The Dividend Children

In a world where children are currency, one girl learns what it costs to be free.

I was worth $213,840 and change by my fifteenth birthday.

The figure wasn’t a boast; it was a ledger entry, cold as the steel of the Lifetrace nodes embedded in our wrists. Deductions chipped away at it daily—living expenses, parental management fees, the cost of shoes that wore out too fast on cracked asphalt, the water rations we drank from recycled pipes, and the endless “developmental enrichment” programs meant to polish our potential.

Whatever remained trickled into a savings node I couldn’t touch. Not until I turned twenty-one. Not unless I died early. Then, it flowed to them.

They called us Lifegrowers. In our neighborhood, it was a badge of pride, a term slung with the same reverence as a prayer. While other kids were mocked for threadbare clothes or crooked teeth, we fielded questions about yield curves and portfolio diversification.

“How many siblings you got?” wasn’t just small talk—it was a probe into how fast your parents’ stock was climbing in the market of flesh and futures.

My parents had seven of us.

Seven breathing assets, each tethered to a state-backed Existence Credit—XCR—dripping hourly like oil from a pipeline that never ran dry. My birth alone had netted them $12,000, a lump sum from the “Childbirth Activation Incentive Package.” Then came the quarterly disbursements, medical supplements, education matches, and tax-free dividend extensions for any child deemed to have “potential.” I was potential. So was my brother, Quinn.

Quinn vanished two weeks after his nineteenth birthday.

“College,” my mother said, her voice flat as the screen she stared at while saying it. “He’s in a Deepstream program.”

I didn’t ask what that meant. Neither did my little sisters—Megan, Laura, or the others too young to know better. We understood the unspoken rule: don’t rock the cradle. Questions were cracks in the system, and cracks could collapse the whole portfolio.

But I couldn’t forget Quinn’s face the day he left. The way he lingered at the back fence, his shadow stretching long across the dirt like it was trying to stay behind. His backpack, unzipped, spilling a corner of a shirt. He didn’t say goodbye.

Three weeks later, my parents upgraded to a 3D food printer, its sleek chrome frame gleaming in our kitchen like a trophy.

I wasn’t brave then. Not yet. But I was curious. And in a world built on obedience, curiosity was a spark in a room full of gas.

Late at night, when the hum of the city’s AI transport lanes softened to a distant pulse, I stole into my father’s study. He was sprawled on the couch, snoring beer-and-brisket into cushions older than most of us.

His retinal lens sat on the counter, a thin disc of biotech that unlocked more than just doors. I dipped it in water, pressed it to the sensor, and held my breath as the system blinked green.

Quinn’s node was still active. Death didn’t erase data—it just rerouted it. The screen flickered, and there it was:

Status: Deceased. Claimed: Family Trust. Code: Clause 7 (Unintentional Early Termination). Estimated Payout: $311,227.96.

My heart folded like a napkin, creased and small. Clause 7. The death dividend. Triggered when a child died before twenty-one. Ten percent penalty, ninety percent profit.

My parents hadn’t mourned Quinn—they’d cashed him out.

The next day, my mother bought me a new dress. It was blue, soft as a whisper, and it fit perfectly. She smiled as she handed it to me, her eyes crinkling like she meant it. I wondered if she saw me at all, or just the numbers ticking behind my name.

They weren’t evil, my parents.

They were investors. The kind with heartbeats and Sunday morning prayers, who knelt before a God they believed endorsed their ledgers.

They never beat us.

They just budgeted us. Every smile a transaction, every hug a performance metric. I used to lie awake, staring at the ceiling’s peeling paint, wondering if they ever looked at me and saw a daughter. Or just a walking escrow account, accruing interest they’d one day claim.

Escape wasn’t a whim. It was a harvest, planned with the patience of a farmer tending a fragile crop. I started by burning my node location in the school’s satellite records, overwriting it with a loop of a past week’s movements—class, home, repeat.

Then came the identity fork, a black-market neural clone uploaded into the Lifetrace archives. It cost me a favor I’d rather not name, paid to a shadow in an alley.

The hardest part was leaving my sisters.

Megan, nine, already reading profit reports with a focus that scared me. Laura, six, still believing our mother’s kisses were real, not just gestures to keep the portfolio compliant. The younger ones barely knew me, their eyes wide with trust I couldn’t afford to break.

I couldn’t take them—not yet. But I left a map in Megan's shoebox, tucked under some old family photos. A promise: if I made it out, I’d send for them.

The drop point was a sanitation tunnel under the east edge of Old Portland, where the AI-run transport lanes flickered like ghosts of The Automation Collapse. I crouched in the amber haze of a city that never fully slept, counting each heartbeat like it cost me, the air thick with the tang of rust and dead things.

Then the drone arrived—scuffed, loud, reliable. Its single eye glowed red as it scanned me.

“Are you Nella Durant?” it asked, its voice flat and genderless.

“I was,” I said. “Now I’m unclaimed equity.”

The truck lifted silently, skimming over a city that slept under the weight of its own calculations. My wrist buzzed as the system logged my absence.

It wouldn’t say escaped. It would say deceased.

Another loss. Another Clause 7. Another dividend.

I imagined my mother sobbing over the payout confirmation screen, her tears not for me but for what I could’ve been—a higher yield, a better return.

I didn’t cry. Instead, I opened a new node under a new name, tied to no family, no claimants. Unbound. It wasn’t legal, but it was mine.

There are others like me. Ghosts in the system, kids who faked their deaths to break free. We’re whispers in the data stream, shadows slipping through the cracks of a world that trades lives for profit.

Quinn’s last words haunted me, whispered through the vent grate one night when we were supposed to be asleep. “You’re not an investment,” he’d said, his voice low and fierce. “You’re the interest they never deserved.”

I didn’t know then what he meant, but I felt it—a spark of something bigger than the numbers they pinned to us.

I plan to find him. If he’s alive, I’ll track him to whatever corner of the world he’s hiding in. If he’s not, I’ll find the truth of what happened, piece by piece, like assembling a machine from scavenged parts.

We’re not gone. We’re just unclaimed.

And ghosts have teeth.

We remember who profited from our lives. We remember the hands that balanced their books on our backs. And we’re coming for what’s ours—not the dividends, not the credits, but the freedom to be more than a line in someone else’s ledger.