CHAPTER 14
Dad was a rock for the next few weeks. Siân took her parents’ rejection hard, which in one way I found surprising. After all, she had surely expected nothing really different?

“Lainey, Lainey, yes. I know. They said all that years ago. It was just, well, I hoped, I thought… I thought they’d see you, and it was like I thought about Vicky, aye? How could anyone not love you as soon as they met you? I thought that would be the difference, that would make them think!”

Copyright 2014
by Barbie Lee

Edited by Catherine Linda Michel

It’s called synchronicity. It weaves lives and events together even when they don’t know one another. It is stronger when people have met, even if years earlier. We move or travel a hundred, thousands of miles from home and meet or cross paths with people we met before. Synchronicity is what the law uses to catch the bad people. It is interwoven with habit among many other things. People have a human nature to return to a place they have been before. People want to return to the same vacation spot. Fishermen want to go back to the same fishing pond. They want to shop at the same store. And crooks…? They go back to the same neighborhood, the same stores, the same friends.

Even those of us who understand that human nature makes us creatures of habit, do the stupid trick of returning to familiar places. Or else we let the odds of synchronicity find us with our guard down and old enemies show up.

In the not too distant future, evolution has taken humanity down a different path. In a society where gender is controlled with numbers, one young man finds that being evolved might not be such a good thing.