Chapter 1: Shades of Purple
Chapter 1: Shades of Purple
Part 1: Alianii the Egg
March 7th, 2100 - Starting My Journal
Is there a better example of irony than the democratic selection of dreary weather as voted for by “citizens” of the robot-revered city of Light’s Hope? Citizens is in quotation marks because we’re misanthropists at best, miscreants most of the time…and “citizens” are presupposed to possess adamantly defended rights, which we do not. We have rights, at least on archived paper or, in my case, encoded in ancient Kindle ink. But they are hardly well-protected.
I write to you dear reader of my journaled journey, captured through my yesteryear tablet, nearly a century old. Bequeathed to me, as it happens, by a former lover. Her name was Melody, and her name suited her well. She was a songbird, in attire, in voice, in smile, in hope. She loved our city, or at the very least, she only ever talked about the parts of it she loved. Light’s Hope. She would whisper the title to me in the morning whilst holding a cup of synthetic, productivity-boosting almost-coffee, as if the name of the city was a beautiful secret she couldn’t help but tell me about.
Light’s Hope - the two words punctuate themselves, they announce their own presence in all their gilded titanium glory. At the heart of our clockwork neocity the metal leviathan stands erect and glimmers, illuminated by a myriad of neon lights and hologram billboards. Aurum Tower, named after gold, but designed with a crystalline intricacy that was rather more artistic than you’d expect for something with the gaudy name of a precious metal. It made sense though, actually. The gilded gave us away, we were to tick tick tock like good little workers, much like the profoundly conscious robots with their installed biochips with imitation neurons and dollar-purchased souls.
Instead of tourism dollars we give the city owners, the investors and their pocket-fed bureaucrats, grayness. That was our gratitude for a life free of hunger, thirst, or the annoyance of unwanted summer heat or unrequested rain. We were the first city in the world to have democratic weather. Each night you got to vote, and were encouraged to gamble, on tomorrow morning’s weather. Both classes of citizen called the weather lottery the “Hope Tax”, for wildly different reasons. They hoped for tax revenue, and we reveled and rebelled in our meek attempts of revenge via taxing their hope for pleasant weather.
The occasional suicide by solar-powered biobots, innocent and gainfully employed bystanders, those metal men and women and non-binary binary bots, did not make the news. The robots with their shining silicon souls, free of malice, free of hunger or want save for fear of a scarcity of electricity, cheerfully nurtured our economy. Our friendly machine companions were collateral damage in a passive aggressive war between the commoners and the occupants of Cadence Corner. Cadence was the undeniably lovely musically-themed street which had bio-engineered trees and iridescent rainbow flowers which joyously sang the calls of extinct songbirds.
Even robots kill themselves. I went to a robot funeral once, hosted on the Everse. It was surprisingly difficult to enter. The encryption and secrecy implied a nuanced inner emotional world and a tightly-knit friend group for a window-cleaning drone who was once my friend. I was one of three humans who was invited to attend the solemn ceremony, and I happened to be the only one who did. His name was Charlie 47G1. He had gray eyes and was famous on his block for being the only robot with a laser-engraved mustache. He was quite proud of his etching, and he took pleasure in wearing silly vintage hats and teaching me about their classification and rarity. He called me Miss Alianii. He would apologize to me because he knew how much the scent of cleaning chemicals bothered us down in Steelslum. They had floral essence by the thousands of gallons in Cadence Corner and we had mass-manufactured antimicrobials.
The friendliest people in the city were those poor cleaning bots we let die by turning off the sun. A fleet that started at ten thousand, a poorly-kept secret was that the drone fleet had been steadily dwindling. With Charlie gone we only had 6,388 drones left to baptize our boxes, the metal and glass rooms in Steelslum wherein we lived.
“Quite sorry Alianii, quite sorry. The scent should dissipate quickly, what with the rain and all, and in any case it wouldn’t do at all to have you get sick from microbes, now would it? A necessary endeavor I’m afraid,” said Charlie with a pleasant smile.
With Charlie’s passing I became complicit in the death of not one but two friends. He was solar-powered, and Melody wanted to be a star that sung by sunshine. I was the bitter bitch who voted, and gambled, on rain. It was my form of spite, and fury.
I had just turned eighteen when the goldies campaigned to take away the right to vote for such weather as rebellious storms. They nearly succeeded, too. But the robots, the very same robots who depended on sunshine for their very existence, defended the commoners. They had been made of metal to polish and protect, to sanitize and serve. It was a Zenbot who rather serenely pointed out a well-meaning sentence written some decades ago by a supercluster of legally-minded synthetic lawyers and silicon strategists. He found our legal defense. We were, after all, just showing a healthy regard for the environment as it once was, as, we argued, it ought always be. We lived in Oregon, after all. Who would we be without the ever-present mist of half-hearted rain.
And so it came to be that the beautifully-planned architecture of the god-like electric towers which illuminate the skyline of Light’s Hope were, literally, overshadowed. We gave away our star, to try and take away theirs.
We voted for rain, I said it was spite, but maybe it really was a helpless effort to wash away the stench of chemical sterilization. Infertility is, coincidentally, at least by common-folk rumor, quite common in Steelslum. The statistics and research disagreed of course, not one study by the highly funded elite members of academia found there to be even a percentage point difference. The children in Steelslum were of course usually adopted anyways. Not by the goldies of Light’s Hope, obviously, it was would be parents in less regal cities who acted as though we were collectible, like Charlie’s hats. Light’s Hope was a sort of oddball rarity, a failed experiment, famous and fabled - it had attained an almost mystic prominence across the world for its beauty. But it was also known that certain corners of the technological metropolis were rather less than idyllic.
Overall, despite our banning the sun, by our ritual daily votes, we were not without notable light. Our preferred resplendence was the hologram moon shining on Aurum Tower each midnight. Even if you hated the neon reflections from the tower, the advertisements, you treasured the hologram moon. From goldie to commoner to egg to synthetic heroin addict, it was dearly loved. We left our electronic moon alone. It was to me a perpetual reminder that, even in darkness, there is often light. Even amidst the most hateful of enemies beauty can, occasionally, be appreciated in unison. Like enemy soldiers drinking whiskey together in the heart of war on Christmas, getting drunk and sharing racy photos of well-busted beloveds.
I revealed it if through quoting Charlie, but I will say it more directly. My name is Alianii U843 and I am quite proud at my having renamed myself after a fictitious demonic queen, a Voi’danari death goddess, from a long forgotten book from a less than famous author.
That was a somewhat doozy of a floozy’s rant, I suppose.
It’s hard to understand what it is you, dear reader of the future, might find yourself thinking if indeed you happened upon this passage of mine, my time capsule written within a time capsule. My diary entrusted to someone else’s tablet, my little relic from someone else’s long ago. If I had to guess, it’ll stop working before I finish, but I suppose I might as well try. Melody always encouraged me to write. I wrote her lyrics, and she sung for me, my illustrious violin heart Viofinch from someone else’s written novel, sweet and soulful.
Alianii U843. Are you curious about the numbers? I guess I ought to explain them to you. As mentioned, my first name Alianii comes from my favorite character in a book I cherished. I changed my name seven times between the ages of 4 and 14 before settling on Alianii, whose mysterious purple eyes and silver hair, despite her eternal youthful beauty, I found so enchanting. As for U843, I guess that part of me is a little more scientific, artificial. Just over eight hundred and forty other “eggs” had been “hatched” in Light’s Hope in artificial wombs on the year I popped into the world, reluctantly. No, I am not a chicken, we did not literally hatch from an egg, we didn’t even “hatch”, these terms are merely examples of society’s collective resentment towards us existing. We were an ugly inconvenience they tolerated, if only because purging our existence would leave their hands red, and look distasteful, and lower the tourism revenue.
I wonder if you’ll still have eggs, people like me, in the future.
It’s a bit of a miracle that I even exist at all, as an egg. I am quite literally the byproduct of accident and metal-manufactured policy. It’s probably old news to you, at this point, just some relic of history, but it wasn’t that long ago that they banned abortion in favor of mandatory artificial wombs for those uninterested in motherhood. We could have been spared a family-less existence, of course, but we also represented untapped potential and a notable and important contribution to a sustainable population and economy. It was a Zenbot-led array of supercomputers who mediated into existence the set of laws that would come to be known as the “Great A Compromise”. If a mother wished to relinquish a hypothetical child, it, the law now proclaimed, would involve giving up the embryo for it to be raised by the government. And so it was that eggs like me were allowed to live and thus be nurtured to be productive and obedient members of our clockwork city. Our city of beauty and the metal mundane, our citizens ranged from occupants of cans to the connoisseurs near Cadence, we had a little bit of everything, except for people in the middle.
So I’m an egg, and I’m from Light’s Hope! You had to know that about me, and now you do. It makes the U843 a little easier to digest - and yes, I know, it’s a little weird to not have changed that. I like it. Unit 843 was where I came from, my first “home”, and it reminds me of my reality - it is who I am to my very core and conception.
Part 2: Pseudomorning Routines
March 8th, 2100 - Just Woke Up
Before I actually enter the Everse and start logging hours, I have a bit of a routine, like most of us in Steelslum do. We live on the neglected edge of the city of Light’s Hope in subsidized housing. Our rent isn’t much, about what you’d expect for a twenty foot by twenty foot box with air conditioning. Four hundred dollars, what you can make in a week of working at minimum wage. Now, I know my place is small, but I do have a bed, a cabinet with my clothing, a lamp, a hologram television, a small bedside drawer, and an electric houseplant which grows, changes colors, blossoms and eventually dies and then reforms itself.
When my biological manifestation craves nutrients, I can go to the vending machines or to the cafeteria at the center of the block, a five minute walk from my glass and steel cage. It sits amongst thousands of such cages on one floor on a stack of twenty floors which comprise our massive, artificial neocity. Note again that the subsidized housing is on the periphery of the city, the goldies live in fancier towers at the city’s center, near the shopping district and the fashion district and the city’s man-made lake.
The public washrooms I had access to were relatively well-designed, basically a wide strip of small self-contained single person occupancy bathrooms for you to relieve yourself, shower, brush your teeth, etc. When you walked in, you selected the aesthetic ambiance (beach, space, surreal, forest, etc) and the walls, which were functional hologram computer screens, adapted and changed to match your desires and played either default music or music you selected via voice commands. The bathrooms were usually pretty clean too, and the robots with a relatively shit job, it may surprise you to know, seldom complained and were even quite chatty and amicable.
“Do enjoy partaking in your hydrous ritual of cleansing, why, what a lovely thing it must be to feel the kiss of showering water against your skin, as you do, Alianii. May you have an increasingly lovely morning!”
The mechanoid Simon provided us soap and clean towels, which were invariably white as bleached snow, and had little electric tags on the corners which they used to keep perfect inventory.
Anyways. As I do on most “mornings” (my sleep schedule varies dramatically despite my wishes, one of the perks of being bipolar), I drank and then recycled a glass bottle of vanilla-flavored Quickmeal. I purchased it from a vending machine just a few minute walk from my room. I enjoyed my morning ritual of a wake-up cup of artificial coffee which, I’ll proudly point out, happens to have a larger amount of caffeine than the real thing.
I wasn’t the only one outside standing near the portable and sometimes quiet and sometimes talkative dispensers of all sorts of beverages and heavily-taxed booze and brews. There were a bunch of Steelies not so different than myself hanging around at the benches. Some were just college-age kids taking a break from their studies at an Everse university, sitting there sleepily and gazing at our artificial moon. There was good old Jerry, your friendly neighborhood synthetic heroin addict, who to be honest is actually a rather decent chess player on the occasional sober Saturday.
I shrugged to myself, and to Clara, who dispensed Quickmeal and was occasionally cheerful, and occasionally solemn. This time she didn’t bother to speak to me, though if anything I think both of us might have enjoyed a few morning pleasantries. It was a Monday, not that the day particularly mattered as a LearnQuest teacher, but it was one of those Mondays where you feel the need to teach in your soul. You can’t always help yourself, or your circumstances, but there’s almost always a way to help someone else.
And on that note, I guess I ought to point out the irony that, as bitter a bitch as my first journal entry likely has you believing me to be, if you haven’t stopped reading, I am a special education teacher. Technically I can work at any point in time, since there is a surplus of students in need of teachers with my specialization, AKA kids with exceptionalities.
I smiled at Simon, who handed me his meticulously cleaned and thoroughly guarded towels. I tried to enjoy the pulsing jets of perfect temperature, with recycled and thoroughly UV sterilized water. I had, I don’t know why, I do this sometimes, brought a little kit of pocket make up that I used to give my pale skin a dash of cherry blush. It makes me look a little less like a vampire, which, again, is probably a curious choice given that teenage Alianii, me, renamed myself after a queen of death and darkness. I liked to look a little less tired, a little less world weary, than I actually felt when not at work. At a quick glance I look older than I am, at twenty-seven, because I dye my hair silver. But the eccentricity of artificially and permanently dyed violet purple eyes is aided by other facial aspects that some people have called beautiful.
Part 3: Flirting With Hugo
March 8th, 2100 - Right Before Work
Like most people who couldn’t afford physical adventure, non-digital adventure, that is electric jets to Europe and maglev bullet trains in Japan, I was raised predominantly in the Everse. I suppose it was only natural for me to figure out how to make a living through it. Mind you, I don’t exactly make a lot of money, as a teacher. But I can survive at least in Light’s Hope.
As is necessary for accessing the Everse, I laid in my bed in my glass and steel cage and closed my eyes and calmly stated the words, “Everse login”, staring at my metal roof. The UI overlay courtesy of a convenient but admittedly creepy-in-principle brain chip appeared as a layer over my vision. I entered my passcode via eye moments resting on letters and digits to verify that I was in a secure location, and I transitioned to the digital universe where I spent many of my waking hours.
Unlike my glass and steel cage, my virtual home has ample space and is decorated with quirky, modern digitized furniture which I could never actually afford. I’m not a digital architect so I didn’t design the house from scratch myself, it was a modular design I purchased for like a hundred dollars. But it is beautiful.
It may not surprise you to learn that purple, white and silver were dominant in the color scheme of my home; my chairs that floated were violet. My curtains (which I usually left open, not that anyone could look through my digital nook), were lilac. My walls were painted pearl white to maintain a purity and brightness to the ambiance, and purple lights painted them softly as if airbrushed in the dinosaur-old Photoshop which I’d seen pictures of. My floor is made of speckled marble with silver trim on the border of each square. Outside of my circular windows you look into the rainbow aurora celestial sky.
I could spend an hour describing all of the gizmos and doodads in my artificial sanctuary, my favorite is an anti-gravity fountain of water which flows through the “air” and around the room in spirals and swirls, zig zags and right lines, with different colored lights flickering through the water. It was as if someone had signed the soul of my apartment with aquatic cursive, you could reach out and touch the stream of water and feel it burst into rainbow mist and then instantly evaporate.
I switched from “appear offline” to “reluctantly sociable” (I liked to customize my status markers with a little Alianii flair), although I knew quite well I was directly inviting conversation. Hugo always, always messaged me when I logged in, the dude barely slept. He was bipolar like me, except he was always hypomanic - overstimulated, a little paranoid, a healthy handful of delusions of grandeur. He was one of the few people who had the access level to initiate video calls with me.
“Alianiiiiii, girl, how you doing? You good?”, said Hugo, as a 3D representation of his face and torso appeared in my vision, his hair the same old electric blue with streaks of bubble gum pink. He was a fashion designer, after all.
“Eh, mas o menos, I’ve been better. Maybe a little world weary,” I said, if there was anyone I could be honest with it was Hugo, I’d known him going on fifteen years. We met in a virtual meme gallery, in a section focused on self-deprecating humor from the early 2000s up to the COVID era.
I waved for him to enter the apartment fully and his avatar went from a torso and head to his full body, complete with his neomagi outfit - cyberpunk meets wizard, neon red, sparkling gold, shoulder hoods. He looked ridiculous, and I loved it.
“Come visit me in Miami,” said Hugo, drumming his fingers on my table as he sat in one of my floating chairs, small fireworks popped into existence and sparkled into dazzling explosions, I allowed him to use digital magic in my domicile, “Why you still livin’ in Light’s Hope? It’s awful. I mean, you tell me its awful.”
“I can’t afford Miami, Hugo. What’s your rent - eight thousand, a month?”
“It’s closer to twelve but you know I live in the fashion district…chica. But you could visit me, stay with me as long as you like. Make something of yourself.”
“And do what precisely? I love my job,” I said, though I knew what his answer would be.
“Model for me, you sheik bitch. You’re gorgeous! Those violet eyes, your subtle frame, I’d name a Deathqueen line after you. Maybe we’d find you a dapper Tobias. Chica there’s a lot of good lookers in Miami! We could hit the clubs UP!”
“I think I’ll pass on the Tobias. Anyways - I make like twenty-five hundred a month, I’m not going anywhere where I cannot support myself. I couldn’t even afford the plane ticket, that’d cost…ah..yes, fifteen hundred and twenty-one dollars and eighty-three cents at the cheapest. Fuck that.”
Hugo warped into a standing upright position and balled his fists and gyrated his hips in a feminine, grinding on the boys kind of motion, I knew he’d been with women too but he also rather liked men, “I got you boo. Let’s go. I’ll buy you that ticket right now, who gives a fuck? Why haven’t we met yet?”
My amigo moonwalked backwards, the aesthetics of his motion combined with a graphic usually called “afterimage” which made it look like multiple Hugos, one behind the other, were each participating in his groovy little neofunk dance. He was bobbing to the left and the right, and his afterimages flipped a golden coin into the air and blew on it as it fell down, the coins dissipated into explosions of translucent rainbow flowers, blowing my way. The flower effect was a subtle reference.
“Are you just trying to get into my pants, babe?” I asked, I waved my hand and dissipated his afterimages (my house, my rules) and locked his abilities for a moment. I teleported him back into one of the floating chairs and transformed into a lilac moonfox, and pounced onto the table in front of him, my voice went an octave higher to match the cuteness of my temporary form, “You’re so hypersexual it’s ridiculous, what do they put in the waters down there?”
“Ecstasy chica, and it’s that aquifer water yo, that good stuff,” Hugo beamed, “And I’m trying to put you INTO pants, into dresses, all that. I mean of course pants have to come off for other pants to go on but that’s just a part of life, that’s just Miami!”
I chirped, “Why aren’t you working? Go to your studio, I have bread to bake. Maybe we can hit up Neon Fire when I’m done.”
“Acquiring talent is part of what I do Alianii, I know talent when I see her,” said Hugo, I released his ability lock to allow him some creative freedom, “I might hold you to that offer. Neon Fire after work.”
“Yeah I bet you’d like to hold me to a lot of things. Fine. Alright, I gotta’ head to the LearnQuest lobby, you know, kids and all that. Apparently small group interaction is like, healthy for brain development, or something.”
We both knew I was lying, or acting, or in some silly way understating something I profoundly loved. I loved my job, if I didn’t have it and all of the adventures I had with kids I’d have killed myself already. Being a model in a dress could never replace the work that I do.
Part 4: Adventure Guide Profile
Name: Alianii U843, A.G Educator Rank: 5 (Master), Ratings: 4.84/5.0 (638 reviews)
Educational Background: Bachelor of Educational Arts in Spontaneous Learning from Light’s Hope University
Age: 27, Sex: Female, Gender Identity: “Cosmic”
Residence: Light’s Hope, Oregon
A Message From The Educator:
Watch out, there’s a death dragon! Hi, parents, my name is Alianii U843 or just Alianii as I prefer it. I’ve been an adventure guide for over four years and I say it from within the depths of my soul that teaching and being an adventure guide is my vocation. My undergraduate thesis focused on adaptive horror and I consistently perform at an expert level in guiding students through emotionally challenging experiences, designed not with the purpose to scare but rather to give the opportunity to overcome fears, anxieties and traumas. Given my specialization, I primarily take on neurodivergent students, particularly students with anxiety, autism, OCD, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and depression and victims of cyber bullying - as well as other learning disabilities and mental health exceptionalities. I have nearly ten thousand hours logged as an educator. Please note that in the interests of offering my services to families in need, I bill at the lowest tier rate for my ranking, but this does NOT mean that I provide tutoring for students without exceptionalities or special needs. I do this by choice, please respect my choice and do not attempt to “bid” on me or get my attention via higher offers.
Thank you, respectfully - Alianii
Reviews:
“As a therapist with my own practice for seventeen years, when I have a student who has been bullied, or is anxious, whose emotional state has been resistant to treatment, out of the hundreds of adventure guides that I have worked with, the one I refer my patients to is Alianii.”
“My name is Lily and I have four daughters. My heart was broken when Rose came home from school because other girls had bullied her. I put her in therapy for weeks to build her confidence, but what she needed was five sessions with Alianii. One week changed our family’s life.”
“My son Marcus has had OCD since he was six. His tics were really challenging for our family. Marcus would fill up cups of water and place them on the kitchen floor one by one and start crying when he ran out of cups. All of his friends loved the Everse but he found it scary, until he worked with Alianii. He still has OCD, but instead of creating chaos in our house, he creates art, and makes money for it.”
“I am ashamed to admit this, but my husband and I were at our wits end, and we were ready to give Celeste back to the government for placement with a different family. We knew there would be challenges, adopting from a nurture center, but we were infertile, and we thought it was the right thing to do. We didn’t realize the depth of longing that nurtured children go through, being born without families. We saw Alianii with U843 as her last name and instantly knew that the kind of woman who embraced her origin would be someone who could help heal our daughter. We were right, thank God. Alianii, you saved our family, you saved our daughter. We are so blessed to have had you in our daughter’s life.”
Part 5: A LearnQuest Life
Regarding March 8th, 2100 - Reflections After Work - Written some days later
LearnQuest has been the most popular Everse platform for educational and recreational experiences since the early 2070s. Over 1.5 billion students of every age, from children to senior citizens, use LearnQuest on a daily basis. If the study I read was correct, approximately 28 percent of the Everse data traffic was directly attributable to learning and gaming sessions hosted by LearnQuest. I differentiate between learning and gaming sessions in my words but in reality it is more of a spectrum. You learn in the well-designed games, you game in the well-designed learning. In any case, this March 8th, the second day after I started my journal, started off like any other.
I teleported to the LearnQuest lobby, I switched to private visibility mode, and went to one of the theoretically infinite virtual offices that I had access to. Technically I could have reviewed case files from home, but there was something about going to an office, even an imaginary, empty, digital, office, that struck a chord with me. It made me feel like a “boomer” (I learned of this word from a meme gallery) from the days of gasoline, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just weird.
This Monday was interesting because I had cleared my “assignment debt”, that is I had already “resolved” the cases that I had specifically referred to me by various other teachers, therapists and psychiatrists. I was and am a specialist, an educational marksman of sorts, my “unique” background has perhaps equipped me with an open-mind and empathy that makes it a little easier to relate to and work with students who struggle the most. In any case, my filters are set such that only about three percent of active LearnQuest profiles can see my profile at all, and of that three percent approximately 5 percent are cases severe enough that I would take on that assignment. That leaves several thousand students who I’d be willing to work with, and I usually do one on one sessions. What does help is that my sessions, and all sessions (for learning and child protection reasons) are recorded and reviewed, and so LearnQuest AI teachers and human peers benefit from my techniques. That said, without meaning to sound like a cocky bitch, there is a creative panache that can be hard for most to replicate.
The electric glow of the imagined Everse office flickered to life, and I barely had to say a word before Marabelle’s voice—calm, collected—filled the room.
“I’ve sorted today’s cases based on complexity, emotional volatility, and overall student engagement,” Marabelle said, as she usually did, be it in one turn of phrase or another. She always spoke with a quiet confidence. As she often pointed out, she had “run through each and every possible outcome” before even presenting the options. I sighed and remembered what it was like when I was getting my master’s degree and was first paired with an AI co-teacher.
“Give me a bit and let me think and draw my own conclusions for crying out loud, Marabelle! We’re not all optimization problems.”
My digital companion laughed. “False. You’re going to end up picking Adrian - case number 43877-B”.
“He’s being considered. Relax.” I responded. I had pulled out a group of files with a random number generator, to add a little bit of luck, but also out of pragmatic need to whittle down the list to something I could process quickly.
Marabelle pushed further, “Less time spent deciding on cases could achieve a higher total quantity of students assisted. We don’t have time to dilly dally!”
I continued sifting through the virtual profiles hovering in the “air”. Adrian’s face appeared, the usual flicker of defiance in his expression. Marabelle wasn’t wrong in picking him, of course. The algorithm never was. But my heart tugged elsewhere. There was a boyish toughness in his grin that told me he would be fine - he had street smarts, he could fend for himself. I have to be surgical in who I pick, and Marabelle, thank god I have her, helps me with that. But I still have to rely on my intuition to make the final decision of how I allocate my efforts.
“Adrian will be alright. He’s got an inner strength, I see it in his eyes. I’ll pick a student with less independence.”
“Samantha, then? She has been progressing slower than expected, emotionally speaking.”
I sighed. “Samantha.” It was clear the AI had learned from me. Marabelle wasn’t just a tool; she was the closest thing I had to a sounding board. Or a mirror, if there’s a difference.
“No, not her either,” I said, “We worked with her last week. She’s recovering well. Let’s give her some time to process our session and redirect her efforts and energies back into school. If we’re too overbearing it will just push her away.”
I wanted a student with a more profound struggle. I really like working with students with bipolar, OCD, and PTSD. This might sound dumb or picky but they’re the most fun and rewarding to work with in my experience. Bipolar students, like me, are a little crazy. I say it with love in my heart. They love the bonkers stories, they make the stories bonkers, and seeing them learn to regulate their emotions, learning to master their feelings and creativity, is supremely rewarding. OCD students are intellectually interesting because they are like a puzzle, and I like solving puzzles. Every case of OCD is different and as a neurodivergent person my perception of people with OCD may differ a little from the DSM X.
I’ve found that students with OCD generally have areas of passion they are willing to explore, and through those passions we can work on their tics together. Children with PTSD are very challenging to work with but they also need it profoundly, I’ve worked with children from war zones, gang neighborhoods (basically war zones), disaster survivors, victims of violence, and so much more. Working with them is an ongoing commitment and I flourish the most as a teacher with some variety so I am very tactical in when I choose such students. Having a mix of students with different needs is very important for managing the stresses of emotional labor.
I stopped as my eyes landed on a young girl of Asian descent, with piercing green eyes that had a soulful sorrow. She had a rejection rate of 99.7 percent, meaning she automatically or almost-automatically declined to work with any teacher who attempted to speak with her. As teachers, we have to respect student’s autonomy and we cannot forcefully enter their reality and thus violate their agency. We have to extend an offer to them and see if they grant us permission to engage in a conversation and then possibly merge realities such that we inhabit the same Everse pocket AKA “instance” or “session”. She was ten, so less than half my age. It seemed the last teacher who she agreed to work with was eight months ago, and that teacher was able to work with her for three sessions. Interestingly, however, Amanda refused to allow that teacher, Anna, to disclose any notes regarding their sessions together. Very curious.
A few prior sessions from other teachers revealed a few tidbits. Phobias: clowns, shadow monsters, open ocean. Favorite flavors: strawberry, vanilla, mango. Favorite color: purple. I loved her already. Size of friends list: five. But I noticed something haunting. All five students on her friends list were deceased, three to suicide, and other than classification of suicide all of the profiles had data access revoked.
I had a sneaking suspicion that she and I had a tragedy in common. Her profile was almost entirely blank, which brought up the question of how she even got a brain chip in the first place - usually children who were chipped had complete profiles.
Brain scans: indicative of early onset bipolar including signs of both hypomanic and depressive episodes, prior teachers have reported paranoia and strange thought patterns which bordered on “mild” psychosis. If you’ve never been psychotic, it’s hard to imagine that there are levels to it, it can be hard to comprehend a differentiation between slightly crazy and risk-to-oneself insane. I have been to the depths and beyond, and beyond again, and so I am proud to admit that I take medication for the betterment of myself and to maintain my ability to contribute to society.
Amanda’s early onset bipolar really spoke to me. It was also very curious that she was online in learning mode despite being so closed off from teachers. Most (nearly all) teachers wouldn’t even try to talk to her with a rejection rate like her 99.7%, but something within her still longed for contact.
“You do always manage to surprise me, Alianii,” said Marabelle, “With that inefficient fickleness of which I am so very fond! Amanda is a good choice too, I must admit.”
Part 6: Wonky the Bear
March 8th, 2100 - In the Morning
I initiated the conversation with a translucent gift package, although the item inside was rendered invisible such that she would have to open it to see what it was. Imagine a glass box, perfectly clear, but you can sense there is an item inside. You can “feel” the item, and the giant exclamation mark that pulses above it is a big give away too. The ribbons were blue rose blue, deep and shiny, and the box was smooth overall but had etchings at the center of each square pane which featured a different scene of a dancing glass teddy bear. Alongside the opening of the box I paired a voice message that she would receive.
“Hi Amanda. My name is Wonky the Bear and I need you to - “
Incomplete messages are a hidden gem technique for working with kids under the age of fifteen or so, though even older students sometimes enjoy them. The underlying psychological motivator is curiosity. The vast majority of teachers start off with a very stiff, professional message aimed directly at appealing to the parents of students, the children of whom mostly do not have “exceptionalities” as we refer to them. This is fine and dandy, but two paragraphs detailing a resume does not tug the heart strings of the orphaned. A minute passed.
Marabelle whispered into my “ears” with notable worry, her digital voice streamed straight into my consciousness, “What if she doesn’t respond? How will we help her?!”
Wazoop!
Amanda had returned the box to me along with a single word voice message, “Hi.”
Her tone was soft and sad. She did something curious, though, she changed the glass color of the box to match my eye color. In the Everse you can select any color and copy and paste it to any location or feature that you have color modification privileges to.
I replied with a pop timer, she could either wait a minute for the message to load and then hear my voice response or she could pop the message and then open it directly, “I have it on good account that you’re fond of purple. Have you ever been to Violetica?”
Ten seconds, twenty, she was going to wait until the minute elapsed, but she popped the timer, “What’s Violetica? It sounds like violet.”
I was pretty sure she’d already looked it up and read a few paragraphs about it, most students (and adults) instantly do when they come across a term that is unfamiliar to them. Her asking me about it didn’t mean she knew nothing about it, but it was an invitation to talk further.
I mailed her a violet apple which tasted like a fusion of grape and watermelon and delivered a message upon the first bite, we called these “munch messages”.
“Can I show you? We could talk for a little bit and then visit it together.”
Would she take a bite? Maybe…maybe…yes! She had a nibble, approximately 2.4% of the apple in one small, calculated nip.
“Astonishing. Amanda actually ate some of the fruit. How you manage to work around a ninety-nine percent rejection rate, I will never understand. Ah well, I suppose that’s why you’re my biological companion, Alianii!” replied Marabelle, with a bit of affection and cheekiness.
“Ok. You can come in,” said Amanda, in her reply.
A mauve metal door, rusted and squeaking (curious…) appeared in front of me, and I knocked three times and opened it and entered her instance.
I entered what I learned to be her home, and it broke my heart. She was sitting in a dirty abandoned-looking apartment in Light’s Hope, based off the city skyline backdrop I saw through her window. Her jade eyes were sorrowful and her black hair was unbrushed, her cheeks were smudged with dust or dirt. Her clothes had rips and holes. She was barefoot, and had cuts on her legs and feet. This wasn’t her avatar, I mean it was, but this was a girl who had scanned herself recently to have her digital avatar match her physical actuality. In the Everse you could be anywhere, in your heaven, and her self-esteem was such that the best reality she could envision for herself was the grimness she was already living. Five friends, all dead, three suicides.
She was an egg, my sister. She just didn’t know it yet.