Story #200: Left Behind

Story #200: Left Behind (Content Tags: Messy diapers, light sci-fi, perceptions of intelligence shifted, humiliation, genius protagonist, light reference to scat, surreal) Nate had once been considered at the genius level; he had been an intellectual that was easily one in a million! Grades were skipped, commendations were awarded, and his smugness was perfectly reasonable. That had been before the giant paradigm shift. That was something from before the total upheaval of the system in place. That lofty designation had been awarded in a time before the dawn of Cerebrex. For all his wit and knowledge, Nate hadn't had the humility to foresee what would end up happening. He had honestly first believed that Cerebrex was a scam, and then that it was exaggerated, and finally that it would be too expensive for the general public to have access to. The final coping mechanism had been the belief that his position wouldn't change, because he too would simply take the medication. Unfortunately, he was one in a million in another area, and that other area was an extremely rare gene that made taking Cerebrex into a non-option. What exactly was Cerebrex? It was a miracle drug. It was a little pill that did incredible things to the human brain. On average, taking the allotted doses, would boost one's IQ score by over a hundred points. There were no real side-effects, at least none that weren't outweighed by the massive benefit, and thus there was no reason to avoid taking it. It was very cheap to manufacture too, and the company responsible was altruistic enough to ensure widespread availability across the entire planet. So it only took a scant few months for the global IQ average to increase by over a hundred points. Every package came with an easy screening tool to ensure that the consumer was compatible, and the overwhelming majority of people were. Some took to it better than others, which meant more pronounced intellectual growth, but even the least compatible saw a transformation to a level that they could never have imagined. And then there was Nate. Nate had the gene known as 'RT-P002', which was one of a small handful of genes that would have a negative reaction to the drug. If he were to take Cerebrex too, then it would actually have the opposite effect on him, and his IQ would be cut by about a hundred points. There was a tiny chance that the interaction wouldn't happen, but it wasn't a chance worth taking. Still, Nate didn't immediately find himself concerned with this change in the world. It was slow at first, and thus it was easy to ignore, because he hadn't been made to truly recognize what such a shift would mean for those left behind. The concern really began to grow whenever he noticed more kids at school starting to wildly outpace him. Kids who had been average, or even slackers, whose families got early access to Cerebrex. For a short period, the disparity between the common folk and the elites had grown tremendously wide, with the wealthiest and best connected people suddenly becoming geniuses. That disparity was ultimately short-lived, and the next big roll-out was intended for those deemed most needy, such as those with intensive intellectual disabilities. That's where it really started to sink in for him. Nate had a slightly older stepbrother: Sammy. Sammy, for lack of a better term, had been mentally retarded. Not just dimwitted or on the spectrum, but downright drooling and pinching off turds in a giant diaper. At fourteen years old, he had the intellect of the average three year old, and that was being fairly generous to him. As crude as it seemed, Nate had been one to tease him for this. With the arrogance and sense of superiority that his genius mind seemed to afford him, Nate had been more than willing to flaunt such things, all while debasing what Sammy lacked. Sammy may have been dumb as rocks, but he had been smart enough to know when he was being teased, and for what he was being teased for. Sammy wasn't the only sibling he had in diapers either, as he also had a younger brother that was just shy of two years old, and so who was obviously in Pampers of his own: Tony. Now, Nate didn't tease Tony for what was only natural, but he did treat a toddler like a toddler. That wasn't an issue until Cerebrex came around during its third big wave. But that would be getting ahead of things. It was Sammy who got swept up into the medication during the second wave of distribution, whenever it was being used to effectively cure mental retardation as a condition. Within just a few days of taking it, Sammy's IQ had started to see massive improvements. Watching this transformation was unsettling to Nate, and thus he doubled down on his crude mockery, as if wanting to make sure that Sammy knew to stay in his assigned lane. The jabs and jeers became more notably cruel, more frankly piercing, and just as Sammy's comprehension grew to be offended on a deeper level. It took less than a week for Sammy's IQ to become average. No longer did he drool or babble, but he spoke like a normal teenage boy might; his pottytraining was less immediate, since he came to fully understand what to do, but his muscles took some extra time to catch up. The third wave of distribution came about a month after the second. The select few who had benefited from the first wave, had become intelligent enough to find a means for the mass production and distribution of the drug to a global market, at essentially zero cost to the consumer. It was seen as an investment into mankind's future, since a more intelligent population would be more likely to bring forth even further prosperity. The third wave would see anyone and everyone becoming a genius beyond the level of Einstein. The only ones who wouldn't see that transition were the very few whose genes didn't allow for it, which was about one percent of one percent of the population. The same bucket that Nate himself was in. Nate's parents would become super geniuses, as would his classmates, teachers, and neighbors. Sammy would get his second dose and be forever elevated to a level beyond Nate, as would Tony. Nate didn't really grasp it until he came home to hear his siblings having an intricate discussion on quantum mechanics. He tried to listen, to join in, but he was utterly lost. Nate was smart, but not on that level. The same could be said for school, where his previously impressive IQ was now wholly inept for the level of discussion that his classmates were having, or the types of lessons that his teachers had moved to teaching. Once there was a total global saturation of Cerebrex users, there very quickly came massive paradigm shifts in the way things operated. While those on it didn't see it, Nate could see that the drug's impact on their intellect had also come with the side-effect of making them lose perspective on what lower intellect was supposed to mean. Legislation came about that redefined what the threshold for 'mental retardation' was, and the new IQ score that designated that condition was '180'. It likely made sense to them, since the new average was '230', but it meant some seriously bad news for the boy who had been left behind at '142', which was now considered at the lowest end of cognition. And so where did Nate end up? None other than the same sort of class he used to mock Sammy for being a part of: Special Education. The perspective from the genius population was so skewed now too, that he genuinely began to be treated as though he was like how Sammy used to be. In relative terms, he was treated as if he had an IQ hovering in the low forties, from a pre-Cerebrax perspective. That was how everyone now saw him, and how they decided it was best he be considered. What else may come along with that, other than a mandatory change in everyday uniform? SPED class meant diapers, with no exceptions being made. If a person's IQ was too low to make the 180 threshold, then diapers were just seen as sensible, as the might 200+ IQ minds couldn't see how such a lowly intellect could be expected to operate a toilet. It didn't matter that Nate had been pottytrained perfectly for a decade, nor that his current IQ was higher than what everyone else's had been just a short time ago. Perception was just totally screwed up. The massive increase in brainpower had effectively made it impossible for anyone to fully actualize what their life had been like when their mental prowess was less than half as powerful; there was an egotistical element to it too, as though the thought of ever being so dumb was humiliating to consider. Getting so smart so fast was an absolute detriment to the collective humanity of the planet, but only because there were a few who got left behind. The diaper legislation was pretty blatantly cooked up by diaper companies who could see that their market would be seeing a large impact by the changing in intellect. Babies would pottytrain earlier, since it became a matter of muscle control and will, and former dummies would mostly no longer need such a product. People like Nate, whose unfortunate gene had made the transcendence impossible, were easy targets. They would become the new market that took over the previous, whether they wanted to or not; it only took a tiny bit of lobbying and some very crude campaigning that manipulated the way the genius population felt about the stragglers. Nate knew it must be worse for some of the others with his same fate, as they'd likely been left at the previous average, which was around a hundred, and was practically viewed on the same level of a diapered monkey in a zoo. There were some others, who didn't have it quite as bad, but who were still caught in the unfortunate scenario of now being considered mentally retarded. There were 'halfers', whose Cerebrex impact hadn't been fully effective, and thus they hadn't jumped quite as the high as the rest of humanity. In SPED, there was actually a unique form of this phenomenon, in which mental IQ increases weren't accompanied by behavioral IQ levels. This essentially meant that there were former morons who now had an IQ that far surpassed Nate's own, but they hadn't shaken the dimwitted behaviours that they'd had before. They still drooled and ate their own boogers, they still gleefully farted and pooped in their diapers, but now they could also run laps around him when it came to trigonometry or calculus. They were arrogant about it too; they were smugly superior. What had once been the highest IQ at the school, was now considered the lowest. Nate was now seen as the dumbest kid there, even when some of his new classmates were playing with their own mushy filth, or much worse. It was the worst fate that someone like Nate could suffer, and it'd happened unimaginably swiftly; within just a few months, he'd gone from the top of the castle, to down in the dung pit. Nobody would acknowledge what he'd once been either. All of his accomplishments were demeaned, and his desperate attempts to bolster his credibility were taken poorly by all those who were now his mental superiors. He was just supposed to be a retard now. The lessons he learned in SPED were a slap to the face, but that was only because he couldn't keep up with the other SPED kids. The next lowest IQ in the room was 164, which made his own brain look like a bowl of oatmeal. The other SPED kids would learn higher level college material, but it was presented as if they were learning their shapes and colors; since Nate couldn't keep up with them, he *was* made to relearn his shapes and colors. There was no middleground for him. He should have been learning high school level stuff, or early college, but they threw him the kind of slop that was now expected to be learned very quickly by literal newborns. He was constantly denied access to the training potty in the room, which was only allowed for those who were close to the SPED threshold in the first place, and so he had to learn to simply void his bladder and bowels in his diapers all day. Horrifyingly, his intellect began to actually falter in such an environment. His control over his bladder and bowels would slip in the coming months, from lack of training upkeep, and his brain would follow. Being treated like a mental invalid, and being given only the most rudimentary of coursework, was enough to make any mind atrophy. It was humiliating, sure, to be considered the 'dumb' one by the kids in his class who still stuck crayons in their nose and put their hands down the back of their dirty diapers, but the shame didn't stop at school. Nate was wearing Sammy's old diapers, since he clearly didn't need them any longer, and his baby brother was rapidly approaching the point of being pottytrained, once his muscles fully developed. Neither brother had any respect for him any longer, with Sammy being exceptionally vindictive in how he treated Nate. It was during Tony's second birthday party, where Nate got the reality check that crushed him entirely. Extended family came out, as did Tony's friends from daycare, and Nate was on the receiving end of some extremely pitying glances. Nate had to plead with his parents to at least cover up his diaper for the party, and they had finally humored him by giving him a romper that barely did its job to veil the garment. "Dis is my wetard bruddah." Tony would introduce him as to the other toddlers who had come to the party. "I'm not a retard! Don't you dare call me that!" Nate would exclaim with indignation, much to the amusement of the tots watching him. There would be laughter and crude comments, as if he was the toddler in the backyard, instead of all of them. One boy, holding what looked like some kind of advanced remote, pointed it at Nate's head and then gawked. "Not even one-fifty!" "His diapee is cuz he's too dumb for da potty." "He's a stupid poo-monkey!" "Poo-monkey! Poo-monkey!" Their jeers boiled his blood, "I am not! I used to be smarter than everyone else, before that stupid Cerebrex came around!" A different little girl shook her head and clicked her tongue, "Previous intellectual scores are irrelevant in a post-Cerebrex world. By today's standard, you're no different than the mindless poo-eaters of the pre-Cerebrax era." It hurt to hear, especially from a toddler. It didn't hurt his feelings, but his ego. He got so worked up about it, that he didn't realize he was soiling himself until a big turd started to push its way into his thick padding. He got wide-eyed and stood still, as the log slowly crackled and squeezed past his buttcheeks. The sounds might have been too subtle to pick up on in the environment of the party, but his sudden stiffness and faraway look was highly suspect to those looking at him. "Poo-monkey is going poo-poo!" One tot said with a cruel giggle. "I-I am n-not...!" Nate tried to argue, unable to stop the massive steamer from crashing into the padding. "Negative, that is a deception." Came a sudden voice from behind; it sounded robotic, and as Nate turned his head, he could see why. It was his little cousin, Alex, who wasn't even yet six months old. He didn't have the vocal development to speak on his own, which was remedied by the little computer that his baby walker had on it. He didn't even have teeth yet, or a full head of hair, and being barely past the newborn stage, he was going through even more diapers per day than Nate was. But, even so, his IQ was over eighty points higher than Nate's was, and he garnered far more respect than Nate could hope to. Alex clumsily moved his chubby fingers around on a holographic display, and all of a sudden, there was a thermal image of Nate showing for everyone to see. The heat-map was sophisticated enough to exclude the natural body heat of a person, and since it did that, it was able to show the intensive heat signature of the solid being deposited in his diaper. Everyone could watch as the heat-signature grew in size, representing the load growing in the back of the diaper. There was no hiding it, even if he was wearing a romper, and the shock made Nate fully evacuate right there. Gas bubbled and sputtered in his seat, and the stool started to more noisily plop into his Pampers. It was at that moment that Nate fully understood his new role in this new world. Even infants were so far above him, and nobody would ever see him as anything even approaching intelligent. Perhaps that meant it was time to stop resisting and instead just lean into the role he now had. The world had left him behind, and he had to accept that.