The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

Like they crawled out of the Undercity one day, fully formed—eyes already glowing, already criminal, already something to cross the street to avoid at all costs.

Like the universe simply woke up one morning and decided to make something both ontologically evil, but also very easily identifiable.

Convenient story, isn’t it? Lets everyone else off the hook…

But the truth isn’t so simple.

Let's talk about what it takes for a woman to choose the Cyan Solution in the first place—because she did choose it, technically, in the same way you choose between drowning and the rocks.

No prenatal care she could afford. No medical access worth the name.

A pregnancy complication that, on any planet with a functioning healthcare infrastructure, would have been even less than simple routine.

Solved before it ever became a crisis in the first place.

But she wasn't on an Inner World, nor a Core one.

She was on a Mid-World, or an Undercity, or one of the dozen other categories of place that the UHF's maps include and its budgets conveniently forget.

The Cyan Solution was what was available. Her only true choice she was ever given, the one possibility to save her child.

She didn't choose to give her child those eyes.

She simply chose for it to live.

And the child—the child had no vote in the matter at all.

Arrived in the universe the way everyone arrives: Without a manual, without intent, without the faintest idea that their eyes were going to be a major problem for people they hadn't met yet, in places they hadn't been yet.

Just a child. Just a pair of eyes.

Beautiful eyes, if you want the honest version of this conversation.

I know that's not what you're used to hearing.

I've heard all of it.

And I understand the discomfort is real. I'm not here to tell you it isn't.

But I ask you: Have you ever noticed that nobody talks about the people who don't have that reaction?

Because they exist. They're not all that rare, in the grand scheme of the galaxy.

You probably even know some of them—you just don't know you know them, because there is no social currency in admitting that you looked at a Cyan's eyes and found them striking. Found them vivid.

Found them, if you were being fully honest with yourself, genuinely and arrestingly gorgeous in the specific way that unusual things are fascinating when you let yourself look at them without the framework of everything you've been told.

Nobody talks about those people. Nobody writes about them.

They don't show up in the cultural narrative about Cyans, because they complicate it, and the narrative doesn't want to be complicated.

The narrative wants the eyes to be wrong. Needs them to be wrong.

Because if the eyes are just eyes—extraordinary ones, unusual ones, eyes that carry the biological evidence of a mother's final, ultimate sacrifice—then the whole architecture of the discomfort starts to look a great deal less like instinct and a great deal more like a choice.

But instead… The child arrives. The eyes are the eyes as we know them.

And then what? It’s a problem right from the start? The monster we all know?

But monsters aren’t born. They are made.

Assembled piece by piece. Word by word. Silence by silence.

You take that child, and you tell them they're nothing.

They’re a criminal.

They’re an abomination.

They’re everything wrong with the universe.

They’re the reason for society to be the way that it is.

Not once—continuously, structurally, in every system they try to navigate and every room they try to exist in.

You make sure they understand that the circumstances of their birth—circumstances they did not choose, produced by conditions they did not create, originating in a failure of infrastructure they had no hand in building—are a moral failing that belongs to them personally.

You show them that kindness is weakness.

That trust only gets you hurt.

That love is conditional and disappears the moment you need it most.

You do this for years—decades.

What do you think happens?

You think they stay soft after that? You think they stay open?

No. They adapt.

They build walls where trust used to be.

They learn to read a room before the room reads them.

They sharpen their very instincts into weapons, their body into something scarred and unapologetic that can outlast everything that is thrown at it, again and again.

They learn to navigate a world that never once indicated they were meant tothrive in it, only endure the pain of it—and then one day, when they stop apologising for merely existing, stop merely asking for a place in this world and instead make their own, you look at them and say: “What happened to you?”

Like you weren't there.

Like you didn't build the city.

Like you weren’t the lesson, every step of the way.

Like you didn't write the policies, drew the district lines and decided, generation after generation, that the people at the bottom were a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved.

But nobody wants to go take a look at the recording; nobody wants to rewind.

Nobody wants to sit with the uncomfortable truth that maybe,just maybe... The monster is the group project.

Here's the thing about monsters, though: They don’t forget who made them.

Every door. Every denial. Every room that went quiet when they walked in.

Every person who crossed the street, who moved their children to the other side, who said nothing—because saying nothing is also a choice.

They don't forget who built the Undercity.

They don't forget who decided to simply stand by.

They don’t forget who closed every door in front of them.

And one day they stop simply enduring, apologizing and asking—they start knocking."

[Excerpt From “Spoken word performance,” Artist unknown, Recorded at the Cultural Preservation Festival, Orionis Alpha, PFC 939.]