[Can’t Opt Out]

The ramifications of Baalphoria’s various youth privacy laws could be seen throughout their lives. Despite their effect, usually, people didn’t give them much thought; they existed, and as a result, people were often somewhat limited in what they could say of their life before turning thirty and becoming an adult in the eyes of the law. For the most part, those laws didn’t affect day-to-day life, however. It wasn’t like Olivier couldn’t discuss his childhood with Emilia, after all; neither was she somehow forbidden from speaking of her life at all with him, as she was not yet thirty.

Yet, there were other times when it was much more clearly seen. One of those places was interviews, biographies, and other public material—the laws, in the end, protected Baalphorians from widespread dissemination of information about their youth, with or without their consent. Ostensibly, this was to protect not just the person themself, but their classmates, friends and younger relatives as well.

In publicly available information, people could talk about their youth, about the friendships and experiences of their compulsory schooling days that helped to form who they were, but specific names and details usually needed to be censored by whoever was distributing the interview. If anything worked itself too close to being identifying, things became even more complicated—this was part of why most people simply avoided talking about their youth in anything official.

It was also why Halen was now in an odd position: most people, by the time they became as famous as he was, already had a gap decade and university behind them. If asked about their inspiration, their friends and classmates, they would just default to talking about the things they had experienced as adults. Halen, in the interviews Olivier had skimmed through in his brief moments of having nothing to do since meeting the young man the day before, was effectively forbidden from talking about anything—even when speaking of what school he had attended, he could only vaguely mention a school in Kalink, followed by one at the southern end of The Penns.

As he and several of his friends were now thirty, he could speak of them and the occasional thing they had done when they were younger—all he needed was their permission to talk about their youthful follies and triumphs, his friend Codeth Runsk mentioned particularly often. Yet, it was easy to see where holes in the narrative existed. Interviewers asked where the inspiration for this or that had come from, and Halen talked around the truth. More often than not, a giant Emilia-shaped hole lay within that missing truth, now that Olivier knew what to look for—and if anyone else knew what to look for, he had no doubt they would be able to find the truth as well.

It was similar to how Emilia knew that, if someone figured out how she uploaded her hacks, they might be able to track them back to her: one of the rare Baalphorians who had access to both a xphern and Black Knot technology. In the same way, any stories Halen told may one day be tied back to her. This was part of the reason Olivier had long thought that Baalphoria’s youth privacy laws did more harm than good—after all, some of Halen’s stories clearly painted her spectre as the antagonist of his compulsory schooling days, yet, she couldn’t defend herself.

In their case, Olivier was almost positive that Halen didn’t mean to paint a skewed picture of their past—Emilia was a little shit, so she probably was the antagonist at times, but Halen easily admitted in interview that he was just as much of a troublemaker as his invisible childhood enemy. Should Emilia one day ask, Olivier had no doubt Halen would more clearly tell the world that they were both horrible kids who had inspired hatred and sparks of imagination in the other for over a decade.

In other cases, however, the results were more insidious because that was the thing: people could work around the nation’s youth privacy laws, if they knew what they were doing and where the lines lay, where intention mattered more than the result. It didn’t take a genius to skew the narrative or lay a thousand hints of someone’s identity or accidentally reveal something that they were mandated by law to keep out of the public knowledge.

His mother, for instance, had blurted out his non-dev status in a live interview. Technically, she had broken the law, and her outing of him could never be taken back. Realistically, the only reason she hadn’t been charged with violating his privacy were her connections—although, he wasn’t convinced she hadn’t also dropped a case later that same year in exchange for no fuss being made about her splattering of his private business over the news.

Even worse, in a twisting way, Baalphoria’s youth privacy laws also protected his mother from him potentially holding her accountable for the harm she had caused him, both in terms of his outing and any perceived emotional abuse he and his brother had experienced—Olivier wasn’t stupid and knew some of her demands and neglect pressed into the realm of emotional abuse, even if it was nowhere near as severe as the horrors he knew other children experience.

While child abuse wasn’t considered particularly common in Baalphoria, it was a known issue that children who attempted to hold their parents and caretakers and teachers responsible for treating them badly often faced an uphill battle. At their core, Baalphoria’s youth privacy laws were meant to protect everyone from being chased by their childhood into adulthood. As a result, if the government thought that an adult might be negatively affected by some piece of information about their childhood becoming public, even an attempt to prosecute their parents for abuse—after all, other people might view them differently if they knew they were a victim of childhood abuse—the government would refuse to move forward on the case. Even if it was an adult attempting to find justice for the abuse of their childhood, in most circumstances, the best that anyone could hope for was for any younger siblings to be removed from their parents’ care, in hopes those children might be safer elsewhere.

Chances were they wouldn’t be—not unless the older sibling was in a position to take custody of them. The risk was they would be moved into group homes, and those were almost always more abusive than parents.

There were too many people, even within the increasingly tolerant population, who refused to raise a child they knew had an irregular deviation. Silverstrains, with their silver hair and silver-speckled eyes, lavender codes with their beautiful purple one, and a handful of other, clearly visible irregular deviations filled group homes. Children who began to exhibit signs of Dyadism as they transitioned from toddler to child were often surrendered to the government, parents aware that many Dyads would need a lifetime of support, even if Olivier was sure those statistics were skewed by purism and stereotypes.

The government never stopped parents from giving up their children, knowing that if a parent didn’t want a child, they were safer in the group homes, maybe. Those homes were often understaffed, and filled with a mixture of normal and high-needs children. Purism was still rampant in them, and there was little oversight to make sure the staff weren’t abusing or neglecting the children because what was the government supposed to do if they were? There were too few people willing to work in those homes; assessing and attempting to stop the abuse would just lead to more staff burnout, more neglect, more people with ill-intentions being hired. It wasn’t right to leave the children in such abusive environments, yet, what was the solution? Follow current novels on novel_fіre.net

It was a terrible, messy situation. It was also yet another case where his family had files that could change things—mutterings of a plan to increase clone birth rates because while the public tended to fear the clones, the government acknowledged that they were skilled at raising their youngest members. Having heard Emilia expound upon how much she loved Loren—upon how great a guardian he had been to the triplets, despite how difficult they had been at times—the night before, Olivier thought the plan—which had died in its infancy after a military coup that had briefly left The Black Knot completely exiled from Baalphoria until the government had been overturned yet again several years later—might actually be an acceptable one.

The problem was those same documents that outlined the plan had also described how the government had been hoping to use the clones to raise good little patriots. As the government at the time had been exceptionally purist—there was a reason so much of the military had been okay with overthrowing it, even the relatively hateful soldiers of the time unhappy with the extent of their purism—there had been discussions of what to do with flawed children, as well as how to make sure the clones raised the children to be just as hateful as the government wished them to be.

That was, in the end, the other, potentially more important reason why his ancestors had hesitated to release the files—why even he would refuse to release all of them, were his anonymity a guarantee: some of those files would do more harm than good. Yet, at the same time, the moral implications of any member of their family choosing what should remain buried and what let to rise into the light was not something any of them had any idea of how to approach.

Should they hide the darkest, most disturbing moments of Baalphoria’s past, or release them as well? Those revelations could have far ranging effects, both domestic and abroad. Some people might look at the plan to have clones raise orphaned and relinquished children, ignore the more horrific aspects of the government’s plan, and then decide if they believed it a viable option. Others might lock on to the hateful government, and deem the clones a risk even under their currently moderate government—after all, The Black Knot was a servant of the ruling regime. Today, they might raise orphaned and surrendered children with kind acceptance. An election from now, they might bear down on them with a whole new set of beliefs.

Emilia laughed as he explained this dilemma to her, having deemed it a benign enough example for using in explaining the moral quandaries of releasing or withholding various documents found in the bunker. “I think you’re well aware that The Black Knot is only kinda beholden to the government,” she pointed out, their conversation still removed to their Censors, even if the smile gracing her face was real and tilted up at him—the shape of her mouth an odd mixture of sharp and teasing because he did know.

Between the lines of everything Emilia had told him about her relationship with the various members of The Black Knot she was associated with—in the things he had heard from the triplets, Grenner and Byron as well—it was clear that if Emilia wanted something from the organization, she would get it. One day, if Emilia faced off against the Baalphorian government, she would have an unknown number of Black Knot agents trailing behind her—her too willing army.

“That might have been nice, though—being raised by the clones, rather than those horrible workers.” Emilia wrinkled her nose, muttering about how terrible the people at her first home had been. “That’s why we have our own sign language—or did I tell you that last night?”

Yes, Emilia had told him that the night before. Olivier would listen to her retell the same stories a thousand times over, especially when they were clearly related to things she clearly cared deeply for.

“I think they would do it—raise random kids, I mean,” Emilia mused as they entered one of the largest rooms in the museum, dozens of hallways leading to specific exhibits. “I do get the risk, though. I might be something of an influence on the clones, but when I’m gone? If a new generation decides they prefer listening to the government over me? They would be really easy to manipulate—by the right person, anyways. I think the public overestimates how easily the clones can be pulled around by the government—after all, even he reason why this plan was never fulfilled is because The Black Knot was exiled. Sure, some governments haven’t liked them much, but chances are they were banned because the organization isn’t just mindlessly beholden to the generic existence of ‘government.’ They do have their own beliefs, just like everyone else…”

Emilia was still chattering on in his head as she skipped off, eyes trained on one of the exhibits. It was odd—Olivier didn’t think it anything new or impressive. Yet, as she stared at it, her babbling trailed off. He was about to ask what was so interesting about it, when a flash of silver hair to his left caught his eye.

Soft purple eyes, with silver stars scattered through them, gazed around the room, frantic, the tiny body they belonged to spinning and clearly panicking—looking for a parent, perhaps? Olivier hadn’t seen any older silverstrains wandering the museum, so either the child was a new-gen silverstrain—rather than a hereditary one—or they hadn’t yet happened across what must certainly be just as worried, panicky parents—they hadn’t seen any of those either.

The child’s eyes caught on his, so like Emilia’s he felt his heart clench in sympathy for the lost, teary-eyed silverstrain. Olivier had never been one to actively involve himself in something like this—usually he would just make sure the child found their way to staff, so they could help them. This was what he was going to do; yet, just as he was readying himself to call out to their tour guide to ask her what museum protocol was for lost children—let their guide and the museum deal with the lost child—the silverstrain bolted off.

In another world, Olivier might have let them go—he might have simply reported what he saw to their tour guide and let them handle it. Whether the child was right there or rushing off, they were still lost—they were still the museum’s problem to deal with, and his only obligation was to report it.

In this world, Olivier felt himself moving. It wasn’t a moving he enjoyed; it wasn’t a moving of his own volition, even if that seemed wrong—impossible. Yet, his feet moved, and the next thing he knew, Emilia, his class, the tour guide, and Cameron Fulbrun were gone—disappeared behind him—and Olivier had no idea where he was going or how to stop himself.