Harry Shields
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been my darling young one?

I’m making my way down a corridor in the United Nations building in Manhattan. My heart pounding out of control. My temples beating so hard against my brain I can hear nothing else but their thud-thud. 

I’m carrying in my pocket a little metal object which will bring utter destruction to everybody around me in just a few moments. I am the bringer of doom. I am the savior of my human race. I am a confused, desperate man who knows what he needs to do. I find the right door. I enter. I am about to unleash a destruction on a greater scale than the world has ever seen. I am about to save my race. How did I get here? How did I get here?

* * * 

“Now, Eusebio, do you happen to have an idea of how many tigers were freely roaming the wilds of Asia during the late nineteenth century, just three hundred years ago?”

I’m sitting in a comfortable, conference room, with leather chairs and oak paneling, thick carpet and soft lights. I’m with two d-humans. At least, that’s what we call them. They just think of themselves as humans. To them, we’re the ones who don’t fit. To them, we’re Primals. Made from primal human DNA. Completely unenhanced.

One of the d-humans, a beautiful woman, looks like she’s in her thirties. Then again, all d-human women look beautiful, so this doesn’t distinguish her. Her name is Naomi Aramovich. She has strawberry blonde, slightly wavy hair, warm brown eyes overflowing with kindness. The other d-human is tall and muscular, with a strong face sporting a thick mustache. D-humans are all much taller than us but this one’s real big - close to seven feet. His eyes blue. His face cold and steely. His name Harry Shields. He’s the one asking the questions.

“No. No idea,” I reply. How would I know the answer to a question like that? Sure, I’m a history teacher. But not that kind of history. I teach my tenth-graders about the American Indians, the Aboriginals. The people who roamed free on this earth before men like Harry Shields came and devastated them.

“Well, best estimates are there were over a hundred thousand of these magnificent creatures in the jungles of India and Southeast Asia.”

“Uh huh.” I had no idea where he was going with this.

“And do you know how many tigers existed in the wild a hundred years later, at the beginning of the third millennium?”

“No.”

“Well, believe it or not, there were less than five thousand of these great creatures left in the wild by that time. Of course, by then, there were conservation projects under way to save the tiger from extinction. Sadly, they didn’t work. Do you know the last time a tiger was seen in the wild?”

“No, I don’t.”

“The mid-twenty thirties, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Thankfully, the genetic code had been collected by then, so we’ve been able to reconstruct them in our d-reservations.

“Now, Eusebio, let me ask you this. Why did the tiger become extinct?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I responded. “I guess hunting… and no more jungle.”

“Not bad. Now, who do you think was responsible for the hunting?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I guess probably the English colonialists… and then the local people.”

“And who do you think was responsible for the loss of the jungle?”

“Probably a lot of people. The local developers, I guess, who cleared the jungles for farming… and the villagers.”

“And what, Eusebio, is in common between all those people you just described?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered.

“Think about the only thing that all these people have in common.”

“I can’t think of anything. They were all human beings,” I replied.

“Wrong, Eusebio, not human beings. They were all Primals. It was the Primal race, your race, who colluded in the extinction of the tigers, wasn’t it, Eusebio?”

There was nothing I could say. I nodded.

“Please speak up, Eusebio.” Harry Shields’ tone was more haranguing, more prosecutorial. “Was the Primal race responsible, single-handedly, for the extinction of the tigers in the wild?”

“Yes. I guess it was.” I have to tell the truth. I have no choice. I’m sitting in a neurographic chair. A special arm chair, with another set of “arms” extending around the back and both sides of my head. These “arms” are a few inches away from my head. I can hear a slight hum around me, and I know that millions of scans each second are piercing through the neurons of my brain, creating neurographic images of my thoughts. It immediately detects if I lie and sets off an alarm. They call that a “neurographic event”. I’ve already had one of those, and I don’t want another.

“Now answer me this, Eusebio. Was there ever a commission held to identify the responsible parties? Was there ever an ‘extinction crimes’ tribunal? Did the Primal race even call it a crime?”

“Not that I know of,” I was forced to reply.

“Now, Counsel Aramovich and the Primal Rights group have been arguing for years in this PEPS session that it’s a crime, prima facie, to carry out the extinction of the Primal species. Please answer me this, Eusebio. Why should we view it as a crime to implement the extinction of the Primals when the Primals themselves were prepared to drive countless other species to extinction without anyone being held accountable?”

I was stunned. How dare this d-human, who looked liked he wouldn’t give a damn if every animal in the world disappeared… how dare he use this argument to extinguish the future of my race! 

The PEPS session. That’s what I was participating in. The Proposed Extinction of the Primal Species. A set of hearings at the United Nations, going on for years, about whether our race should be eliminated from this earth. There are seven billion d-humans in the world and just three billion of us. But that’s three billion too many, from their point of view. And I’m the Primal witness, on the stand for my race. That’s why I was abducted from my little community of Tuckers Corner. Because Naomi Aramovich and her fellow Primal Rights activists chose me to defend my race. And I seemed to be doing a lousy job of it so far.

Excerpted from Requiem of the Human Soul © Copyright 2012 by Jeremy R. Lent. Reprinted with permission by Libros Libertad. All rights reserved.