Our multi-generational space habitat, the Starship Cooperation, has been cruising through space for quite some time now. Although we are free of a planet rotating around a sun, we still measure our time the same way as our ancestors, minus the leap years. There are twenty-four hours a day and three-hundred-sixty-five days per year. That makes this year our fourth century in space.

I suppose it's fitting that I take on the role of President of Starship Operations on our quadricentennial year. I am the first gender-fluid president on our ship, after all. We've come a long way since our ancestors in the Earth Cooperation Project first left shore so many generations ago. Back then, there was a lot of fighting. It was hard for our forebearers to blend so many different cultures together on one tiny vessel. People fought over religion, race, gender, and sexual orientation. For a while, it seemed like they might cause their own extinction. But, time really does wonders for one's spirit of teamwork. The thought of the vacuum of space being the only place they could escape probably didn't hurt either. It's much different when you have a planet with thousands of kilometers of open land, as opposed to what is, in comparison, an aluminum can floating in space. The ability to generate metals to expand the dimensions of the ship as needed certainly helped as well.

In the past century, the people on the Cooperation have gotten along and had resided and worked among each other in relative peace. There is still the occasional conflict, but differences in appearance and beliefs among the people usually don't come into play in arguments anymore. Of course, I'm an exception. For all of our advances in tolerance and acceptance, it's still hard for people to accept someone who presents as a male on one day, presents as a female on another, and ocassionally presents as androgenous as a mixture of both or none at all. It's even harder for them to accept a person like that in a position of authority. I've heard more than a fair share of derisive terms about people like me, many of which date back to the earliest years of the voyage of our vessel. They're prejudices that most people ignore because they think that such things don't exist in our peaceful modern society. The friction that so many of the crew have given me upon my election to the role of president is living proof that we're not quite as advanced as we think.

Still lost in my thoughts, I look at the head counselor, Maria Corben. She the woman to whom I am confiding my innermost thoughts. I realize that, if anyone would understand my situation, it is her. She is more of an exception to the rule of content among the crew than even I. She has green scales instead of skin and has yellow eyes with black pupils. Everything else about her appears completely human, from her long copper hair and full red lips, to her button nose and oval face. She also has a figure that I would love to have on my most feminine days. Though her appearance suggests otherwise, her parents were both human, as we have yet to encounter alien life on our journey. She is part of what is known among the people on the ship as a 'splicer baby'.

Thirty years ago, some of our scientists began experimenting with gene-splicing techniques. It was supposed to help with cures for diseases, but some people began using them on themselves recreationally. It was extreme body modification, a way to make them stand out from the crowd. It worked on that front, albeit a little too well. We didn't have animals on the ship, only animal DNA, but after a heist on the DNA center brought the sample out into the public, they the samples were rapidly cloned.

Once the DNA was available to the public, it was near impossible to contain. People were able to splice themselves with the various animal DNA samples, at least those that were stolen. Most chose vicious creatures such as reptiles, much like the mother of our counselor. They also chose lions, bears, and even more extreme modifications such as rhinos. The people on the Cooperation were frightened of their newly remodeled brethren, and tensions rose to levels that our ship hadn't seen since it first departed from Earth four hundred years prior.

Those people who had used gene splicing on themselves were sentenced to prison terms for illegal use of the technology. Our best scientists worked to find a way to reverse it, but their pursuits were fruitless. It seemed to be a one-way process. Gene splicing was eventually completely outlawed, the sources of the cloned DNA samples were found, and the shops that illegally sold modifications were closed and renovated into new businesses with new owners.

After their sentences were served, they were released back into the general populace. It was hard on them, but, as the other people on the Cooperation realized that they were stuck that way, they didn't give them a hard time, at least not physically. However, old fashioned racism was brewing. It was something that our ancestors had worked so hard to overcome, and once we were confronted with people we hadn't seen before, we were starting it right back up. People began referring to them as 'splicers', and viewed them as inhuman. Unfortunately, once the 'splicers' had children, it was discovered that the spliced genes were dominant, and the children would inherit their traits. They also would inherit the racism against their parents. Terms like 'splicer baby' were among the first wave of that.

Like with their parents, adults weren't mean to them in public. However, when in private, they saw these children as less than human and imparted that belief into their own children. As for these children, the young can be much crueler than their parents, so they did not show courtesy to their peers that had spliced genes. The insults were just the tip of the iceberg, as the bullies would beat these children since their parents made them believe that they did not deserve to live. The teachers were at a loss as to what to do, as the ship hadn't had this kind of violence and hatred on-board in over two centuries. They would send these children home for a week or more, much like our ancestors called an out-of-school suspension.

However, their problems weren't resolved, as the parents of these bullies felt their children did nothing wrong. In a number of cases, the parents even went to the administrators of the various schools on the Cooperation to get their children back in classes and expressed their bigoted belief in-person. The school didn't want this kind of atmosphere, so at first, they tried segregated schools, supposedly to keep the children with spliced genes safe from harm.

School segregation hadn't worked on our ancestral planet, and the same was true on our ship centuries later. The bigoted parents, and even those who did not have any children, ascended to positions of power in the smaller neighborhood governments on the ship. Those local governments put paywalls on the material supplied by the ship's computer. These paywalls were above the level of funding made available to schools with splicer children, so the teachers were forced to only use material that had been backed up when they did have full access.

Maria was one of the first children to attend these schools. She, along with the other spliced gene children and their parents, was treated badly by both children and adults in public, as the adults felt that the segregation had validated their views. On top of the mistreatment, the material being taught in schools with systemically discriminated children soon became outdated. The parents of the undereducated children protested in large numbers.

The President of Public Relations, my mother, was brought in to try to find a peaceful resolution. It was decided that, although the segregated schools were made with good intentions, they did more harm than good. The schools were once again integrated, but in reality the local governments had sinister intentions in mind. All of the schools once again had full access to teaching material, but they were distributed from local servers rather than shipwide as they had prior to segregation. This meant that the local governments could control the content of the text, and they predictably left out any accomplishments that were made by those with spliced genes while promoting, exagerating, and at times downright lying about the accomplishments of those unaffected by gene splicing.

On top of that, the social damage of segregation had already been done. Maria and her peers were still routinely mocked, and she was constantly told that she couldn't amount to anything in her life simply because of who she was. That is the reason why she studied and worked so hard to become a counselor. She wanted to prove that she could be someone important, and she could use her position to spread compassion. Her behavior and willingness to show empathy for even those who looked down on her shows that people who were the product of gene splicing were as worthy of expressing their humanity as anyone else.

That is the main reason why I was so relaxed in my mandated counseling sessions. Along with her calm, kind demeanor, we both were routinely mocked for who we were. In cadet training, my peers consistently told me to pick one gender and stick with it or that I was just changing genders for attention. When I was elected to a position of power on the ship, people insinuate that I had gotten my position simply so the President of Public Relations could put up a veneer of inclusivity, because my mother was once the President of Public Relations herself, or a mixture of both. I knew that I had gotten through because of hard work and determination, and tried my best to ignore the accusations of others.

After many years of hard work, I was now president and she was the head counselor. We both knew that working in our positions wouldn't be the easiest because of who we were, but we both felt that we could make a difference to our settlement in our positions. We were both still the same people we had always been, and we didn't let our hardships change that. That was what made us both strong people, and that was what was the most important. We knew that we couldn't change the opinions of everyone, but if our demeanor and aptitudes made even one detractor believe that it was possible that we weren't so different from everyone else, that alone would make everything worth it.

It was at this point that I took my mind out of its reminiscence and brought my thoughts back into focus on the matter at hand. I was here to talk with Counselor Corben about the present, as there was no need delving back into our pasts, and it was certainly not worth it to worry about the mistakes of our parents. We had both accomplished our dreams and were both new in our positions of power. We certainly had a lot to talk about in regards to the present, so talking about the past not only is pointless, but potentially harmful, as it would take away from our limited time allotted as president and counselor to talk about the here and now.

I began to tell her about my first week as president, and how surprisingly dull it had been, when the ship's alarm went off. It seems that I had just jinxed myself with my comments, as when I got up and headed out into the hallway, I was confronted with a truly disturbing sight. This is something that not even my mother saw on her time on the ship, and was certainly something I thought that I would never see. The entire senior staff wing of the operational section of the ship was now in the process of a full out brawl.

I ordered them to stop, but it was to no avail. Maybe the staff doesn't respect me in my role as president of operations after all. Maria tried to get them to stop as well, and I thought at first that her attempt had succeeded. However, after everyone stopped fighting they all eerily turned their attention towards her. They shouted that everything was her fault, along with people like her, and at once I understood what had started this brawl. The hatred of splicers had bubbled under the surface for several decades, and I had just witnessed it boiling over.