Dystopia

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Been working on a project, on and off, for about two years, and one of the many byproducts of that project was a wealth of half completed stories. If anyone wants in on the action please PM me so I know people are interested. :thumbsup:

 

 

Luke sat in the lazy classroom on the lazy Tuesday afternoon in the lazy month of November. It wasnt that he was lazy usually. It was simply the feeling that he got from the constant gloom of the rain clouds out of the window. The lesson was dragging somewhat, not that it wasnt an enjoyable lesson; he usually enjoyed history, but the rewriting of coursework on this lazy afternoon was not the only thing he could have been doing. The absent daydream was beginning to take hold but he needed to concentrate and so regrettingly he opened his eyes again. The blank, unlined, page was before him, which was odd because he was writing in his notebook but then Mr Gate had said that he might be getting a computer down for him. Luke felt the smile creep onto his face, he had been daydreaming longer than he intended.

 

He flipped the note pad open and flicked though till he found the page entitled Can Industrialisation Be Justified? The day he had chosen this topic had been much like today, a lazy, gloomy afternoon, though it had been upstairs, quite whatever possessed the board to move the teachers around was beyond even him. He smiled again at his lack of modesty; that really needed to be ironed out. The queerly blue, gray and white program, with its black bar, blinked at him, must be an old computer, though that was to be expected. He drew a breath, noticed the keyboard and exhaled, a seriously old computer. Meekly the title is entered, the return key used and the essay begun.

 

Mr Gate returned, watched Luke type for a moment, then went to the desk, sat down, shuffled some papers, stood up, walked across the room, flicked the radiator on, came back, checked the desk draw, got a pen. All seen out of the peripheries of Lukes eyes, he seemed agitated, or maybe restless, in any eventuality the little clock in the corner of the screen said there was fourteen hours and nine minutes left of the lesson. He looked back at the clock on the wall, ten past two, that wasnt right, not at all. He put the thought from his head, perhaps the computer was playing up. He tried to concentrate on the essay but his typing skill, in QWERTY anyway, was not exactly proficient, each few seconds he had to check what had been written which was slowing him considerably.

 

A half hour later the computer had restarted thrice and had been reprogrammed once, it was the keyboard more than anything that was the problem. Mr Gate had finally settled on marking and was making ticking motions here and there. The operating system was terribly written, a number of halfities and nonities were corrected. Then the basic program had to be reset to accommodate the new software. That of course had been after the keyboard had been reshuffled to Kent-Standard, speeding the process greatly, although a microphone would have been even better. He flicked the power switch and the computer began to work, there was an amount of angry clicks coming from the box, which for the first time he realised was self contained, meaning it had been made in the last few years though why the system was so frail was beyond him. A smile for modesty. The processors, or by the sound of it processor attempted to come up to capacitate, failed, tried again, worked, searched for the data strings it needed, couldnt find them, began to create them then hummed softly as the login screen came up.