Pretty Minds
"We were doctors," Az began.
"Cosmetic surgeons, to be precise," Maddy said. "We've both performed the operation hundreds of times. And when we met, I had just been named to the Committee for Morphological Standards."
Tally's eyes widened. "The Pretty Committee?"
Maddy smiled at the nickname. "We were preparing for a Morphological Congress. That's when all the cities share data on the operation."
Tally nodded. Cities worked very hard to stay independent of one another, but the Pretty Committee was a global institution that made sure pretties were all more or less the same. It would ruin the whole point of the operation if the people from one city wound up prettier than everyone else.
Like most uglies, Tally had often indulged the fantasy that one day she might be on the Committee, and help decide what the next generation would look like. In school, of course, they always managed to make it sound really boring, all graphs and averages and measuring people's pupils when they looked at different faces.
"At the same time, I was doing some independent research on anesthesia," Az said. "Trying to make the operation safer."
"Safer?" Tally asked.
"A few people still die each year, as with any surgery," he said. "From being unconscious so long, more than anything else."
Tally bit her lip. She'd never heard that. "Oh."
"I found that there were complications from the anesthetic used in the operation. Tiny lesions in the brain.
Barely visible, even with the best machines."
Tally decided to risk sounding stupid. "What's a lesion?"
"Basically it's a bunch of cells that don't look right," Az said. "Like a wound, or a cancer, or just something that doesn't belong there."
"But you couldn't justsay that," David said. He rolled his eyes toward Tally. "Doctors."
Maddy ignored her son. "When Az showed me his results, I started investigating. The local committee had millions of scans in its database. Not the stuff they put in medical textbooks, but raw data from pretties all over the world. The lesions turned up everywhere."
Tally frowned. "You mean, people were sick?"
"They didn't seem to be. And the lesions weren't cancerous, because they didn't spread. Almost everyone had them, and they were always in exactly the same place." She pointed to a spot on the top of her head.
"A bit to the left, dear," Az said, dropping a white cube into his tea.
Maddy obliged him, then continued. "Most importantly, almost everyone all over the world had these lesions. If they were a health hazard, ninety-nine percent of the population would show some kind of symptoms."
"But they weren't natural?" Tally asked.
"No. Only post-ops - pretties, I mean - had them," Az said. "No uglies did. They were definitely a result of the operation."
Tally shifted in her chair. The thought of a weird little mystery in everyone's brain made her queasy. "Did you find out what caused them?"
Maddy sighed. "In one sense, we did. Az and I looked very closely at all the negatives - that is, the few pretties who didn't have the lesions - and tried to figure out why they were different. What made them immune to the lesions? We ruled out blood type, gender, physical size, intelligence factors, genetic markers - nothing seemed to account for the negatives. They weren't any different from everyone else."
"Until we discovered an odd coincidence," Az said.
"Their jobs," Maddy said.
"Jobs?"
"Every negative worked in the same sort of profession," Az said. "Firefighters, wardens, doctors, politicians, and anyone who worked for Special Circumstances. Everyone with those jobs didn't have the lesions; all the other pretties did."