My name is Franklin

Nathaniel knew that Franklin would never thrive in the care of Reed and Sue... the child would be raised to be a normal human being, protected by those who tried to save the world and those who clung to the illusion that this was actually possible. But Nate knew the future.. he himself had created and refined it with the Maker, the perfect version of his son Reed... almost perfected and Franklin’s divine gene was meant to make that very world indestructible. The world Nathaniel took Frank to when he was just six was a continent sized machine of glass, steel, and clinical, technical constructs. Cities were divided into zones, efficient core centers with timed work cycles, and peripheral spaces where people spent time in programs. Emotions were treated as resources to be regulated, too much led to unproductivity, too little to social dysfunction. 

Social dysfunction could be corrected with conditioning if you ensured people grew accustomed to little attention from birth and couldn’t miss what they’d never known. Education was standardized, everyone spoke the same language, learned perfectly and monotonously so it sounded like a single chorus. The environment was technically sanitized, plants and real ecosystems were rare. Nature’s power to destroy was stripped away and replaced with technical imitations and reflective images that made areas outside the cities look like green oases or wild deserts. Those borderlands were meant to be avoided, there a person learned dependence on the created system and could not survive outside it. Escape meant certain death.

Franklin felt the sadness of what was lost as he remembered his first six years in that other world. He also felt a terrible, crystalline clarity, in a world that valued mechanics over man, it was easy to imagine machine and human as the same. That clarity frightened him more than any punishment he’d endured. His grandfather wanted to make him powerful, a godlike heir to carry on what he had built. The basis for that was the boy’s altered genetics, the so-called god gene he carried by birth in Cosmos and through his parents’ mutated DNA. The boy had his blood; that blood had been improved. Nathaniel had tried everything to adapt his own DNA and failed, which made Franklin all the more valuable. He focused manically on conditioning his grandson until the child fulfilled what he was born to do. 

Nathanael built structures and moral axioms to justify it all. Discipline meant no contradiction, emotions were energy to be channeled into productive outlets, otherwise they were unpredictable. Tears were a weakness, a flaw in the system and he used them as data to cure the disease. Routines mattered because repetition shaped the inner self more than words. Franklin was to achieve neutrality, because those who felt nothing decided faster, and faster decisions meant efficiency. Empathy was a variable, not an axiom, reduce it through desensitization. The point was total control, rooms looked identical, lights never went out because bodies should not depend on a natural day–night rhythm. There was no natural time, days sometimes lasted 34 hours, nothing was natural unless Nate allowed it. Self-image was conditioned, Franklin was not to see himself as a human being. Nate alienated him from his name, humans were numbers in a formula. Individuality led to rebellion and war.

And yet, in the cracks of those days, something refused to become a system. A small song Franklin whistled during duty made his chest feel like an organ again, not a battery. A crumb of bread hidden in his jacket became a treasure, warming him with memories of cookies baked with his mother at Christmas. He learned that some things didn’t need counting, didn’t fit formulas. He fought against the conditioning, even if it looked like he was becoming what his grandfather wanted, he never lost his own will. Systems, however perfect, had gaps, even a broken spirit kept a seed that could take root again. Franklin learned that empathy was his best weapon, often keener than measurable intelligence. 

That was something his grandfather could not accept. Emotional intelligence was a razor, classical intelligence could build systems, models, strategies orderly, predictable, seemingly unassailable structures. But emotional intelligence was different, an inner radar that read people before the rational mind could, that noticed micro reactions, unspoken desires, the fear behind a pose, the warmth behind a sentence. It opened doors logic left closed, forged bonds, built trust, defused conflict, ignited courage. Because it couldn’t be measured, it couldn’t be controlled like an instrument. A single empathic impulse could undo a thousand perfectly worked plans. That made it more powerful than any fucking intelligence his grandfather revered.

Franklin would remain capable of feeling. Even if that meant he felt the cold and knew what it was to have everything taken away, to know despair and pain.. he clung to it like a holy relic. That clinging helped him escape a future not worth living, one that had to be stopped before it was created.

He had expected the past to feel warmer, but no sooner had he arrived than a cold shock hit him. Teenagers stood close together yet didn’t look at one another, their worlds played out on screens. Trends replaced individuality, likes replaced real recognition. Praise from a mother triggered less than a heart icon from a stranger. Franklin realized that the future he’d fled had already begun to sprout here in small habits. People were starting to define themselves by metrics and visibility rather than closeness. Emotional impoverishment crept in quiet and almost imperceptible ways.. and he felt it everywhere. It shook him to the core, because it proved Nate right in one horrible way,  Nathaniel’s system had not caused this.. it was the logical continuation of what was already seeding here. That realization made Franklin think, for the first time, of destroying this world, to stop what seemed unstoppable.