Ken was now a white homicide detective with the Detroit Police Department, and Barbara a white high school teacher. Radical surgery like theirs to fit the social ideals of the only political party that mattered had become as commonplace as face-lifts and breast modifications. If Michigan’s attorney general and the doctor who founded the Society To Outlaw Pornography In Total got their way, an even more extreme surgical procedure would be next. It was not a procedure that any sane parent would want to discuss with a young male child. The Campbells were going to have to.

"What is Gidarbing?"

The 10-year-old voice attached to one of the most chilling questions of the mid-21st century belonged to Ken and Barbara’s son, Sam. His brown-haired, green-eyed, genetically engineered Caucasoid features matched those of his surgically altered parents.

The older Campbells, wearing jogging shorts, sat barefoot and bare-chested on the couch in front of their 3’x 5’, wall-mounted telewindow the way most American’s did on a Sunday evening after church. Since Barbara’s breasts and nipples were the proper size, shape and color to fit within the proper bounds of good taste, it didn’t matter that they were exposed. Everything she did fit well within the bounds of good taste whether anyone was watching or not. She was a woman of conscience and integrity, a real American who prided herself in her strong moral character. She was no longer as sure as she wanted to be about Ken’s.

They had been watching an old, French movie converted to 3-D, and dubbed into English with slight French accents and perfect lip synchronization. Only the accents and the acting styles of the period would have told most people when and where the movie was filmed. ELectronic Facsimiles of people copied from live models or made from scratch could have been dubbed in as well. Only the best of programmers would have been able to pick out the actors from the ELFs, the computer generated fields from the original scenes.

Such was the technological state of art in the lifelike, 3-D medium of mass communication known as telewindows. With a more advanced T-window model than the Campbells had, G-rated moves could have been reprogrammed for specific action of any kind including graphic violence and explicit sex. Absent that capability on the consumer level, programmers with access to a broadcast channel could supply telewindow viewers with virtually anything they wanted them to see.

Had there been no such thing as T-windows, perhaps there would have been no such thing as Gidarbing.

Sam had come into the family entertainment room before either of his parents had realized it, the ambient sound from the movie having masked the opening and closing of the sliding back door. His question had startled them, not only because of his unexpected presence, but because the question itself was so unsettling to his father and so difficult to address by either of them.

Barbara said, "I thought you were next door playing with Oliver."

"I got kicked out."

Ken knitted his brows. "Whadaya’ mean, you got kicked out?"

"You know how the Wessons are. They started arguing about the Blue Monday trial. Mr. Wesson got real, real red in the face and told me I’d better leave."

"Oh," said the boy’s parents in unison, now precisely aware of where his question had come from.

Sam asked it again. "Well, what is Gidarbing?"

Barbara forced a smile. "It’s nothing you’ll ever have to worry about, Son."

Ken grunted, "Unless Jack Fleetwood takes the Party nomination for President away from the President and makes Estelle Gidarb the surgeon general of the United States."

Barbara cut her husband a hard look.

He shrugged. "Okay," he said, "you tell him?"

"You’re his father. You’re supposed to tell him about things like that."

"No way, lady!"

Oh-oh, thought Sam, I shouldn’t have let Oliver talk me into this.

Whenever Sam’s mother told his father what he was supposed to do as a man, it was going to be something bad that girls didn’t have to deal with. Whenever his father called his mother, "lady," there was going to be a fight.

"Never mind," mumbled the boy, trying to back away.

Barbara stopped him with her eyes and turned back to her husband. "You can’t duck out of this. Your son asked you a question. You’re supposed to give him an answer."

Ken started to dig in his heels, but relented when he saw what the conflict was doing to the boy. Barbara had caught on to how to win any argument with him and he could think of no way to break the pattern without torturing their son—which is what she was counting on. Ken made a mental note to have it out with her about that once and for all...in private.

He sighed, shifting his position on the couch to face his son with one leg drawn up on the cushion and an arm resting on the back. "Sam, what do you know about the Blue Monday trial?"

The boy shrugged, "All I know is he’s some kinda criminal who made real bad T-window programs for kids and now they’re tryin’ ta get’em for it."

Barbara felt relieved that her child had not mentioned pornography or indicated that he knew what it was. "Close enough," she said, ignoring the fact that Monday had made no telewindow programs for or about children.

"No," said Ken, thinking of the anatomically incomplete Ken doll for little girls that Dr. Gidarb used so profitably to illustrate the clean, smooth, inoffensive result of her surgical procedure, "it isn’t close enough."

He was right....

Though the obscenity trial of Blueford Monday could not be called a criminal proceeding for technical reasons, to some minds, the consequence of conviction could be called nothing less than criminal. It would allow a man accused of obscenity purveying in the state of Michigan to be Gidarbed as a "cure" for "sexual deviation invidious to the general welfare." It would make Gidarbing the weapon of choice in Attorney General Jack Fleetwood’s war on smut.

Estelle appeared frequently with her husband Euel, on talk shows like the one in Ann Arbor where Monday was arrested by Fleetwood’s state troopers. She was the first to perform the operation she called a "G Rating" for the G rating appearance it would give to the full frontal nudity of her male patients. The awkward-sounding name never caught on the way she hoped it would. Everyone else called it Gidarbing. In her best-selling book, Doing Without, she revealed that her husband, Euel, was the first to have it voluntarily performed on him as a cure for his pornography addiction.

Blue Monday, a dark-eyed, African-American in his late 30s was the first man in the country to be put in jeopardy of undergoing the procedure involuntarily.

The trial was over. Deliberations in the case of The People of the State of Michigan vs. Blueford Monday were about to begin. In homes, taverns, offices, cyberspace—anywhere people might gather to exchange ideas, deliberations had already begun.

Ken looked into the wide, green eyes of his son knowing that he and Barbara had done the best thing for the boy’s future by giving him those green eyes in his embryonic state. But the decision to change the other physical characteristics that defined his racial identity was one that didn’t rest easy in Ken’s soul.

Having a white baby meant becoming white parents. That still gave Ken and Barbara 23 years of black experience to draw on. Sam had none. Even though they made no secret of their black African roots, Ken sometimes wondered whether his son could relate to black people at all. He was beginning to wonder the same thing about Barbara.

"Are you going to sit there staring at your son all night," said Barbara, "or are you going to explain to him why his understanding of the situation isn’t close enough to what’s really going on?"

She pursed her lips in a way that would have looked like an overdrawn caricature of an angry black woman if he hadn’t known it for the natural expression it was. She was right about one thing; he had addressed the boy and then gotten lost in his own thoughts for no telling how long. He was doing that a lot lately. He resolved to stop doing it before it became a habit.

"Sam," he said, "that trial has to do with things that you’re too young to know about. But you’re old enough to know that the man they’re trying to get is not a criminal and the programs he sold were for adults."

Sex! thought Sam, glowing red in a searing flash of insight that his naked innocence was showing, I should have known! Jeez, now what am I gonna do?

Ken read his sons thoughts as well as if the boy had spoken them aloud and smiled to himself at the secret knowledge that pointed the way for him to go from there.

Before he could proceed, Barbara said, "That’s only a technicality."

Ken shot back at his wife, "A technicality that the Party thought up so they could butcher a man they don’t approve of."

Sam put two and two together on the spot and the color drained from his face—nearly all of the color drained from his face.

Oh, shit! thought Ken. While he sat there uncharacteristically frozen in place when swift action was called for, his wife acted swiftly. She was out of her seat and around the back of the couch so quickly that Ken couldn’t honestly have said how she got there. She knelt to wrap him in her motherly arms but he broke away and ran for the stairs leading to his room with a muted wail of horror trailing behind him.

Barbara started after him, but Ken stretched his body over the back of the couch to grab her by the wrist. She glared at him. A racial epithet beginning with the letter "n" formed on her lips and froze on the "g" that marked the end of the first syllable. It was a word she often used when she was angry with dark-skinned, brown-eyed people. It was the first time since their race-reassignment that she had come so close to using it on him. The look he gave her said all of that and more.

Barbara wrenched her arm away from her husband’s grip. "Don’t you ever lay hands on me like that again," she said.

"I only wanted to stop you from going after Sam."

Barbara stood akimbo. "Are you trying to tell me I can’t comfort my own son without getting assaulted by his father?"

Ken stood facing his wife with the couch between them in what he hoped was a less confrontational stance than hers, but one that she would not interpret as submissive. He motioned to her with his hands to keep it down. "Please, Barbara," he whispered," pointing with his chin toward the stairs....

Sam stood trembling inside of his open bedroom door. He heard everything his parents said to each other including the "n" word which didn’t have to be said in full to resonate in full. He closed the door and went to his neat little desk where his computer with its ancient keyboard and telewindow monitor sat on top. He turned on the machine and slid into his chair in one coordinated motion.

He and his best friend, Oliver Wesson, needed to talk—about the naked women ELF’s they’d been making with Oliver’s new Ito Supreme telewindow computer. Thanks to the Starr report and all of the pictures of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, they could make a recreation of their sexual encounters as convincing as any flashback image. Those ELF programs didn't worry Sam as much as the ones he liked to make of Euelalia Charmain. Just looking at her excited him, simply because everything about her was supposed to be obscene.

Children younger than he was knew that about the woman. They knew that her stage name was Charm. They knew that Charm's name was somehow linked to Monica Lewinsky's. They knew that Charm had done something so nasty that they put her in prison two or three lifetimes before his birth, never to be seen again.

The message was clear, and one that the media brought home with every mention of her name. Even a 10-year-old could see the connection between Euel and Euelalia for the bare-faced scare tactic that it was. It was working with Sam.

At the bottom of Sam’s telewindow pane was a short string of icons. Next to a drawing of a schoolhouse, where Sam went to school by way of his T-window linked to a Virtual Reality Visor, was a telephone icon. It was an ancient black telephone with a tall column on a round base, a protruding mouthpiece and a dangling ear piece on a hook. Next to it were holograms of four white boys his age. Next to them was a clean-shaven man the color of dark chocolate with long, graying, Afro hair worn in the popular style of the 1970s. He had a small, black wart next to his left eye. Sam had feared for him as much as for himself and his friend, Oliver, when he’d learned what Gidarbing was.

Sam clicked on the telephone icon and then on the hologram of the first boy next to it, another scrawny kid with dark brown hair. This one also had dark brown eyes like the dark-skinned man. Most of the kids he knew at his T-window school and neighborhood recreation center called them monkey eyes.

Actually, monkey eyes was the kindest epithet hurled at his best friend. Nigger-eyes was the worst...No, the worst was what the little kids said; the bright-eyed children who hadn’t yet learned the difference between "nigger-eyes" and "nigger."

Sam knew the difference.

As young Oliver Wesson’s computer telephone rang, the ugly word drew Sam’s eyes to the hologram of the black man. That’s who I really need to talk to, he thought. He canceled the call to his friend and clicked on the hologram of his grandfather. Sam was closer to him than either of his parents knew. He often wondered how Grandpa McPhail had managed to accomplish all he had with the burden of that awful "n" name hung around his neck because of his physical resemblance to African slaves. Resemblance to African slaves. That’s how Sam had seen the issue from his first view of the old South’s "peculiar institution" which had no more regard for the minds and bodies of black people than it did for any other beast of burden.

Being a time track engineer allowed Grandpa McPhail to show his grandson the real thing as it happened by way of a satellite called a Temporal Observation Manipulator; TOM, for short. He had shown Sam an unforgettable flashback to an auction block in 18^th century America, where the terms "nigger" and "slave" were used interchangeably. As a tracker, it was his job to turn the chaotic satellite signals called "time tracks" that recorded past events on flashback film into sounds and pictures. The results were indistinguishable from the sights and sounds captured contemporaneously with an ordinary T-window recorder. But, as a citizen of the State of Michigan, he was obligated to protect minors from obscene material—not that the sale of human beings was considered by the state to be obscene, unless the wrong body parts were showing....

Until the Blue Monday trial began, Aaron McPhail had thought little about the history lesson he’d given his grandson to supplement the one he wasn’t getting in his state licensed, T-window/VRV school. Since then he could think of little else. The wrong body parts were definitely showing. That’s how it had been in the time and place captured on film. The men running this New World auction house would have seen no more need to clothe an undomesticated black African straight off the slave ship than to clothe a mule.

The fact that some of women had breasts as huge as Euelalia Charmain's would have had nothing to do with whether or not their public exposure was obscene regardless of their color. These were different times with different ideas of what was obscene. The only way to get the truth of that attitude across though the centuries was to show it as it transpired. The truth of the situation in 21^st century cyberspace was that a Blue Monday conviction could make the exposure of that truth to minors punishable by Gidarbing.

Having a friend on the Monday jury didn’t help to keep Aaron’s mind away from such thoughts, especially a friend that he’d promised to visit by way of a Virtual Reality Session at least twice a week.

Aaron sat in the darkness of his small home office where a network of electronic signals would soon superimpose upon his visual cortex a computer-generated field of vision as convincing as the real thing. Everything in the VR environment would look different. Even the shirt on his back would be changed from a Western-style, long sleeve yellow to a military-style shirt sleeve green. At the touch of a button on his wristband computer, the transformation would begin. Aaron was moving his hand to touch that button when the miniature T-window attached to the wide, silver band like the rectangular face of an out-sized wristwatch lit up with the face of his grandson.

The boy looked frightened.

"Granpa, Granpa! It’s me, Sam. We gotta talk!"

Aaron pressed the illuminated button on his wristband. The picture the boy would see in his T-window would be a hollow ELF—a facsimile of his grandfather that would give a crude representation of his facial expressions as he spoke. Normally Aaron would have preferred to talk to Sam with his own face but he wasn’t set up to do that in his office. The hollow ELF would have to do.

"What is it, Sam?"

"Granpa...I...I just found out somethin’ about that guy. You know...the guy on trial."

Aaron could think of only one man for whom the mention of the words, "guy on trial," would be description enough. That man was Blue Monday. "I know who you’re talking about."

"...Ah...Do you know what I’m talking about?"

"I think so."

"Is it true? Can they really do that to somebody ‘cause a some programs he put in the T-window?"

"Nobody knows, Sam. Tell you the truth, I doubt it. The jury has been out for over three days, which means it could go either way. But it’s a test case. That means there hasn’t been one like it, so whichever way it goes it’ll probably get appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. That could take years. By then the politics driving this whole thing will probably have shifted to something else."

"Huh?"

Sam was so bright and mature for his age that Aaron often forgot how young he truly was.

"You know Attorney General Jack Fleetwood, don’t you?"

"Sure, Granpa, everybody does."

"Well, for some people that’s what politics is all about, making sure everybody knows your name. And making them think you’re so wise and wonderful that when you say laws should be passed to make people do what you want them to, most people will go along with you."

"Oh!" said Sam, his face showing the scattered pieces of the Monday trial jigsaw puzzle in his mind all zooming into place, "I get it. Jack Fleetwood wants to be the President and Dr. Gidarb wants to be the surgeon general. So if they get enough people to think they’re doing something good for kids by...you know...doing that Gidarb thing to that black guy...I mean."

Aaron smiled, hoping that the range of smiles programmed into the hollow ELF of himself in the boy’s telewindow, would show the true warmth and understanding he felt. "I know what you mean. You think the trial also has something to do with his color."

"Yup. I think Dad does, too."

"Oh? What did he say to make you believe that?"

Sam shrugged, "I dunno. Lots’a things...Him and mom...."

"You don’t have to go into this if you don’t want. I know my daughter. If my little lady knew we were having conversations like this, she’d probably pull the plug?"

"What plug?"

Aaron chuckled, "It’s a figure of speech from the days when devices that used a lot of electricity had to be plugged into wall sockets.

"Yeah," said Sam. "I seen’em in them flashbacks from when you were a little boy." He snickered. "They had them cords running all over the place. How did people ever figure out where to put all them things?"

"Not many of’em did."

Sam laughed, "Granpa, you’re okay."

"So are you, Sam."

"I’ll see ya."

"Soon, I hope."

"You bet. Bye."

"Bye."

Good Lord, thought Aaron, hoping that he’d told his grandson the right things. What is a 10-year-old boy doing with Estelle Gidarb on his mind?

Aaron put the blame squarely on Jack Fleetwood. "That son of a bitch," he mumbled as he pressed the button on his wristband computer to pay a VR call on his friend.

An instant later, Aaron, dressed in a green T-shirt that showed off his powerfully-built body, was sitting on a bench at a picnic table on the city’s island park. Sailboats with colorful, full-blown sails glided on the shimmering surface of the Detroit River close enough for the park visitors to get a good look at them. Young adults on shore played catch. Young children ran and tumbled on the green Summer grass.

A dark-haired, younger white man sat across from Aaron in a black T-shirt emblazoned with gold letters that spelled "Airborne Rangers". He was shorter but just as powerfully built. His slick, straight hair was parted down the middle and he wore a thin, neatly trimmed mustache.

"How’ya doin’, Vince?"

The man smiled, "Fine, Aaron...Boy, I love this park."

"Yeah," said Aaron. "Me, too. Too bad you can’t feel the breeze."

"Don’t rub it in."

"Sorry about that. Maybe I can give you something more interesting to watch. How about a hydroplane race?"