"You know," she said with an expression that mixed frustration and fatigue, "I've just been so fed up lately. My boss makes me work just as hard as the guys—sometimes harder—but I still get paid less. And when I bring it up, he just shrugs. Like it’s not a big deal. Like getting screwed over is just something I’m supposed to accept because I’m a woman."
She looked up. "It’s exhausting. And that’s why I’ve started standing up more—and yeah, I’ve begun standing up for feminism. Because if we don’t name the problem, how the hell are we supposed to change it? Because someone has to speak up for what’s still not right."
Rafael met her eyes, warm and present. “Fighting for equality,” he said. “That’s never a small thing.”
“I just get tired of how some people pretend inequality doesn’t exist,” she said. “They act like if a woman is struggling, it’s her fault. Like the system isn’t tilted.”
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
He nodded slowly. “I remember when Mosaic faced similar truths. Groups—minorities, women—treated unfairly.”
“So what did you do?” she asked.
“We didn’t just demand fairness,” Rafael said. “We redesigned the playing field.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“In Mosaic, everyone is seen first as what they are—a human being. The most complex creation in the observable universe. That comes before roles, careers, gender—before anything else. You’re human first. Everything else is detail.”
The waitress looked intrigued. “Sounds nice. But how does that stop inequality?”
Rafael smiled gently. “Because we removed the conditions that made it possible in the first place. In your world, people can gather power or wealth and pass it to others like coins. In Mosaic, recognition—your social standing—is something only can build. It’s yours alone. It can’t be transferred. Can’t be stolen. Can’t be inherited.”
She frowned. “So no one gets ahead through family or connections?”
“No one gets ahead Everyone is measured by their own actions, and those standards are the same for all. Over time, that naturally made people’s living standards more even—because when you level the system itself, you don’t have to fix symptoms with quotas or corrections.”
She thought about that. “So you’re saying… you didn’t fix inequality with a patch. You changed the foundation.”
“Exactly,” Rafael said. “You can’t hoard what isn’t hoardable. And if no group can gather or pass on unfair advantages, there’s no structural reason for one group to dominate or another to be pushed aside. The whole system makes exclusion pointless.”
The wind stirred. She looked out at the street “I wish we had that.”