Date: 2018.5.23

“Today we lost a great mind, one that the world will not see again for some time. He joins the likes of Da Vinci, Einstein, and Hawking. Though, the world will never know his work. That is the saddest part about this tragedy. To the world at large, Mr. del Salvador will always just be that random guy who came on stage at Microsoft press conferences.

“To me, he was so much more. He was my mate, my lover, my husband. To his mother he was Mi’ijo. To his father, brother and cousins, he was el burro. He filled our lives with joy, laughter, and bleeding ears. It is with much regret that I must say goodbye to someone whom I cherished with all my heart. It is with that in mind that I announce a new project inspired by a dream of my dead lover.

“Mig, I love you, I miss you, and I hope you are waiting for me wherever they send gays like me and you.” Dr. Jefferson said into the microphone on the plywood podium. Tears, like little globes of dew, beaded his eyes as he stepped away from it. He passed in front of my prone form, kissed me on the forehead, and took a torch from an awaiting, glowering priest and started a song:

The entire crowd of friends and family joined in as Aaron threw the torch on the burial pyre, setting it ablaze.

They had the firemen there, just in case my burial pyre decided to ignite more than just my body. As it burned my mother cried profusely, as did Aaron. I’d been slowly going away from the Judeo-Christian version of the Creator for a long, long time. I chose a burial pyre for my funeral for a few reasons, besides being slightly obsessed with Star Wars. I liked the symbolism. To me, the burning of the body was a symbol of the fragility of life. The fire, itself lead my spirit through the smoke into the next life, while the ashes of my body symbolized my body returning from whence it came. “Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust,” comes to mind when I think about this.

Anyways, enough on me, we need to get back to the story. After the fire burned itself out and everyone was ready to head out, my son stepped forward. Aiden was very intelligent for a three year old boy.  He was reading at the fifth grade level and was speaking extremely articulately even this young. That wasn’t what was impressive about him. What was impressive about this young thing, was that he was my and Aaron’s boy, biologically. Aaron was an extremely intelligent geneticist and took a sperm from me and a sperm from him and combined the DNA in the lab to make Aiden. We had a good friend be his surrogate mother, but he was our baby.

Here’s what he said, “My papi was a great man. What my dad said is true. He was extremely intelligent and deserves to have his brilliance shown.” After that he caught up with Aaron and proceeded to the feast.

~~~Fast forward 2035.8.30~~~

It was the second week of classes for Aiden. He was studying hard in the dorms while his roommate got drunk at a frat party. It was getting late and my son was already in bed. He had a desk lamp turned on over his bed and was reading out of his physics textbook. He couldn’t believe that, despite all that was going on in the state; the school one of his fathers went to was still open. He’d gotten in on several scholarships. His high school weighted GPA was a 4.35; His attendance was flawless, and he’d gotten a 34 on the ACT, and well let’s just say that he was a perfect student.

His roommate, literally his polar opposite in many ways—yet still managed to have had a 4.20 GPA in high school—came in not three minutes after Aiden had closed his text book to go to sleep. The kid was a scaley—an anthro raptor—who apparently had come from a very well off area in Colorado. He drove a car which he loved to boast was one of only 3 in the world. However rare the car was, my son could not see the point of him having an old internal combustion engine when fossil fuels were in the hundreds of dollars a gallon at this point. He knew that vehicle in particular got a maximum of 20 miles to the gallon. Going home cost the kid a thousand dollars plus. Aiden wondered what it would be like to have that kind of cash. He couldn’t conceive anything close.

The raptor was built like any other on the track team. Lean and sleek. He was muscled in the way most track stars were—built for speed, not overt strength. He was tall; there may have been about six inches of clearance for the raptor when he entered the room. He tried to enter the room quietly, but then the old dorm still used metal mechanical keys to unlock the dorm doors. It was absurd. The mechanism inside the lock was so loud that when the key entered the lock it could be faintly heard in the two neighboring dorms. So when the key entered the lock, Aiden woke with a start. In came the raptor looking remorseful for waking the human. He whispered a simple, “Sorry,” before closing the door and walking the short distance to his bed. He climbed in, looked over at Aiden and shrunk visibly at the glare my son gave him.

“Do you have any idea what fucking time it is, DesCoteaux? It’s like three in the goddamn morning! I have a fucking test tomorrow you scaled freak!” Aiden screamed, “Why must you party every fucking night!”

“Keep it down, you worm. Like you said it’s three in the morning. Do you want Joaquin to come in here? You remember the last time we woke him up?” DesCoteaux replied, only using the slur in response to my son’s own.

“That bovine meat-head can suck my uncut dick! You have got to understand that I am actually trying to have a successful college career, Damien. I don’t give a shit what you do, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my studying…or sleeping for that matter. I understand it was Thirsty Thursday, but that still means that there is still Friday to get through before the weekend starts. So please, Damien, can we try to not screw with my sleep schedule more than necessary?” my son calmed down and pleaded.

“Look, love, you need to calm yourself. Get some sleep,” Damien said.

Yes, Damien and Aiden were dating. It was pure coincidence that they happened to be paired as roommates. They’d met over the summer previous. It was very interesting to see how well the two got along. My son had a very strong dislike of anthros. He had a reason to dislike them; he was picked on for being human in middle school. It wasn’t just that, it was well known that Aiden was the result of one of my husband’s genetic experiments and because of that he was the target for all sorts of slurs and jests. So until he met Damien, Aiden had a very negative view of the dominant race on the planet. When he met Damien, he’d originally given the kid the cold shoulder, but Damien kept trying, eventually causing the human to threaten him with a trip to the Pound. Damien was a persistent boy, though and eventually won Aiden over through a display of athleticism and intelligence that only a raptor could provide.

Damien was a math major and to garner the attention of my son set up a challenge to himself: Recite the first thousand digits of pi whilst doing one jumping jack per digit, showing both brains and brawn. He started the challenge with a great amount of athletic stamina, but he only got to about 350 digits before Aiden stopped him.

“Ok, te entiendo. Te daré una cita. ¿Comprendes? ¡Una Cita! ¡Una!”[Ok, I understand you. I’ll give you one date. Understand? One date! One!] Aiden had given the raptor as a response. If you’re wondering why my son is speaking Spanish to the raptor, well as of 2020 the government of the United States required that all students in K-12 schools be taught Spanish as a second language, so most everyone understood Spanish in America in 2035. However, the reason Aiden knew was because of my influence. When he was just a bebito Aaron and I decided that I would only speak Spanish to the boy. It also was easier that way to tell which father the baby wanted.

~~~2035.8.31~~~

“Ok, students, Ve have test. You have half hour to feenish. Do gut, Ja!” came the heavily accented voice of Aiden’s Rottweiler, bull dog mix professor to announce the beginning of the test.

Aiden looked down at the test and laughed to himself silently. He’d studied to the point of exhaustion for no reason. It was over his favorite subject, partially because it was so much a part of the history of his species, but also because of his father’s best friend’s favorite quote. It was History. Specifically it was 1934 to 2012. This was an era of massive movements in technology and because of this Aiden practically obsessed over this stuff. He knew it without even having to look at a textbook.

He went through the questions:

What is the number of Jews (race not religion) killed during the Nazi Holocaust?

A.  600.000 (six hundred thousand)

B.  6.000.000 (six million)

C.  65

D.  500.000 (five hundred thousand)

Which country was Hitler from?

A.  Germany

B.  Switzerland

C.  Thailand

D.  Austria

…

Which president ordered which dictator to surrender the location of his WMDs or face the might of the US military after the 9/11/2001 attacks?

A.  Abraham Lincoln/Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte

B.  George H.W. Bush/Saddam Hussein

C.  George W. Bush/Saddam Hussein

D.  Barack Obama/Muammar Gaddafi

Those were just some of the easy questions my son encountered on this test. After about ten minutes my son handed in his test and left.