Technocracy: Freshman Year, Part 2

“Now,” said Mr. Simeon, looking up from his screen, “this is Homeroom, where you’ll receive all your notices and assignments for your remaining classes of the day. We don’t have much of an agenda today, since it’s the first day of school, so we’ll just be cycling through some forms and permission files you’ll need to download and take home to your parents. They should already have their own copies by now, but you’ll need your version to have their electronic signatures.”

Marin tapped at her desk, filtering through the forms and papers and permission slips that flickered, brightly, across the screen. It was all pretty mundane: medical releases, liability arrangements, outlines of the school year. As mentioned, her mother already had copies of them all. Marin didn’t even read them, really. Whatever she’d need to know, she’d learn through absorption over the course of the day and the week. This was her way.

And yet…

There was a thing that seemed different now. She twitched at this, and shivered, in her pretty orange dress. Something was different. Something—something. She glanced over her shoulder again. Ardo was looking at her. His ruby eyes, those eyes as red as lava, met her own sapphire blue gaze. She scowled. He grinned. “Ugh!” she snapped, and turned hard back to her screen. Something was… wrong. Something had changed and she could not change it back. What? What was it? She had no idea and it made her feel uncomfortable. She hated not knowing everything about everything. She hated it!

The bell rang. Marin sat bolt upright. The feeling in her chest was coiling, oozing, like something melting and running down her heart and into the pit of her stomach. Something was different. Something was… starting. Was it just her period? She’d been having them for a year now. But she’d finished hers a few days ago. It couldn’t be starting again. So what was it? What was it. She didn’t know. It bothered her. She felt fine, she felt fine… except she didn’t. Somehow. Something bothered her that she could not explain.

“Are you all right?” asked Saera, from her seat by the window.

Marin’s sallow skin went paler at the question. “I’m… fine,” she said, glancing to the side. She did not wish to admit that she was out of sorts.

“See you later, fatass,” said Ardo as he passed her desk.

“F-Fuck you!” barked Marin.

“Marin,” said Saera, voice quiet, but firm.

Ardo laughed at this. He turned and shouldered from the room, knocking a student aside as he did. “Hey,” mumbled the student.

“Fuck off,” grumbled Ardo over his shoulder as he walked into the hall. He looked, everywhere, for his next scuffle, his next challenge, his next trouble. The girl with the long black hair, the fatass, had been good sport, to start with. But he needed more.

Both his eyes were burning, like two candles in the dark.

He bounded up the steps to the second floor, slipping and shouldering his way through the crowd. His black hair swished around his neck, catching the light and contrasting with his brown skin. An even greater contrast were those bright red eyes of his, so strange. His aunts and cousins always told him they were special, unique. Sometimes he thought so. Other times he just thought they were weird.

He drifted into the classroom of his next class. English. God willing, the annoying girl in the orange dress wouldn’t be in this one. So he took a seat near the front, in a corner near the window. There he took out a notebook and a colored pen and began, swiftly and rapidly, to draw. Nothing in particular—more abstract shapes than anything else, bends of architecture, hints of some grander design that he more felt than saw. For all its indeterminate shape, there was order to it, and Ardo’s hand moved with practiced, careful ease.

Yet all of a sudden something twitched. Something was strange. And a surge of anger swelled in him, blazing in his heart, and with angry lines he scrawled all over the drawings, nastily scratching them out. He snarled under his breath, and gazed to his left. Something was strange and he could feel it and it bothered him.

He gazed to his left, just in time to see someone sit down next to him. And, in fact, it was someone he recognized, though they’d only just met. It was the boy from the other class, from the Homeroom. The one who’d stammered, and that some of the other kids had laughed at. His brown hair fell in heavy bangs on his pale forehead. He turned Ardo’s direction, and Ardo couldn’t help but note his eyes. These were brown as well, but there was something… off, about them. Ardo had always had an eye for color, and these were not normal brown eyes. They had a richness, and a hardness, and a glint to them. There was a kind of metallic look to the irises, like they were copper, or maybe bronze. Maybe both—there was an unclarity to them, right now.

The boy noticed him look, and flinched backwards. “W-What?” he asked.

Ardo huffed, annoyed. “You gonna sit there?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “That a problem?”

“No,” said Ardo, turning back towards the front. It was, really, but he knew better than to start shit right in the middle of class. In fact, he decided to stick a hand in the boy’s direction. “Ardo.”

The boy was somewhat startled, but he stretched his hand out as well, and they shook. “Terry.” That’s right. Terry. That was his name.

“All right, all right, settle down, you all,” said the teacher, a woman, coming into the room. “My name is Mrs. Anna, and I’ll be teaching you English this semester. I see you’re all accounted for,” she tapped on her screen, “so let’s just go over a few forms.”

Ardo snorted in derision and blew some of his black hair out of his face. More fucking forms. It’s not like his aunts didn’t already have these…

“Here is a liability release and an obscenity statement...”

Whatever.

“… followed by a syllabus for the course this year.”

Ardo glanced to the side. Terry was noiselessly sifting through the forms on his desk’s screen, drawing and tracing. Or… no, more than that. He was signing. Ardo watched, out of the corner of his eye, as Terry began slowly, shiftingly to sign the parental line on all his forms. Ardo could see the way his arm jerked and twisted: it was a faking, a forgery. Did he have to forge his parents’ signature? That was weird, and made Ardo wonder.

“So, anyway,” said Mrs. Anna, “obviously for this course we are going to be introducing you to English literature. But, of course, as you know, that presents some problems, because our knowledge of the past is limited.”

Ardo rolled his red eyes. Here it came…

“As you certainly know by now, much of our knowledge of the history of literature is constrained by the total destruction of human society during the Ravaging.”

Yep, another Ravaging speech. How many of them had he heard, all through middle school?

“It’s hard to believe there’s so much about the past that we don’t know, but that’s what happens after fifty years of global nuclear war. Even almost five hundred years later, we’re still having trouble piecing things together.”

Ardo subtly slid his notebook back onto his desk and began to sketch. He’d gotten used to tuning these talks out, selectively picking out the things that he’d be asked about later. Now he began to draw a dog he’d seen while riding to school that day. It had been black with some tan on its mouth and paws.

“But nonetheless, civilization has recovered, and persisted. And we have generated new art, new writing, and that is what we will study this semester: art of the last 500 years. Poems, short stories, novels, we’re going to cover the art of a reborn world, our world...”

Ardo began to shade the drawing of the dog, carefully twitching and sketching with his pencil. Graphite really was the best for drawing like this.

“And we’ll find out just what art has to say about our present life in Atlanta, Georgia.” Mrs. Anna abruptly stopped. Ardo detected the lack of noise and glanced up. She was standing right in front of him. “Mr. Ortiz, what are you doing?”

Ardo blanched. “I...”

“He’s just taking notes, ma’am,” said Terry next to him. “They’re all on his desk.”

Ardo’s red eyes swelled. His gaze twitched down to his desk screen, and sure enough, there were notes drawn out there, written in a small, neat script.

“Fine,” said Mrs. Anna. She pulled away from Ardo, and took up her touchscreen again. “As I was saying...”

Ardo didn’t hear the rest of what she said. She peeled away, and continued on, but all Ardo could do was gaze at Terry, off to his left. The taller boy glanced idly at him. Those copper eyes, that metallic brown, seemed to flicker at him, like the glint of something precious buried in the earth. Ardo twitched his own red gaze aside, but could not stop the wonder that arose.

The teacher assigned them a poem to read for tomorrow, and Ardo tapped a few sigils on his desk to make sure it was downloaded into his phone. He’d read it at home tonight. The bell rang, then, and Terry got up abruptly, his green field jacket swathing itself around his tall and narrow form. He was also wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He went from the room in a firm, direct line, moving swiftly. “Hey,” said Ardo, hastily shoving his notebook and his phone into his satchel. “Hey!” he cried, shouldering other students aside to hurry out into the hall.

“Go away,” said Terry as Ardo came fast up to his shoulder.

“Why’d you do that?” Ardo asked.

“Leave me alone,” said Terry, trying to shoulder past him.

This flared Ardo’s temper, and he grabbed Terry by the bicep. Terry went a bit limp, and with a sigh allowed Ardo to pull him around. His brown eyes glinted in that metal swell; for whatever reason, they now leaned more towards the bronze hue than the copper.

“Dude, I just wanna thank you, okay?” said Ardo. “You saved me a ton of trouble back there and you didn’t have to.”

Terry cocked his head gently to the side. “I liked your drawings. And you let me sit next to you. I thought I owed you.”

“Well, thanks again!” said Ardo brightly. “How’d you do it, anyway?”

“These are the same desks from middle school,” said Terry. “It’s not hard to figure out how to get in and out of them, and shift things between them, if you spend enough time with them.”

“Oh, I… never really bothered to learn.”

“Maybe you should.” Terry began to slide past Ardo.

Ardo moved in front of him again. “What’s your next class?”

“History.”

“Mine’s Algebra. When’s your Lunch?”

“The period after this.”

“Me too!” Ardo clapped him hard on the bicep.

“Ow,” said Terry, wincing. Ardo did not notice.

“We should sit together! Be friends, you know?”

“I...” Terry’s face twitched. “I’m not really interested...”

“Come on, man, let’s do it.”

Terry glanced to the side idly. Then he sighed. “Fine.”

“Great!” said Ardo, who smacked his arm again.

“Ow,” said Terry, more pointedly. Ardo did not notice this one either.

“Okay, so I’ll meet you on the front steps of the cafeteria at the start of Lunch, all right?”

“Sure.”

“Great,” said Ardo. “Catch you then!” And with a wave over his shoulder, Ardo hurried off down a hall to the left.

Terry sighed. Lunch with a stranger. Well, it was better than sitting alone. Maybe. He hefted his backpack up onto his shoulders, and started walking straight ahead. He’d already memorized the way to all his classes.

He strode forward, firm with purpose, solid like the earth.

He did not shoulder people aside. People seemed to naturally part around Terry, as though he exuded some kind of aura. Maybe it was his height: he was tall already, and though he was thin he wasn’t a complete stick. He glanced from side to side, seeing people who did not see him. He was used to this, by now. To drift, silent, through crowds, paying them mind but having them refuse to return the favor. It had become a regular feature of his life.

Which is why Ardo coming to him was so striking. Terry had done nice things, kind things, helpful things for others. Just because he was silent and distant didn’t mean he didn’t feel the tug of his chest at another’s distress. But his reward, so often, was a simple glance, a single word, maybe two. For Ardo to come blazing up to him and demand they sit together at Lunch was… strange.

But perhaps not unpleasant. “Hmm,” hummed Terry, huffing the ghost of a chuckle and shaking his head.

He entered the classroom silently. He scanned it, silently. A few faces, here and there. Maybe two from Homeroom. He went up and down the rows of desks, trying to pick one out. He liked to sit near the front. But he didn’t like people on both sides of him. One on one side was fine, but he did not enjoy the feeling of being hemmed in. Terry enjoyed at least a certain amount of open terrain. It was a thing he very much preferred to have. He wanted to wait, therefore, and see how the class would fill up. So he drifted backwards out of the door, and stood aside as more and more students came in.

When the holographic clock on the wall told him it was a minute until class would start, he walked back inside. The class had only about fifteen or sixteen people—standard class size at this school, he was finding out by now. There were two empty seats right at the front, right next to each other. On either side of this pair, someone was sitting. A boy with dark skin and dark hair sat on one side. On the other—

A pale face twitched in his direction, and pale, silver eyes locked onto his own bronze gaze. They were real, true silver, not that blue-color that was sometimes called silver: they were a pale, iridescent white. Platinum blonde hair gathered about them. Oh, it was that girl from Homeroom, the one who was ghostly white. She sat by the window, and there was a spot next to her.

She was good enough. He had remembered her being quiet. So he went to the seat next to her, and sat down at the desk. The silver-eyed girl did not turn her head, but Terry turned his, and saw her eyes twitch his direction despite her face remaining set straight ahead. She put him off a little—but there was something in him that pressed against her, quietly. Something sharp and metallic. He felt it, and it made him sit more confidently at her side.

“Hello there, class,” said a tall, dark-skinned woman, walking into the room with a huff. “I’m Mrs. Herod, and I’ll be your World History teacher this semester.” The class stared silently at her as she walked to the large touchscreen whiteboard and tapped it, pulling up a suite of digital forms. “Obviously you’re going to need your parents to fill out these forms...”

Terry had already begun forging his father’s signature. He’d learned to do this in middle school, just to avoid trouble. After all, the chances that he could even get his father to look at these forms, much less sign them, were slim.

“And we’re going to download a syllabus, as well,” said Mrs. Herod, tapping on the screen, sending papers and files streaming to their desks, and also to their phones.

Terry silently tapped and forged, tapped and forged.

“As you can see, we’ll be covering our limited knowledge of pre-Ravaging history in the first two weeks, then move on to our basic knowledge of history in the immediate aftermath, and the gradually more well-developed history of the last five or so centuries.” Mrs. Herod arched an eyebrow. “By the way, can anyone tell me when we generally assume that the Ravaging started?”

The pale arm next to Terry rose into the air.

“Ms. Alhimov?”

“I believe in 2012,” said the silver-eyed girl.

“That’s correct.”

Terry’s face did not show it, but he was surprised at this. He’d been hearing about the Ravaging since intermediate school but he had never bothered to remember most of its details like that. It’s not as though it was important for his day to day life.

“So, we’ll move on...”

She began to talk. Terry heard her, in one ear. But in truth he began to think. He wondered. Silence came, in and out, over him, as Mrs. Herod talked and he partly heard her. He was good at partly hearing. He knew, by now, that he’d remember what he needed to remember. He always did.

But something was strange. Something was off. Something was making him think, and search, and reach for something he did not know. The day was strange and he could feel it. And in a moment that he almost instantly felt he would regret, he pulled up his desk’s messaging function. The desk next to his, by the window. He pinged it. He typed in a message with a few rapid fingers.

>Hello.

He sent it. Of course, messaging on school desks was a two-person affair. You couldn’t just send them unilaterally; the other desk had to approve them for them to go through. So he saw the flicker, the blinking, the waiting. And he expected it to end there, with a blink of red, as the message was denied.

But it was not: instead, it was accepted. And, a few moments later, the Ask for a message from the other desk flickered across his own screen. He accepted.

>Hello.

Terry felt a churning up his spine. He hadn’t expected a response at all. He typed again.

>I think we’re in Homeroom together.

Sent. He waited again. Again he heard the teacher. She was talking about the contours of the oligarchies that had arisen after the Ravaging. He heard—he heard enough, anyway. But then he saw another message from the silver-eyed girl.

>Yes, we are. I am sorry people laughed at you. They should not have.

Terry felt his heart twitch at this. They’d laughed. They’d laughed because he hadn’t listened, because sometimes when he half-listened to the teacher he forgot the half part, and he just stopped listening at all, and just sat there, in the middle of his own thoughts. He knew he had to be careful about that, about retreating too much into his own head. Especially when people needed him to listen. People sometimes yelled at him to listen, but sometimes it got him to listen less.

>Thanks. Your name’s Sara, right?

A pause. He came up for air and listened: “… interested trade conglomerates, many of whom took the vacuum of power as an opportunity to seize lands and titles for themselves...” Nothing important. The teacher was rambling.

>Saera. That is my name.

>That’s a cool spelling.

He didn’t have to wait any time at all to get an answer to this one:

>It is an unusual spelling, I know. But I like it.

Terry did not know how to respond to this. He’d messaged girls before. One had flicked her hand at him dismissively not so long ago. But he just wanted to be friendly. Finally, he settled on:

>That’s neat.

Saera did not respond to this. He glanced to the side, towards her. She was unreadable. Just for a moment. But then, slowly, one silver eye turned his way. And Terry saw her smile, just a little. Just a hint, a flicker, a twist of her lip. But it was there. And Terry huffed, and shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t usually make friends.

“Mr. Philips?”

“Yes, ma’am?” said Terry, perking up at his name.

“Can you tell me what the first independent nation to declare itself in the aftermath of the Ravaging was?”

Terry smiled. “Oh, that would be the Kingdom of Persia, ma’am.”

“Correct. Now, as I was saying...”

Terry didn’t bother to listen to the rest. He knew she wouldn’t call on him again. His copper eyes flickered over to Saera, and they saw her silver gaze dart his way before turning back to her screen. “Hmm,” hummed Terry, hunching down over his desk.