Chapter One, Part One

She walked slowly and carefully down the road, cautiously glancing around every few feet. She got to the corner, and stood still as a statue, listening hard. When she decided that she’d heard enough, she sprinted as fast as humanly possible across the street. She continued on her way like this all the way to school.

She reached the school building. She swiped a card through a slot in the door handle, stood still with her eyes wide for the retinal scan, put her thumb in the gel pad for the thumbprint identification, and, when the signals turned green, walked through the door.

She glanced down the halls for a room marked “129-B”, for that was her learning division. She found it eventually, conveniently located on the first floor, and went through the same procedure that she had at the main door. The signals turned green, and she walked through the door.

She glanced around the room – it held all of eleven people. She made twelve.

She took a seat (one of three left) and began to pull up the opening screen on the desktop surface.

Finding the signature box screen, she picked up a stylus on the side of the desk and signed her name carefully. The signature appeared in a window at the front of her desk, so it would be visible to the teacher.

She sat, lapping up every second of beautiful silence in the still room. She pulled up lessons that would be taught in the higher learning division classes (a skill that only she herself knew) and kept herself occupied with those until the teacher arrived, which would probably be in about five minutes.
She was always there before the teacher.
She was probably the only one who cared about the teacher, or paid any attention to him.
She was disgusted, thinking of the feeble minds that would take part in the “learning” that she would when the teacher arrived. The administration diagnosed her learning ability without even testing her. She was destined to be a B-129 forever, even if she proved she could be at least an A-190 a million times over.
She hated her country and the flag with the thirteen stripes and the 58 stars that represented it. She learned in the A-240’s lesson plans that the country’s education system had once been leveled differently. You were placed with children at your only level of learning, and your teacher gave you material that was challenging.
She longed for that.
Instead, she would have to sit and be bored. Again, just like yesterday, and the day before that.
She started to daydream. She dreams that she was an A-500, who study to be time-travelers. She dreamed that she went back in time five hundred years, and that she was in a classroom with brilliant minds like her own, learning things beyond the imaginations of the simple-minded.
And that’s as far as she could do, for now. Just sit, and dream…