here is allowed to look old. Buildings are resurfaced every decade. Colors are regulated—cream, pearl, muted gold—so nothing appears too loud, too raw, too alive. Even the air is filtered for softness. Harshness is considered a design flaw.
Mirrors line the corridor outside our door. Not decorative mirrors—functional ones. Civic mirrors. They bloom to life as I step forward, light rippling across their surfaces, pulling my image into focus.
Metrics shimmer above my head.
Youth Index: Optimal. Symmetry Score: Compliant. Maintenance Status: Overdue.
Three days overdue.
My mother sees it instantly.
"Still refusing?" she asks, eyes fixed not on my face but on the numbers hovering between us.
"Yes."
The word lands cleanly. Sharper than she expects.
Her fingers curl around the strap of her bag. It's subtle, but I've learned to read her the way she reads herself in mirrors. That small tightening means fear—not for me, not really, but for what my choices reflect back onto her.
"You know how it looks," she says carefully. "People notice patterns."
"I'm sure they do."
Neglect suggests instability. Instability suggests grief. Grief suggests emotional excess. Emotional excess suggests defect.
In Eirene, everything leads back to the body.
"I'm not breaking," I add. "I'm just not fixing."
Her breath leaves her in a controlled exhale, the kind taught in post-gestation wellness seminars. "That's not how bodies work."
"It's how they used to."
The silence that follows is immediate and absolute, like a glass dome lowering around us.
History is not discussed casually here. Especially not bodily history. Especially not the era before release schedules and calibration charts, when women carried consequences under their skin.
My mother turns to me then, really turns. Her face is flawless in the particular way of women who lived through the transition—old enough to remember choice becoming expectation, young enough to have benefited from it fully. No stretch marks. No sag. No visible evidence that her body was ever capable of making another.
She is beautiful in the way the city understands beauty.
"I gave you perfection," she says quietly. "Do you have any idea what that cost me?"
I almost laugh.
They taught us in civic education that birth was inefficient. Violent. A primitive process romanticized by women who didn't know better. We watched archived footage—blurred, desaturated, mercifully silent—of swollen bodies and sweat-slicked skin, of pain presented as proof of inferiority.
Pregnancy ruined posture. It aged the face. It destabilized hormones. It interrupted productivity.
Choice saved us, they said.
Beauty saved us.
The first generation opted in. The second complied. By the third, there was nothing left to opt out of. Bodies adapted. Wombs quieted. The capability disappeared so gradually it felt like relief.
Now, no woman gives birth.
Not because it is forbidden.
Because it is impossible.
"Grateful," my mother continues, her voice tightening. "That's what you should be. You were never trapped in a body that could betray you."
I do know.
That's the problem.