Tomorrow’s World by Davie Henderson

and dumb and second-best.
    Before Annie MacDougall could pick out a pupil, the know-it-all who’d corrected her earlier said, “The Hydrocarbon Holocaust.”
    It had to be a Pareto. I turned around to see if I was right. Sure enough, I found myself looking at a younger version of the smug face that had sneered at me as I got off the exercise bike in the gym the night before. A few desks away was another face just like it, displaying an identical sneer. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but there seem to be more Paretos than there used to be. My heart went out to Annie MacDougall—two in one class.
    When I turned back to Annie, she was nodding. “Can anyone explain how the Hydrocarbon Holocaust came about?” This time, before either of the Paretos could answer, she looked at a small boy in the front row who’d been begging to answer the previous question, and said, “Frankie, would you like to try?”
    He nodded. Although I was looking at the back of his head I could picture his face. It would be a mask of concentration. The silence stretched out long enough to become awkward, and then embarrassing. It was filled by a snigger. I imagined the boy’s face turning bright red. Finally he said, “It was the bomb in the beefburger place and the Americans getting mad at the Muslims and the Muslims getting their own back and…” the words dried up.
    More sniggers, then one of the Paretos piped up: “What he’s trying to say is that tensions between Christians and Muslims over the treatment of the Palestinians and the terrorism it spawned were worsened by the policies of a US government which was increasingly a puppet for multinational companies who manipulated it for their own ends, principally to meet their growing demand for increasingly scarce resources, especially oil.”
    I shook my head in disbelief. The Pareto was no more than fourteen years old, and yet talked like an adult. And history is their
weakest
subject.
    He wasn’t finished yet. “United by a sense of injustice and double standards, a Muslim Coalition was formed. The first thing it did was increase oil prices. This caused great hardship in the developed countries, especially the US, and ratcheted up racial and religious tensions even further.”
    â€œThank you, Paul, or is it Mark?” the teacher said sweetly.
    Someone sniggered. It was me. I was sniggering because I knew Annie was having a dig at the Pareto’s lack of individuality. Although I’d laughed, it wasn’t really all that funny. I’d seen enough of Annie MacDougall to know that, like her father, she was as good as people get—yet even she’d been driven to launch an attack across the genetic divide.
    â€œI’ll take it from here, because I’ve got some more pictures to show you,” she said. With her good hand she clicked the audio-visual control, and the wall behind her became a city of skyscrapers seen from ground level. All the shop windows were blown out, and a cloud of smoke hung heavily just above the debris-strewn street. People emerged coughing and choking from the dust, their clothes torn and bloodstained. Some held handkerchiefs to their mouths, many looked like they didn’t know where they were. A few people, mostly wearing fire and police and paramedic uniforms, rushed toward the cloud to help those who came staggering out of it, but they had to fight their way through panicked crowds pouring from the surrounding buildings. The classroom around me was filled with the screams of pain, fear and panic of long-dead people, and the wailing of a hundred sirens. I’d seen the footage many times before but it hadn’t lost its power to shock me, and I found myself caught up in the heroism and sheer terror of the events portrayed. I stole a glance at Paula. She only looked mildly interested, as if she was watching an old Hollywood movie rather than a turning point in