Bruna Pereira was born on Durus under the First Republic, which would retroactively be called the phallocracy. As a woman, she was not allowed to practice medicine in any form. Doctors, nurses, and emergency technicians were all positions filled by men, because women
could not be trusted. All they would let her do was clean up the medical facilities after they were done, though even that was humiliating, because a man would have to come in afterwards every single time to check her work. She studied at the library every day before or after work, learning what she would had she attended their culture’s version of university. One of the first things Hokusai Gimura and her rebel friends from the thicket did was overturn all discriminatory educational and employment policies. She immediately registered for classes, as did many of her contemporaries, first testing out of most college courses within a year, then going on to the four-year medical program. She wasn’t the first woman on the planet to become a doctor, but she did graduate in the first class. She ultimately decided to specialize in obstetrics, believing that it and gynecology were the two fields in most need of female representation. She hadn’t even been a practicing obstetrician for a year when she started getting mixed up with some of the Earthans visitors. Many people from Earth were sent up to Durus when the two worlds nearly collided in 2161, but there were a few others here and there who had the means to escape. These people had different rules, and in order to protect her patient’s lives, Bruna had to break some as well. Durus had changed by then, having fully entered the Democratic Republic, but equality was only the official position of the government, and plenty of people were still around who remembered what they believed to be the good ol’ days. Had a man made similar questionable decisions to value patient over policy, he would have been suspended for a brief period of time, at worst, and he probably would have had the option to spend it in another temporal dimension, so most people wouldn’t have even noticed that he was gone. Bruna was not so lucky. She was harshly reprimanded the first time, but as she continued to color outside the lines, her superiors felt they had no choice but to let her go. To make matters worse, they dragged the process out so long that the visitors had by then left, and returned to Earth without her. Lots of people, past and present, possessed powers, but not a one had the ability to take her offworld. However, that didn’t mean she couldn’t move to somewhere more accepting. Worried something like this might happen, she had procured illegal access to a database of
paramounts; one of whom could send her to the future. She didn’t know exactly how things would turn out, but she strongly believed life there would get better in the future, so she just skipped over all the struggle in between. She landed thirty years later, when Durus had traveled so far through interstellar space that it had been picked up by a new binary star system. It was finally a real planet, capable of sustaining its own atmosphere, and forming a water cycle, and this gave residents hope for peaceful lives, in a good society. This prompted greater change in policy, and she was quickly reinstated as a medical professional, following a year’s worth of studying to catch up with biomedical advances, of course. And from there, she continued on doing what she did best, ushering life into the world.
No comments :
Post a Comment