Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

Part of me expects that any minute someone is going to shout out “April Fools!” and this whole experience will turn out to be a gigantic prank. The rest of me is sure it’s all some weird dream, and I’m going to wake up to Mom’s voice any time now. But no one wakes me up, and no one does the big April Fool’s Day reveal, so by the time I get seated at breakfast I’m forced to accept this place as my new reality. My siblings don’t seem to realize what day it is. No pranks, no jokes, no one even mentions the holiday until I ask Evan about it.

“I don’t know, brother,” he answers around a mouth full of waffles. “A lot of that kind of thing we just don’t do here. I mean, I’ve heard of it, but mostly from shows. Marc tried a prank, years ago. He decided to get Chad by putting hair dye in his shampoo, but that ended up with him getting a beating from a blue-haired Chad. No one much wanted to try anything like that afterwards.”

“Does Chad beat on Marc a lot?” I ask.

“He used to, especially right after we moved into the dorms and lost our nannies. I’d stop him if I was around, but Chad was smart enough to take his shots when no one was looking. He doesn’t anymore. He got called to Father’s office a couple of years ago after he was careless enough to give Marc a black eye. I don’t know what the old man told Chad, but he hasn’t laid a hand on him since. Yesterday was pretty close though.”

“Yeah, I thought he was going to lay him out.” I dip a piece of sausage in the runny egg yolks on my plate and take the bite.

“Naw,” Evan says. “He’ll threaten him, but he won’t hurt him. When we got our implants, Father said he’d take them away if he didn’t think we were worthy of them. Chad’s a dick, but he’s not going to risk losing his cloud. Or worse yet, disappointing Father.”

“He’s that big of a suck-up, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s Chad, a real kiss up, kick down kind of guy.”

That tracks with what I’ve seen of him. I nod and finish breakfast, smiling at the gorgeous young woman in a white apron who comes to wipe the table as we get up. She flashes a quick smile back but quickly looks away to focus on her work. I peel my eyes away from her and walk with Evan over to the Learning Center. According to the tablet’s schedule app, I’m supposed to have class in room 164. Evan points me down the right hallway, then heads off to his own class. When I get to my room, I see a slim older woman with immaculately coiffed white hair and a neat navy pantsuit already there, seated at one of the two chairs around a small circular table. I’d guess she’s in her mid-seventies.

“Mrs. Jones?” I venture, stepping through the doorway.

“Yes, and you must be Noah,” she says, standing to greet me. The smart part of me is relieved to have a teacher that doesn’t look like a lot of the staff here. I don’t know how much I would be able to concentrate if I had someone trying to teach me who looked like Janet or the cafeteria girls.

My new teacher talks me through the subjects she’s going to be covering: literature, history, geography, political science, and ethics. She seems nice, in a no-nonsense kind of way. We spend most of the next couple of hours doing a fast version of world history that condenses the broad strokes of all the history I’ve ever learned into one sitting. She’s good at this. Really good. She uses a tablet like mine to pop reading assignments to me every time I don’t know something that she asks me, so by the end of her class I have a dozen books and essays lined up to read. I sigh as I realize I’m never going to have free time again.

Halfway through the morning, a balding man in a rumpled shirt knocks on the open door. “Charles!” says Mrs. Jones, looking up at him. “They called you back in as well?”

He grins at her, revealing a crooked set of teeth. “Yes, Grace. I was trying to stay retired this time, but you know how it is. They make it so hard to refuse.”

“Well, this young man is Noah,” she says, packing up her things into her black leather briefcase. “If my experience with him so far is any indicator, you’ll enjoy him.” She smiles and takes her leave.

Without any further greeting, the man makes his way to the white board that covers one wall and immediately starts into a whirlwind math course, beginning with a lightning-fast review of calculus. “Just stop me when we get to what you don’t know,” he says cheerfully as he whips through principles and equations. If Mrs. Jones was good, he’s amazing. I finally stop him as he hits the second fundamental theorem of calculus and ask his name.

“My name is Charles, as you heard, but you can call me Mr. Johnson if that feels more comfortable for you,” he says, then turns back to the board and continues scrawling numbers and greek letters, talking to the board more than to me but throwing questions my way every minute or two to make sure I’m still with him. I was going to tell him that we had hit the limit of what I knew, but his explanations are so clear that even though he’s plowing through new material, I think I’m still following. I feel my brain expanding as he pours pure mathematics into it.

An old, banged-up plastic watch on his wrist beeps and he glances at it. “Twenty minutes left,” he notes. “Goodness, I lost track. Time for you to work some problems.”

And with that, I’m up at the board with him, integrating by partial fractions and calculating the lengths of parameterized curves under his expert tutelage. I learn as much in a couple of hours as I did in a whole year of math at my old school. He lays on a homework load heavier than I would have done in a week back home as the bell sends me on my way to computer lab.

I see Jeff in the hallway ahead of me, gliding along. It takes me a second look to realize that he isn’t just walking with some unnaturally smooth gait, he’s literally gliding. His feet don’t move. Well, they move, but only because all of him is moving. It’s like someone is pushing him on roller skates, but I can’t see anything between his black shoes and the tile floor. Chad wasn’t kidding when he said that Jeff uses his cloud for everything. Even walking, apparently.

“Hey Jeff,” I greet him, catching up and matching pace with his glide. He turns his head my way and inclines it slightly.

“Noah.”

I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t, so I just walk the rest of the way to the lab with him in silence. He takes his same seat in the corner of the lab, sitting with that same rigid motion I’d noticed before. We’re the only ones there so far, and I’m super curious about his unique way of typing, so I grab the seat next to him. He turns to look at me for a moment, but doesn’t say anything. I get myself logged in and watch his keyboard out of the corner of my eye. His typing ball moves fast, but I still catch his password as he logs in, 4LLP0werfulC1ouD. I mentally stash that away for future use. You never know when it might be handy to not be yourself on a network, especially if you have a history of doing maybe slightly illegal things with computers.

I check my schedule to see if there’s anything there about meeting my father today. No such luck. I pop open the programming assignment from yesterday. It’s in something called SynScript, which is a new language for me, but the fundamentals look a lot like javascript, so I bust through it in a couple of minutes. I take advantage of my stolen free time and get started on the homework from Mr. Johnson. I get into the math zone and don’t even notice that Evan came in until I take a moment to stretch and see him seated on the other side of me.

“How long have you been there?” I ask him.

“About half an hour. You get intense when you focus.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” I let my chair roll a few inches back and look around. Andrea sits on the other side of Evan, facing away from her computer and staring at her fingers. She slowly moves them through the air as small pops of formless color appear in front of her then fade to nothing. Jeff and Louise both jam away at their workstations, coding in that same language from my assignment. Chad is parked in the opposite corner of the room, which suits me just fine.

I’m about to say more to Evan when Marc grabs him and pulls him over to his workstation and starts making him help him with a programming question. I listen in absently as I work through another math problem. Marc is stuck on some pretty basic stuff using a binary tree data structure. Evan explains things to him three different times before Marc can finally solve it. I guess not everyone here is a genius, despite the stellar teachers and intense curriculum.

I get enough of my homework done that I should be able to wrap the rest up tonight without too much trouble and decide that’s enough math for now. I check my calendar again, still nothing about meeting my father. I guess it’s not happening today. Evan is stuck helping Marc and everyone else looks busy. A few minutes are left before lunch, so I take a moment to poke around and check the network security situation. Just how well does Janet have the internet buttoned up here with her filters and firewalls?

I get a command terminal up and let the hacking basics Mom taught me do their thing. The security on the computer is tight, but not unbeatable. The network connection that gets to the outside world uses a physical ethernet cable, and it’s a separate network from the wireless that keeps the tablet restricted to the campus intranet. The internet filter looks pretty standard, and the firewalls are nothing special. I think I can beat those with a little work and Mom’s tools, if I can sneak her laptop in here. It won’t be the same without Mom teaching me new tricks as we go, but I feel closer to her just thinking about it.