John McCoy, was a normal fifteen year old kid. He knew he wanted to figure out girls, what there were of them but didn’t know enough to realize he never would. He knew he wanted to grow up but didn’t know what a lame idea that was. He knew school was bullshit but had no idea how right he was. It wasn’t that school was difficult, in the sense of making grades or using the all encompassing, pocket Y-34 computer but he didn’t trust anyone in this, “chicken shit outfit” as his grandfather used to say.
The instructor was returning history pads and John’s was accompanied with an approving nod. Yeah, 100% again but John didn’t think it much more than a memory exam. He had submitted a report on the twentieth century, because not much happened. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thankfully came to the fore and Adolf Hitler, from Germany, backed down not to be heard from again. F.D.R. ordered a solution and Hitler and his malcontents, were sent to another unspecified planet, outside our galaxy. Actually, the word malcontent was coined, following the Hitler incident, as there was no precedent making the word necessary. With the “Hitler virus” identified and wiped out, the earth lived in harmony, up to and including the present, 2321.
John’s grandfather had told him horror stories, when John was little. “The real truth” he called it. Tales of, what he called hate, prejudice, theft and other petrifying things he described. John sometimes thought the words his grandfather manufactured were as funny as the stories were scary. Some of it was lost on him. How could the color of one’s skin be an issue, when we are all light brown and always have been? Sure there was an albino or ebony child, born occasionally but they were sent for cosmetic correction. That they were never seen again, was never spoken of. It didn’t make sense that someone would take something from someone else. We all received the same things and a neighbor would surely let you have something if you wanted it. Another thing claimed of the past, people would touch each other. “The way grampa put it, a fella might walk right up to someone and put their arm around them. How could you not feel violated by that?” John loved his grampa, but there were limits to everything including his stories.
John’s grandfather disappeared one day but had left a note for John. The note said that he had been betrayed by a supposed confederate named Mark and he would never be seen again. John made it his business to find Mark and murder him. Mark’s body was never discovered and nothing was made of it.
The artifacts John’s grandfather had passed onto him proving his tales true, are still hidden away, and whereabouts known only by John. Like his ancestors before him, John wrestles with exposing the facts and whether a peaceful, brainwashed and ignorant society with a fabricated history outweighs an embattled one, apparently bent on its own destruction, with a past deemed so horrific, it warranted a re-write. What would you do?
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