New World Orioles

In 2034, after a global collapse in birth rates, women are confined to state-run homes and classified as “productive” or “unproductive” under the unblinking watch of LYRA, an AI that tracks their every breath. In one such house, X, Q, and 3 live in an enforced routine, waiting for evaluations that determine their futures.
When Q wakes from six days of unexplained sedation to find her lower leg removed for stem-cell extraction, she begins to question the system she was told to trust. A dangerous idea forms when she stumbles upon a passage in an old dictionary about species evolving identical traits under identical pressures: survival may require divergence.