Don’t Call Me Daughter

A child played. He picked up grains of sand like an excavator and then dropped them. The wind carried the rest away into the atmosphere and further. He got up and walked to his mother and father. They relaxed on the beach. With each handful, the wind whisked away the fine granules like wishes on a whim.

“What do you have there, buddy?” his father Tobias Wirth asked, a glint of sunlight in his eyes. His mother Velia smiled behind shades.

“I’m making a castle…well, trying to make one. The wind keeps pushing it away,” Wirth engaged a dome over the three of them which illuminated in various shades of purple. The wind showed no sign of interrupting the boy’s progress.

“Babe, why don’t we head back. We all have dates tonight,” Velia suggested.

“Oh, that’s right,” Wirth said, showing that he had actually forgotten. “C’mon, son. You heard your mother. Let’s go home.” The dome retracted and Wirth, Velia, and Konley left the beach. They stepped into machines that blasted away all sand and water like human car washes minus the flaps and soap suds. A transportation module picked them up and brought them to their home in seconds. Konley changed over rapidly, applying oil to his bald head in the mirror. Just seven years old, he still had a flair for the way he groomed himself. He wore a green jumpsuit. His father and mother changed quickly as well. Dressed in a starch black shirt and slacks, Wirth looked pert. Velia wore a red dress that had little frilly things on the arms and at the hemline.

An alert came up on their data centers in front of their eyes. They made their way to the kitchen.

“Hey, guys! We just wanted to let you know our transportation system is acting screwy. We should be there in half an hour or so. Thanks for your patience!” Nifton Adamicz shared the video with the Wirths.

“Hey, everyone!” Polia Adamicz waved.

The Wirths returned the salutation.

“Okay, we have time enough to read some stories!” Konley exclaimed.

“Yes, I guess we can read a few tales in the meantime,” Velia agreed.

“What do you want to read first?” Wirth asked.

“I want to know about our ancestors,” Konley voiced, his excitement rising.

“Alright, how far do you want to go back?”

“Before the terraforming.”

“That’s a fine selection, Konley,” his mother winked.

“Then we’ll just have to go back.”

On an emitter, Wirth projected the image of people of different skin and hair and eye colors. Facial features showed long skinny noses and flat broad noses and thin lips and big wide lips. Epicanthic folds appeared on the screen.

“Wow, that’s what people looked like on Earth?”

“Absolutely,” Velia chimed.

“Why do we look grayish?”

Wirth and Velia exchanged glances.

“We as a people decided to come up with a way to make us all look alike. Now, we didn’t mess with ability or change any other genetic information besides what separated humans from each other in terms of some physical appearance,” Velia explained to her son.

Their gray skin and gray eyes glinted in the light.

“That’s actually what we wanted to discuss with the Adamiczis.”

“This is different,” Konley stated. His voice seemed curious with a bit of misunderstanding.

“You see pal, if you dig deep enough, you will see we descended from a people from a continent on Earth called Africa. Then, our ancestors had been stripped of their native land, language, and ideas and brought to a place called the Americas and elsewhere.”

“I remember hearing something about that in school. They didn’t show people looking like that, though,” Konley observed, pointing to the digital array of lights in front of him.

“Over time, we genetically engineered our bodies to get rid of any resemblance to our forebears. The scientists didn’t alter anything else, just skin color, hair color and texture, and facial features,” Wirth added. “They made everyone bald to keep it simple. It’s a condition called alopecia that they found could be given to babies. By the time you’re at the age you are now, your head is completely uncovered.”

Konley looked down. His arms looked like pewter. He looked at his parents. “What was the reason for the change? Those people look beautiful. Some have blue eyes and wavy blonde hair. Other people have brown skin. Some people have red. Others have yellow skin and folds on their eyes. And there are black people who look like tar. They’re all beautiful.”

“I know,” Wirth sighed. “But the differences in the physical traits led to so much confusion, even bloodshed.”

“Really?” Konley asked with a low timbre.

Wirth and Velia nodded their heads.

“Can this be changed back?” Konley asked.

“Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately son, no. It’s already a problem that people are born on this planet shorter or taller or heftier than others. It presents a problem when those people are sectioned off for their stature or body weight. Never mind if you’re born a boy or a girl.”

“Was I born a girl?” Konley asked. His chest heaved in the slightest way.

“Yes.”

Konley’s horror became evident and he stormed out of the room. He circled back.

“When were you going to tell me?!”

“I was a boy at birth,” Velia whimpered.

“And I, a young female,” Wirth admitted.

Konley’s head spun. “What is this? Is this some kind of simulation mode again?”

“No. It’s the truth. To not offend anyone or to make anyone angry with us, scientists devised a plan to perform surgeries to make us equal in non-essentials and gender. That meant that every girl born had to be a boy and vice versa. This mandate had been put into place to decrease the amount of violence perpetrated against the human race. It eliminated it.”

Konley drew up a plan in his room to play video games.

Velia stood at his portal. “Honey, it’s….It’s no one’s fault. That’s the way we’ve maintained peace all of these years. There’s not been one Martian war based on race or gender or anything, really. You don’t know about Earth’s wars because you haven’t gotten to that stage of understanding yet.”

“I get it mom, or should I say ‘Velier’?” Konley cracked wise. “I mean, who am I? I was a girl before? What am I supposed to do with that?”

“We were going to sit you down when you were older,” Wirth mentioned, now standing at the portal.

Konley put down his digital apparatus and passed through his portal to where his parents remained.

“I just feel like I’ve been lied to my whole life. I get the grayness but I never thought I’d be a girl and then a boy and then you two….”

“It’s alright, son. What you are now is a strong young man who will live to be two hundred. Or you can switch to being a female again. You have that option. You’ve gotta understand that the best intentions aren’t always great in practice. Sometimes there’s a glitch in the system,” Velia got across.

“What about DNA? Isn’t there something with that?”

“Yes. There are things called chromosomes.”

“Do I have girl chromosomes?” Konley asked.

“Yes.”

“So, you’re telling me I was engineered to be a boy but I’m actually built as a female?” Konley’s tone became indignant. He puffed a little bit while trying to say the words.

“That’s right, son,” Wirth emphasized the word son.

“Why do you say ‘son?’ You might as well call me daughter. Don’t call me daughter.”

“You’re still our son,” Velia reassured.

“So I like girls…and they like me….”

“You’re still straight…unless you want to be someone else….” Wirth clarified.

“There has never been a report of anyone in the queer community being harmed on this planet. So, if you want to tell us something….” Velia encouraged.

“I just found out I was born a girl, I think you should be the one telling me something….” Konley suggested.

“Look, we love you the same. Remember, the same thing happened to your dad and I and we had you.”

Then, the portal to the house indicated that the Adamiczis had arrived.

“Sorry we’re late.”

Wirth opened the portal to grant the Adamiczis access. Their son Pawel looked up forlorn. They all wore white tops with red bottoms.

Konley came running from his room. Pawel smiled.

“I’ve got something to tell you, man….” he shook his head and talked low.

Adamiczi and Ippa looked at the two eight-year-old kids about to exchange information.

The grown ups departed for their restaurant tour and quiet evening along the water. The boys had the house to themselves. They didn’t need any synthetic beings watching their moves.

“So you’re saying, we’re girls?”

“We were girls. We were supposed to be females.”

“So our parents lied to us this whole time….”

“I would just call it withholding information.”

“It’s cool, though. I mean I like Cefla.”

“I like Daline.”

“What else haven’t they told us, though?” Pawel questioned. “I mean, what else is there that we don’t know about?”

Konley tried to gain access to the emitter that displayed historic facts.

“It’s not only our parents but our teachers, too,” Pawel observed.

Konley looked down at his green jumpsuit. “Revolutionary But Gangster,” he said aloud. And the emitter glowed. It projected a single bar.

“We wish to know the history of the last three thousand years.”

Scores of video, text, and other bits of data rushed past them like a wave.

They stopped on one particular article that dealt with belief.

“What’s faith?”

The information absorbed through their pores. And they knew the history of ascribing to the unknown and unknowable.

“How could we have missed that?” Pawel asked.

“There’s a good chance that they didn’t want us to know about all the carnage involved.”

The grayness of their skin seemed to glisten once the information had fully processed.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t tell anyone about that either,” Pawel recognized.

“But we have to remember, our ancestors didn’t have much in the way of absolute science and the chance to reject this kind of living,” Konley said. “They were sometimes born into it and some of them never even questioned it.”

The boys’ parents looked at one another as Phobos and Deimos remained affixed in the night sky.

“We told him,” Velia admitted and sipped wine.

“Why?” Ippa asked.

“Essentially, he wanted information from the past, so we just said it,” Wirth swallowed all of his wine.

“We’re picking up new messages saying the boys are accessing your emitter,” Adamiczi’s rose a bit.

“We better head back there’s a notification on the emitter,” Wirth acknowledged.

Once the parents returned, they found their boys crafting a digital, makeshift post and whipping the other in mock torture.

“What are you two doing!?” Adamiczi demanded.

“This is what happens when you learn something new. We discovered a man named Jesus. We found out he lived thousands of years ago. He died not for his own sins, but for those of lesser worth. That’s disgusting!” Konley exclaimed.

“I can’t look at either of you the same way,” Pawel proclaimed.

The four parents looked at each other. Then, they looked at their sons.

Wirth spoke up like a representative for the grownups in the room.

“There were a lot of things that some people once called ‘religion.’ That’s more like routines, though. The best name for it would have been faith. Millennia have passed and we don’t have to worry about that any longer. Once you got to a certain level in school, you would’ve known about it.”

The boys stopped their improvised rendition of Jesus’ final days on earth.

“The story you chose was about a man who believed in this thing called God. People all over believed it and wars and famine arose because of the constant and bitter fighting which took place as a result,” Velia explained.

“Men and women fought each other and other faith-based tribes. They didn’t just worship deities but also atoms and poisonous ideas,” Adamiczi pointed out.

“Why isn’t there anymore of it?”

“We employed reason and kept it,” Wirth asserted.

“Yes,” Velia replied, looking at her husband. “Humans fought their last battle over nationality, race, color, creed, gender, sex, faith, or anything and everything that could separate the species. The remaining people found an ancient text which outlines how to live a life of thought, self-direction, and entrepreneurship.”

“You boys now know something, you can communicate with your friends at school tomorrow,” Wirth mentioned. His face looked tired and strong at the same time.

“We’re going to show them all of this,” Pawel announced. Konley looked at the virtual flogger glistening on the floor.

“Maybe not all of this….” Konley remarked.