Another Brick in The Wall

The rest of the school day went as usual. I had math classes after that, where we being taught algebra. Ms. Finnigan, our math teacher, had the expression that I assumed I carried on my face when the teacher's looked at me. A vacant staring off into the distance wishing I was somewhere else. Ms. Finnigan didn't seem to mind Joy coming up every single time to write the solutions, and, frankly, neither did the classroom.

Lunch followed that where we ate a meal of oat porridge with curried chickpeas and a soy bar. The meal tasted like ash in my mouth and I spent most of the time talking with Joy about the book. She seemed to love books but didn't understand what I meant when I brought up that there was something missing. A word came to me and I said... desire. It seemed like there was a lack of it. What motivated people and especially men.

"They probably had more time to think of things they needed or wanted in life. For us, it's just a matter of trying to survive but for them... they already had so much that they didn't worry about it that they could have invented new things to want," Joy theorized.

I shrugged. It sounded plausible but like my meal, it left me empty and hollow.

After lunch, we shuffled to the science class. In science, Ms. Rita Fleming explained how eggs were harvested from women and mixed with DNA samples from men to create a fertilized embryo. We were taught that the fertilized embryo would then be placed into a gestation pod where it would develop for nine months. It seemed amazing for such a miracle of creation to seem so unceremonious and devoid of life.

"How do they get the DNA samples from men?" Joy asked.

"That's a wonderful question, Joy." Ms. Fleming was the opposite of Ms. Finnigan. She had a genuine zeal for her job that I just did not understand. "Unfortunately that is a question I can not fully answer. From what the Institute tells us, some volunteer men are sedated and DNA is extracted from them. Maybe they take it in the form of a blood sample."

Ms. Fleming carried on with the conversation with Joy continuing to ask more and more questions. I waited for the bell to ring to the only class I actually enjoyed.

After science, the boys and girls had to be shoved into the cramped locker room like sardines, each jostling to change before we did laps around the school and then played a game where we kicked the ball around a patchy grass field into a net. I took the pent up energy and anxiety I had been storing up and ran circles around people. Still, my accuracy left a lot to be desired, and I ended up kicking the ball into the forest when I had a chance.

After the Physical Education class was over, we hit the showers. Every naked body, boy and girl, in the class was scrambling to fight over prime real estate under the showerheads. I had bump butts with Joy, who was behind me, naked under the other showerhead. Another naked girl was at my side, jostling to get under my spot and rubbing her naked body over me. This was uncomfortable, to say the least. The water was ice cold though, just like I like it, though the clattering teeth of my classmates would say they disagree with me.

The last class was History. Our class studied and talked about the presidency of a former King, though they called him The President, in the long ancient past, named Willaim Jefferson Clinton. We were primarily focused on his impeachment, how he was impeached for lying to congress about engaging in insider stock trading with one Monica Lewinski. Ms. Velma Chapman reciting a famous saying from President Clinton saying, “I did not engage in insider trading with that woman, Miss Lewinski,” as one of his controversial statements.

Another dreary day learning about the past we will never get back and stuff we will never use. I walked with a bit of melancholy back home in slumped shoulders, cutting through the forest in my own shortcut. I don't know if it actually saved me time but walking through the woods and “nature” always made me feel better. Something about this life we were given in this tiny dome just seemed hopeless and full of despair.

I must have wandered off my usual trail because I came to an unfamiliar ledge. Peering down, I notice a sinkhole that must have opened up after the “rain” (more apt to call it the sky sprinklers) yesterday. The "sun" was right above the little sinkhole and something shiny sparkled down there. Being curious, I followed it down. At the bottom of the sinkhole on the dirt ground, a piece of metal stuck out.

The rusty metal ring peered out of the dirt and look on the edge of collapsing into dust. I pulled on it, and it lifts up. A metal hatch had open similarly to an attic cellar door. There was a tunnel with metal rungs that go down about a story. I hesitated to venture down there. Who knows what could be down there.

Something came over me, though, as I stood staring down into the darkness. A sense of adventure and excitement I never had before. It was like I stumbled onto a great archaeologist find like Howard Carter.

Well… fortune favors the bold.

On the bottom, a passageway leads to walls of concrete. The sun was setting in a way that poured faint light from the cave entrance into the tunnel that sent long shadows down the shaft. I could faintly make out a door that I grasped at to find a handle. I could feel a metal bar and lifted the rusty handle to open the door. Inside the bunker was a long room of brick tiles and concrete walls.

The place reeked of decay and urine. The bed on the left had an unmade blanket over it. The bed was supported by aluminum legs, and underneath was a trunk of faded sky blue and rusty latches and hinges. A few empty jars and tin cans remain on a pantry shelf on the right. Other than that, the place was barren besides the little trunk underneath the bed along with the inch of dust.

I pulled the trunk out into the light pouring in the entrance and unlatched it. Someone must have cleared it. It was mostly empty, but there was an assortment of unusable junk left in there. One looked like a brick of plastic with a long cord attached to it. There was a glass tablet device inside of it. Other than there were a bunch of cables. I picked up the glass-like tablet device, it was roughly the size of a playing card. There was a round button on the bottom center. I clicked it, and nothing happened. It looked like some kind of power device, but the power must have gone out a long time ago.

I tried to look around the device for an opening for the battery, but it had nothing but a few holes on the bottom. Looking through the long black cables, I notice some of the ends attached to gaps in the tablet device. One long rope attached to a small hole on the bottom had an electrical connector on the other end similar to the ones we have for our fridge, our car, and our landline phone.

Maybe I can charge it up? The battery is inside like it is in our car? How did they make a battery so small, though?

From what I read, the ancients had devices that could watch plays and films on it, listen to music and make phone calls. Most of the movie of the past had been disintegrated, but they still played “The Wizard of Oz” in the old run-down theatre in town every Sunday. The Ancients even browsed something called a net, an information highway that connected all of them. The very thought of the ability to do that had just seemed like magic to me. Maybe this was one of those magical devices?

I would need to charge this thing up and see. However, most likely, this thing had a silicon circuit in it. That would mean it would most likely be considered contraband and disposed of. If I was caught with this, it would most likely be seized, and I could face discipline. I would have to keep this whole place a secret.

Sensing there wasn’t more to do here and the time being late, I climbed out of the bunker and headed home with my new archaeological artifact in my sling bag. Little did I know, I had just opened the proverbial Pandora’s box.