Divine Heritage, Chapter 2
part of a novel by David Sims
Brookstone School GSC
Columbus, Georgia
Mid- to late 2044
BROOKSTONE School had a minimum-IQ policy applicable to candidates for enrollment. They didn’t go by school grades because different schools had differing grade standards, and a 3.5 grade point average at one school might mean a lot less than the same average from another did. They didn’t go by standardized test scores, either, because academic frauds have been known to happen. What they use today to decide who deserves admission is the IQ score on a version of Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices that has been hyped-up to Mensa standards. There are a few other requirements, such as being fluent in English and having an acceptable degree of general academic knowledge.
I must say, though, that I approve of the minimum-IQ requirement. Every really good school that wants to stay really good ought to adopt the same policy. It tends to keep the hooligans out.
Still, I’d never had my IQ tested, and since it was necessary to submit a legally certified IQ test score to the school prior to admission next fall, Dad took me to have the test done. I dressed really pretty and used my innocent-little-girl look, with the cuteness level set at about eighty percent. I was quite the bouncy young lady that day. Just the sort of skippy blonde you’d expect to hit about 95 on an IQ test. Definitely not Supergirl.
Yes, I was feeling mischievous. Sue me.
I must have done well with my act, since the lady who took Dad’s money and signed me in sort of rolled her eyes in anticipation of my demonstration of stupidity. Then we sat down in the lobby because we had to wait for the previous round of test-takers to finish.
It turned out that lots of parents were trying to get their progeny into one exclusive school or another, and I met with several other Brookstone hopefuls, about half of whom probably didn’t have a chance. I could tell that most of them thought the same about me.
Dad thought that I was carrying the empty-head routine too far and admonished me. I pouted at him outrageously.
Finally, the earlier group left the building, and it was our turn in the Inner Sanctum. We kids were led into a large classroom with three tables running the length of it. There was a clock on the wall, which was apparently redundant because there was an electronic timer at the head of the table and two grown-ups, a man and a woman, each wearing a stopwatch. I sat at the place to which I’d been shown and continued to look dumb and pretty. Some boys across the table snickered and pointed at me. A girl was looking at me out of the corner of her eye while whispering behind her hand into another girl’s ear. The other girl nodded and laughed.
Now the test booklets were being passed around. We were cautioned not to open them until permitted. We were told to write our names on the cover of the booklet. We were told that the test was timed and advised to skip any of the picture-sets we couldn’t figure out quickly, and come back to them later if there was still enough time. We were warned that they would be watching us all closely and that cheaters would be disqualified immediately. The lady with the stopwatch wished us all luck, while the man set the timer, both of them pushed a button on their stopwatches and said “Begin!”
In case you’ve never taken a Raven’s type of test, I’ll tell you that the “questions” are a set of pictures that are laid out in a logical evolution of design. You have to see the pattern of the changes in the pictures you are shown, and make the proper choice for the missing picture from a set of alternatives shown at the page bottom. It is, in fact, sort of a multiple choice test. But the language of the test is pure logic. Raven’s is one of those culture-free tests for which it doesn’t matter what your cultural background is, or which languages you speak.
The early progressions are easy. The circle starts small, gets big, and then bigger, so of course the right answer is biggest, which is one of the choices you can make. But the later progressions aren’t so easy. Objects changed shape. They began having filled-or-empty rules and priorities regarding what is visible when an occultation happens. They acquired spin and paths of motion, sometimes rotating or moving clockwise or counterclockwise in the plane of the paper, but sometimes rotating perpendicular to the plane of the paper. The objects begin having other objects associated with them in various ways. And there were picture-sets in which several different patterns were going on at the same time.
Some of the kids around me were sweating by the fifth problem. I was having trouble with the eleventh, and, just as I was getting desperate my mind did its goddess thing again. After that, I had no more problems until the last picture-set. Try as I might, I couldn’t see any pattern to it. Not even with goddess-mode on. So I left it uncompleted.
I checked my work and had finished checking about the time the timer went ding and the grown-ups called out “Stop. Now! Close your booklets.”
We were shown out of the same door we’d entered by, and I found Dad still waiting in the lobby for me.
“How soon will I know how badly I did?” I asked him.
“Oh, probably in about a week.” He smiled indulgently. “This testing company must score a great many tests, so they probably won’t get to yours for a few days.”
During that week, I graduated from Morningside Elementary School as first-in-class for 2044. As expected, Sarah Weisman didn’t enjoy the proceedings at all. She was fourth-in-class, behind me, Peter Chu, and Brian Smith.
We heard back from the testing company, all right. Right after our Congressman called to convey his congratulations. And then the Governor did the same thing. Which left my dad and I looking at each other and wondering whether this was the customary procedure. If so, then that testing company sure gave its customers their money’s worth.
And then the company’s representative arrived at our doorstep to congratulate me in person. Dad was casual as he invited her into our home, though I knew he was anxious. I wasn’t. I’d taken the test. I knew that I’d done well, having been unable to find the right answer to only one question on a test having many questions. The representative was a middle-aged woman with dark brown hair.
“So, what’s my IQ?” I asked her.
“We don’t know,” said the representative, grinning. She smoothed her skirt out. Her eyes were wide, as if she had never had to say that before.
“Wait a minute,” my dad said, showing some irritation. “We paid good money so that — ”
“You misunderstand me, Mr. Jones,” the lady told my dad. She turned to me. “What I mean is your IQ is at least 180. We don’t know how much higher than that your IQ is because that’s as high as this test goes.”
“And I didn’t even answer the last question.”
The company lady laughed.
“You weren’t supposed to,” she said, patting my shoulder. “The last question was designed to have no pattern at all. All the choices at the bottom were wrong. You did the best thing you could have done.”
Well. I hadn’t thought of that possibility. I should have.
The lady congratulated us again and told us that a certified copy of my scored test had been mailed to Brookstone School in Columbus, as we’d requested. Then she returned down the walk to her car and drove away.
And then the media started showing up.
* * *
If you’ve never seen yourself on TV, being praised to the skies by reporters, pundits, politicians, and head-nodding news anchormen, try it sometime. It’s a real ego-trip. But the praise isn’t quite as heartfelt as they try to make it sound. To them, I was just something to talk about, something they could gain views and ratings and sponsors from. Since most of the media bosses are political leftists, I’m sure that they’d much rather I were black.
“Yesterday, our reporter Paul Siegalman interviewed Miss Jones at her home in Druid Hills. Paul, what was your impression of Atlanta’s young genius?”
“Frank, Brenda Jones makes quite an impression when you meet her in person. You just wouldn’t expect someone who is only eleven years old to speak like she does. She can project a certain air of naivety one moment, and in the next instant surprise you with her razor-sharp intellect. I’ve never in my life been so…”
They’ve been saying stuff like that on every channel.
“Paul, we understand that one of the teachers at Morningside gave her a difficult math question, something at the college level.”
“That’s right, Frank. The teacher is a ‘Mrs. Johns,’ the school’s Math teacher. It was a calculus question that Brenda Jones allegedly solved in her head.”
“Really? Not even using a calculator?”
“According to the teacher, no. She is said to have worked it out in her head almost instantly.”
“Amazing. Just amazing. Now in other news, Atlanta Mayor LaShawn Devon Brown has denied any involvement in the drug trafficking scandal at…”
Hm.
It’s all fluff, of course. They don’t know that I’m studying celestial mechanics. Or that I know how to do fast Fourier transforms. Or that I’ve solved a non-linear differential equation regarding time-to-fall in a plunge orbit. Or that I knew why you should never divide by —
2(5!) − cot [4 arctan 0.2 + ½ i ln i] − 1
— before I’d ever heard of Leonhard Euler.
They don’t care about the particulars. All they’re doing, really, is boosting my fame as a means of boosting their profits.
Tonight’s newscast should show that snooty Sarah Weisman her place, but lately I haven’t been able to say why I should care about what airs someone like her puts on.
Also, being famous for a good reason isn’t a bad thing, but it comes with a risk. Although it will predispose people to think well of you, they will also expect the best of you, which means that your public manners had better improve if they aren’t already suitable for royal company. The higher you go socially, the harder you’ll fall if you lose favor. I know more than most people do about the theory of beautiful deportment, but I’m still enough of a tween to find its implementation somewhat difficult.
* * *
Summer vacation passed as it usually does in Atlanta. I surfed the web, tweeted, and watched videos. White kids can’t safely go outside to play because of the “youth” gangs that control the street, sometimes in defiance of, and sometimes in complicity with, the mostly-black Atlanta Police Department. Druid Hills wasn’t as bad a neighborhood as most of Atlanta is, but it’s bad enough that we don’t wander around outside. Even the front yard can be dangerous. And yet sometimes a bit of neighborhood traveling can’t be avoided, and it was while I was walking to Nancy Petersen’s house that I beat up my first black.
Or, rather, I beat up four of them, after they started trouble with me. Blacks almost never attack solo, but nearly always in pairs or in packs, when they think that they have overwhelming advantage on their side. I suppose that a lone black might attack a cripple or someone he perceived as being too weak to defend himself. But otherwise they go in groups to stalk their prey.
I think that they had rape on their minds, even though I wasn’t pulchritudinous at age eleven. Black teenagers don’t care about that. They’ll rape old women, fat women, ugly women, each other, and nanny goats, if they can catch them. They will certainly rape pre-teen white girls. Unless the white girl is me.
Moving at four times my normal speed, I found it very easy to defeat the thugs. They couldn’t take hold of any part of me because that part moved faster than their hands could. I left them all with broken bones, moaning and thrashing around helplessly on the ground. I thought that perhaps I should kill them.
Since that might be a shock to you, I’ll explain my reasons. First, crime statistics suggest that they’d probably have killed me, if they had won our fight, just to prevent me from identifying them afterward. Turnabout is fair play. Second, the likelihood is very small that any of those four black youths will ever in his life repay society for the costs of his upbringing alone, without even counting the additional costs he will impose on that same society with his criminal actions. So they are, via taxation, a drain on everybody else in the country. Whether my fellow citizens would thank me for killing these youths or not, they should at least appreciate the relief from a small part of their crime risk and economic burden.
But I didn’t kill them. I did, however, relieve them of several cell phones and credit cards that didn’t belong to them. I’d mail these items back to their owners as soon as I’d found out who they were and where they lived. The police? You’ve got to be kidding me. This is Atlanta. The police are grown-ups who were gang members just a few years ago. They pretend to be protectors, but they aren’t. They pretend to uphold the laws, but they don’t — except when it lets them do as they please. If the cops ever get their hands on valuable property, it might just “disappear” once again. The police in this city are enemies you smile at because you can’t fight them and win. And they smile back, confident in their power, and pose for the media’s cameras as if they were the most righteous fellows in the world.
I’ve been told that, once upon a time, before I was born, most police officers were professionals who impartially enforced just laws. But that has changed. Now the cops are just another gang. Do you know what the difference is? Professional police officers police each other at least as assiduously as they police their communities, and they don’t make excuses for other officers who commit misdeeds under color of law. When the cops start doing that, they’ve become a bunch of punks, distinguished from other punks only by wearing somewhat nicer clothes and by being, on average, a little older.
I arrived at Nancy’s house, and I told her about my adventures along the way. We got right to work on the internet, finding out who owned the credit cards and the phones, using encryption methods that I devised to defeat the government’s spyware. If we’d tried to do the right thing openly, we might have gotten arrested. Before long, we had the addresses, and we satisfied our social interaction desires by doing our civic duty. Boxing up each cell phone and slipping each credit card into an envelope, we put the stolen properties with Nancy’s outgoing mail to be returned to their rightful owners. We didn’t include any return address for reasons of operational security. It was more likely that we’d get into trouble than be recognized as heroes.
Then Nancy and I ate popcorn and watched old movies. While we were doing that, another group of young blacks, waving pistols, tried to rob a drug store about a half-mile from where we lived. A white store manager pulled out a gun and started shooting, killing one of the robbers and putting the others to flight. I didn’t hear about it until the news came on TV that evening, by which time I was back home again.
“They arrested the store manager?” I asked. “Whatever for?”
“The police think that he used unnecessary lethal force,” my dad replied. “Or, anyway, the police spokesman said that was what the police believed.”
Phooey. I saw the robbers’ guns in the news broadcast, which had included an outtake from the store’s security video. The guns were real, and they were loaded. One of the robbers had even gotten off a shot, which missed. Even if the guns had not been loaded, nobody defending the store, at the last moment it would be possible to exercise a defense by shooting back, would have enough time to make sure of it. And likewise if the guns had been only toys. Any sensible defender will shoot to kill, simply because a robber’s gun appears to be — and nearly always is — a real gun with real bullets in it.
The only reason for the opinion of the police officers, and for the arrest, was that the winner of an interracial conflict had been the white side of it, and the black police department intends to revise the outcome.
I think it was right about then that I understood what my life’s purpose would be, though I had no idea how I was going to proceed.
Because it doesn’t matter where you find them, blacks are about the same everywhere: Atlanta, Detroit, London, Johannesburg, or Port au Prince. Considered as a group, blacks always have a higher per capita rate for perpetrating violent crimes. And it isn’t just a little bit higher, either. It isn’t a matter of a few percent. Nor is it merely double or triple. The difference between the crime rate for the average black and the crime rate for the average while is a whole order of magnitude, a factor of ten or close to it.
The US government once kept track of crimes by race. If you can access the archived files of the Department of Justice, look for the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. They’ll tell you most of what you ought to know. The historical demographic data from the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract of the United States (formerly a publication of the US Government Printing Office), and the old CIA Factbooks, if you can find them, will tell you the rest.
Or, if you live in an area heavily populated by blacks, you can just look around. If you don’t live in such a place, and if you won’t do the research that I just now suggested, then how can you convince me that your opinion is worth a nickle?
No, the reason for the difference isn’t poverty. I hear that excuse quite often. The leftist’s “poverty causes crime” argument sounds plausible at first. I remember thinking it over when Mrs. Fergus introduced it in her social science class at Morningside Elementary. The idea is that poor people, seeking food and the bare necessities of life, are forced to commit crimes in order to survive. Thus, the per capita crime rate among poor people should exhibit a strong correlation with socio-economic status, but no correlation at all with race. But I’ve checked, and there’s an even stronger correlation between crime and race than there is between crime and social class.
Poor whites don’t behave as poor blacks do. Each race has a characteristic statistical spread of behaviors. The conjecture that poverty causes crime is disproved by the evidence. It is a myth whose tellers hope to blame “social injustice” for racial differences. On the contrary: blacks and whites simply aren’t the same kind of creature.
The myth serves as the leftists’ road to political empowerment, which is their true goal. The Marxists want to be able to dominate, and thus to exploit, everybody else. They want to supplant the natural elite, the elite of merit, with themselves, and to enforce their rule by murdering dissidents and by starving defiant populations into submission. All of their talk about “social justice” is mere hypocritical deception.
The sooner you deal with a problem, the easier the task will usually be. If Americans had recognized a fundamental racial difference between whites and blacks in 1995, or, even better, in 1950, or, better still, in 1850, and had dealt with it rationally, with a clear grasp of the facts, then their great-grandchildren would not be suffering from race-related crime and violence today, in 2044. Instead, they believed polite fictions about the “equality” of the races, and they believed them to the point of punishing anyone who did not believe them. People who told the truth were ostracized. They lost their jobs.
Similar things were going on in other countries — it was almost as if the lunacy were being orchestrated by an international conspiracy — and, in a few countries, it became illegal to tell the truth about race. Telling the truth became a crime called “inciting racial hatred,” and people who told the truth were arrested and bum-rushed through a show trial, in which the judge took judicial notice that the truth must be false because the lies were legally required to be true, and sent the defendant to prison.
The law does not create virtue. At its best, the law reflects virtue. When the law is dirty, it doesn’t.
These were my thoughts as I considered the events of the day, and the televised news of that evening.
Somebody had to save the world. And it had to be saved from more than an asteroid collision in 2068. And I decided, as I went to bed that night, that I was going to be the one to do it.
* * *
Summer passed, and I prepared myself to live apart from my parents for the first time in my life. Dad and Mom signed papers contracting my legal guardianship to Brookstone’s Dean Norman Klang for the duration of the school year. I would be moving to a room in a girls’ dormitory called Mathews Hall. I was allowed one suitcase for clothes, one computer if I had one, and one small satchel for toiletries. Any money over $1000 that I had with me had to be deposited with the Brookstone Bank, which was also on campus. It was, I believed, a student project.
Brookstone School is a combined school that can take a student from pre-kindergarten all the way to a Bachelor’s degree in a wide range of subjects. It’s a private school founded in the 1950s, moving twice to new and larger campuses for grade school, adding a college campus in 2026, and just rolling in money because it is widely known as an exceptionally successful school, having an unblemished public safety record (no murders, ever), where the students were self-disciplined, the campus orderly and neat, and the teachers competent and glad to be out of the hell-hole public schools. It had acquired a new school president just this year, the old one having retired last year. I got a whiff of politics behind that, but I didn’t delve into it deeply.
To my father’s surprise, and mine, I received notice by mail that I was being given a 50% discount on my tuition because Brookstone’s administration had read my IQ test report and my school transcript (we’d authorized it for release to Brookstone), and wanted me badly enough to cut my fees in half. Which was just as well. Brookstone’s usual tuition, and its fees for housing and food, were the same as that of a very reputable college, and my poor, hard-working dad would have been billed into poverty if he’d had to pay the full amount.
So, one sunny August morning, I hugged my parents, said my good-byes, and boarded the bus to Columbus. I tried not to think about it too much. The other passengers were the usual motley bunch, with rebel teens and their loud music boxes, older people telling them to be quiet, a few fellows in suits, a sprinkling of shady-looking types.
A well-dressed middle aged woman recognized me, or thought she did. She asked whom I was, and I told her “Brenda Jones.” She asked if she could sit beside me, and I acceded mostly because otherwise a rambunctious boy might claim that seat. The bus moved out of the station, and we struck up a conversation about where I was going, and what I hoped to do in the future.
Well, it doesn’t do to explain what one hopes to do, if what one hopes to do is turn the world upside down, shake it until all the rascals fall off, and then put it back together in one’s own way.
“I want to study science,” I said.
* * *
Source: Author