The world is divided into three distinct sub-genders.
I know how that sounds. Sub-gender. Even saying it out loud feels faintly ridiculous. I want to scoff at the term, and I do, often, privately, where no one can see me. The irony is that this trivial little label is the single most important thing that determines where you fall in the food chain. Not intelligence. Not talent. Not years of thankless overtime.
Sub-gender.
At the top, you have the Alphas. Tall, broad, magnetic and powerful. They carry themselves like the world was measured and tailored specifically to their proportions, which — if you look at how society has been structured for the last several centuries — it essentially was. Anger issues and generational wealth in equal, impressive measure. Everyone wants an Alpha, but no one can get an Alpha.
At the bottom — and I use bottom only in terms of how society insists on framing it — you have the Omegas. Precious, rare, fought over like limited-edition precious commodities by men who should, by any reasonable standard, know better. Society has spent considerable energy constructing a mythology around them: delicate, luminous, somehow simultaneously innocent and the most desired-sexiest beings in existence. They belong to the Alphas, the collective wisdom declares. No questions asked. Like gems that exist only to be coveted.
The two of them are like opposite poles of a magnet, endlessly, biologically drawn to each other through what the textbooks call pheromones. Biological signifiers. The polite scientific term for I cannot help myself and I refuse to try.
And then there are the Betas.
The invisible middle child that no one thinks to account for until something needs doing. Betas don't emit pheromones and they can't detect them. They are, in the grand romantic theatre of the other two, the stagehands, present for every scene, responsible for keeping the whole production from collapsing, and entirely absent from the credits.
Betas are ordinary. They are everywhere. They are usually chill , not exactly desirable, but the reliable middle working class. Good at office work, good at showing up, good at holding things together while the oh-so-powerful alphas are too busy either fighting each other like rabid mutts or fucking in the bathroom as if the rest of us can't see the obvious, with that one unique, shiny omega assistant, naturally.
"Hey, Brendon! Think fast!"
I look up from my monitor on reflex and catch the file dossier before it can take out my coffee. By weight alone, it is roughly equivalent to a small architectural beam. Ugh. To be clear, I am not weak by any measure — I hit the gym regularly, do martial arts on the side. By all means I can handle myself. But that shit is heavy.
"What is this?" I set it down on my desk with a thud that turns a few heads. "It feels like someone printed a tombstone."
Mark leans over the partition between our cubicles with a sigh. "Something like that. Mr. Miller dropped it off before he disappeared." He pauses for dramatic effect, Mark has always been fond of dramatic effect. "Word is he spotted the guy he's been pursuing at the bar across the street. With another alpha."
"The Omega?"
"The omega." He nods, and we both instinctively grimace at the implication.
A jealous fuck fest.
I look at the dossier. Then at Mark.
"Overtime this week?"
"Overtime," he confirms, with the gravity of a funeral announcement.
We both sigh. Next cubicle over, I can already hear him beginning to quietly mourn.
Right. Alphas, omegas, and betas.
It requires very little self-examination to know where I stand. I have ordinary brown hair and ordinary brown eyes and the kind of face that people describe, when they describe it at all, as reliable-looking. My height occasionally causes a moment of recalibration in people who clock it — 189 centimeters tends to register before the rest of me does — but a second glance is usually enough to settle the matter.
Beta. Obviously.
I am a regular, functional, thoroughly unremarkable beta who is currently staring down a week of doubled workload because my boss is somewhere across the street, presumably in the grip of a jealous rage that will cost the company approximately forty billable hours and cost me approximately forty hours of sleep.
I don't get paid enough for this shit.
"If only we weren't just betas," Sam says from beside me, not looking up from absolutely nothing productive. He is a junior analyst and has been employed here for six months, which is apparently long enough to develop grievances but not long enough to develop work habits. "Imagine getting a whole week off every month just to… you know, to fuck."
I do not dignify this with a response.
"But honestly though," he continues, undeterred by my silence, which I have been told is withering and which clearly is not withering enough. "If you could choose — alpha or omega, which would you pick?"
"Alpha, obviously." Mark doesn't even look up from his keyboard. "Look at the benefits package. Besides, our Brendon over here could easily pass as one. With that handsome face."
"True, besides he's too cold and aloof to ever be an omega."
My temples begin their familiar protest.
"Neither," I say. I straighten the stack of papers in front of me and align them against the edge of my desk, which is the closest I allow myself to expressing irritation. "I have very little interest in losing my capacity for rational thought on a biological schedule. Now. Work."
They both return to their desks with the slightly chastened energy and scramble to do their jobs. Finally.
I pull the dossier toward me and open the first page.
It is going to be a long week. It is always a long week. That is, I have come to understand, the fundamental and unremarkable condition of being a beta ,you are the one left holding the work when the drama has cleared the room, and you do it because the work does not care what you are, and the table still needs food on it.
I find, in some moods, that I don't actually mind.
In other moods — like this one, staring at page one of what appears to be a three-hundred-page forensic audit — I mind considerably.
I turn to page two.