It was not surprising that Barón was treated as a strange neighbor by shallow teen-agers around his block for his unusual perspectives about life. Barón was trying always to engage in intellectual conversation which contrasted with the pragmatic tendencies that students had been learning from their effective functio-instructors. Most of the students in Barón’s neighborhood valued education for the practical consequences that were entailed by it; thus, most of them did not understand Barón’s aversion towards functiomatons, which he often tried to denigrate with expressions such as “the evil instruments of natures destruction,” which he often uttered casually around teen-agers during his failed attempts to hold a conversation.
The main reason why Barón’s young acquaintances around his neighborhood were not pleased to interact with Barón was that he was a non-libidinous person: In the hedonist ambience of Truxes, teen-agers living in Barón’s neighborhood could not understand someone like Barón who had no desire at all to be physically intimate with someone else. He neither had the ability to fall in love nor wanted to please himself physically even though he was physiologically correct. He had no cognitive disorders. He did not have any well known syndromes. Simply stated, Barón had a non-libidinous identity.
Barón’s non-libidinous identity greatly contrasted with the libidinous identity of most of the people around his neighborhood; they were mostly interested in meeting someone so that they could be physically intimate in the future. Much of what libidinous teen-agers talked and did were projections of their desires for physical intimacy. Given that teen-agers in the Truxes area were carefully monitored by adults at all moments via technology, libidinous teen-agers could only talk about physical intimacy and share verbally what they wanted from a partner in their adult, unsupervised future—However, sometimes, around his block, teen-agers heard stories about pairs of teen-agers, that had run away because they were in “love”, and were found later that day by the police. In contrast, Barón was not preoccupied about finding a partner; his focus was deeply academic and often dismissed conversations about vulgar physical pleasure, when he talked with libidinous students during the allowed hour, not being able to understand the need they had to share their bodies with someone else just for pleasure; for Barón, the idea was as ridiculous as it was for a libidinous person to see “two people tickling each other noses just to induce a sneeze”—it was a thought he did not want to share with anyone.
Barón’s lack of emotional connection with physically intimate topics, which seemed like an obsession for repressed teen-agers from the point of view of Barón—Most of the teen-agers in his neighborhood—was reciprocated negatively by libidinous teen-agers: Many teen-agers scorned the fact that Barón claimed not to have physical attraction towards anything or anybody. The derogatory term used by teen-agers to harass him was “Empty Doll”. Obviously, given the strict electronic surveillance everywhere, such a term was not openly uttered; it was whispered occasionally in Barón’s ear when some bully walked closed by. All the subtle harassment resulted in Barón’s social isolation from teen-ager’s groups formed around his neighborhood during the allowed hours.
On the other hand, Barón did not care much about being socially isolated from the majority of those shallow students. In order to be able to socialize tastefully, he had the original idea of forming a group for non-libidinous teen-agers. With the magnificent help of functio-communication, Barón had been able to find only three, bright, openly non-libidinous students, living around his dishonorable neighborhood —Barón had named his faithful group The Proud Zeros, having been inspired by an old punk rock song he had heard from a device called “I-pod” which had belonged to his father. Soon after they had met, the group of four members became their own social world.
The group of four worked together efficiently. In tune with Barón’s love for beautiful natural settings, the four members used to meet in an enchanting park during the allowed hours for forty minutes; they constantly talked about post-modern philosophers who had been questioning the role of gender in shaping the human thought. Also, they discussed ways to educate the majority about what it meant to be non-libidinous. A frequent activity carried out by the clever group was to pass out informational functio-storage units to open minded teen-agers walking by the park, about what is entailed by the possession of the eccentric non-libidinous identity—it was unusual for people to do this due to wireless functio-communications; on the other hand, it was clever to be doing such thing at the park. In addition, they were opened to talk to teen-agers about their amusing group, and their quirky non-libidinous identity, whenever any curious person wanted to know about them.
The group of four was more than just a group of people with whom they could share intellectual thoughts about gender and physical intimacy. For all of them, the unusual group meant an extension of a family where they could have close and loving friends who accepted them for what they were. They often held hands while they were in their meetings to make prayers to nature about things that they wished happened in the world and without feeling inhibited to express their love for one another in words. They love each other so much that they acted as one entity, where the group was the body, and Barón was the mind.
Just like Barón, the other three students from the Proud Zeros Club were as interested in academic knowledge as Barón was. One of them was Mary, a shy, sensitive, nervous girl, who was also sixteen years of age, like young Barón, and who liked reading romantic poetry like Barón did; they often wrote poems to one another. Another member of the Proud Zeros Club was the sixteen year old Martin who was outspoken and interested in politics. The most quiet from all of them was Carl, who often did not want to challenge any of the other three members whenever he disagree with someone’s policy, but was deeply interested in discussing scientific topic—It was only about science that he liked to talk about. Nevertheless, Barón was the smartest from all the group indisputably given that he was classified as more than a genius by the Functio-School: he was already taking upper level courses at the university level at that age of sixteen. It was obvious for the other members of the group to recognize that he was the smartest given the amazing knowledge that he had about every topic mentioned by the other students. In fact, the other members affectionately nicknamed him “The functio- encyclopedia” behind his back. On the other hand, regardless of their intelligence, they were all excellent students and shared the love for academic learning.
Although they were enchanted to be learning about school subjects themselves, just like Barón, they all were “irked” by the means that were institutionalized in order for them to be able to learn academics knowledge daily: they all detested learning from functiomatons. In this way, The Proud Zeros Club was also the place to learn, in their view, from human to human. Their reunions in the park were vicarious ways to learn as if they were in an old-fashioned school.