Nick started writing when he was but a wee lad. In third grade he completed a series of children's books set in the magical Fifi Forest, where animals could talk and moral lessons reigned supreme. Nick's third grade teacher, Mrs. Cobb urged Nick to publish his stories in a local magazine, but not wanting to attract attention to his talent at such a young age, Nick opted to avoid the pressure of fame and fortune and kept Fifi forest out of print.

Now Nick has just completed his first novel, The Thirteen Worlds and the Palace at Delphine. It is the first in a series of fantasy novels to take place in the mysterious Thirteen Worlds. Seeing as it isn't nearly as impressive for a guy in his twenties to write a novel as it is for a third grader to write a dumb little story about talking animals, Nick no longer has publishers nipping at his heels for a submission. Thus Nick gives his greatest thanks in advance to anyone who will send a willing agent or publisher his way.

Nick is also working on a fiction novel that may or may not become a work of genius, depending on Nick's mood. Additionally, Nick has written several science fiction short stories and some really lame poetry.


THE BUTTON
by Nick Ponticello
Harold Martin Thomas Jr. pulled a loose thread from the hem of his beat up, black racer jacket. He leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms over his head. Before him sixteen television screens buzzed and flickered. The black and white images were motionless save for the occasional line of static that cut across a screen and shifted slowly from the top of the television to the bottom where it dropped out of existence behind the plastic encasement of the Panasonic set.

Harold stared first at the screens in the middle of the four-by-four display and then wound his way towards the perimeter, as he was accustomed to do when he started to doze. He snorted and reached for the ceramic mug. The coffee was lukewarm. Little brown specks floated lazily at the bottom of the cup. Harold took a small sip. It was bitter. Then he swallowed the remaining brown liquid in a single gulp.

There was small tear forming on the right knee of his blue Levis. They were nearly twenty years old, that pair; thin as a paper bag. Harold couldn't think why they would be worn in the knees except from the times when he crossed his legs and put his feet up on the control panel of the security display. Or maybe it was the walk from his car to the chair every night at ten o'clock. Or the walk back to his car when he got off at six every morning.

It was cold in the control room. Harold rubbed his hands together and then stuck them snugly between his thighs and the chair. When he pulled them out again, the tops of his hands were streaked with red lines from where the creases in his pants had been. He started to whistle but that gave the place an eerie feel, so he stopped and leaned back further in his chair.

At about three in the morning, a cat wandered across one of the screens. It was the only screen that monitored the exterior of the building. The cat stopped in front of the main entrance and sniffed the cement step leading up to the door. Harold wondered if the cat could smell some trace of him there. Maybe the cat could smell the cigarette smoke from his clothing.

At four Harold reached across the control panel and flicked on the portable television set that sat between the water cooler and the display. The picture came in all static and Harold had to get up and adjust the antenna for better reception. When the picture cleared, Harold was facing an elderly woman behind a marble counter. She was slicing potatoes into thin yellow-white sheaves. The audio was busted and the sound came through only one of the speakers at a faint whisper, which was all but drowned out by the buzzing of the security display. Harold watched the woman for some time, looking up at the screens every few minutes as if expecting to see something there although he hadn't seen anything in the seventeen years he had worked in the building.

Harold had always had the night shift. He preferred the night. Less coming and going. He felt less as if he was missing something than he did when he worked the day shift. He liked to sleep when the world was awake. That way he didn't have to face it.

Third screen over and second down was the one that looked in on the button. A small red pinprick in the middle of an empty room, mounted on a three-foot kiosk. That was the screen Harold liked the least. He didn't mind he job so much when he didn't have to think about what it was he was doing exactly. But every time he saw that button-third over, second down-he remembered and it made him uneasy.

At exactly five o'clock, Harold switched off the television, leaned way back in the chair so that the springs couldn't stretch any farther, and with a sigh heaved himself to his feet. He straightened the racer jacket around his shoulders and pulled the waist of his pants up over his hips by the denim belt loops. The circulation in his right foot was gone and he limped warily about the control room while the tingling sensation ran up and down his leg and slowly subsided. Then he picked up the coffee mug absentmindedly, set it down again and opened the door out into the hall.

He walked the corridors of the building the way an ant follows a trail. He was thinking of other things, but every time he passed a security camera mounted up on the wall he silently logged it in his subconscious. One, two, three, he counted as he passed each camera. It was a path he had taken hundreds and thousands of times before. Sometimes Harold looked right into the eye of a camera and wondered at the irony that he should be the most interesting thing to happen all night in that long corridor and that nobody-not him-was in the control room to see it. He thought what he must look like passing under the camera. He imagined the security display just as he had left it, and just as it had been etched into his mind over the years; and he watched himself pass through each screen and he noticed how he walked so slowly with such a mechanical sense of direction. He knew every step of that hall. He could even see the expression on his own face. It wasn't a smile or a frown or anything. It was an expression of resignation.

Then Harold came to the door. He fumbled with the keys in his racer pocket. They jingled noisily in the pitch silence of that long corridor. He hated those damn keys. There were two keys for the front door. There was one key for the control room, even though Harold had never locked that door in his life. There were two keys for his Ford pickup, a house key and then three others that had come with the job, but the use of which Harold couldn't figure out, nor did he ever try to figure out. And then there was the key to the room with the button. And that key came with a code that Harold had never written down-was forbidden to write down.

Harold stuck the key into the door. He punched in a long code, and then held his breath for thirty seconds. He never had to go into that room. But sometimes he did. And he hated that he did. It made him sick, that room. But it fascinated him in a sort of creepy, spine-tingling way.

He turned the key in the lock and heard the click and then pushed the door open. The room was dark. There were glassy gray shadows cast by the dull light fixtures in the ceiling. The red button stood haloed in light at the center of the room. It was much closer from the doorway where Harold stood leaning against the metal framing than it was from the view of the screen third over, second down.

Goddamn button, Harold thought. He stood staring at it with look of despondency. Job wouldn't be so bad except for that button. He flicked on the small flashlight hanging from his keychain and swiveled it clockwise around the room for good measure. Nothing amiss, he told himself, although he knew damn well he had only gone in there to get a closer glimpse of that button.

He closed the door behind him, jiggled it a bit to make sure it was locked and then retraced his steps back to the control room. When he looked at the display there was no sign that he had ever passed down that hall or even set foot in the room with the button. There was no trace of him at all and he wondered (as he so often did) if maybe he hadn't taken a walk down that hall at all.

At six o'clock, Ralph McKenzie showed up on the first screen. He wiped his feet on the doormat and shooed away the cat that was still there. He gave the camera a nod and Harold nodded unconsciously at the monitor. Then Ralph unlocked the door and came in. Harold watched him on the screens until he was right outside the door to the control room. Then Harold swiveled around in his chair just in time to meet Ralph coming in. A few words were exchanged and then Harold surrendered his chair and clocked out.

One night Harold stood outside the door to the room with the button for an entire half hour. The key was in the door and his forefinger was poised in front of the code panel. The entry code kept repeating in his head like the sound of a metronome. After a half an hour, Harold pulled the keys from the door and backed away from the room. He paced the length of the corridor two or three times and then went swiftly for the door and plunged the key into the lock and punched in the code, the plastic of the little number keys clicking against his untrimmed fingernails.

The door swung open and Harold stood there framed in darkness, looking in at the button on the three-foot pedestal. He wanted to be closer. So he stepped into the room cautiously. The floor was carpeted-thick lilac carpeting that left deep imprints under his boots. The button had collected dust. Harold brought his face into the halo of light that shone down on the kiosk. He held his breath. The button stared at him callously.

Did it really work? Harold wondered. And if it did work, why was it ever made? What sick mind had created it and for what means? The button stared on, indifferent to everything around it. Harold took one finger and traced a circle in the dust around it, careful to stay exactly three inches away from the red little eye. What if he pushed it? Would it really do what they said it would do?

The circle he made in the dust shone unnaturally in the light, like black marble in candlelight. The air was stiff and hard like ale. Harold breathed it in. There was also the stench of cigarette smoke rising in waves off his jacket.

Harold found when he went home he could think of nothing but the button. When he was sitting in front of his television watching early morning news stations eating his dinner (even though it was six thirty in the morning), the button would fill his mind like balloon blown up to the point where it wants to pop. Sometimes he pretended he was in the room with button, hovering over it like a wasp over a flower, and he could smell that room. He would take up the remote control and press the little red power button, and the TV in the living room would black out, and he would startle himself and feel guilty, because he had just pushed the button-in his mind he had pushed the button.

Goddamn button, Harold sighed. It was the button that destroyed all human life. So Harold had been told the first night on the job. Push it and everybody in the world, every Chinese man, African man, American man, would die. All the babies in their cribs would die. The women asleep or walking to lunch or on the bus, the grandmothers and the old men who wore suspenders and overalls-they would all die. And it would end human life forever. Even the people in their little space stations orbiting Earth, the people in the submarines and the people on distant islands with names Harold could not pronounce-it would be all over for all of them. There would be nothing left-cats and dogs maybe, birds and plants. But who would be there to see the world without humans? It was ironic that even the person who pushed the button would die. It was like when Harold walked the halls and the control room was empty and nobody was there to see him walking the halls. It was ironic that way, the button.

And Harold Martin Thomas Jr. felt guilty for even pretending to push it. He'd sit on front of the TV at home with the remote control in his hands and he'd tremble and he'd bring his thumb around and-blink-the TV would go dark. And then he'd go to bed knowing he pushed the button that killed everybody-in his head he pushed it over and over again.

Christmas morning Ralph McKenzie handed Harold a small brown-wrapped paper package as they traded shifts. Harold took it into his big, dry hands and sniffed it out. Then he gently tore the wrapping off. It was a clean ceramic mug.

"To replace that old one you got there," Ralph said. Harold thanked him under his breath. He picked up his old mug, straightened his racer jacket around his shoulders and left the building with a mug in each hand.

That morning when Harold got home he stared at the old mug and the new mug for a long time in the light over the stove. He shifted both mugs around in his hands. The old one was chipped just above the handle. The inside was stained brown and the bottom had scratches from the times he slid it along the control panel at work. The new one was spotless. Harold wondered if he should have gotten Ralph something. Ralph was new to the job-started six months ago. The other guy, the two to ten shift fellow, he was an old guy. Been on the job twenty-three years. He used to work the night shift, Harold's shift. Then his daughter, Leslie, had kids and she needed him home mornings to take care of the grandchildren while she taught at the high school. So he traded Harold for the two to ten shift. Harold was glad to make the trade. He preferred the night shift. He liked to listen to the world sleeping around him. Like there was nobody else in the world but him.

That evening-Christmas-at nine when he woke up, Harold filled the old mug with coffee, added three little packets of sugar and drove his Ford pickup to work. The clean, white mug Ralph had given him stood on his shelf next to a bunch of crystal champagne glasses he never used once in his whole life.

Harold relaxed into his chair New Year's Eve and the air from the leather cushion hissed out under each of his wide buttocks. He leaned back so that the springs in the back of chair creaked and whined under his weight. He had seen kids out in the streets with fireworks on his drive to work. He had damn nearly hit a few-the way they ran out into the street with fiery little sparklers, not giving a goddamn thought to the people who had to drive to work New Year's Eve. Goddamn kids.

Steam rose from his mug. He slid it across the control panel from one hand back to the other. His hands were cold. It was clear and cloudless and icy outside. He was shivering, but not just from the cold. He felt a pain in his gut. It had been there for some time now. He wasn't sure when it started. Could have been years ago. But he shifted in his chair uncomfortably. He couldn't sleep much anymore. Watched TV instead. And it was better to be at work in the safe little closet of a control room than at home in that empty house.

The screens were empty and dull. He knew they would be like that forever. Nobody would come to push that button. Maybe nobody else even knew about it. In seventeen years not a person had ever come into that building to push that button. Did it still work, even? Had it ever worked?

Harold massaged his gut with the knuckles of his fist. Maybe he ought to see a doctor. But a doctor couldn't cure what he had. All the while the button was on his mind. It watched him and he watched it, third screen over, second down.

He opened his jacket to the inside pocket and took out a small silver flask that was worn and tarnished. Cost him $2.99 at the gas station. He liked it because it had the picture of a meadow on it, and he liked that, for no particular reason. He wasn't supposed to drink on the job, but what the hell, he thought, it's New Year's Eve, godammit.

He poured a little of the pale brown fluid into his mug and little gray bubbles swirled on the surface of the steaming liquid. He sniffed it and then took a swig. The coffee burned the roof of his mouth and he could feel a little flap of dead skin come loose and hang there by a thread. He flicked at the skin with his tongue and then took another sip and the skin came loose and he swallowed it.

He leaned back and half-shut his eyes for a quarter of an hour. But the pain in his stomach gnawed and he had to stand a little and pace about. Near midnight he flicked on the old television set and played with the antennas. A picture came through finally, and the dull hum of a crowd echoed through the busted speaker. New York City, Times Square.

There were people all static and electricity crowding the streets. It was snowing but it had to be hot down there in the throng of flesh and heightened expectations. Harold finished off his coffee and then took to sipping straight from the flask. He stared dully at the screen. A million little people in that ten-inch screen and just one of him in that whole building. Just one of him in his six hundred square foot apartment on Eliot Drive. Just one of him and sixteen security cameras. And just one button. Just one of him and just one button. In his state of self-pity, Harold saw that as some kind of perfect match.

And then the numbers came up, some kind of dizzy, frenzied countdown to another disappointment of a year. Harold counted the numbers subconsciously, like he counted the cameras in the hall. And then the ball dropped and for a million people in that ten-inch screen something amazing had just happened, some sort of butterfly of a year had just crawled out of the cocoon of the past. But for Harold, the only difference was the tear in his Levis had gotten bigger.

He reached across and flicked the television off. He swiveled lazily in his chair, more to rock away the sickness in his gut than to pass the time. A line of static rose across the first screen of the security display. Harold watched it go. He was the son of a construction man. Yet he had built nothing out of his life.

At five o'clock Harold rose from his chair perfunctorily. He set his mug down on the table. He had been holding it, although it contained nothing, for over five hours. The cushions in the chair were imprinted from where he had stayed unmoving through the night. Harold still shivered. He walked out into the hall, little keychain flashlight in hand. He counted, one, two, three, in his head and the impressions of what might have been words echoed so loud Harold had to shake his head to get the ringing out of his ears.

When he reached the door he stuck the key and punched the code without hesitation. Maybe he was still a little drunk. The lilac carpet felt even deeper than before and he had to swim through it to get to the kiosk on which sat the little red eye. He came into the halo of light gasping for air. And there still was the circle he had traced, three inches in radius, around the button. The dust was thick everywhere but there, but by now even the circle had its own fine coat of residue to keep it warm.

The pain in Harold's stomach had risen to his chest. He breathed little raspy breaths. It was dark around him and he was more alone than he had ever been. He might have been the only person in the world if he had not just seen a million smiling faces in Times Square. But he knew they were all there, too, them and billions of others-and they were all welcoming in another year that would bring them nothing but disappointment.

In his six hundred square foot flat at 404 Eliot Drive, the ceramic mug Ralph McKenzie had given him shone brightly in light from above the stove, beside all those crystal champagne glasses that had never touched a drop of alcohol in their lifetimes. And the light reflected off the champagne glasses like lighters at a rock concert. The light flickered and swayed with the hissing of the gas exhausted by the stove, left on and filling the place with an heady smell like a filling station.

Harold's face was pale in the light above the kiosk. He took a cigarette and a lighter from his racer. It took him a few tries, and the cigarette was lit and glowing red like the button. He took a long drag and imagined he was in his living room in front of the television watching the morning news shows. And in his mind he took up the clicker and reached for the red power button.

And Harold's hand reached across the kiosk and his jacket shone in the light and he took his calloused thumb and pressed it firmly down on the button.


THE MISSHAPEN
by Nick Ponticello
Give me some coal and I will sketch you a story. Or give me a voice with which to speak or tell or sing a song of my youth. I do not come from this place, where each day is so certainly different from the day before it and where each night brings a moon and stars and the hum of crickets. I do not live in such innocent bliss as you, my children, must for you have not yet tasted the bitter twang of hardship on your tongue, nor have you feared the nipping of death dogs at your heels and the growl of hunger in your stomach. You do not have the appreciation for all that you see or hear, or do in the brightness of this sun. Play you will, forever. Or until the same fate that I myself have seen comes shrieking from the heavens to strike you and your own as it did me and mine.

There used to be people. So many people. And we used to live in cities without trees or gardens or birdsongs or ladybugs and butterflies and little cocoons beside dewdrop spider webs in cornstalk fields and blackberry brambles. I knew nothing of fresh air, or what is open and free. I was born in darkness. Without a mother and father, spawn from some glass cage with the rest of my kind. And my body was shapeless at first, still in the stages of molding and becoming and of listless being. We were shaped, then, by the humming sounds and the buzzing fingers, and the change of fluid and the sucking of tubes and breathing of little air bubbles along our backs and around our faces. And when we did see the smothered orange bulb behind the gray skies, we weren't afraid, for it was very dull and admitted nothing of its power for, I believe, it had given up on our kind and was readying to die and be reborn again in a better place where its children could begin worlds of their own, worlds that might yet appreciate the twilight, the evening, the daybreak, the difference between the day and night.

I was given green eyes. And my hair was straight and dark, and my features sharp so as to catch the pale light just right and to show off what we today call beauty. Yes, we were all mostly beautiful. The old ones borne of natural means were a scarcity and were very horrid indeed, for they lived with fear and anger in the darkest of all places, in the caves. They were misshapen. Oh, but I shouldn't say that. For what have I become in my old age and after my trials and terrors? And what, my dear children, are you? Misshapen, the whole lot of you. Oddly and unique and of all different sorts, misshapen, and what I've now come to call beautiful. But it wasn't beautiful then. Oh, no. The Misshapen were ugly and deformed and ghostly and horrid. And although my sponsors hid it well, I too was one of the Misshapen. For somehow I had been given green eyes. A terrible accident. But fixed easily enough. I was given gray lenses to put over my green eyes at first. "A temporary solution," the printout had read, "Until grown to full size."

And when I had grown to my full size, my eyes were dyed the color of the polluted sky, gray, like the rest of my kind. And my straight brown hair and my sharp features, that were exactly like everyone else's, that is, except the Misshapen. I was fixed of my deformity. And although we were exact and what is today considered rare and beautiful, we weren't attractive at all, for we were all the same, or as much the same as each potato in the field is to its neighbor. Plain, dry, with but the slightest variation.

And there was no such thing as beauty. Or if there was, we could not see it. What was was, and there was its neighbor, so much like it that it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two. And male and female did not make any difference. We were of the same glass cage, and we had no roles of our own to play. When we were made we were not given our individuality as you, my children have been given. Oh, yes, we had the parts, male and female. But we did not have the desire, or the need to use them. Perhaps it was because we had been made without the desire or the need. Or perhaps everything was so much the same that desire was impossible because there existed no comparison between what is mine and what is yours. There existed no beauty, or variation or thrill or even distinction between the you and the me. So how possibly could there be a desire, sexual or any other. What was to be wanted?

Or perhaps there was no desire because evolution had deemed it unnecessary of our kind. As I tell you, there were so many people. Too many, I should think, for so small an environment. And no longer did we feel the animal need to reproduce and keep our species alive. There was no threat to humankind. Disease could be fought genetically or with our ever-increasing medical technology. Natural predators were either extinct years back or kept in cages for preservation and study. Animosity, jealousy and hate were nonexistent among our kind for each person had his share and there was nothing that anybody had that you did not. And we had our laboratories always creating more and more of our kind in those glass cages, all as similar as potatoes in a field. Every once in a while we'd get a bad potato, but nothing a little dye, or surgery or genetic alteration couldn't fix, like in my case. And if the potato was so bad that there was nothing to be done with it, the Misshapen were always willing to take it in as they would a child of their own. So perhaps, with the lack of threat to our kind, evolution weeded out desire because there was no longer a need for humans to reproduce. Isn't it so that we have been known to adapt to our environment? Of course it's so, for I have seen it firsthand. Look at yourselves, my children. Misshapen the lot of you. Run rampant, girls chasing boys and boys becoming men and chasing girls. Things I hardly know anything about. Changes, oh the changes. But I suppose in my time, evolution took away desire because the people were too many and we were sure to survive like cockroaches in a nuclear disaster, and like locusts in an endless field of rotting yams. But all this talk of potatoes and insects and fields takes us away from my story, for in my time there were no such things, only in preserves, which might as well have been called laboratories, for their sole purpose was to explore the possibilities of alternate genetics in fighting the ever evolving diseases. And humans never set foot in these preserves, for fear the sight of such splendid creatures would bring about desire and possibly revolution. Machines and computers and the likes of their tools set to work in these plant and animal laboratories. Machines and computers set to work everywhere. Humans did not participate in labor like they do now. But they did work. For as much as the computers tried, they could not rid us of our need to be busy, our agitation, our boredom. So we were all given tedious, but mind occupying jobs in the gray buildings. We set to work at translating computer codes and languages so that we could help upgrade all systems that were not evolving with the technology. And we understood that this was very important, for if the computers could not communicate with each other, our society was bound to collapse. We were the medium between the old technology and the new. We were the translators for the different races of computers. It was what we were trained to do as children and qualified to do as adults. So we spent our days deciphering the computer languages. All of us. All of the people, each day, except the Misshapen, of course, off in their caves. This was how we came to feel a sense of purpose in the world; it is how we satisfied our desire to be doing. And when we came home at the end of the day, we were taxed and there was no energy left to be creative, as there is today. We did not know creativity as you know it. We thought that translating new and evolutionary computer codes was creative enough. And we were often tired, but satisfied. Because, for our work, we all received comfortable, plain homes with comfortable, plain furniture and several different and appetizing meals, that came around again once or twice a month, depending on how the computers were able to budget and harvest the food supply, which was made in glass cages, nearly the same as humans were made. And we were all as healthy and happy as we thought possible at the time. And there was a screen that showed us images of computers at work in the factories where they made our food, or made our furniture, or made new humans. And we saw machines creating new vaccines and exploring new medical sciences. And our greatest endeavor was exploring the universe so that maybe we could find new planets capable of harboring our kind, or find new life forms, which we thought to surely exist in nearly infinite space. Our ultimate goal was to understand our purpose as a species in this great and spiraling galaxy and beyond. Such a desire - the desire to understand our existence - could not be avoided. But humans no longer needed to search for the answers. The machines would do that for us, and report their findings on the large screen at home, just so long as we kept translating the codes from computer to computer. So long as we did our part, all the necessities and answers and findings would come to us like the flow of this river, steady and strong and unwaveringly. Sometimes there would be floods of information, just as the river swells in the spring after the snows melt. And there would very often be little to see on the screen, like the muddy trickle in the dry canal in the late August days. But the screen kept us informed and, most of all, entertained and occupied and out of the way. There was also music if we wanted it, but never with human voices, as in today's music. It's funny really; we didn't even think to sing. We were always so tired and satisfied and what real pleasure came in the form of gossip and stories concerning the terrible Misshapen in their caves.

So, I suppose, even then, the computers could not weed out curiosity and the desire of something more. You know, something more. So we told stories about the horrid beasts that lived underground several miles out, away from the people. We even laughed a little when we spoke of the way some of them had blonde or red hair, or pitch black, or curly, or real short, or the way some were large and fat, and some shorter and some taller than average. And we poked fun because their eyes were of different colors, blue and brown and green and hazel, like all of yours, my children. I did not laugh when they made fun of the eyes, though. For I remembered that, although I had been fixed, my eyes had been once very much like the eyes of the Misshapen, green and bold and horrid. That was the only time I ever became afraid, when we made fun of the Misshapen for their colorful eyes. And I didn't know it was fear then. There wasn't fear in our time because the computers kept us safe from all threats. But I could fear my own people because I knew they would not accept me if they knew that I had been born a Misshapen myself. There were others like me living in the city, that I knew, but who they were I could not tell, for they had been fixed like me. But I felt fear, even then, when fear was obsolete.

Then there came the time for all our kind to know what it was to be afraid. Our space probes found a series of asteroids, each ranging from an eighth to a quarter of a mile wide, headed directly for Earth. It would be seventeen years before they struck, but such a collision was predicted to wipe all life from the face of the planet. It was then that the computers began to prepare us for the disaster. But our time was limited, and as the cities developed underground shelters and the machines constructed spaceships to carry as many people as possible away from the Earth, it became evident that there would not be enough room in the bunkers or star crafts to hold the entire world populace. So human production came to halt and a selective process began among those humans already existing. The Misshapen were to be left out of the salvation preparations altogether. In fact, they hadn't even been a consideration of ours. The Aged-Past-Ninety were to be left out, for their lives were coming to an end besides. And with these eliminations, there was now room enough for almost everybody to hide from the oncoming asteroids. But not quite enough room. So it was that the Mistakes became a part of the Unwanted - the mistakes, such as myself, born with green eyes. The medical records were searched and those made with deformities were rooted out and alienated. Although we had been corrected, we were still different beneath our clever disguises. So, we, the Mistakes, joined the Aged-Past-Ninety and left the cities for the caves, where we would join the Misshapen. It was our only choice, for the day of disaster was approaching, and the computers had not eliminated our desire to survive, so we sought refuge in the deep caverns and tombs of the beastly creatures that we once ridiculed so heartlessly. And the Misshapen took us in, they gave us food we had never seen before, and put us in rooms that looked different from one another. They treated us differently, befriended us differently, and gave us separate tasks to perform. It was then that we developed the first feelings of jealousy, but it was healthy for us, for we worked hard to be better and to overcome the sedentary habits we had become accustomed to in the gray cities without. And it was then that we began to develop individuality, for no longer did we know the same things, or have the same experiences. We were spending each day differently than the day before and doing things that maybe our neighbors weren't. It was in those caves that the Mistakes and the Aged-Past Ninety learned to cherish personality. We learned to be happy, we learned to be sad; we learned anticipation, hope, joy and anguish.

And the day of destruction came and went. We had been prepared. We had gathered supplies, we had closed off our entrances, and we had borrowed the technology of the city to create a ventilation system and a sewage system, and a medical facility and all the things we needed to survive underground for as long as it would be. We had raided the cities for supplies, things that the people who had disappeared into their bunkers or had flown off into space had left behind. And we managed to make it through the initial onslaught. Of course we had our hard times: tunnels collapsed, people were crushed, mountains were toppled. But the caves went deeper than you can imagine, and there were places where we could escape even the worst of the storm.

It was many years before the dust settled and the air was fresh again. By then, of course, most of us had died, our supplies had run low, and we had been forced to feed off the rotting flesh of the deceased. It was not a paradise, this hell in the hills. But it was life at least. And a life full of learning. Learning to love, learning to hate, to see beauty in diversity, to sense excitement in change. We were transformed, us the Unwanted, hidden in the dark caves of the Misshapen. And when we emerged, we were no longer a separate kind. We were all humans. For that was all we could be. The cities had collapsed, and with them, the bunkers. The space shuttles to this day have not returned. The computers, never possessing the survival instinct, had failed to protect themselves, and they too had perished with their glass cage people. We, the Mistakes, the Aged-Past-Ninety and the Misshapen, we were the lucky ones. And although it was even harder to survive in this ruin of a world where only isolated regions had managed to escape annihilation, we did survive. We migrated, we found places untouched by destruction, we merged with others like us, discovered land with growth and wildlife, somehow untouched by the storm's fury, but more amazingly, untouched by my people's computers and machines. We found that the storm had only been successful in wiping away what I had come to hate, human civilization, and had somehow managed to be gentle with those places still wild and free. And so I was thankful, and I wondered if I had survived alongside the Misshapen because some higher power deemed us to be wild and free as well. I suppose I will never know. But I tell you, my children, the universe is like our very own selves. When there is disease inside our bodies, we will destroy it if we can. Where and when I come from was a disease to this world, a speck of decay in the universal body. It was fought and destroyed. Perhaps it was a mistake, though, that humans, however few, live on. For once, in an age long before my time, there were people just like us who became the disease. So let us not become the disease again. Oh, I ask of you, my children, remember my story, for it is to tell us great things if we are willing to listen to the whisper of time and history and age and wisdom.

Why do you look so startled? Is it because you do not believe me? Or do you fear the things I tell you as you fear the stories of ghosts and dark spirits? It is no mere fairytale, this legend of mine. It is true as my blood is blue. Oh, you smile now. What? Blood is red you say? You dare to call an elder such as I a liar? What's that? You say my story can't be true because nobody can live so long as ninety? Is that all your youthful curiosity can pull from such a tale of adventure, beauty and transformation? Just because the age of ninety no longer exists today, doesn't mean it didn't exist in my time. Ninety and much more, I'll say. Why, we were living well into our hundred and thirties! You don't believe me? Well how old do you guess I am? Sixty? Seventy? Is that all your little minds can imagine? No. I am one hundred and eighty-three. I lie not to you. My faultless genetics and this fresh air suit each other well. I suppose our lives were shortened back in my youth due to a lack of love, beauty, excitement, adventure and above all hardship. What I've seen has made me strong. I was made in a glass cage, perfect, with vaccines and genetic alterations to protect me from the disease of this world. And now my perfect self has endured the trials of time, and I have things that my kind could never imagine - strawberries, human voices singing, the strokes of a paintbrush on canvass, grass and wildflowers, history, memories and an understanding of our purpose here on earth and here in this universe - I, my children, may even outlive the youngest of you yet, for I am the most misshapen of all the Misshapen.