By 2030, no one asked if you were a Shifter.
They asked what kind.
The term had lost its mystique. Genetic Shift was no longer a miracle—it was a statistic. A demographic variable. A checkbox on college applications and employment screenings.
Children were tested early. Some manifested at birth. Others at puberty. A few are under extreme trauma.
No one questioned the randomness anymore.
They feared the ceilings.
Tier classifications dominated public understanding. Tiers I through III were common. Tier IV and V were respected. Tier VI and above were whispered about, usually followed by silence.
Law enforcement adapted first.
Police departments recruited Shifters with compatible abilities—barrier generators, kinetic dampeners, perception amplifiers. Riot units carried relic-assisted gear, neon-lit weapons humming with constrained power. Military forces operated on an entirely different scale, though most of that information remained classified.
Power did not guarantee success.
Control did.
By the time Aegis was seventeen, the world had stabilized around an imbalance.
And he had not changed at all.
He woke to the low hum of the city's power grid cycling.
His room was small. Functional. Barely in the way, only people without ambition or expectation allowed themselves to live. A cracked holo-panel flickered on the wall, cycling through local alerts—weather stabilization complete, minor Shift-related incident downtown, public transit delays.
Nothing unusual.
Aegis lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
He did that every morning.
Not because he was lazy—but because part of him expected something to be different when he opened his eyes.
It never was.
No enhanced senses.
No accelerated cognition.
No instinctive pull toward power.
At seventeen, that made him an outlier.
At seventeen, it made him invisible.
He dressed, slung his bag over one shoulder, and stepped into a world where almost everyone had already found the answer evolution had given them.
He was still waiting for the question to be asked.