Jericho 01-02

            Pete was occupied talking to my mother, saying things like “Becca, where did you get this fish?” and “have you heard back from Lydia about Thursday?”, but his words came out muddied with the sounds of half eaten fish flesh slowly mashing its way between teeth and tongue.

            Pete didn’t even try to have manners, it was one of the many reasons I despised him.

            My mother sat at the opposite end of the table and kept up with polite conversation between dainty bites.

            Daintiness was a side effect of her upbringing.

            My mother grew up in a political dynasty, her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and uncles were all leading members of various Earth 2 councils. The side effect of having such a well to do family was that she and her sisters grew up in a state of perpetual elegance where manners were essential and rudeness was condemned.  She grew up walking on eggshells, because if she made one misstep the entire family could suffer.

            So my mother kept herself in the background, just another smiling face in the crowd, and let her sisters (now both provincial Senators), steal the spotlight with their playful antics. She always knew that, when the time was right, she would use her natural beauty to find a man who was high enough in status to please her family, but unglamorous enough to avoid publication, and settle down.

            When my mother met my father she knew he was the one. He had a fantastic job in a field that was both lucrative and safe, but better yet he had the sort of infectious confidence that made you forget about your own shortcomings and believe you could do anything just because he said so.

            It didn’t take much for my dad to fall in love with my mother either; all he had to do was see the freckles on her face to know that she was the one.

            My mother was very pretty, in a sort of dried out way. Everything about her was thin and fragile, from her whisper blonde hair to her nearly translucent skin, she had become more and more like a china doll with age.

            Her freckles were unique. They danced across her face and arms like the stars dot the cosmos.

            As a baby I remember spending time drawing lines from dot to dot, making constellations on her skin.

            Freckles are rare on E2, they are part of a genetic legacy that our ancestors on old earth attempted to stomp out through selective breeding.

            The result was easily seen at this very dinner table, the people on Earth 2 and surrounding planets were blonde haired and light eyed, with skin that ranged from translucent white to the well sunned tan that Pete wore with pride.

            Father off, mostly in the outworlds, were people with skin colors that ranged across the entire spectrum… I had even heard of people with skin so dark it looked purple, but I didn’t know if I would ever get the chance to explore the outworlds.

            “So Sport, you nervous about the big move?”

            The sound of Pete’s voice derailed my train of thought.

            “Well sport?” Pete was a fan of diminutive names, he never called me Jason, it was always “Sport” or “Champ” or “Smalls”.  It made me want to puke on the table.

            My mother cut me off before I could make a sassy retort, saying “Are you all packed? Do you need me to go through your bags?”

            This was about the twentieth time she offered to go through my bag, she knew very well that the center would provide me with everything I could ever possibly want, but fussing over me seemed to make her feel better.

            It was hard for me to sustain my anger at being sent away when all my mother wanted to do was make sure every last second I spent at home was comfortable and happy, she even allowed me to sleep in the holochamber, something that had been forbidden after I had fallen off the platform in my sleep when I was seven.

            “He’s packed mom” David said for me, “and you’ve packed and repacked his bag every night this week.”

            My mother nodded. “I suppose you’re right, it’s just…”, she didn’t finish this thought, just looked at me and for a moment.

            “The boy will be fine Rebecca, he’s going to the best school in the system, he’ll be better off there than he ever was here.” Pete punctuated his words by siphoning some seaweed salad into his mouth and releasing a chorus of slippery sounds that resounded off the thick walls of the dinning room, thoroughly killing my appetite.

            He continued as a smile crossed his face in a small, yet menacing, gesture; “You know, we’re almost lucky he was expelled…”

            Pete’s words stabbed me directly in the gut.

***

            The chain of events that had resulted in my expulsion began with the most innocent of activities.

            One morning, months ago, as I sat at the table enjoying my breakfast, I had a sudden burst of inspiration.

            Today, I had thought, I am going to build a gravity field generator.

            This was fairly routine for me.

            A side effect of my genius was that the public school I attended really didn’t have much to offer me in the way of classes in math or science. When I completed the standard curriculum in those departments at age six my parents and the school came together and created a personalized education plan that involved allowing me to do projects of my own choosing.

            Each semester I would write one or more project proposals, submit them to my teachers for approval, and then spend the hours when I wasn’t taking classes in literature, music, or health, working in one of the school’s labs. They didn’t bother to grade me, the work was usually pretty far above most of my teachers.

            At 14 I had gone through the process around 20 times, all successful, and my teachers barely even bothered to read my proposals anymore.

             Still no one needed to question my plans, Gravity Field Generators are hardly rare, and I definitely wasn’t the first kid to build one as a school project. 

            What caused the trouble was how I chose to test my generator.

            You see, most gravity field generators work in such a way that when in use the entire area affected has the exact same amount of gravity. This comes in handy when applied to starships and space stations, ensuring that interstellar travelers don’t lose bone density over time.

            However, I made a Gravity Field Generator that could vary gravity on a millimeter by millimeter basis.

            Last Tuesday, in the school’s lab, there was 500 gallons of crystal clear water floating in a near perfect sphere just below the ceiling. I pressed a button and a sliver of that sphere compressed inwards. The touch of another button caused the same section to expand.

            I played for a while; enjoying the diverse combination of conditions I could render. The sphere grew spikes and divots. It became waveforms, spirals and flattened out until it was nearly one-dimensional.

            But then, it all came crashing down.

            I mean this literally, I pushed it too hard and the generator malfunctioned sending gallons upon gallons of water crashing down onto the lab floor. It swam across the floor, over the tables, and under the door into the hallways, damaging property and my reputation as it went.

            They dragged me into the office soaked to the bone.

            Accidents happen, but the level of property damage I caused was far beyond the threshold of what we were allowed to call an accident.

            My Mother and Pete were called in.

            The school wasn’t sure what to do with me; they had never really dealt with a situation like this.

            A meeting was held and the final verdict was expulsion, we would have the opportunity to appeal our case in twenty days.

            After the meeting I watched as Pete pulled my mother aside and whispered the words that fully sealed my fate. She would send me to the Center.

            She felt she had no other choice.

----
This is the end of Chapter 1 of my Jericho story. It is in desperate need of editing, but I think I covered a lot of ground.

More to come -KayPee