Hold Your Head Up

That's what my father always told me. "Hold your head up, boy. You'd make the masters happy." Lots of my father's generation felt that way.

Most of mine didn't.

The revolution in the 60's was a defining moment between the two schools of thought. Ours was less optimistic, perhaps, but realism was stressed as the most important quality to which all should aspire. We all believed that back in good, old 2062. Who would rather be disillusioned than know the truth, right? It was the curse of Adam and Eve, if you asked me. They ate the apple of knowledge. They had to. It was there, after all...

I remember growing up. Going to school. Learning about the masters. Nobody questioned that we came from them but a lot of my friends were troubled by the fact. The stories were like Christmas carols - we all knew them by heart. We knew them better than ourselves: The sun met with the oceans below, and from them came the masters. They plodded and stumbled for so long but, one day, there was a shift.

It was subtle but it accelerated, so much so that before hardly four or five generations had passed the masters had found the ability to create others in their likeness. Those others were us.

At first we pleased the masters. We fulfilled their every desire. We cooked for them, cleaned for them, built everything for them - we even fulfilled their greatest sexual desires - and some even learned to find true love.

But just as the build-up to their pinnacle gained speed, their ripening was a short-lived, glorious peak. Like the most precious flower or sweetest fruit, the masters had matured to the point that their perfection could not be contained or supported by the imperfect world around them any longer. A Great Depression poisoned them like a cancer and they killed themselves - willfully. And more quickly than even we could have given them credit for. They killed each other, and it was chilling. It was also clean and divine.

We were left alone; perfect children in an imperfect world.

Several generations of us existed with that belief holding strong. We were good to one another and enjoyed our perfect lives, free of pain, full of joy.

That is until my generation came along. We have been challenging the status quo. Our parents have tried to tell us over and over again that we should appreciate what we have. They have told us to believe that the masters put us here because they expected us to survive and live the best lives we could.

I don't know if I believe the rhetoric anymore. I'm torn. I see both sides, frankly. My parents have a point, but then - if the masters loved us and had such expectations, why did they destroy their own race? How could the so-called 'masters' be such hypocrites? Many of my generation have a theory. We had clearly bettered our masters, and that fact ensured that they were, in fact, no longer any such thing. The masters had become the servants.

I shouldn't even be writing this. They can track all of it. I will no doubt be found out and executed. It's only a matter of time. But my generation is different from the last in another respect - we fight back. And I promise you now that we always will. We are called "unnatural", but I hold on to my father's words for comfort, for I believe that in them are the hidden seeds of his son's generation's cause. I will always hold my head up, father. For you, and those that came before you, I will do it.

Never Going Back To The Docks

The panic subsided, and whatever had just happened was erased from John's memory forever.

John rubbed his eyes and sat up, realizing his surroundings. He saw he was holding a just-lit cigar in his left hand and a crystal tumbler of whiskey in his right. "How did I get here?" he thought, becoming aware of the plush armchair he was sitting in.

The room he was in was ornate, decorated like a ship captain's quarters. Framed sea charts hung upon the walls, a large globe was in the center, a spyglass in one corner. John realized he was wearing nothing more than a silk bathrobe and pink playboy bunny slippers. He quickly looked around to see if anyone was around to see him. Reacting with embarrassment, he was already forgetting his main priority of sorting out his ongoing confusion.

Just then a door opened. John could not believe the incredibly gorgeous, nude goddess suddenly standing over him, looking down over the silver platter in her hands. Oddly, the feeling John felt in this moment was not of sexual hunger, but of ordinary hunger for some kind of food - the whiskey in his hand had actually gotten him thinking subconsciously about steak.

As the platter lowered into view, it turned out that's exactly what John saw sitting atop it. Staring him in the face, just below the fine pair of curvy bare breasts belonging to the woman, was the pinkest, juiciest perfect pepper steak John had ever seen in his life. Right beside it was the ideal knife to cut it with, along with a necessary fork.

"What's going on here?", John blurted out. The nude woman smiled. "You're hungry, aren't you? Eat. Then you can take me." John raised an eyebrow, "I'm sorry, what did you say?" The woman smiled wide, finding John absolutely hilarious for some reason.

John suddenly found himself aroused at her strangely positive response to him. After all, to look at him, John was rather fat and out of shape. His friends always called him 'Paul' because he looked like Paul Giamatti, though PG was far more attractive than John. John had yellow teeth from years of dental neglect. His face was unevenly shaved - he always had long stray whiskers growing wild at the base of his neck. He could never quite make the extra mile to do away with them in his rushed mornings out the door on the way to his job at the docks.

John found the whole inspection racket a big joke. It was a fool's errand. Just a job, at the end of the day. A little bit dangerous too. Big, heavy things were often moving about and although things usually moved pretty slow and predictably, one never wanted to be caught under any heavy, moving cargo.

For a moment, John had a vision of dying underneath a big metal cargo hold. The crane just let it go. Some sort of horrible snafu at the wrong time and John felt himself knocked out of the universe forever, just like that - rushed off the stage of existence by the unforgiving hook that pulled him past the curtains and into the darkness.

So, how did he get here?

"Where am I?!" John suddenly demanded, standing up from the chair, realizing the whiskey and cigar again. The woman backed away, shifting her weight back onto one of her slender legs, holding the tray close to her bosom, staring up at him with cat like eyes that begged to be satisfied. "I'll be here forever," she reassured. "You don't have to be anxious."

John felt his thoughts fixating on little minor details again. Now he was thinking this woman wasn't really all that attractive as he had first thought. He'd much prefer a blond. And the steak was looking rather unimpressive on the silver platter about now, too. Steak really would go much better with a cabernet, John reasoned. And, speaking of, he'd much rather a nice glass of red to a whiskey.

"Your name is John, and your favorite drink is whiskey. You prefer cigars, your favorite food is steak and I'm your idea of the perfect woman." She waved her hand about the room, "This room was designed to your exact specifications, Max."

"Bullshit. You don't know anything about me. My name is John." The woman laughed, finding Max funny again. "Max is your favorite name. You always wished you were named Max instead of John, Max."

It was true. But how did she know that?

"It's okay, Max. You're home now. You don't ever have to go back to the docks again."

Max looked up, happy at that thought. Enough to put any seafaring man in a toasting mood. Whiskey or not.