Double Standard

In a future where only the physically perfect are permitted to colonize the new worlds, the chance to leave Earth is a tightly controlled lottery. Kim Hall has spent her whole life dreaming of the red dunes of Mars and the icy plains of Io, but the Eugenics Board deems her too slight and unsuitable for the breeding stock the colonies demand. Desperate to claim a place among the stars, she turns to an underground surgeon who can fabricate a new body, masking her true self with a flawless façade.

She summons her old friend Kane, a rejected applicant himself, to inspect the transformation before she boards the gleaming launch ship. Their tense conversation reveals the moral cost of her deception and the bitter irony of a system that values muscle over ambition. As the night deepens, Kim’s resolve hardens, and the line of hopeful travelers waits under floodlights, ready to lift off toward a destiny that may never forgive a forged identity.