The elevator to the 47th floor had mirrors on every wall, and David Park tried not to look at himself in them. Not because he disliked what he saw—he was used to his own face, the Korean features that marked him as other in every room he entered—but because the mirrors showed him differently up here. The lighting was calibrated, the angles flattering, and for a moment he looked like he belonged. He didn't. The party was in full swing when he arrived. Manhattan skyline stretched beyond floor-to-ceiling windows, a glittering circuit board of human ambition. People in designer clothes laughed over champagne that cost more than his father made in a month. This was the world of the Optimized—gene-edited humans with enhanced cognition, extended lifespans, and bodies that didn't fail until they were ninety. David was thirty-four, unmodified, and his knees already ached when it rained. "David!" Sarah spotted him across the room and waved, cutting through the crowd with the effortless grace that had made her the face of the Optimization Initiative. She was thirty-two, Irish-American, and beautifully, impossibly enhanced. Her skin had the faint luminescence that came from cellular repair genes, and her eyes were a shade of blue that didn't exist in nature. "You came," she said, reaching him. "I said I might." "You came." She touched his arm, and her skin was warm and perfect. "I'm glad." They had not spoken in two years. Not since the night David had refused the genetic screening, not since Sarah had told him that refusing was a privilege he couldn't afford, not since Mr. Park had called David a fool for choosing to remain "less than" when the technology to be more was available. "Congratulations on the initiative," David said. "Mandatory optimization for all citizens under forty. Very progressive." Sarah's smile didn't falter, but something behind her eyes tightened. "It's not mandatory, David. It's strongly recommended. There's a difference." "Is there? Because it sounds like people who don't optimize are losing their civil rights." She looked away, toward the window. Below, Brooklyn stretched in the October darkness—brownstones and tenements and the dim lights of communities where the unoptimized lived their unoptimized lives. "The committee says it's for the greater good. Resource allocation, public health, genetic diversity—" "Code words," David said. "They always use code words." Sarah turned back to him, and for a moment the perfect face cracked. "David, I didn't optimize to be superior. I optimized because I wanted to live longer. To see more. To—" "To be what?" David gestured at the room, at the sea of flawless faces. "This isn't living longer. This is becoming something else." The music changed—someone had switched from jazz to classical, and the room adjusted accordingly, faces shifting from easy laughter to more measured expressions. Optimization included emotional regulation, Sarah had explained once, and David had called it emotional censorship. "I need air," David said. "David, wait—" But he was already moving toward the terrace, through doors that opened to a world of wind and city lights and the terrible distance between where he came from and where he was standing. The terrace was cold. New York in October carried a chill that went through expensive suits and thin skin alike. David leaned against the railing and looked south, toward Brooklyn, toward the neighborhood where he'd grown up, where his father still lived in the same apartment they'd occupied for twenty-three years. Mr. Park had refused optimization. So had ninety percent of first-generation immigrants in the Korean community, and similar numbers in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese neighborhoods. The unoptimized enclaves of New York were growing—Brooklyn, Flushing, Sunset Park—places where people chose ancestry over enhancement, tradition over progress. David understood his father's choice. He also understood Sarah's. He found his father three days later, sitting at the kitchen table in their Bushwick apartment, reading the newspaper with reading glasses perched on his nose. The apartment was small and warm and smelled of rice and ginger and the particular brand of soy sauce his father had been importing from Korea since 1987. "Father." Mr. Park looked up. At sixty-five, he was unoptimized in every way—grey hair, wrinkled skin, the slight stoop of a man who had carried heavy things for a long time. "David. You look thin. Have you been eating?" "I'm fine." "Your mother would worry." Mr. Park set down the paper. "How is the work at the clinic?" "Fine." David sat across from him. They had this conversation every time. Small talk as armor. "Sarah called me." David froze. "She what?" "Sarah O'Brien. She called to check on you. She's a good young woman." "Father—" "David, I know what she was asking. She wants to know if you'll reconsider the screening." "I'm not reconsidering." Mr. Park nodded slowly. "Your mother and I had a conversation about this. About what it means to be human." He paused, choosing words carefully in his accented English. "In Korea, we had a saying: the tree that bends survives the storm. The tree that stands straight breaks." "That's not the same thing." "Isn't it? You stand straight, David. You are proud of being unmodified. But the storm is coming, and the question is whether your pride will keep you warm when the wind blows." David looked at his father's hands—knotted with arthritis, stained with decades of manual labor, beautiful in their worn authenticity. He thought about Sarah's perfect hands, the ones that could type a hundred words per minute and play piano and never, ever shake. "I'm not breaking," he said quietly. "I know," Mr. Park said. "But the world is changing. And I worry that when it changes, you will have nothing to hold onto except your pride. And pride does not pay rent, David. Pride does not cure illness. Pride does not keep you warm in winter." David left the apartment at midnight, walking south through streets that were gradually transforming around him. New York was becoming two cities—the Optimized and the Unchanged, separated not by walls but by genes, by choice, by the slow irreversible drift of a species dividing itself. He walked past the bodeles and diners and laundromats of his childhood, past the places where his father had worked and his mother had raised him, and he thought about the elevator with mirrors, about the woman he loved who had chosen to become something more, about the father who refused to change and the world that was changing anyway. At the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, he stopped and looked back north, toward the glittering towers where Sarah was probably still at the party, laughing with people who would live to be one hundred and never know the particular warmth of a kitchen that smelled like home. He turned and walked south, into the unoptimized dark, carrying nothing but his unmodified body and his unoptimized heart and the certain knowledge that tomorrow he would have to make a choice he wasn't ready to make. The city continued to divide. The elevator continued to rise. And somewhere in a laboratory on the 47th floor, a committee voted unanimously to expand the optimization mandate to all citizens under fifty. The storm was coming. David just didn't know how hard it would blow.