The One Percent
by L. B. Zinger
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
June 13, 2060
The five of us were dressed in our best and sitting on rusting metal chairs in the Colonial courthouse. This was the final step to get us college scholarships in the United States. As American expats, we were eligible for special scholarships in competition with another 5,000 or so teens living around the world. The room was stifling. Outside, the sun was hot and relentless, and there was no sea breeze to cool us.
One by one, we were dissected by a team of four men and one woman.
Of them, only the woman stood out. The males were interchangeable, wearing similar suits, white shirts, distinguished only by their ties and the amount of hair on their heads. Three were engineers, and the fourth was an Economics professor. The woman was a government official from the Department of Education. Her credentials and name now escape me. She was intimidating, and the room became silent.
A tall, thin blonde with piercing blue eyes, she wore a navy silk suit with a pale gray camisole and matching sandals. Despite the humidity, her hair did not frizz. I envied her. Amia nudged me, pointing out that we could be mother and daughter or even sisters, we looked so much alike. A look of pure venom from the woman cut off all whispering.
The examiners took their time with us and, as they did, the anxiety among my friends was palpable. The men shuffled folders with our letters and scores, which unnerved us further.
Alfie was asked about drug cartels in which his Colombian grandparents might or might not have participated. Dimitri, a political refugee, was asked about his grandparents’ and parents’ roles in international terrorism. Amia was asked how many generations of her family had lived on welfare in the U.S. Connie had it worse: they disputed her claim of descendance from Thomas Jefferson and asked her about prostitution and entrapment. Before Connie, each of my friends had handled the interrogation calmly.
Connie lost it, stamped her foot and yelled at them: “How can I be held accountable for anything my ancestors did or did not do? I’m telling you my story as I know it.” She stopped herself there, thankfully. The woman examiner smirked a bit and then shrugged at her companions.
I was last.
As she faced me, she seemed openly hostile. What had I done to deserve this? If her goal was intimidation, she was succeeding. I hid my feelings as best I could but felt the creep of sweat on my forehead and upper lip. I focused on being prepared for anything.
“I have only one question for you, Dinah Armstrong.” Her eyes bored into mine, and I shrank into my sixteen-year old self. She leaned forward. “What crime did your grandmother commit to get you and your family sent here?”
The room went silent. I hadn’t expected that question, and I was temporarily stunned. Criminal? My Grandma was no criminal! A flush of anger replaced anxiety. As I fought to compose my answer, my mind raced back to the written exam we had taken three months ago, the exam that had gotten us here.
* * *
Three months earlier
Only the scratch of pencils on test papers broke the silence until Alfie slammed his notebook on a fly that had been grooming itself on his desk. He peeled the body off and dropped it onto the dirt floor between us, both of us shaking with silent laughter.
Father Paul’s brown hands landed on our desks, and he gave us a bemused look.
“Bored?” he asked. Father Paul was our teacher, mentor, and confidant since the beginning of high school. The Catholic school in town went only to eighth grade; after that you were on your own. Our families had scraped stipend money together and appealed to the Jesuits for a teacher. The Jesuits had sent Father Paul, whom we all adored.
We shook our heads “no” while Father Paul’s head moved up and down in the affirmative. He sighed.
“Never matter,” he said in his British public-school accent. He called time and collected the exam papers to be sent off for official grading.
“Now then, we have new books with the latest revisions to American History. I doubt this will be covered in the interviews, but you never know.” As he handed out the shrink-wrapped volumes, he avoided mentioning that only a few of us would get interviews.
I looked around at my eleven classmates. We had been together forever, and the possibility that we could be separated in a little over a year hit me. We were American citizens, expats on Naneeda, a small island in the Pacific Ocean. We lived on an old Air Force base called Camp Calhoun in trailers and old barracks.
Our grandparents had been sent here in the turmoil of the 2030s and, thirty years later, we were competing against each other, and some of us wouldn’t make the cut. This exam was the first hurdle. Instead of friends, we were now potential winners and losers.
We weren’t the only camp. Abandoned military bases had been repurposed to accept exiles from the mainland after COVID-19 decimated the population. Scattered across the world, there were thousands of kids my age, but only 1% would get a scholarship. None of us had money to go to college, so this was the first rung on our ladder to success. The alternatives were jobs in trades, call centers, or like my parents and older brother, work as mercenaries for private contractors.
I had dreamed of becoming a doctor since I was five and broke my arm. The local doctor had fixed it and, when I was older, let me tag along on “rounds” until she moved back to Australia. I worked hard at my studies and volunteered at the hospital; all I needed to do now was prove that I deserved one of those scholarships.
My friends filed out, reluctantly accepting their copies of America Moving Toward the 22nd Century. I sat at my desk, looking at the cover for a long while, then slit the wrapper with a fingernail and flipped through. The List of Authors included generals, politicians and commentators I had heard on satellite radio.
The book started with the events of September 11, 2001 and continued to the re-election of the President for an unprecedented eighth term in office in 2056. I wondered how he had bypassed the Twenty-Second Amendment. With his election, one party controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate and was able to keep that majority, making laws that enabled him to continue in office indefinitely, “in order to preserve democracy and protect the American people from outside threats.”
I read that the pandemic had been brought in by immigrants and spread through minority communities, overloading hospitals and killing over a million people. These people were described as jobless, homeless and hopeless slackers who drained the economy and took jobs and benefits from legitimate European-Americans. Was that me? My skin started to crawl.
After his inauguration in January, 2029, the Great Reformer gave an Executive order to screen the population for “inherited abilities, so that the country could separate the weak from the strong.” Those who had disabilities were sterilized, and others with “inherited tendencies for community burden” were told that they should leave.
What was an “inherited tendency”? Student visas were cancelled and immigrants deported. My jaw dropped and my heart raced. What?! This didn’t sound like Jeffersonian democracy. Grandma had told me a totally different tale of voluntary exile due to unemployment. My parents had told me nothing.
I looked around. Father Paul was grading papers, his half-glasses tipped far down on his nose.
“Did you read this?” I pointed to a table listing the inherited defects that were undesirable.
Coming over, he leaned in and murmured, “mental illness, promiscuity, generational Welfare abuse.”
He rotated a chair around to sit facing me and gently closed the book. He pulled out his pipe, lit it and soon the fragrant smoke percolated through the room. He seemed to draw himself together.
“Like many civilizations, the United States had a crisis of identity. We saw this when we studied the Greeks, the Roman Empire and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, right?”
I met his brown eyes, which were full of concern, and nodded.
“It was a country started by immigrants seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity but, after 200 plus years, the collective consciousness denied the benefit of immigration, and shut its borders to new people and new ideas.”
“I understood that immigrants brought technological advances that allowed the U.S. to become a superpower,” I broke in.
He nodded. “That was fine if the immigrants were Europeans. In the late 20th century, refugees from gang wars and revolutions in developing countries fled over the borders, looking for a better life. They were willing to do manual and low-paying work, and they took jobs that blue-collar workers thought belonged to them.”
“I guess that would cause friction if people whose families had been around a long time lost jobs,” I said.
There was anger in his voice. “This became a conflict of poor and middle-class white people against other poor people, fueled by the Great Reformer. People died. I worked at a detention center for Central American migrants in El Paso, trying to help any way I could. One night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window of my house. It was a terrifying time.”
“Where do I fit in?” I asked, puzzled.
It was a moment or two before he answered. “Powerful, wealthy people, the top 1% of the population, convinced the government to get rid of the threat posed by minorities, and they used DNA testing to screen people and exile them.”
He looked at me intently, examining my reaction. I was stunned but still didn’t see why we were exiled. I was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenager, the All-American Girl. My friends looked the same to me. What did a minority look like anyway?
Instead of asking that question, “What’s it like now?” came out of my mouth.
“Nothing has changed. It takes moral courage for a country to face its faults, and the U.S. isn’t there yet. It’s easier to blame bad genes for all of society’s failures. When similar movements occurred in Europe, the governments shut them down.”
He looked at me intently. I tried to keep my face still, but I’m sure I failed. I could feel myself shaking inside. My eyes teared up. Why was I thinking that I could get a U.S. scholarship? “I have a lot to think about.”
He nodded, still looking concerned. “I’m here if you want to talk.”
“Thanks.” As I left, I noticed that he had gone back to his desk and picked up his pencil, but he wasn’t writing, just staring off into space.
* * *
My head spinning, I headed over to the old ballroom where my friends and I hung out. It was the only place with computers and Wi-Fi. Maybe I could talk to Amia or Connie about all this.
A gang of 6th-graders were playing some stupid game on one of the terminals. The volume was high enough to make my ears ring. A few years ago, I would have been one of them, but suddenly I felt old. Would I be in the 1% who got a U.S. scholarship, or was I genetically undesirable despite my hard work? Did my friends know all this?
Like a fool, I didn’t have a backup plan for college, but I couldn’t afford it anyway. I didn’t want to become a mercenary or work in a call center. I had never asked my friends about their plans. All we talked about was the next step, not what we would do if it didn’t work. What kind of friend doesn’t ask? Maybe I was afraid of the answer.
Connie and Amia were watching cat videos. Done with e-mails and social media, they were just talking and laughing. Amia patted the seat next to her, and through half of a buttered roll motioned me to sit down.
“Did you look at the new History text?” I asked. They shook their heads, pointing to the untouched shrink-wrap on the books hanging out of their backpacks.
I went on. “It says some things about kicking people out of the country based on their DNA profiles that I just can’t believe.”
“Believe it,” Amia cut in. “My grandparents were sent here because they were from Jamaica. Within two days, their bank accounts were frozen, and they lost everything, thanks to the new Congress that came in in 2031. All based on eugenics bull.”
Connie was nodding slowly, her hazel eyes troubled and her reddish gold hair dull in the faulty fluorescent light.
“But what about us?” Then I bit my tongue. Amia looked angry already, and I didn’t want her ticked off at me for implying that Connie and I were something she wasn’t. Why did being Jamaican matter?
“You know how Jefferson was tall with red hair?” Connie didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, he had a lot of kids with one of his slaves, and she’s a distant relative of mine, so don’t let my color fool you. In the eugenics of today, I’m still African. It doesn’t count that one of my ancestors was a President.”
I wondered about my family. If my two best friends were here because of genetics, my genetics must be flawed, too. Grandma’s unemployment tale was a story for little kids, and I had believed it. Stupid me! Confused, embarrassed and annoyed with myself, I gathered my things to leave.
Amia held my arm and turned to face me, looking sympathetic. “Dinah, it’s common knowledge that your Grandma hasn’t ever told her story to anyone here. No one knows why you guys are here, and we really don’t care. My grandparents saw this stuff in the 1960s and had no delusions about what was going on. This time, the white folk permanently got rid of us.”
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by L. B. Zinger
