Hatred of the World

I brooded alone on a park bench within the bio-dome, ignoring the artificial world on an artificially sunny day. My fifteen-year-old mind focused on fifteen-year-old things, things I would later learn to be of little consequence. To a boy not yet a man, they were important things, even if only to linger in memory as faded echoes.

My self-imposed isolation shattered as a basketball slapped sharp against my cheek. Through the sting and sudden adrenaline, the figure of a leering teenager a year older stood in the middle of the red haze of vision. He was cyber-enhanced, large, mean, and looming, even from afar. I couldn't recall his name, but I remembered his taunts in the hallways of academy. I assumed him a year older, but he might one of the countless held back mechanical misanthropes wandering this Mars town.

I rose to my feet without realizing it, my fists clenched.

"Hey monkey, give me the ball," he commanded in a deep voice, his ugly face with its ugly fat nose split by an ugly, crooked grin. "Come on furry, give me the ball."

I learned it's hard to be a minority. It's worse when you're a minority to other minorities. I felt an irrational shame for my chimpanzee heritage, as if I deserved to be the focus of their hatred of the world.

"Give me the ball, chimp."

I reached down and picked up the dull, worn sphere, only vaguely orange. I had a decision to make, and quick.

"You deaf, you fucking faggot chimp? Give me the ball."

My hands tightened around the basketball. If I gave it back, he would throw it again. I only forestalled the inevitable. I made ready to heave it into that grotesque mug, to charge into my larger foe. With my blood, I would buy a few weeks of grudging respect until my next beating.

A rough hand shoved him in the side of his face and knocked him down. He hit the concrete hard. Looming over him was an overweight miner. I knew him to be Joe, a proud "true" human from Earth whom somehow, by cruel Providence, wound up in this hellhole.

"You causin' trouble, sparky?" he mocked. "You causin' trouble, robo-boy?"

My tormenter lay on the ground, a mix of fear and defiance simmering in his dull eyes. Although far superior physically, he knew it against the law to tangle with a pure. He continued to cower as Joe prodded him with a toe.

"You ain't so tough," continued Joe. "I've never seen one of you tinheads pick a fair fight."

I should have been jubilant. I should have laughed with him, but Joe never looked at me. He wasn't doing this for my benefit. Just like the cyber-enhanced wasn't only mad at me. Just like me brooding alone beneath a false sun.

Joe walked away, cursing those "damn robots" and lamenting his fate on the red planet.

My bully picked himself from off the ground. I saw something profoundly miserable in his expression, something I identified with. I handed him the ball. "Here you go," I said.

I left him standing there, not another word spoken. He never said a hello or a thank you afterward. He never so much as glanced at me.

He never picked on me again.

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