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.