“Dr. Isstup of Third Division, Fourth Battalion, Company 30.” Isstup raised up her badge, “I have been working here for the past two years, green boy. Your cartridge machine has gone kaput.”

The receptionist was clearly in a fit of panic; he knew not to offend a doctor out of all people, yet he also could not for the life of him find Isstup’s profile amongst the tens and thousands of cartridges in his machine.

“Like I said, it has gone kaput,” Isstup muttered slowly as she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, “can I return to my own office now?”

A technical support guy came down the stairs, “Isstup! You flopping cock! You're bothering our Vivi again! The boy has just been here a month and you are giving him a hard time!”

“I wouldn’t be bothering him if he would just let me enter the building and do my goddamn job!” Isstup grunted; she still hadn't had the chance to learn the tech guy’s name, but they had been bickering at each other ever since she worked here. These technoclards, the basest humanist of them all in the Republic that’s for sure, always had a thing for doctors; should’ve deported their entire clan back to the volcanoes where they belonged.

The Second-affiliated Medical Center of Iota Democracy was one of the biggest medical facilities in the Republic. With almost two hundred years of history, the facility had been used as both a hospital and a rehabilitative facility since the abolishment of prison, housing nearly four hundred thousand patients and receiving five million people annually. It also was the political center West of the Kist mountains where the annual Medical parliamentary meeting was hosted. Not a moment passes in this place without doctors and patients thronging in and out of it.

Coming at thirty-three years old, Isstup could physically feel her age catching up to her, growing progressively more intolerant of loud noises and foul smells that necessarily came with the crowd; she was fearing a heart attack when hearing the news of her being transferred from the small city of Fourth Battalion, Third Division to here. Luckily, her office building was in the off-site Psychology department where quietude and peace were still feasible on the off days.

Her office was a 6 square meters (60 square feet) squalor with only one open window facing towards the psych ward’s yard and one desk piled with mountains of cartridges and papers. As soon as she entered the room and before she could even put her coat down, a boy poked his puerile face through the ajar door.

“Ugh… Dr. Isstup?” Rarryi, the assistant of the floor, a boy of fourteen years old going through his medical university degree, “There is a patient who has been sitting in the lounge since half past one. A comrade… Feistia?”

Isstup took a look at her watch; it was three o’two right now. “Send them in, I guess.”

Now sitting across the desk, the patient, a teen-adult boy with lanky limbs and baggy eyes, was rather calm and well-postured, only that every one of his pore exhumed the air of exhaustion and suffering. Notably, he had a walking stick with him, and the orbs in his eyes looked cloudy.

“The name?” Isstup asked.

“Feistia of Second Division, Company Beta,” the boy answered with an undertone of pride and self-affirmation.

“A birth local,” Isstup searched for the boy's name amongst the cartridges, “are you an adult yet?”

“Physically, yes… psychosocially, not yet…”

“And we have a word for it: teen-adult. Gender?”

“Male, as for my genitals.”

Isstup raised her brows, “And why do you deem it appropriate to inform me of that? I do not need to know the content in your pants. I’m a psychiatrist. The Sexology branch is in the main building.”

“I’m sorry, doctor,” the boy let out a juvenile giggle as though he had come across a dirty joke, “I’m simply stating the common sense.”

What a way to start the day, to counsel some riff-raff overdosing on regressivist rhetoric, “Are you ethnic? Is anyone within two generations in your family ethnic?”

“No! I’m a Democratic Iota Republican!” A tinge of anger in his voice.

“I’m sure you are, and so is every human on the planet,” it was hard upholding her professionalism despite her decade of experience in this field, simply due to the fact that Regressive Medicalism hadn’t been a thing for nearly a hundred years; its popularity only soared after that bumbling fool at the director board published his unscientific Geneticist paper some twenty years ago, and the idea gained even more traction after the disaster that was Tutut. Many were blaming the government for its unwillingness to commit more drastic actions against the tribes; some even attributed blame to the ethnic groups within the Republic.

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Medical Consciencism dictated that every human being stood equal before the spirit of medicalism; surely, these regressivists would feel shame benefiting from the exact universal and egalitarian principle that they decried.

Apparently not, as the boy before her showed little if any shame; he frail body sat upright in that uncomfortable chair, he cloudy eyes stared unflinchingly forward, and his prideful smile unmoving.

“What is your condition?” Isstup asked.

“I am in bad shape,” the sheen on the boy’s face dissipated like a wisp of smoke, replaced by a great wave of disappointment and hopelessness, “I have felt… horrible, like my life has been misplaced… into some… whatchamacallit… boxes. I felt… unfit. I went to see the doctor, and they said I have no bodily malfunction or disease, outside of my eye that is, and sent me…”

“What happened to your eyes?”

“They said it is some sort of degenerative disease,” the boy muttered beneath his breath, diffident and resigned, looking like an entirely different person than he was a minute ago, “it is the result of… glaucoma, they said. Not retinal detachment… it’s… retinal displacement. It’s the… the retina, that they had a problem… a problem with. They said it doesn’t do good no more. They said in the short… or long term, I will lose it. Lose my eye. I’m what they call… I got a name for it, it should be on my cartridge… I’m what they call, because of my retinal problem, and the glaucoma which they said, only old people get… that I’m blind.”

Isstup took a glance at the boy’s profile; a line of large embroidered text read Legally Blind.

“How much can you see?” Isstup continued, writing every answer she got down in her notepad; papers had gone up in exchange value lately, but she couldn’t bear another stash of cartridges gathering dust in this office, she wanted to write.

“Not much… shadows. I can see where you are. A democratic, medically educated female… I’m sure you are good looking but… can’t really tell.”

Female… male… words used only to describe inanimate organs and sexual characteristics were now being used as adjectives for living people; the boy was using vocabularies propagated by the highly regressive medical movement: Sexualism. The idea that the psychosocial spectrum of gender, ranging from the ultra-feminine to the ultra-masculine, could be boiled down to a biological category -- a binary biological category, nonetheless! -- would be considered obscenely unscientific just a decade ago.

The revival of regressive medical theory could no longer be overlooked, and Isstup blamed the entirety of it on one man: He. Yulart. The cock wasn’t even a working doctor! He was a clergyman from the Discipline of History! The guy studied fossils for the first twenty years of his life!

“I’m a woman, but thank you, comrade. I don’t consider myself particularly good-looking,” in fact, she had little to no pursuer throughout her entire life, “you serving at the moment?”

“No, I dropped out of university.”

“Reason being?”

“Can’t keep up with the courses… and ugh, you know how it is. The school is too busy fulfilling their quota of accepting ethnics rather than taking care of their own students! Dirty Atogs from Werxoo could study at the Church without putting in a day of work while real Democratic Republicans like us got sent to warfare!” Rancor overtook him for just a few fleeting moments before the reality of his bodily suffering set back in, “people are suffering, doctor, and none is doing anything. Not the one sitting in the ivory towers that’s for sure!”

“Ugh huh,” Isstup ignored the tirade, “please reframe from using slurs in my office. So you still living in your birth domicile?”

“No.”

“So where are you living?”

“Public dormitory,” places with quadruple bunk beds all lined up, housing hundreds of people in one room, “and before you ask, yes, I eat in a public diner as well.” The boy said it as though to prove a point, as though his poor and less-than-dignified living condition had validated all his feelings.

“So you are a deserter.”

“Fuck you, doctor,” the boy gnashed bitterly. Deserters referred to those who had the capability to serve and contribute their labor yet chose out of their own volition not to; these people usually congregated in public dormitories and dining halls, often trading illegal substances and exhibiting extreme incivility such as eating or copulating in the public, all undignified lives. The boy clearly disliked being referred to as such yet had no recourse to refute this distasteful title.

“Deserter is a neutral label. We are doctors. We don’t judge.” Isstup simply commented, “If you long for judgment, go to the clerks. How is your sleep?”

“What?”

“How is your sleep, comrade Feistia?” She just wanted this exchange to end at this point.

“Um… I don’t know… I don’t know if I have had enough sleep…”

“Well, the Company Beta Medical Protocol instructed at least three and a half to four hours of sleep.”

“I don’t… I fell asleep and woke up at the same hour… not that they make any difference, anyhow. I cannot tell if I’m asleep sometimes.”

Isstup lifted up her head from the notebook to be met by the boy’s utterly dejected expression, one of bitter resignation and acceptance of his own fate, with not a shred of desire to even attempt altering the course; he would be who he was for the rest of his life.

“Why couldn’t you tell?” Isstup asked.

“Not that I can see in my waking moments, ain’t it?” The boy laughed, bitterly.