Dumb, no-good, godforsaken superpower.

Turning eighteen was the most important day of your life. It was the day that you finally earned a wish. The day when the candles on your birthday cake granted you something that you had always wanted.

People spent years researching their wish, looking at the consequences, making sure the genie wouldn’t pull a fast one. The legal documentation alone costs years of wages. Those that could afford to create their own path did so, becoming billionaires or founding companies with groundbreaking technology. Those that had the family to back them up, to make their wish mean something.

I didn’t have anything like that. I was an orphan who had to make do with the state appointed lawyers. My birthday cake was a cupcake with a single candle, my legal document three pages covering the worst outcomes. 

I was supposed to wish to help the public, become a healer or a joiner. That's what the government does with the disposable wishers. Those that the foster homes don’t snap up, slap a fill in the blank form on, and use a wish to make their facilities turn a profit.

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It was suicide to try and change course. Without the legal protections on the genie, there was nothing to keep him from killing you. Quickly if you were lucky, slowly if you were not. I was to be a builder, breaking my back to make roads that would never break and houses that could withstand the end of the world.

I couldn’t do it though. I had lived my entire life underfoot and unwanted. I owed them nothing, absolutely nothing. Being a builder, a slave to the regime was my worst nightmare. I would rather be dead.

So at my birthday party, a drab affair in a government building with the other orphans, I asked for something different. I asked for change.

Genies hate to be penned in and, given an open wish like that, they couldn’t help themselves.

Reality shifted and suddenly I was twenty seconds back, before I had said my wish, before the people around me had gasped and taken cover, diving behind the judges stand. Before the orphans in line with me had cringed away, trying to avoid the worst of the blood splatter.

I was there again, asking for my wish. I felt my mouth move against my volition, my very wish changing.

“I wish to be a builder, to the terms of the documentation before me,” the genie said from inside of me. 

I slapped a hand over my mouth but the damage was done. The people around the room gave a ragged, half-hearted cheer and then it was on to the next kid. Their machine needed more cogs.