I was back to my normal Sunday schedule, despite the pox on all our houses that is Daylight Savings Time. (I’d give up that extra hour in autumn and accept a more gradual transition to longer days, no problem, if we could call DLS quits altogether.)
I did the Sunday crossword, and I went to my regular writing group. Here’s what I free-wrote in the time alotted:
“The race is not to the swift,” said Father Bellowes, not for the first time quoting his favorite Ecclesiastes to bore his already half-comatose students. As always, if he noticed their vacant stares and drooping eyes, chins propped up with hands to keep them from thunking against desks, it slowed his oratory not one bit. “Nor is the battle to the strong. You all would do well to remember that.”
He paused, perhaps for breath, and in unison the boys in the class nodded — “yes, Father” — and as one hoped that the priest would use this moment to remember himself the results of their midterm exam. The fifth period bell was only five minutes away, by the clock hung above the door, and in the last hour so far, Father Bellowes had done little but quote scripture at random and sketch obscure mathematical proofs on the chalkboard. (The fact that he was ostensibly teaching 18th-century European literature had never seemed to prevent his doing this.)
“I suppose,” Father Bellowes seemed to muse, “I should take this opportunity to share with you the results of last Friday’s exam. Though, as the Bible tells us, in its way, exams are not the sum of a man. Despite this exam, of course, being worth half your grade for the year.”
It was at this moment, to the boys’ collective dismay, that the sky shattered. The sun split in two, the hands of the clock spun crazily in reverse, and Father Bellowes became suddenly frozen in place.
This HAD happened before. The computing power needed to keep the school’s virtusl environment operational was massive, dwarfing even the great super-processors of old. When they’d escaped Earth, they were supposed to have left limitations like this behind them; in embracing AI aboard the station and ceding it control, they were supposed to have worked bugs like this out of the system. At least, that was what their parents kept saying.
But here was Father Bellowes, a piece of the AI’s program, locked in place, mid-sentence. A giant tear ran across the length of the sky outside the window, a jagged scar splitting the sun and its twin, and revealing a stream of what looked like ash-gray static beneath.
Collectively, the boys sighed — though only some out of real consternation and some just mimicking the crowd. (It was an open secret that almost a third of the class were themselves digitized. There were hardly enough children in the millenial enclave to fill an entire school.) They’d been warned never to panic when hiccups like this happened, but also not to leave the room or, if possible, their seats. The AI would right itself; it always had. A few patient minutes was hardly asking too much, was it?
After all, things were much worse in the other enclaves. The boys didn’t want to try their luck with the warlords, did they?
I’m not really happy with it, but such is often the nature of free-writing off a prompt.
After writing, my friend Maurice and I went see the surprisingly quite fun John Carter of Mars. It was a nice end to what’s been an exceptionally long week.
I go back to work tomorrow, so let’s keep our fingers crossed for no return of the pneumonia.