THE MIDDLE CHILDREN

"Hi Mr .... How do you pronounce your name?" The young Asian woman said standing in front of me, holding out her hand, a small embarrassed smile on her face.

Surprised, I grabbed her hand and shook it firmly, then I answered:

"Leszczyński.... Professor Babel?"

"It's me, Mr. Leszin...i...ski," she said, aware that she had mispronounced my name, she just added immediately with a big smile: "Yes, I'm a middle child too working in a profession that used to be male-dominated, not anymore, "

She was the first to use the term in this sense. I understood immediately what she meant by 'middle child'.

"Would you mind if I called you Borys?" She continued, laughing as she showed me the way to her office with a wave of her hand.

I followed the professor having the strange impression of being like Alice following the rabbit down the hole towards Wonderland. There was already a lot of talk around the Babel gene, but I still had some doubts about the credulity of the information that the media was sharing with the public. Since the aftermath of manipulation and censorship in the 2020s just before the war of the rich countries and their colonisation by AI, I was having a hard time trusting governments and the media again. They had greatly contributed to the suffering of their own populations by artificial intelligence. The latter having never been more than just a tool in the hands of greedy idiots, I couldn't help it, but put the blame and the entire responsibility to the men in power who had orchestrated all this. They simply hadn't thought of the possibility of the terrible tragedy into which they were going to force everyone, including themselves.

Although I had learnt to live better with my traumas, I still considered myself as an orphan and the void left by the death of all my family members had become more and more invasive without solutions or answers. Indeed, the countries of paradise had chosen to turn the page without looking for any culprit. They had to move on quickly if they didn't want to find themselves in a spiral of remorse and bitterness. Most importantly, they wanted to catch back up with the former developing countries. As for me, I needed to prevent at all costs the same thing from happening again in the future, or at least during my lifetime. In my opinion, the only way to achieve this seemed to be through the light of awareness and transparency. Far too much information had been manipulated and hidden in the past forty years. We had become dangerously too familiar with the fear of speaking out, of contradicting, of investigating, of questioning anything as long as they were coming from rich and influential people in power.

I had two brown-skinned children, both of whom possessed the Babel gene, I wanted to know if the world they were growing up in would threaten, abuse or respect them because of that gene. I could feel that the wheel of fortune was still turning and I wanted to know exactly in which direction. There was nothing left to envy anyone since everything that had happened in recent years: yes, the rich countries had fallen from paradise and the poor countries had finally come out of the hole of poverty. The gap between having and being was closing in on men, but did all this really matter knowing that the Earth looked seriously ill and dying? Inevitably, the human species would die with it, wouldn't they? We only had to open our eyes and look through our windows to see it, except that our windows showed us something else to help us deny that horrible truth. Men wanted to keep hope, but they were still to find hope somewhere. Could the Babel gene with all its potential be the spark that would reignite the flame of humanity's hope or would it become yet another mere tool in the hands of very dangerous men?