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“We are not going to screw it up this time.”

“Excuse me?”

The boy tensed his square jaw, his cold charcoal eyes hard and dark. He would not excuse his fellow geniuses; this was no time for excusal. It was imperative that they understood everything he said, and that they agreed with every word of it. “Look what my father left to me. Look, and tell me that you do not see a bright, untainted surface. A perfect mirror of our own world, only this time a completely new slate.”

One of the assembled geniuses chortled shamelessly.

Another narrowed his eyes upon the boy, this bright but quite unseasoned boy who wanted so badly to be every ounce his father, even at this unripe age. “There was no last time, boy,” the genius advised him. “We never screwed anything up.”

“We weren’t the ones who did the original damage. But this whole world is a screwup,” the boy asserted, sweeping his lean arm in a gesture toward the world beyond the walls of the Collective Genius—a world in which the prisons were always full, the courts always overextended, the wars always violent, the streets always teeming with violent crime. The world had been that way for too many millennia now. “Somewhere along the line, perhaps even before the beginning, imperfection was bred on this earth. And since then it has flourished. This insidious imperfection, it has grown darker every day of every sad, dark year.”

“This imperfection is called nature,” the genius stated evenly.

“Then we will remake nature,” the boy determined, “and we will make it right this time.”

He looked up at the great, imposing screen at the front of the assembly room. He worked the controls on his handheld remote, zooming in for an intimate overhead view of the lush, fertile land on this untouched twin earth. To the rhythm of his fingers, the images on the screen rotated smoothly, offering the assembled men a sweeping bird’s eye tour.

He provided no commentary—the image of Glorion spoke for itself.

“My father had a vision,” the boy declared. “And I won’t let that vision die with him.”

“Your father was a lofty and ambitious man.”

“My father was the greatest genius the Collective ever knew,” he staunchly contended. “The best and the most brilliant. His probe explored the farthest reaches of the universe, discovered countless planets, countless forms of life. Countless forms of intelligent life, no less. Few geniuses can say the same for themselves. And long before his death—for the Glorious discovery, men, was made well before the hairs on all your sorry heads turned gray; my father merely never mentioned it—long before his death, my father achieved the fruition of all his life’s purpose. He found a world not only perfectly habitable, but quite actually perfect. A world so precisely like ours that we could there viably duplicate the human trajectory, only this time without everything that went wrong.”

“And who’s to say just what went wrong, boy?” another elderly genius demanded.

“My father is to say, and I will echo him. And,” the boy added, “I will not be called boy.”

The assembled men were visibly amused at this little boy’s self-righteous indignation. Dry smiles crossed many of their sage, sardonic faces. But in spite of their age and their cynical wisdom, they respected him much more than they were willing to admit. In a society of intellects, his sharp, precocious mind inspired deference. And even at this young age, that mind had won him admission into the distinguished inner circle of the Genius, which was now assembled here. They recognized that he had every right to be self-righteous.

“We mean no disrespect,” another genius defended, “but as you are not even yet sixteen—”

“A man is measured by the speed at which his neurons fire, not by the years that he has spent upon this sad, cold rock,” the boy averred. “I was his youngest son, but the only son of his to earn admission to the Collective. I am the only one who inherited his genius, and that makes me more of a man than all my elder brothers. And, I’d hazard, more of a man than any of you.”

“So like your father,” a low voice broke in from the far end of the room. A grizzled man was standing in the doorway. “Though I suppose, to you, that is a good thing.”

The young boy steeled his stony eyes. “Uncle,” he muttered. “You were not invited.”

“I am well aware,” the man acknowledged. “But you are in my charge, you know. I ought to keep an eye on you.”

“I am no one’s charge but my own,” the boy countered through clamped teeth. “You are not privy to these matters. You never gained admission to the inner circle of the Collective, as my father did before you. And as I did, at the tender age of fifteen, a mere three months after I joined. You are in no way superior to me, and so I do not need your supervision.”

A frown entered the uncle’s eyes, though his mouth remained a firm, immobile line upon his withered face. “I do not claim to be your superior. Just like you, your father never let a day go by without reminding me how stupid and inferior I am,” he recalled. “But you know something, boy?”

The boy glowered at him, glaring a silent reply that he knew everything. Or at the very least liked to think he did.

“A mere three months after his Glorious discovery,” the uncle spoke, “your father shared it with me. He chose to share it first, and only, with his stupid little brother.”

The boy’s gray eyes widened a bit, the stirrings of a grimace curling back his upper lip. “He may have shown you his discovery of the planet,” the boy conceded. “But the vision? I am sure he never told you of his vision for it.”

“Oh, of course not. But he never told you either.”

“Yes,” the boy snarled, “he did. He left it to me just before his death.”

“Is that so?” the uncle questioned, raising his hoary brows. “I thought you’d only discovered his vision by accident. As I understand it, he meant to take it to his grave.”

“No. He left it to me,” the boy insisted fervidly. “He left it to me.”

“He left it to no one. He was too disappointed in all of his children, even down to the youngest and brightest. He told me he would sooner let the vision die than leave it in unworthy hands. He deemed you almost worthy—he knew that you were brilliant. And yet you were not brilliant enough. Not good enough,” the uncle paused, his gravid silence adding emphasis where emphasis was due. “But you already know that, don’t you, boy?”

The boy’s nostrils were visibly dilated, his brows drawn down in apprehensive anger over febrile eyes. For once in his life, he looked like a child.

“Do you want me to tell these men the truth? About your father’s death?” the uncle, since unmoving at the doorway, began at this point to enter the room, infiltrating the sacred space of the selective inner circle. “A funny thing, that it happened a mere three months after you joined the Collective. Or perhaps… perhaps we ought not tell them yet.”

“Enough. Enough of this family quarrel,” one of the seated geniuses intervened. The lot of them had been captive in tense, breathless silence, hanging on this boy and uncle’s every word. But now that the matter at stake was bordering on practical, and criminal, these men of intellect would have to stop their ears. The Genius did not know how to pass judgment on men—only on ideas. “Let us hear this vision, and we will pass judgment upon it.”

“The inner circle will pass judgment,” another added, casting a stern eye on the uncle. “Would you excuse us, please.”

The uncle bowed his head and left the way he’d come, bringing the door to a soft close behind him.

The vision was told. It was told in a thin, pubescent voice that trembled with the weight of what it spoke. It fell with equal weight upon the ears of those assembled. On the screen at the front of the room, the Glorious globe watched and listened, unfazed and unchanging.

Silence followed the boy’s closing words. His voice had gained a robust tenor as he spoke, and he no longer looked like a child. His face flushed with self-righteous confidence as he concluded, and his stone eyes scanned his audience as if challenging them to oppose him.

“It’s brilliant,” one genius put forward.

“It’s mad,” countered another.

“It’s both,” the eldest in the room pronounced. “It has to be both. It’s moral eugenics.”

“I would not call—” the boy began to object.

“It’s moral eugenics,” the eldest genius proceeded, ignoring the boy and addressing those assembled at the table. “It is a vision that has been lurking in the darkest reaches of the Collective mind for centuries now. We have not dared give breath to it, not after the catastrophes of the previous millennium.”

“And there is good reason for that,” an anxious-eyed genius advised him.

“Yes. There is,” the eldest granted. “There is also good reason against it. There always has been, but never more so than now. Now that the Glorious discovery has been made.”

“And now that a viable project has been proposed,” a younger genius furthered, his eyes ablaze like sunlit emeralds. “This boy is right. His father was the greatest genius the Collective ever saw; I have never been more convinced of that than now. He took a vision that we were all too scared to even entertain, and he developed that vision into a feasible, workable project. A project that he clearly laid out with deep thought and meticulous detail, backed by a wealth of wisdom and research that no other genius can boast. Based on what his son has told us of it, I think this is a project that might very well succeed.”

“The risk of failure runs deep, though,” another admonished.

“Does it?” the emerald-eyed genius wondered aloud. “Not on a new slate. If anything goes wrong, it will go wrong light years away from this place. That new earth will be our field, and we will people it with guinea pigs—willing guinea pigs, who understand the risk. Whatever risk there is, if any. I am sure there will be plenty of willing subjects, for an enterprise as Glorious as this, and the chance to live upon that paradise of a planet. That planet can be our experiment. If it fails, that will not matter for us. Everything on Earth will continue as usual, and our test subjects will be the only ones who suffer for it—a risk they willingly undertook. And if it succeeds… then we can join them, or model our own world on theirs.”

“The first generation may be all of willing guinea pigs, but their posterity? I suppose all of them will sign contracts at birth? And if they are scared of these risks, we’ll happily ship them back to Earth?” another genius derisively demurred.

“Moral matters. Legal, maybe. Those are for the government to decide.”

“I’d hoped… not to involve the government, not this time,” the boy broke in, his voice a little tremulous again.

The geniuses blinked. “And why would that be, boy?” one of them asked him.

The boy paused briefly and bit his lip, then released it reluctantly. “Father did not want them to know. About the vision, or about the very existence of Glorion. And I agree with him that we ought not tell them. Not yet—perhaps not ever,” he claimed. “When the Genius first attempted immunological eugenics, the Red Plague broke out. That was the fault of the government.”

That assignment of blame was very heavily contested, beyond the walls of the Collective Genius. Within the Genius, it was taken as brute fact.

“The Collective’s attempts at intellectual eugenics led to an outbreak of idiocy, which lasted decades. Just as much a plague. And just as much the fault of the government,” he carried on. This claim, as well, was taken as truth among the geniuses. “Every attempt at eugenics has been foiled by the government. Whenever their slimy hands intervene—even when they are in support of us, and trying clumsily to aid us in our cause—everything crumbles to dust and decay.”

The geniuses absorbed his words, and mulled them for a moment.

“He is right, of course,” the eldest stated at length, on behalf of his nodding colleagues.

“There is another thing that I’ve not mentioned,” the boy disclosed. “Glorion is extremely faraway, and currently inaccessible. My father’s probes can reach it easily, but no loaded spacecraft could. The distance is not humanly traversable. Not yet.”

“Well,” the eldest uttered as he cast a promising smile upon the boy. “That will change, in due time. Perhaps not in our time, but soon, I am sure. With geniuses like you among us, I trust the Collective will be making quite rapid advances in the years to come.”

“So you endorse this? This mad eugenics of morality?” a nervous genius asked the eldest.

“Of course. It’s mad, it’s brilliant. It’s Glorious.”

“But if we so disastrously failed with the biological and the intellectual, why would we now venture toward the darkest, the most dangerous and most difficult depths of humanity? Why would we ever try to reengineer the soul, after trying and failing with the body and the mind, when the cost of failure in this case would be so monstrous?”

“More monstrous in this case than in others? What makes moral ill so much worse than a virulent plague, or a spell of stupidity? Evil’s not so bad. It can’t be worse than idiocy,” the eldest replied, ostensibly half in jest, though really altogether serious.

“The question of good and evil is a slippery one. It is not a clean distinction. It is the messiest thing we’ve ever dreamt of tackling,” another genius argued.

“Then we will handle it with very close and very careful thought,” the eldest declared.

“But I thought the Genius makes a point of never meddling in the moral?” yet another objected. “Why would we mire our hands in it now, in the most dangerous way possible?”

“But it’s not even dangerous for us,” the emerald-eyed genius asserted, raising a hand toward the blue globe on the screen. “Everything will happen there, on Glorion. Earth will not be endangered at all.”

“And you’ll just leave the moral and legal quandaries of the guinea pigs to the government? But, oh—the government will not know,” another genius scoffed, his raised voice ironic and smug. “Well in that case, I suppose, since we’re such experts in morality after all, we may as well decide those things ourselves.”

At the front of the room, the boy felt his heart beating a little too fast—faster and louder with every mention of the moral and the legal. He wondered whether the geniuses closest to him could hear it thundering in his chest.

After a lengthy and heated discussion, the eldest suddenly rose from the table. A hush fell over the room. Age was not, perhaps, a respectable thing in itself, but this man was both exceedingly old and exceedingly intelligent; he boasted all the wisdom of his age, but none of its typical senility. He thus commanded deep respect in the Collective.

“Even we men of great minds,” he spoke, “are not always like-minded. Moral matters are always laden with intractable disagreements. Until now, that has been a reason for us to avoid them. But today, because of the prospects that are now presenting themselves, it becomes a reason for us to tackle them with new rigor and new determination.”

The geniuses regarded him in silence for a moment.

“And if we arrive at an impasse—if the Collective mind finds that it can no longer function in unison—” he continued, “then mayhap it ought to divide.”

Some of the geniuses gasped; others blinked; others audibly swallowed; one of them sneezed. None of them took these words lightly. Were the Collective to divide, they thought in horror, it would no longer be a collective. Its power lay in the unity of the collective mind. Were that mind to divide, it seemed, the genius would be broken.

The eldest in the room, and the youngest, were the only two present whose minds were not racked with such grave apprehensions.

“Come,” the eldest summoned, beckoning the young boy to accompany him elsewhere. “I would speak to you about your father.”

“My father?” the boy bleated weakly, the crack in his voice betraying his age. He feared that that was not all that it betrayed.

“Not the man,” the elder genius reassured the boy. “The vision.”