C11 The classroom

Gerald turned and found the classroom eerily quiet. All the students sat silently in their customized seats. Their eyes closed, their breathing rhythmic. At the head of the class stood the teacher, likewise eyes closed and silent.

In the far corner sat a student with bright red skin like a fire-engine. The three seats around her were empty, as if there were a buffer between her and the rest of the class. Gerald felt like his footsteps sounded three times louder than normal as he walked over to one of the empty seats.

The seat, little more than an egg-shaped lump in its inert mode, reacted to his presence and reformed itself into the shape of a bicycle seat.

“Someone needs to change the setting for humans,” Gerald quipped to the student as he sat down, but she was completely unresponsive.

For several agonizing minutes Gerald sat there in complete silence. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. It was five kinds of creepy, and it made his skin feel itchy, like he felt whenever he passed through an old cemetery or listened to a Justin Bieber song.

Scratching his arm, Gerald leaned over and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Gerald Dyson. I’m new here, nice to meet you.”

This time the red-skinned student opened her black eyes and turned to him. “Why are you speaking to us?” she asked.

Self-consciously he scratched the back of his neck. “Well, I’ve been told classmates should be friendly to one another. I just wanted to know your name.”

She raised a black eyebrow. “You do not know us?”

“Well, no,” he chuckled. “That’s why I asked.”

She looked at him curiously. Her eyes were black on black, like colorless marbles. Larger than human eyes, he could faintly see his own nervous reflection in them.

“Trahzi,” she said at last.

“Trahzi?”

She nodded. “We are Trahzi.”

Gerald offered to shake her hand. She looked at him distastefully.

“We do not like to be touched.”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand and faking a smile. “It’s nice to meet you Trahzi.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Why would it be?”

“Well... ah...”

Without saying anything else, she turned back forward and closed her eyes again. Gerald flicked the translator he wore on his ear a couple of times, thinking there was something wrong with it again. It kept translating ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when she spoke.

The teacher at the front of the class opened her eyes and noticed him sitting there.

“Oh my, I’m so sorry I didn’t notice you come in. Everyone, we have a latecomer here in class today.”

At that all of the students seemed to come to life as if she had thrown a switch. They removed the cables from the back of their necks and turned around, greeting him half-heartedly in a variety of fashions. None of them seemed pleased to see him.

“I am Ms. Stubbs, and I teach your homeroom, she said with a demure little smile. “Why don’t you come up and introduce yourself to the class?”

“Sure, that doesn’t sound awkward at all,” he whispered under his breath as he got up off the bicycle seat and walked up to the front of the class.

It felt like there were a thousand eyes on him, and when he passed a student with segmented eyes like a fly, he realized that might literally be true.

“Hello everyone,” he said, making sure to pause so their translators could download his language from Central. “I know that a lot of you are wondering why I’m here, and to be honest I’m asking myself the same question. I have no idea why I’m here. As far as I can tell, there has never been a human student, and being the first is a lot of pressure, but I am happy to be here. I know humans don’t have a very good reputation in the Alliance, but let me assure you, I don’t consider myself any different from the rest of you, and I ask only that you afford me the same courtesy. I look forward to working together to become the best that we can be. Let’s all graduate together with honors.”

Feeling quite pleased with himself, he thrust one hand in the air and finished his introduction with a “Woo!” half expecting the others to join in, but none of them did.

“Earth?” came a voice from inside his head. Gerald’s eyes darted around looking for a source, but could find none. “Isn’t that the planet that joined the Alliance then spun apart?”

The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was unnerving to say the least.

A student in the front row stood up and a window appeared in the air above her, indicating her grades and current ranking. Gerald couldn’t make out much of it, but he recognized the large symbol meaning “number one” next to her name.

“Ms. Stubbs, as Class Representative I must protest”, came the voice again. Somehow Gerald knew it was coming from this student, even though her mouth didn’t move when she spoke.

“Cha’Rolette...” Ms. Stubbs began, but she cut her off.

“You will refer to me as Madam Ssykes, Duchess, or not at all. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Duchess,” the teacher apologized with a hasty bow.

Cha’Rolette turned to Gerald and looked him over judgmentally. Her uniform was adorned and personalized with jewelry. There was something regal about the way she held herself, and something smug about the crooked smile on her lips. She looked surprisingly similar to a human except for her skin, which was a light green hue. Her hair was a darker green, which she wore in styled ringlets on either side of her face.

“As our teacher it is your duty to guard our reputations, and protect us from anything that would threaten them, is that correct?” Cha’Rolette’s voice echoed, even though her mouth remained closed.

“Yes, Duchess”, replied the teacher.

“I have worked long and hard to earn my place here, but if word gets out that I am classmate to a game addict, then surely even a low-birth such as yourself can see how that association would reflect poorly on me.”

Gerald held up his finger. “Actually, I’ve never even played True-Life.”

It was then that he realized that what he thought was hair wasn’t hair at all, but some kind of smooth tentacle that grew out from her head. Without looking at him, her ringlet unwound itself and formed into the shape of a hand motioning for him to silence himself.

“You will speak when spoken to”, her voice echoed. “Or, do they not teach manners on Earth anymore?”

Gerald thought. “Actually I don’t think they teach anything anymore. The last schools closed years ago.”

Cha’Rolette looked at him sharply.

“Sorry, I talk when I’m nervous.”

“See that you correct that habit.”

Another student stood up and a ranking window appeared over his head. “Tomar Keendland, currently ranked third,” he said, his large elephant-like ears hanging back over his shoulders. “I agree that Dyson has no place here among us, but that is only an opinion, isn’t it? We should withhold final judgment until he is tested and ranked as we were during the evaluation ceremonies.”

Ms. Stubbs looked to Cha’Rolette for approval.

“Noblesse Oblige”, Cha’Rolette said, flicking her ringlets back with her hand. “It is the responsibility of the nobility to set an example for the others to aspire to. Let him take the tests and sift himself out of our presence.”

Cha’Rolette and Tomar sat back down, and as Gerald returned to his seat. A window appeared over his head, all the values set at zero.

“Boy, they really take this ranking stuff seriously,” he whispered to himself as he sat back down.

“While the testing protocols are brought up, you are welcome to join in on our discussion,” Ms. Stubbs said sweetly. “Link to Central channel roku. We are currently reviewing Calatarian case law and proconsul court rulings up to and including the modern era.”

All the other students unwound the cables from their desks and plugged them into the back of their necks. Gerald sat down, looking at the lonely cable poking out from the top of his desk. For a moment he considered saying nothing, but the teacher noticed and denied him the chance.

“Is there something wrong? Why are you not plugging-in?” she asked with one eye cracked open.

Gerald cleared his throat. “Well, because humans can’t do that.”

Everyone turned around and scowled at him.

“Y-you’re kidding, right?” Ms. Stubbs said, trying to laugh it off.

He slapped the back of his neck, showing that there were no implants there. “I mean, I could jam it in my nose, but that’s about it.”

The teacher stared at him in disbelief. To emphasize the point, he pulled out the cable and put the end in his nose. “See? Nothing.”

Suddenly every student in the class stood up and began protesting. Their ranking windows filled the air above them, their voices rolling over and fusing together into a kind of squall that vaguely reminded Gerald of seagulls.

He had never been overly fond of seagulls, but at that moment, he would have given anything to be back at the shores of the Great Salt Lake listening to the gulls. Sure, the lake was fetid and stinky, little more than a natural cesspool, but by Soeck’s pedestal, it was his cesspool.

“Um, Mr. Dyson,” came the panicked voice of his teacher above the students. “I think you’d better go see the Director and see if you can straighten this out. Yeah, I think that would be best for everyone involved.”

Gerald glanced over at Trahzi, who was the only one still sitting at her seat, eyes closed amid the chaos.

“Only three minutes and I’m already being sent to the director’s office,” Gerald joked with her. “That’s got to be some kind of a record.”

Trahzi ignored him.