Fate of the Future Generations

“Grandpa!”

A tiny voice crept through the hall, making its way to the work area where an old man sat, hunched over various blue prints under the pale yellow lamp light, pushing his large spectacles back to the bridge of his nose.

The old man didn’t hear the tiny voice calling to him. Nor did he feel the small oh so fragile hand tug at his sleeves. He kept his mind on his work, fingers fiddling away at the fist sized contraption, grumbling when it spit some oil onto his glasses.

“Grandpa. Grandpa. “The girls fingers, wrapped in her handkerchief, wiped his glasses clean, her lace, pale pink hanky now stained with his turmoil.

“O’ Grace, what’re you doin ‘er? You shouldn’t be down ‘er, it’s dangerous and dirty, you could get hurt.”

The old man pulled his glasses off, his eyes now small and wrinkled. The flesh folding over itself, but the paled, sweaty and grimy flesh covered in oil and soot, could not hide the clear blue eyes, nearly glassy from the strain of seeing the girls face in the dimming light. Beneath them sat dark and puffy bags of weariness. He had been working on this project so long, so many years slaving away for the revolution man wanted to achieve.

He released his glasses to her care and ran his hand through his silvery, nearly bald head. He frowned ever so slightly, his back was so tense, shoulders tight and his neck felt like it may never move again. The muscles pulled, the kinks in his spine popped as he straightened himself. He then placed his palms on his jaw and swiftly twisted. The violent crack that erupted startled both himself and the young girl beside him. His glasses clattered to the floor as she shrieked.

He released a low groan and repeated the movement in the other direction, this time not such a loud sound came, just small pops. He reassured the child with a smile, her face then too broke into a gap-toothed grin. His shoulders still remained as un-relaxed as ever, his small stretch doing little to relieve them. He rolled his shoulders in their socket, clenching his teeth as the muscles pulled and the bones ground against one another. Grace shyly placed the glasses, rather lopsidedly, onto the old man’s nose. He made no movement to fix them, just continued to stretch and roll his shoulders.

“Grandpa, can you really fix this?” The little girl pointed to the metal contraption that had been his trouble for days.

“Bet’cha I can.” He pushed his glasses straight, giving up on relaxing his body, and picked up the metal contraption from where it rested.

“This piece ‘er came from one of them old planes from the 21st century. It’s god darn useful in our Space Racers.”

“Wouldn’t that make it really-really-really-really old?” She ticked off the number of ‘really’ on her fingers, switching them when she felt she got the number wrong. The old man only smiled at her, glad that he can help in this war, even if it was just on these mechanical pieces— if only to save her generation.

“In this day and age sweetie,” he pulled her closer, tapping her on the nose like he would when she was just a toddler. “Anything is used to fight that war out there. “

“You mean the one daddy went to fight?” She rearranged her face to something akin to that of a brave fool. Her fingers took the shape of the latest laser gun, the ones they used in those movies, and pretended to shoot enemies down.

“Daddy said that they were destroying the planet.” She relaxed herself to a normal stance and stared directly at her grandfather. It surprised him how much she looked like her mother, same facial expression, same stance— the one her mother wore when she wanted the truth.

“But why would they do that?”

This was the question the old man knew was coming. The one that he wanted, but at the same time, didn’t want to answer. To reveal to her the secret that their race was prone to doing, cursed really, would shatter her. No matter how many were able to break free, the rest were still going to be blindfolded and thus fated to continue their curse.

“There are a lot of people on this old planet and some of them were not as nice as we would want them to be.”

Grace looked at him quizzically, her head tilting to the side, trying to discover if what he told her was the entire truth, If there was a hidden meaning behind his words.

“Then why are we called mankind?”

“Grace, sweetie,” he pulled her onto his lap, uncaring if the oil stained her pretty white dress. “We all just need to remember that God and Mother Nature did not intend for us to fight or abuse the land or others.”

He knew his words were cryptic to her, but one day she’ll understand. For now he was content to leave her as she was, innocent. For how could he tell a child of 5 years the truth of the world? How mankind was truthfully unkind, to other and to their planet? How could he tell her that they were created on another planet many centuries ago? How could he tell her that that planet they were created on was nothing but a lifeless rock, all from their own doing and the war now in progress was to prevent history from repeating? But then how could anyone dump that on the future generations?