Intro

My first entry. I've gotten started late, but if I can keep up this pace, I may just finish (yeah, right):

Nathan reread his essay for the third time. He still had twenty minutes until lunch. He wondered briefly if that was enough time to finish another lesson.

Beep! Beep-beep! Beep-beep!

He reach up and tapped the ear piece on his Reality Enhancement Glasses. “I’m awake,” he mumbled. Finally, he pressed the FINISH button on his console.

“Are you done now?” a little girl’s voice said into his ear.

Nathan rolled his eyes and smiled. He selected “Razelle” in is contact list and typed his response into a chat window.

Nathan: Yes, I’m done.

“Yay!” A chubby three-year-old girl with long brown hair, green eyes, and olive skin appeared in the seat next to him. “Can we play now?”

Nathan: Only for a little bit, and it has to be a quiet game.

“Why?”

Nathan: Because I’m in class and can’t talk out loud.

Razelle blinked rapidly several times. She was thinking. “How about chess?”

Nathan: You always beat me.

“How about a word game?”

Nathan: Okay. Reference string. I’ll say something, then you take a word in what I say and refer to something else. Or find a phrase of the same meaning the start a new string. Ready?

Razelle nodded.

Nathan: A rose by any other name…
Razelle: Roses are red, violets are blue.
Nathan: blue in the face
Razelle: face the music
Nathan: face facts
Razelle: facts of life
Nathan: life as we know it
Razelle: know thyself
Nathan: nosce te ipsum
Razelle: res ipsa loquitur

“Ah, crud. I should’ve known better than to switch to Latin.”

“Hey, Nat! Who you talkin’ to? Your imaginary friend?” Snickering curled the hairs on the back of Nathan’s neck.

He turned around to face the two boys sitting behind him. Ivan, a thirteen-year-old on the slow side of the bell curve, was doing a horrible job of pretending to pay attention to his console. Titus was a year younger but much more dangerous. He wasn’t even pretending to pay attention. “Mind your own, Titus.”

Titus smiled cruelly. “So tell me. What does she look like? Is she hot?”

“Short out,” Nathan growled as his turned back around.

“Not as hot as you, I’d bet.”

Before Nathan could ask what he was talking about, Gwen, an older student who was the class monitor for the day, screamed. “Nathan! Take that shell off this instant!”

“What shell?” He looked down at himself to find a naked female form juxtaposed onto his own, fully-clothed body. Titus and Ivan burst out laughing. The laughter quickly spread around the room, pressing down on him as he frantically tried to disable the shell they had somehow installed in his PAN. He fell dizzy and ill. The shortcut for his shell escaped his memory and he couldn’t find it in the menus. He could feel himself crumbling under the weight of his classmates’ cruel amusement.

Gwen typed some commands into her console and Nathan’s physical self reappeared. Razelle disappeared.

“Who did that?!” Gwen demanded.

Nathan blushed deeply. “I-I’m finished with my lessons. Can I go?”

“Don’t you want to know who did this?” Gwen looked both angry and concerned.

Titus smiled coldly when Nathan glanced at him. Ivan was biting into his fists to keep from laughing again.

“I’ll just install a block on my system. I’ve been meaning to upgrade my security anyway.”

Gwen glared at Titus who stared innocently up at her. Ivan put his head on his desk, his shoulders heaving up and down.

“Fine. I’m hungry anyway. Why don’t we grab an early lunch? Robert, you’ve got guard duty.” A teenager in the back of the room nodded and took Gwen’s place at the monitor’s desk. Gwen took Nathan’s arm and marched him into the lounge next to the classroom.

“What happened? Why did you disappear?” Razelle was already at Nathan’s side again.

“I didn’t disappear, Razelle. Gwen blocked all inter-PAN communications. Anything that wasn’t corporeal or involved in intra-personal area communications disappeared.”

“You know, you probably shouldn’t let Razelle follow you to school,” Gwen said as she fixed herself a cup of coffee.

“So your console still knew who you were?” Razelle asked.

“Dad wants her to learn. What better place to learn than a school. And, yes, Razelle, my console still knew who I was.”

“Then why didn’t you continue the string?”

Nathan, who had been reaching into the fridge to grab his lunch, stopped. “String? Razelle, weren’t you paying attention?”

“To what?” She looked confused.

Nathan waved his arms in the air, exasperated. “To the shell that Titus uploaded onto my PAN, making me look like a naked woman.”

“Oh, that. Sure, I remember.”

Nathan stopped again. “Wait. You remember? Does that mean you have a record of the file transfer? And the file?”

“Yes.”

Nathan bounced on his heals. “Show me.”

A network activity tag identifying the file, origin, and destination appeared in front of Nathan’s eyes, projected by his REGs. Nathan smiled. “Good puppy.”

“Arf!” Razelle panted.

“Did she catch him?” Gwen stood beside Nathan and stared at the point in space where he seemed to be looking. Nathan let her see the tag. “Excellent! I’ll send it to the Administrator and see to that his network privileges are revoked for at least a week.

Nathan frowned. “A lot of good it’ll do me outside of school.”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking about the school network.” Gwen winked. “But that doesn’t mean you can put off upgrading your security. I expect you to do that as soon as you finish eating. Those consoles may prevent inter-PAN communicating during lessons, but you really shouldn’t let anyone modify your settings at any time.”
Nathan sighed in relief. He liked Gwen. She was like a big sister to him. It was embarrassing sometimes the way she protected him, but today, he was thankful for it.

Razelle waited until he had finished his lunch to speak again. “I upgraded your security settings for you.”

“Um, thanks.” He noticed she was staring straight ahead. “What’s on your mind?”

“What did Titus mean when he asked if I was ‘hot’?”

Nathan thought carefully about how to answer. Nathan was pretty sure he knew how to explain it to a three-year-old. But Razelle wasn’t really a three-year-old.

“He wants to know if you’re sexually attractive.”

“Am I?”

“If anyone is sexually attracted to you, something is wrong with them, not you.”

Razelle frowned. “Isn’t being attractive good?”

“There’s different kinds of attractive.”

“Like?”

People started to trickle in from the classroom. Nathan brought up a new chat window with Razelle. Instead of appearing on a console, this chat window appeared on the table in front of him.

Nathan: Well, there’s “cute” which is physically attractive but not necessarily sexually attractive.
Razelle: Am I cute?
Nathan: Yes, you’re cute.

“Hooray! I’m cute! I’m cute!” Razelle jumped onto one of the lunch tables and did a dance in Titus’ soup. It was Nathan’s turn to laugh.

Titus’ eyes pierced Razelle’s image. “What’s so funny?”

“Well, you seemed to like that shell, so I gave it to you.” Titus’ eyes went wide and he looked down at himself.
“Made you look!”

“Oh, very creative, Nat. Go bug someone else.”