By Rob Maynard

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Chapter 2

Oliver Murray Jr. was in a dream.

Not, of course, that that's unusual among hot boys with 18 years worth of pent-up hormones and bodily secretions to express.

For boys at that stage of their exciting young lives, dreams - particularly those of the wet variety - are, after all, something of a speciality.

But Oliver wasn't dreaming, this time, in the comfort of his warm bed at home, but in the far more prosaic surroundings of Room 44D of Bette Midler High School.

And, for a bright boy like Oliver Murray Jr., that was completely unprecedented.

Normally the most eager and attentive of students who couldn't pay enough attention to every word uttered by his favourite teacher - hot Mr Petersen - this morning Oliver was, it seemed in a world entirely of his own.

Partly it was because Mr Petersen hadn't shown up for his history class that morning. The Head Teacher hadn't offered any explanation but had simply told the class that instead of Mr Petersen teaching "gay sensibilities in Weimar Germany" they'd be getting Miss Radcliffe-Hall, who'd travelled right across town from Navratilova Academy at very short notice, with a talk on the correct maintenance of heavy duty machinery.

An odd substitution, Olly had thought at the time.

But thereafter, as Miss Radcliffe-Hall's descriptions of catalytic electro-distributor caps and enhanced metohydraulic-suspension faded into an incomprehensible blur, he drifted away again into a world of his own.

But, if you'd asked him where exactly that world was or what he was actually dreaming about there, poor Olly couldn't have told you.

All he knew was that, for his 18th birthday, things seemed decidedly weird.

It should have been a day for celebration.

After all, today was the day when the authorities recognised his sexual independence and his induction into queenly society with a framed certificate.

There was also, somewhat less formally, a goody bag which included, amongst a great deal else, an interplanetary guide to the solar system's gay venues all the way from the cold planet Pluto, furthest of all from the sun, to the very closest, the recently-renamed Freddy-Mercury. And, recognising that young guys fresh out of school need a little help, there were even a few discount vouchers to some of the solar system's hottest nitespots ("Give your friends a hot time on Uranus!")

But, in spite of the undoubted significance of today's rite of passage, Olly was lost in thought.

And it puzzled him.

Because, apart from a general feeling of unease - that something untoward was about to happen - he found that he was thinking about Roland.

His personal robot mentor.

For the past two years Olly had assumed that, once he hit 18, he'd be sending Roland back to the robot reprogramming centre.

After all, by the age of 18 years and one day he hoped he'd be sharing his bed with a real boy (or, if he were lucky, a real man in the shape of Mr Petersen), not, when all was said and done, a piece of machinery.

But ever since he'd left the house that morning, with a last backward glance into his room at the sleeping robot, Oliver Murray Jr. found that final image coming back and sticking in his mind.

Roland was a robot.

But, all the same, Roland was more handsome than anyone else Oliver knew - at Bette Midler High or anywhere else, come to that.

And he and Roland had a history.

They'd vacationed together.

They'd swapped stories of hot boys together.

They'd watched their first porno together (and Roland had even helped clear up the mess afterwards).

They'd kissed, they'd hugged, they'd caressed…

And, if only Roland's programming hadn't forbidden him to go beyond stage 8B(ii) of the Board of Youth Sexuality's inanimate mentors' code, Oliver was beginning to be sure, in his own mind, that they'd soon have gone a lot further.

Meanwhile, as Miss Radcliffe-Hall was droning on about the importance of thorough lubrication (a concept with which, of course, she was more than familiar in her own private life) things were certainly going a lot further in the Bette Midler High School Head Teacher's office.

It was an odd room. Basically a reflection of its occupant's character, it was plain and cold. But, in an obvious (and obviously fake) attempt to suggest a little humanity, some "fun" pictures - mostly of the pumped-up bodybuilders variety - had been affixed without a great deal of care to the wall, giving the whole room, entirely contrary to the original intention, a rather cheap and seedy impression.

As the Head Teacher, Mr Gaveston, sat squarely in his chair with the most serious imaginable expression on his face, an ashen Mr Petersen - the love of Olly's life - stood facing him across the desk.

"This is, Petersen, as I am sure you realise, a most serious allegation that has been made against you", said Mr Gaveston.

"A school like Bette Midler High has a reputation to maintain.

"The Board of Youth Sexuality invariably takes any allegation of sexual impropriety between faculty and students as a most serious matter and I am afraid that it will be necessary to suspend you from your duties here until a full investigation has been carried out.

"You need not worry about your students. My counterpart at Navratilova Academy, Ms. Mauresmo, has kindly sent across a temporary replacement - and, while Miss Radcliffe-Hall's areas of expertise may not quite match your own, I'm certain our boys will enjoy something in the way of a change."

Petersen left Mr Gaveston's office a broken man.

He had known nothing about such allegations before this morning.

There was certainly nothing to them.

But he knew that, without knowing even what the precise allegations were - let alone who was making them against him - he would find it well nigh impossible to clear his name.

Bellerophon Black III was the school bully.

Even in the 23rd century they still had them.

Educational psychologists had decided long ago that in relatively enclosed societies, like schools or prisons, bullying was pretty inevitable.

All that could be done to tackle it was to try to identify the perpetrators as early as possible and then have them temporarily removed. Experience showed that, after the usual period of six months in the Marquis de Sade Institution for Wayward Youths, most of them reappeared at Bette Midler High and took great care never to cause any trouble ever again.

But Bellerophon Black was cleverer than most bullies.

He took care to cover his tracks well.

By invariably picking on the really weak boys - easily identified by their propensity to enrol in Mr Femme's after-school needlework class - and terrifying them into keeping quiet, Black ensured that nothing of his unpleasant activities, which included physical assaults, extortion and regular and repeated sexual intimidation, ever came to light.

He was also helped immeasurably by his own robot mentor Cyprian.

Just as Oliver Murray Jr. had specified Roland's characteristics - beauty, charm, loyalty and a highly developed sense of fun - to suit himself, so had Bellerophon.

His own robot mentor Cyprian, while undeniably beautiful in a dark, saturnine way, was therefore also as harsh, cruel and vindictive as his master.

And - a secret known to absolutely no-one else - Bellerophon had even managed to hack into Cyprian's crypto-control system so as to by-pass stage 8B(ii) of the Board of Youth Sexuality's inanimate mentors' code, thus explaining why his aforementioned sexual impositions on Bette Midler High's weaker boys took a somewhat more sophisticated and advanced form than one might have otherwise expected (even right up as far as stage 16A(iv) of the Board's inanimate mentor's code on one particularly memorable occasion.)

It had, truth be told, been the robot Cyprian that had first come up with the idea of how to remove the troublesome Mr Petersen, suspected for some reason of being about to suggest Bellerophon's expulsion from Bette Midler High, from the scene.

"All you need to do, Sir, is to tell Mr Gaveston that he's been touching you there and making indecent suggestions after class", Cyprian had said.

"And, if he tries to deny it, we'll just find some of the weaker kids who, with a little extra persuasion, will back your story up."

After that, events had moved quickly.

Within an hour of Bellerophon Black taking his story to Mr Gaveston, Jeff Petersen was out of Bette Midler's High's exquisitely polished gilt doors (the ones with the diamante and mother of pearl inlay).

It now appeared to Bellerophon Black that, with the perceptive Mr Petersen out of the way, the whole school lay before him to exploit in any way he wanted.

And, to Oliver Murray Jr., when he heard what had happened to his adored Mr Petersen, it seemed that his whole world had come to an end before it had even begun.

© Rob Maynard / HMBoys.com 2003

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