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.