Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: CHILDHOOD (03/09/17)
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TITLE: Where Did We Go Wrong? | Previous Challenge Entry
By Art Westefeld
03/14/17 -
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“So, Mom and Dad you have a daughter-in law now,” the message that he’d sent a year and a half ago read. The the viewer shifted from text to an image of a woman with red hair and green skin. His letter continued a minute after the woman's picture faded out. Bruce put it on pause and his son’s text stopped scrolling on their screen. “I wonder what species she is,” :he murmured to his wife.
Selina continued his letter, reaching past her spouse to resume the text, “She’s a synthezoid and the science officer here on the Testament.” Both parents looked and winced at each other at the ship’s name. Bruce grunted, “He found a posting on that ship of religious nuts, as I recall. But a synthezoid?”
Selina smiled at her husband, “At least he isn’t speciesist. So he’s not that much of a nut. Marrying a synthezoid... there goes our hopes for grandchildren.” She sighed and her husband responded to her.
“Would you want any grandchildren raised in a religious community of self righteous science deniers?”
Selina sighed again and asked Bruce, “How did our boy go so wrong?” They were a thoroughly modern family of the twenty-sixth century. Bruce a noted professor of biological evolution, and Selina an engineer in computer science. They started to reminisce aloud John’s childhood.
“Remember, dearest,” Bruce said quietly, “John’s analysis report from third grade? He had barely begun to understand quantum physics. And he had started to hang around those backward thinking Jones?”
Selina shuddered at the memory and responded, “And by the time he had hit puberty, he had talked about going on a ‘missions trip’ as his seventh grade service project.
"Then, He started talking about going to train in the Junior Space Officers Corp." He grimaced and continued, "We'd thought he was going through a phase as he hit his adolescence. That he'd grow out of it and take interest in a nice civilian career"
"Where did we go wrong?" Selina lamented. "We did our best to give him a normal upbringing in a well grounded home. He had the best of everything, why did he reject us and go out to live in the service among those...those Christians!" She spat the last word in disgust.
"Now, Selina, calm down. We said we'd study the Bible he sent us for our anniversary two years back. We promised the boy we would, when he went into space, to try and see his point of view, if nothing else, and to be able to argue for a more realistic perspective."
"I read it," Selina confessed to her husband. "I can see why he believes in it. It teaches that our mortal existence is not the be all and end all of our lives. That there is a way to go on existing in a place called heaven or hell. Though I'm not sure we'd like hell."
"I had read it before he gave us a copy of our own on the pub-net,": John admitted to Selina, "As a man of science I can't accept all the fables in it, but I can see where an idealist like our John would have found something in it to escape our overly materialistic world view."
Selina laughed as Bruce told her this, "You mean like the story that this 'God' created the world and all life in six days or that He destroyed it in a planetary flood years after that and saved such a small gene pool of people and animals to repopulate the planet?"
Bruce smiled as he shared his wife's response to the book that had taken over John's mind as surely as the green woman they had seen earlier had taken his heart. "Well at least they won't have any kids to dash their hopes for them as John did for us when he was a boy." They resumed the letter and saw that John had saved a surprise until the end.
He concluded, "Jayde and I are adopting a pair of orphans from a colony planet where they had a famine. We'll send you a picture of Nick and Katie,if and when it goes through. Love always, John and Jayde."
"There go the grand kids!" They groaned in unison.
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