Ameritocracy

8/15/2119

Dear reader, I imagine you as Lacon’s ideal with a mind far more moral than my own living in a fair society that has overcome the evils of corruption and greed. As I’m writing this, the top officials have deposed expert crews into what’s left of the wild to nurture the last bee colonies. Just a few years ago, ocean levels reached the ‘tipping point’ and began gulping the land back into its own watery corpulence. This was the impetus for the Great Migration—and already, the societal effects have been devastating. Riots, overcrowding, disease, and great racial tensions in pre-merit countries: Malaysians into China, Turks into Eastern Europe, Floridians into the mainland.

So much to say, the sky was falling—and still, my own world didn’t come down until my 14th year. My Male Earner and I were taking the above-ground back from the city, the afternoon sun laying like a derelict on the tops of the lower-bracket buildings along the skyline.

I’m ashamed to tell you, but I must: I landed in the tenth of percentile of athletic capability—much below the 90th, which can get you immediately enlisted, but also below the 20th that can put you in a fine, mindless position as a janitor, window washer, rocket ship bagman, you get the idea. The future for a kid that’s 10th percentile in athletics and 45th percentile (though always significantly overachieving) in intelligence was dark indeed.

My Male Earner consoled me: “Don’t worry. That’s what I was doing at your age and look at me.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

Go ahead, laugh. I’m sure you can see exactly where this is going.

My Male Earner just coughed, said something about oh, you know, things can change, and pointed out that our stop was coming up. I saw my Female Earner from the platform. She bent over the oven and pulled out a tray of one cupcake. I simply thought what I’d always thought about them—they were a well-paired couple of quirky people. Who else would make a treat for their Dependent?

They watched me eat it—only after five minutes of debate did they take a bite. Afterward, they watched television and I reread firsthand accounts from A People’s History of the United States, nearly all of them written by people of significance—the rest of those letters lost to moths, fires, and floods. Soon, my Earners went to bed. And the last Local chugged loudly by. It receded down the tracks, and the voices of my Earners became audible. I heard my Female Earner say, “The boy is not an idiot. You can’t make that mistake again and expect him not to find out.”

I looked up from one of Zinn’s paragraphs and thought, “Figure out what?” Immediately, I knew. I was their real son. Everyone said how incredible the likeness was, I chalked it up to the way children mirror the facial expressions as the adults surrounding them. But my complexion was the same as my Female Earner, my bright eyes the same hue as my Male Earner.

There, I’d figured it out. I slammed the book, my world in rubble as the Express blitzed past, its scream rising to a sharp, whistling point like the one inside me—the anger of being lied to, the thrill of no longer belonging here.

8/30/2119

At school, I breezed past my ‘peers’ and spent my hours furtively researching where one could take this type of error. There was no avenue for reporting it. It was not statistically possible that I had been placed, based on my merit, into my biological family. I created a few fake email addresses, whose domains resembled that of the Merit Placement Organization with the names of real database managers. Knowing how little adults like to read emails, I created a long thread discussing corrupted data in our systems. I looped in the real records manager, asking her to clarify Max Washington’s original test scores. Once I had that information, I reached out to another records manager, this one on the child placement side, and asked which household was slotted for that ranked child. And just like that, I had a household and its address.

I spent hours learning the correct jargon. Teachers found me unengaged, and one even caught me listening to a merit industry conference on a surreptitious earbud. My Earners noticed slight behavioral changes as well and asked me about my feelings often. This morning, they ambushed me: “Ever since your Male Earner survived the heart attack all those years ago, everything in life seems so poignant. Maybe I’m sensitive, but you’ve been so detached. We were going to let you get over it, but we heard you were slacking off at school.”

“And that’s unacceptable.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I believe you owe it to—”

“Why should I listen to you? You’re my real dad!”

My mother gasped; my father’s facial expressions were arrested by the shock. I felt bad. I had sympathy for the people, even if they hadn’t given me up like they were supposed to. They’d posed as my Earners for all my life, for God’s sake.

I left them and retrieved my packed bag from my room. I climbed down the fire escape, jumped onto the landing of the commuter rail, and walked up the last flight to the platform. In the window, the very one I’d seen her in the other day, my mother stuck her head out and yelled, “You don’t have to go. It didn’t used to be this way.”

I looked back only for a second. I thought of my true Earners; were they wondering where their real Dependent was?

8/31/2119

During the early 21st-century, Democrats’ equal-opportunity programs hoped to redistribute wealth and power to previously discriminated and disenfranchised groups, based namely on race and gender, while Republicans championed a merit-based ideology, in the traditional, antiquated sense, that posited that an opening should be filled by the most talented candidate, no matter his or her identity, by the discretion of the employer. However, the Total Meritocracy Bill was not drafted by the GOP, but by a Democrat in an elaborate political maneuver meant to illuminate her opposition’s hypocrisy. This proposal simply stated that a merit-based program be instituted as soon as possible. The law would go on to be known as Ameritocracy and change the nation’s education as much as the very social and economic factors which so often predicted it, by a manner deemed far too extreme at the time:

“After no more than two years, children will be tested and placed in homes according to their projected career, not only to maximize their own worth with the resources necessary for their talent, but also the nation’s GDP.”

For posterity, I wrote down these relevant passages from my 12th-year history textbook. I’m also restless and nervous as I ride this commuter rail—my destiny clear, my fate undecided.

9/04/2119

I arrived in Greenwich like a newborn child: blinded in the darkness and as good as naked with the stiff wind cutting through my jacket. I thought, ‘A baby could not wish on the circumstances of its home as I can now.’ What did I want? Significance? Power? Passive income? I had also been placed, unfair as it may have been, on the other side of the brackets. I just wanted enough to be given a fair shot—as any person would.

I had to walk to get around. I followed the smooth, litter-less streets toward the water, seeing the homes grow as I approached the shoreline. The ‘Upper School,’ my true school, rose like a sentry across the street from the Sound, protected by a cobbled rock wall. I meant to keep walking, but the lunch bell rang, and the students streamed out—to my horror. One by one, reanimating the corpse I’d been foolish enough to believe was disposed of in the last century, that of Segregation. But there they were: white, white, white, white, white, white, white…

The whipping wind curled and rolled the American flag up on itself like a snake, and the speech I’d prepared for the school administrators blew out of mind: There’s been a mistake. I deserve a place at this school. At birth, I was admitted through the front doors, if you will, while some kid snuck in a side door and took my place…

I could see only one course of action left and I followed it. The plots of land grew larger, the distance between the verdant lawns longer. The air cleansed and refreshed me. Even the animals (chirping finches, squirrels, singing grasshoppers) were better than those back home (pigeons, fat rats, cockroaches).

The beautiful colonial home had a wrap-around porch, vegetable garden, and thick grove of trees. It looked empty. I bashed in a window and climbed in. The inside was clean with granite surfaces, glass-covered cabinets and bookcases, fine throw-rugs on couches, a fully stocked wine rack, drawings by Matisse and Dali on the walls.

I wandered into the office. A set of oil paintings lined the wall from top to bottom. Each patriarch had the same green eyes, black hair, square chins, and tight ears. All of them, without a doubt, of the same lineage. I heard the click of a rifle behind me.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said.

“Why not?” my true Male Earner growled.

“You can’t shoot a boy in his own home.”

We finished the conversation across the oak desk, our family heirloom. My Male Earner explained, “You might be within some kind of right to be here, but your father and I had an agreement. He didn’t have insurance; we needed a household to switch with at assignment time. A transfer of goods was made. Do you think it’s fair for you to come here now? What with your dad’s repaired heart ticking?”

As he finished, I diverted my attention to the family portraits. “You’re right, I don’t think it’s fair. Fair would be for my family to have been given the land they worked and assigned several white people to be their slaves, for their children to own whites for a couple centuries—to amass a fortune, to engorge themselves on the profits of free labor. Then everything could go back to equal.”

“If you won’t be reasonable … my Dependent will be home soon. We’ll let the law decide who will be removed. As a notable, taxpaying citizen of this fine county, I know who it’s going to be.”

But his son never came home. I read later, with delight, how the FBI removed him, and many others, from their schools and immediately reassigned them. Having received a tip from the Merit Placement Organization (God bless those naïve managers), they’d uncovered the greatest educational fraud since 2019.

That afternoon, my Male Earner and I sat in silence as the grandfather clock dutifully ticked. He only moved my Female Earner came home crying, telling him what had happened and directing her assistant where to put the cured meats, soft cheeses, artisanal bread, organic fruits and vegetables, and bright fitness drinks. She dropped a six-pack of Monster in the trashcan and sobbed.

They couldn’t look at me over dinner. I heard their clinking silverware as I savored each bite of lobster, taking satisfaction in cracking the shells and dipping the soft meat in warm butter. The grand finale, a massive slice of chocolate cake I ate like a sandwich.

8/1/2120

Over the last year, they’ve taken to me like an amputee facing the reality of a missing limb. They send me over to neighbors to charm them. They bet against other parents on who’s Dependent will get better test scores. They only think of how they can use me to further their own image, without a shred of familial love. Everything is, finally, how it should be.

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