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A quote: “In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.” ~~ Robert Green Ingersoll
I’ll start with a story …
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His mother wanted to give him a chance to experience school. “He needs other kids,” she said half-convinced.
I gave in, too, because not rocking the boat seemed the best at the time.
Didn’t take long before the calls came about our disruptive son. Too many questions, too many ‘not paying attention’, too many ‘doesn’t fit in’.
We’d see him at home gazing out the window and knew. Never saw him so happy as when we told him he didn’t have to go back anymore.
It was a golden age moment. He learned how to navigate the library in light-speed time, a range of interests that dizzied us. We gave him all the tools.
When he started devouring the game of numbers, I dusted off my own college algebra texts, then trig and calculus. He lost me at differential equations.
Then, not so funny stuff started to happen. Librarians would catch sight of him and pick up a phone. Books we thought we could find on advanced or theoretical physics were ‘unavailable’. Unnerving, even our home felt invaded.
Now, with just the clothes on our back and a slip of paper from a trusted friend, we’re driving into the unknown.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Cameron says: Even now, I can still remember the feeling of peace as we drove into the rain-soaked night. Dad was focused on the road and the radio was playing softly in the background. When we hit one of the big rest stops, he let me have some of my favorite food as a treat and I saw him get a few bags of snacks.
“We got a long way to go, buddy,” he told me. “So we gotta stay awake.”
A few days later, I was in a new school with new friends. It would be years before I learned the truth about that trip. Before dad passed away, he left me a note explaining everything to me. About him and mom, about the people they worked for and why they wanted me so badly. And why he had the school train my mind and body so harshly.
I vowed two things to myself after burning that note. When this was over, the people that killed my family would be dead and forgotten. And someday, I would have a family of my own with a child that would feel the peace that I did back then.
I will keep those promises.
We left one rainy night. I would’ve liked to have taken more with us, but we had to make it look like we were just going down to the campground for the weekend.
In the two decades and change since President Reagan announced to a stunned America that yes, we had our own cloning and genetic modification problems to counter the Soviets’ secret labs, things had become steadily worse. Even at the beginning there was grumbles about “Frankenstein science,” but most people were willing to focus their ire on the scientists, not their subjects. But somewhere after the Energy Wars, opinions started shifting.
Maybe it was just a matter of conflicting national interests putting us and the Russians at odds after having been allies in the Energy Wars. Maybe it was any of a number of factors, but one thing was certain: sympathies were shifting against us. There were increasing calls for distinguishing marks on our driver’s licenses and passports, not for legitimate medical purposes in an emergency, but so we couldn’t blend into the population.
And then came the day when our son came home from school in tears. The other kids had been picking on them, and the teacher had told him that he needed to stop acting like he thinks he’s better than he is. That he needs to learn to defer to the “normal” children, to let them go first and have whatever they want, and bow his head and all that nonsense, like he were a peasant in the Middle Ages. And when we called the school, the principal backed the teacher, and said that we needed to understand how things worked nowadays.
“This is America, dammit,” Ray said. “If they don’t consider my son to be created equal, just because I came from the NASA cloning labs instead of the horizontal bop, we’ll go somewhere that does.”
So here we are on the road, heading west like so many Americans before us. Sure, we’ve got a car on that long gray double ribbon of concrete that’s I-80 instead of a covered wagon on a rutted trail, but we’re leaving our old lives behind in hopes of a better one at the other end of our voyage.
Let’s just hope that Governor Thorne really can hold the line like she says she will.
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