Henry Farver

                                                          From the Case File of Henry Farver
                                                                        9 October 2042
[Talking to Metic]

Henry: The earliest memory I have is of a playground. I must have been about five years old. I sat there on the sun-baked dirt with a little toy truck, watching the other children play. Pushing each other on swings, cascading down slides, hands in the sand; they laughed.

Metic: You were jealous of them?

Henry: No. No, I wasn’t jealous [pauses] I was just different.

Metic: What made you think that? I mean, you were very young. Did you even have a concept of what it meant to be “different”?

Henry: My mother told me I was “special”, delicate. I wasn’t always allowed to play with the other children. They shied away from me and I repelled them.

Metic: Repelled them?

Henry: Yes. They were more than just indifferent to me. They were wary. My mother would tell me to try to be more social. But sociable isn’t exactly a concept a child can really understand. “Just make one friend” she’d plead with me. And so I broke my silence. Five years of nearly absolute silence, and I spoke to Craig Randolph on the playground that day…

         “Hi, I’m Henry.” Henry cringed at the metallic reverberations of his voice. He held out a little green, plastic truck towards the boy. Surely he’d noticed the oddness in Henry’s voice. He’d laugh and run away to play with the normal children. Then he thought of his mother and the sad face she’d make when it was time to go, and he still sat alone in the dirt. “Do you want to play with me?”