Unnaturals Read Online Free

Natural people didn't miss their mates like this, and Mel was better at being unnatural than Mom was, so she thought she must care for both of them.
    Mel had feeling that Nicolas's message box could be interesting, but she never got access to it. It was as if he just...didn't exist any more. She found some of his friends through the feeds. They hadn't seen him or heard from him, they said. Those who remembered him at all. By the time she wrote to them, most had forgotten him.
    When Mel turned fifteen, she went to Nicolas' city. She had to be at least fifteen in order to leave her own city and then come back. Nicolas must have been about fifteen when she met him, seventeen now.
    There weren't many other cities. Three of them, to be precise. The old articles mentioned more, but in school the teachers said three and insisted on three. This was the truth, they said, the real truth.
    At fifteen, people graduated from school. They became adults, and they could travel. The morning after graduation, Mel went to her neighborhood train station and bought a ticket to Annabella City.
    She started on a normal Lucastan underground train. She used them sometimes, especially if she wanted to be late for school. She was too punctual if she rode her bicycle through the mostly empty long-distance bike lanes. The short-distance ones were usually filled with kids out there for obligatory sports, but for longer distances, such as the one-mile distance to school, people preferred the trains.
    The trains were slow. They had a schedule but it was a guideline, not a rule. No one was supposed to be on time in Lucasta. Punctuality had only been expected eighty years ago or earlier. Now it was natural to be late. And why not? The wagons were large and brightly lit, the seats red or blue or green, upholstered with the logo of whoever was the sponsor this week. The musicstats played tones even crisper than at home. People talked to other people on the train, communicated on the interweb, slept, shopped, ate the good food—people felt comfortable.
    At least, naturals did.
    At Lucasta's main station, where Meliora was about to transfer to the train to Annabella, she was told that she'd be even more comfortable than that.
    "You will be asleep all the time, dear, dreaming the best kind of dreams," the beautiful woman at the door to the intercity terminal said. "Isn't that lovely?"
    "But I want to be awake and see the scenery," Mel said.
    "There is no scenery, dear. The beautiful pictures on the underground walls and the great movies you see there only exist in cities. There is nothing on the walls out there, dear." She said there as if the word was giving her one of the wonderful experiences of the GreatLifeExperiences, Inc. theater.
    "Well, if it is so exciting, I certainly want to see it," Mel said.
    "There is nothing, dear. But there will be fun excitement in your dreams, of course."
    "And who are you to tell me what is and what isn't out there—or anywhere! ," Mel suddenly shouted. The woman jumped back. "I won't sleep! I don't want to sleep! I am tired of pretending to sleep! Am I not an adult now!? Have I not graduated and earned my trip to a new city!? I want to see what there is when there is no city at all!"
    "Walls, dear," the woman said softly. "Now shall we get your pills, dear? Wait just a tiny moment, dear..."
    "I won't wait!" Mel grabbed the pills from the woman's hand and thrust them into the wall. The packaging broke. The pills spilled on the spotless floor. "I am tired of waiting for you people, of slowing down for you, of pretending for you! Why are you normal, and I unnatural!?"
    The woman was crying now, snot trickling down her smooth white face while she hummed, hiccuping into her microphone. Another woman came, a man with her. The new woman reached towards Meliora, and Mel shoved her in the chest.
    ***
    She woke up in a room she remembered, and her eyes fell on a man with a familiar face.
    "Hello, Doc," Mel said.
    "Ah, young lady.