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The world moves too fast, the people in it always on their way towards something, hurrying, hurrying. There’s no time to stop to breathe, to heave for the oxygen one’s dried up lungs have forgotten tastes like, because if you do then someone else will have replaced you, taken your place, and you will have been long forgotten by the time you start running again.

In the year 2354 AD there’s no room for anything in life except beauty and money; it’s what you’re working towards, what your dreams consist of, what you were born to strive after even if it means you’re going to have to climb over the graying corpses of your peers.

And that is why Kim Jongin knows he is not right. He is wrong, so faulty, in so many ways that his parents would shun him if they knew about it.

But they don’t, because Jongin has become so good at acting the way they expect him to that they don’t really know the truth about him and his faulty thoughts.

Because Jongin isn’t running to fame and wealth, he is running from them. His perfect grades in school, the prestigious millionaires’ sons and daughters he surrounds himself with in order to gain valuable connections within the Upper Class of society, how he lets his parents bring him to the Enhancing Facilities at least once a month to erase the imperfections from his body and turn him into the flawless robot they want him to be; he’s doing it all, letting it happen, because that way he knows that he’ll be able to get away from this place the second he turns twenty.

Some may wonder why he would go to such lengths to hide his true self from his parents, from everyone, but you see, Jongin knows what happens to teenagers who rebel against their parents and the norms their ruthless society they live in has set for them. Jongin isn’t stupid, after all. He’s fully aware of how they get sent to the Correction Labs where the scientists open up their heads to fix their ‘defective brains’, scalpels and surgical instruments obliterating memories and thoughts and feelings the surgeons and parents do not approve of.

Jongin doesn’t want his head drilled into, and neither does he want his dreams (dreams he has never told anyone save for his pillow when he’d whispered it into the soft stuffing in the middle of the night when his parents had been away on a business trip) to be deleted. He really, really doesn’t.

So he lets his mother and father parade him around as their pretty little puppet, dancing from the strings they have tied his limbs to while the people around watch and applause his jerky performance, eyes as hollow as their hearts, because Jongin knows it’ll all be worth it as long as he in the end can leave this hell and fulfill his dreams.

As long as he won’t ever turn into the empty shells the perfect people around him are becoming, or in the adults’ cases already are.

“Mr. Kim, what is the answer to the following mathematical problem?”

Blinking, Jongin’s focus is pulled from his thoughts to his teacher’s voice addressing him. He glances down at the VISpad lying in front of him on his desk, its screen flashing an impressive assortment of numbers and symbols at him. “Eighty-seven through fourteen-hundred minus T divided by XYπ,” Jongin replies, not even having needed to stop and think before voicing what he already knows is the correct solution to the problem.

“Correct.”

The teacher nods approvingly at him once before moving on to the student sitting to Jongin’s left, asking for the answer to the next mathematical conundrum that has replaced the one Jongin just solved on all of the students’ VISpads.

Jongin gulps, his stomach churning as he reflects on what he’d been thinking about up until he’d been interrupted by his standoffish teacher. He knows very well that mind-reading is impossible, that no one could ever hope to read another person’s thoughts, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling as if he’s taking a slight risk just thinking about his dreams during the time he spends in school.

As he lets his eyes drift over the sterile classroom, the whitewashed walls and the meticulously cleaned floor devoid of any and all kinds of specks of dirt or dust, Jongin has to carefully keep his face blank, expressionless, as his thoughts turn sharp.

He hates this place, this school. He hates its interior, he hates its exterior, he hates the teachers, and he hates the students – all so full of themselves, so greedy and vain – but most of all he hates how he himself behaves in here. Because Jongin is scared, so goddamned terrified, of someone – anyone – finding out about his deviating plans regarding his own future, so he pretends to be someone he’s not. Pretends to be so full of himself that he’s almost high on it, acts like he has the world grasped in his cupped palms and is unsure about whether he wants to crush it or cherish it. Acts like he’s better than the rest of the students just because he happens to have surgeons who’re skilled enough to shape him into something better-looking than the rest.

And the students eat it up like starving stray dogs, every word he says and every gesture he makes, and it’s almost like they have turned him into their god, because if he ordered them to, they would get down on their knees and his shoes without hesitating.

It makes Jongin sick to his stomach, because it’s not like they care about Jongin as a person. All they want from him is either fame-by-association, money or to use him, and it’s disgusting and superficial.

Everything is disgusting and superficial.

Everything… except for his dreams.