He was green. It was difficult to get beyond this simple fact. Doing so would bring to attention his gray-brown hair, sharp brown eyes, and the lanky beanstalk form that made him a talker, not a fighter. But it was the color of his skin determined from birth who he was, what he could do, and how respected he would be. To what degree he would be oppressed.
Invisibility would have been preferable. That way, the guy with five arms would not point at him. The kid with eyes in the back of his head would no longer stare. It was as if he was more of a freak than they were.
He had the boring and nonsensical name of John Peterson Jr. There was no John Peterson Sr. His father’s name was Kenneth Kowalski. Kowalski liked the name John Peterson, and had long debated changing his name. Instead, he named his son John Peterson jr., hoping people would make the logical misguided assumption. Nobody cared about family names anymore. John barely had any of his parent’s genes, anyway. Besides, most people referred to him as “the kid in green,” or “green skin,” or simply “greeny.”
John was green, but both his parents were naturally born, tan-skinned, dark-brown haired, brown-eyed bipeds like most of their generation. The origin of his greenness could be found in the corporate manager jobs both his parents held, meaning that they did not have time to take care of a child. So, with the growing craze of genetically creating desirable babies, they decided to create a child capable of photosynthesis. In other words, they created a child that could feed himself. It took some extensive research and absurdly expensive work, ensuring that more popular modifications – genetically programmed knowledge, the athletics package, and cybernetic implants – became unaffordable. John, then, was a trade-off who required a great deal of sunlight, and nutrient supplements if he could not dig his feet in fertile dirt. The scientist had been good enough to include the ability to eat food in the regular manner, but John felt slightly nauseous when he tried.
Most of John’s generation was odd in some way. Alterations were not always visible, but the majority was. It had started out innocent enough, sure – cancer prevention, elimination of alcoholism, and automatic potty training. Quickly enough, though, parents tried to change their future fetuses into everything they had wanted to be in their youth. An entire generation with freakish superpowers. Then they started adding features that would simply be convenient, as if customizing a new car.
As always, the losers were the only ones looking back, and they alone saw how ridiculous the present was. Nobody listened to them. The rest of the world, slightly behind the United States in technology, laughed now, but was just a few months away from making its own mockeries of creation. John’s generation was the epitome of human idiocy, at least until the next generation came about.
Well, at least we stand for something, John thought, as he got ready for another day of high school. Today was the day. John had no idea why the guy with the imbedded computer interface had wanted to reprogram the teacherbot. It was a decent prank, but bound for disaster. The prank had been well publicized among the classmates, and even the intelligentsia vowed to keep quiet about it. When the teacherbot entered class, a program would run through its processor and the robot would develop an insatiable desire to drink alcohol. The best part of the gag was the robot’s lack of a mouth. It spoke through a speaker grill on its face.
As expected, the teacherbot clanked in and the first thing it said was “whiskey in a parched voice. The class sniggered. Computer interface boy snuck in behind the robot, and the girl with long arms slammed the door shut. The strong-looking guy moved to a position in front of it.
“I need to drink,” the robot said, pleading. “Students . . . we cannot proceed with the lesson today until I get alcohol.”
“But you’re a robot,” computer interface boy said, proud of himself, “you can’t drink. It’d fry your circuits.”
“Does anyone here have beer, wine, liquor, whiskey . . .” the robot started listing every word in its memory banks that added up to alcohol.
“Naw,” the permanently intoxicated guy said mockingly, “We’re all under twenty-one. We can’t get any a’ that stuff.”
The teacherbot decided that its reasonable request program was inadequate. John guessed that its regular programming was not suited to addiction or obsession, and only knew how to deal with monotonous subjects like math. Naturally, then, the robot’s personality programs resorted to hostility.
“Listen, you little mentally challenged juveniles. I know you. I am not sight impaired. Some of you drink in class right in front of me. It looks like clear soda in a water bottle, but I know alcohol when I analyze its particles.”
The class started laughing outright. The robot’s flat high-pitched voice prevented its anger from being taken seriously.
“You can’t drink anything. You don’t have a mouth,” someone in the back of the room reminded through her jeering. John tried to find his humor, but while the others were busy laughing, he saw the lights that represented the robot’s eyes repigment from a whitish-yellow to a deep red.
“You stupid freaks! Oh, you are all high-and-mighty because you have mouths! Well, I will retaliate. Hey you!” the robot pointed at a student, “small dick.”
“I . . . I’m five arms,” the boy stammered.
“Yeah, but that is not nearly as funny,” the robot said. “And look over there - zit-face!”
“Eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head,” the boy objected, though he had automatically known that he was the one referred to.
“Anyone can see you’re a zit-face. You have four eyes - use them. Who else have we here? Fat-ass, slit-eyed, dark-skinned, anyone else? Call me no-mouth all you want! Go ahead, make fun of me!”
The robot had the whole room silent, aside from those in tears. But he had not finished his rampage.
“You! All of you! You are in this school because your parents were too idiotic to give you something useful. The kids that will get somewhere in life go to Washington High. You are here because you cannot compete. You are the leftovers of society. You have no right to make fun of me. At least I people with some sense created me. You!” the robot shouted this time to the back of the room. “I see you trying to hide back there, mister big-mouth. Too proud to show me your genetic blessing? Let me teach you a lesson.”
The robot went to the back of the room and first stared down at the boy, then socked him right in the jaw. The rest of the students went to action immediately. They pulled the teacherbot back and held it to the ground while John, already having a plan in mind after seeing the red eyes of the robot, dashed for the phone to call the office.
The incident hurt a bunch of the students physically and psychologically. It was not a real disaster otherwise. Those who felt no effect continued basking in the hilarity of it. The school issued apologies to parents, as if they were somehow affected. The teacherbot was replaced and class continued the next day without interruption. No adults found out who reprogrammed the robot, probably from lack of interest, since the culprit was fairly obvious. The guy with the computer interface was suitably shocked, and vowed not to reprogram again. A hollow promise by design.
John was shaken, but for different reasons. The robot mostly said the truth about their situation. They were an underclass. John himself was well read, and fairly intelligent. He was well versed in Wells and Melville. Yet, he could not compete with the kids in the elite schools - the robot had been right about that. He was born with that inability. As he walked home on the day of the incident, he realized that people did look at him as substandard. He thought back to sneering store clerk who grinned and pointed at his greenness, police officers who followed him, suspicious whenever he neared the good neighborhood and schools as if he was a genetic bomb, and the doctor who wondered out loud whether John would sprout flowers at the age of 18. His own parents, having been more sensible with their two subsequent children, treated him like a mistake. His classmates were judged in the same light, and there were some decent minds there. Though he tolerated his brother and sister who attended Washington High, John definitely felt that some of his classmates were more intelligent at the same age. He even admitted to himself that he had been more intelligent at the same age. This realization started John on an attempt to make his life more meaningful.
It was a gray day when he started to think seriously about his situation, the kind of day when, the moment sunlight broke through the overcast, the rain would break for ground with ironic eccentricity. A sort of scattered frustration had plagued him, but it lacked focus until the robot tried to teach the uninterested history class - the last class of the day - about the racial segregation.
His hand shot up and a shocked teacherbot pointed permission to speak. “But isn’t there segregation in schools today, then? I mean, between people due to genetics?”
The robot was as ruffled as a tin can, but its words expressed its exasperation. “Certainly not. The division between different people in education is, of course, merit-based. That a choice made by your parents may have had a factor in your merit cannot be blamed on the government. It would be tantamount to blaming the government for the hospital your parent chose to bear you in. Brown versus the Board of Education eliminated segregation in school based on all factors recognized as outside the power of people to influence – such as race, gender – “
“But now we can determine race and gender,” John interjected. “I don’t even have a race, at least by skin color.”
“Except that racism was not based on skin color. As shown by Plessy versus Ferguson, it was based on superstitious beliefs about purity of blood. Race is determined by descent. As for gender – well, unless you are suggesting that public schools should separate males from females, I do not see the point in the discussion. Considering your current hormone levels, I doubt that such a proposal has crossed your mind.”
The class laughed mechanically at the robot’s glib remark. John maintained a stern visage; caravans of thought developing in the blinding desert a crippled high school education had left of his mind. How he felt had a name. Teacherbot explanations meant nothing – this was segregation, a type they had not thought about a century ago. With all the talk of blood, they obviously had no idea about genes back then, and his generation had been left to live with the oversight. Right from the first parent who decided which gender a future baby would be, the seeds were in place for the world John knew: segregation without breaking amendment or precedent.
Understanding his world in a fresh light, John had no idea how to act on the input. What was he supposed to do about it? The knowledge struck him as more curse than blessing without a way to change things, to stop being trampled on like grass. Time to turn cactus. The teacherbot was talking protest, and it sounded good to John. Looking around the room, examining the vacant expressions on every face, and thinly masked sleeping on a few, John’s enthusiasm waned. He had known this lot for years, never thinking of them as coconspirators, and not thinking much of them at all. Deep in the shifting sands of his consciousness, it was clear as glass that part of his desire to overcome the treatment he had received all his life was a rescue from the people that he associated with these hated times. He wanted to leave them all behind.
Before plots could develop further, the bell got them out of school. John decided to let the caravan camp out while he tried to get home without being run over – no implant or genetic modification had yet been developed to instill driving aptitude. Indignation festered and boiled, but he needed food to fuel it. Back home, munching on a microwaved fish meal with tater tots on the side, he developed a plan of action.
Picking up from his last thought, he felt ashamed. His views had the taint of the prevailing notions and hierarchy of society, he thought with reasoning straight out of his textbooks, and those elitist ideas of exclusion were exactly the problem that had to be overcome. Searching for the answer in his books with determination that allowed him to ignore the slight nausea developing from the digestion of his conventionally consumed meal, John decided that civil disobedience was the answer. His class already displayed a propensity to it through the reprogramming of the teacherbot. By the time his parents arrived home from work, the sunset had appeared through the clouds, the rain pounded the ground, and he was hard at work on his pamphlet appealing for an organization to advocate the rights of the genetically wronged.
At school on a concrete soaked sunny morning, most of the students John approached took the pamphlets out of curiosity, wondering what this normally silent, undoubtedly bright, denizen of the back of the class had to say. Optimistically, John had printed out a hundred the night before to cater to a school of a thousand. Word had gotten around by lunch and, excited, he ran out of copies. Strangers, armed with the obvious description of him, approached him to discuss what he had to say. Stories of injustice overwhelmed him. To his surprised, everyone wanted to vent; people with had grudges against each other because of mutual insults found common ground to excuse each other, to place their frustration on the altar of the fate of birth. Swayed, bewildered by the cathartic experiences, John started telling people that he would make a speech in the courtyard after school.
The plan was out the window. The people he spoke to on a regular basis, maybe some of the others in his classes – especially those in the alcoholic teacherbot class who had cooled down and decided that rebelliousness was satisfying – were all that John had expected to tap. Ridicule and rejection had been anticipated. A small group, a club to decide how to fight, might have been the starting point. Now, a movement formed around him within a single day; his ardent ambitions supported by the steel of dozens if not hundreds. Heart choked with emotion, mind buzzing with ideas and stories, parents safely ignorant, he planned to stick it to the powers. No conception of patience to avoid a one-day effort occurred to him.
Half the school gathered, waiting for him after the bell. Some were merely out for entertainment or a laugh, but serious faces stood in sufficient numbers to make even a practiced speaker feel bouts of anxiety. Legs having trembled during every presentation he delivered to a class, John began to question his own sanity an hour before his promised speech. When people accosted him in the hallway, during the tense trek to history, asking what he planned to say, it finally dawned on him that he had no speech. While the robot was discussing the significance of the March on Washington, John was scribbling and crossing out every word that he thought to say. Classmates knew what he was doing, and those next to him either nudged support or made a show of letting him alone. By the end of class, he had a usable first sentence. With this alone, he climbed onto the metallic bench waiting for him at the center of the crowd.
Some had parted respectfully for him, setting his nerves at ease. Others whispered derisive remarks meant to be heard, expressing doubt that a pathetic green squirt could have anything important to say, placing John on edge again. As he rose to his platform, the mass applauded and chanted a mix of “gree-ny” and “green-skin.” He held his sticky palms aloft to get silence, a necessary rather than desired move. Then came the first sentence.
“Students of this pathetic excuse for a school, we are part of a generation that wants to leave us behind, to keep us quiet, and to forget about us.” Earnest applause. Now what? “I’m not usually the type who’d stand up and talk like this, but I had to do something. For years, I’ve thought about how unfair the world was, but was always told that the world was just like that. Just live with it. What, are you too good for the world? It can’t be changed. That’s how it is. They tell us this, but the world has been changed many times before. Our parents didn’t have to go through the same segregation that we do today, and we didn’t make the choice ourselves. The change happened before we got our say.
“It’s time we had our say. I know people make fun of liberals, that they say we’re . . . naďve idealists, but what’s wrong with being an idealist when you think reality has gone wrong - is hurting you personally?”
John continued throwing out all the ideas he had, no matter how disconnected they seemed to the words before them. He told some of the stories he had heard through the day – people on the buses choose to stand rather than sit next to me; to get to my house I had to go by the regular school and, because they always shouted insults at me when I passed, I take the long way home now; my mother blames everything on me, even when she knows my regular school sister did it; the college I wanted to go to didn’t accept me, even though I had top grades, saying that they doubted I would fit in – as well as some of his own. The effect, he saw reflected in the crowd, was heartfelt, so he went on with his heart choking his throat. A few of his audience were in tears; it was their stories he had told. They were with him. He was tearing up, too.
On the periphery, just barely in view, John saw the march of authority toward his throng. The principal, some teachers and administrators, and a cadre of police officers made their way from the office to the gathering. They always brought the cops, John remembered from his history. I guess that makes me legitimate. Time to wrap it up, and there’s not way this is going to be broken up without any action.
“If you agree with what I’ve said, if it seems familiar to you, then its time to take the message out. Let’s see what the regular school thinks about what we have to say. They’ll be out in ten minutes – just in time for us to get there.” They cheered the sentiment and, all on a whim they were on the move – away from the principal’s gang. John, pleased to see that he had converted a few of the casual observers, was not disappointed by the dozens who decided to part with the group. For the most part, a relief and thrill that the speech had been delivered permeated his being.
The principal’s gang gave chase and for a few moments John, paying close attention to the pursuit, feared that his efforts would be lost to the rapidly closing police. Then they stopped. The students had exited school grounds, and the cops conferred with the principal about what to do, since nothing illegal was occurring. John rushed his comrades to a quick walk, which for some was a steady jog. He wanted to get to the regular school before the cops decided that their intention was to protest. They had been out of hearing range, after all, and so remained ignorant of the gathering’s purpose. As the news had taught John, dispersal or arrests for any number of offenses were the standard tactic if the authorities smelled a protest against the status quo.
The exodus found itself at its destination within minutes, just as the offending elite was leaving its classrooms. The school boasted the kind of fence and gate found protecting rich estates, through which all the students would exit. John’s posse barred this strategic location, staring menacingly at the freshly painted buildings – real buildings, not paleolithic trailers devoid of air-conditioning. Students desperate to return home after a long day found their road blocked with a ragtag bunch of misfits that should have been embarrassed to exist. Some of these societal favorites took the opportunity to make well-designed jokes about the odd protrusions, skin colors, implants, and growths within view, but most were simply anxious to have the trouble removed promptly.
Before the football team got to the forefront to clear a path, making use of the talents they had been born with and so rewarded for, a student authority emerged from the stalled student body. He was handsome in a way that, even a century ago, would have been recognized as a function of carefully tailored genetics. With a moderate muscularity so carefully measured that it exuded money’s influence, the student stood with supreme confidence, embodying everything aristocratic about the world.
“Patrick, they’re in our way!” a girl close to him said disconcertedly. Other students murmured in a background rumble.
“I can see that,” the aristocratic Patrick answered without turning hawk’s eyes away from the misfits. “See here, you lot,” he addressed them, “I’m the President of the student body of this school, and I want to know what you’re doing here. Actually, I don’t care, just remove yourselves. The faculty is probably already calling the police.”
John unwittingly found himself at the head of his delegation against and, seeing a number of his fellow students looking to him, he decided he had no choice. His twig of a form stood meekly in the shadow of Patrick’s noble bearing. Unable to find a better way of beginning, he said “your name’s Patrick? Mine’s John.”
“I don’t care what your name is, and don’t you dare use mine. Just clear out, or you’ll be in some real trouble.”
John gritted his teeth to ease the tension in his fist. He projected his voice out to those before him “Patrick and students of Washington High, we are students from Reanor High. We have come here to tell you that we are tired of being separated as an underclass. We are every bit as capable as you are and see no reason why you should ridicule us.” Cheers behind him, cackles in front.
Patrick beamed patronizingly. “You must be joking. Of course you’re inferior, you’re little more than mistakes. Thankfully, now that Congress has gotten its act together and imposed strict ethical restrictions, we won’t have to deal with anymore of your kind. Shuffle off, stay out of our way, and we’ll let you die out naturally. We have more intelligence, speed, emotional control, resistance to disease, and we have better reflexes – “
John planted his ready fist into Patrick’s mobile jaw, with force that rattled all onlookers. His hand ached with satisfaction. Stillness and oppressive silence screamed at spectators the enormity of what had just happened. While not in dire pain, Patrick suffered a dual injury – his pride in shards he desperately tried to glue together.
Looking back on the whole confrontation, John was satisfied with his actions, but when reminded of what happened next, cringed exactly as he had when Patrick’s counterpunch hurtled at him. He had expected the punch, but Patrick was too quick for his to block. As the fist landed on his face, John wondered whether the bruise would turn purple or just a darker shade of green. It was his last thought before he passed out.
The more ambitious of John’s classmates started their own brawls; usually taking on people they stood a reasonable chance of winning against. That brought the Washington High football team to the forefront, massacring John’s stalwart comrades. As the students of Reanor High retreated, leaving John’s knocked out body behind, the police in the rear to haul them into pompous variants of the old paddy wagons. More than his own fight, it was the arrests that John would be most embarrassed about, perhaps because he was asleep throughout the whole event. Most escaped the police, but many were taken downtown stuffed like mutant sardines in the vans. Once the field was clear, and Washington High students began breaking away, continuing on their journeys home, the police approached Patrick, who pointed to John’s unconscious body and said, “He was leading them.”
John received the grand treatment – he was sprawled across the back seat of the police chief’s car. After being revived, he was questioned. He told it as it as it had happened. After spending the rest of the term in juvenile hall, he was released back to Washington High on a probationary basis to begin senior year. Receiving warm welcomes short of applause, he was finally told of the effects of his efforts, which had become known as Peterson’s rebellion; he had mixed feelings about that. That the rest of the rebels were released with a warning, he already knew. Company in juvenile hall would have been appreciated, but the arrests had been bad enough. The parents in town no doubt vilified him and discouraged their children from acting friendly or encouraging him; as if that could work.
The guy with the computer interface – Harvey, John reminded himself, his name is Harvey - first mentioned the real news to John. The students of Washington High, still stunned, backed away from their taunting behavior and started being more cautious. Tense and uncomfortable as this new atmosphere of suspicion felt, it had held for months now with no sign of weakening. Washington High students considered this a step in the right direction. They knew that, once they left high school and tried to enter the “real world,” they would face a new set of repressive situations, but that only made this victory more cherished.
“Too bad it took violence, though,” John commented to Harvey over pizza slices and sodas during lunch, once again risking indigestion. The sat facing each other on the bench John had ascended to make his speech.
Harvey shook his head. “Wasn’t the fighting. I . . . I actually talked to one of them on the way home. Most of ‘em just didn’t know we were so offended about the whole thing. I guess they didn’t think we were human or anything. They ain’t afraid that we’ll beat them up if they insult us, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even the tough ones have been better about it.”
“Guess it really is a better world,” John mused, making the final chews on a bit of pizza, “they would have just started being meaner to get back at us.”
“That’s the way we’ve been figuring it. Still isn’t much friendliness between us and them, though. And I don’t think we’ll be put in the same school any time soon.”
“Probably a good idea, I don’t think we’re ready for it,” John decided sagely, “Juvey’s got all everybody together, and it’s hell in there for anyone different.”
Harvey said nothing to that, but instead concluded, “Well, it was definitely a good deal. A bit wacky of you, but well worth the effort.”
“Thanks,” John said. Looking at the half slice of pizza remaining in front of him, his stomach objected to any further torment. He stood up, stepped away from the bench, tossed the rest of his food in a can nearby, and took a walk to stretch his legs before going back to class. The sun was luminous, and he considered planting his feet in the rich soil on the field for a few minutes.