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Unwired
by:
291
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26 Votes 
Chapter 1:- 1:Gadgets
“…so Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as his response to Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt on supposed communists in the entertainment industry. He used the play as an allegory.
“If you can define allegory, I’d like you to please post your response definition to the whiteboard chat space now,” Kate Belair add, speaking in the slightly exaggerated way that annoyed Hailey to no end about her mother when she was in ‘teacher mode’.
“I know it, mom!” Hailey shouted from her bedroom forgetting to cover her com-microphone and hearing her own voice blast through her headset.
“Please post it on your whiteboard, Hailey, so everyone in class can see it, and remember not to shout into your com-mike.” The reprimand came over Hailey’s headset, and she cringed at the thought of her friends and not-so-friends alike hearing Mrs. Belair, their teacher and Hailey’s mom, correct her publicly. She hated having her mom as her teacher.
As Hailey typed her definition of allegory, she noted her friends Jeff and Deanna had already posted. Wrong answers – both of them. She loved them, but they were not the sharpest tools in the shed when it came to American lit. An allegory was not “a comparison using like or as” (Jeff’s definition), and it was not a “particularly gruesome story” (Deanna’s version). She giggled reading Deanna’s definition – the part where Proctor was hanged had really made an impact apparently. Hailey had this English course stuff down cold; you can’t be the kid of a cyber teacher without just absorbing the bits and bytes of subject matter through the wi-fi, she supposed. It was probably even genetic somehow. Hailey was practically a blonde, blue-eyed eBook of high school English literature and grammar.
She hit the enter key after typing her definition (the representation of abstract ideas in story form) with a flourish and spun a 360 in her desk chair waiting for the rest of the class to finish posting. It always took a few minutes for the live chat sessions to get flowing – some kids just never did learn to type up-to-speed in 2nd and 3rd grade like they should’ve – and it still slowed them down now in high school.
Hailey sighed, bored, and eyed her new Gadget. She’d downloaded the three latest tunes by Deckhand and couldn’t wait to listen, but her mom’s wi-fi snooper would probably pick up the signal and bust her. This was School Live! time and Hailey wasn’t up for being grounded, again. No multi-tasking allowed in the Belair household. God, her mother thought like such an antique! Doing one thing at a time was such a monumental waste of time, not to mention wasting like 3/4ths of her brain. Hailey picked up her silver-blue Gadget, letting her thumb softly caress the power button without actually turning it on.
I’m no different than this Gadget, she thought. I can easily do lots of things at one time and do them well. Hailey’s Gadget, fresh out of the beta testing lab since her dad was a salesman for the company, contained all the newest upgrades. Mp6 player, 3Dphone, tracker, SimLife Interactive projection capabilities – even Jeff’s Gadget didn’t have that yet, plus all the standards: KreditKeeper, Cyberschool stuff, and even some hacking tools Max programmed in for her when she’d helped him with his Algebra homework. Plus, at 2 inches square and metallic blue – it just looked uncharted – as in uncharted waters – Deanna’s favorite new catch phrase for when something was really new, and about to be considered “valuable”.
“Treasure was always found in uncharted territory,” she’d posted one day in US History class. And then in a private message to Hailey, “I found this song by Deckhand on a great uncharted website – lol!” She sent the Mp6 file also. Hailey had to admit, the song was great, the website – definitely uncharted – and the word just stayed, with a new meaning for them. Pretty soon the rest of their friends were texting, blogging, and IM’ing the new word all over cyber space and it became a part of their everyday vocabulary.
“I see Chad in Edinburgh has posted a very interesting definition of allegory. Chad, can you give an example of another eBook or ePlay we’ve read that illustrates what you mean?” Kate Belair’s voice brought Hailey back around from her daydreaming to see that most of the class had been posting about allegory and discussing without her.
As soon as Chad began to speak, Hailey rolled her eyes and comically dropped her chin to her chest in a dramatic pantomime of someone being dulled to sleep. His decidedly uninspiring voice droned in her earpiece. She could care less what one Scottish teen thought of a classic American drama and whether he could find a fitting comparative example. He was only attending the cyber school on an exchange student basis anyway.
Deanna gushed on and on in emails and Gadget texts about his Scottish accent, but Hailey just found him to be boring. He sounded like the proverbial 80-pound weakling who would get sand kicked in his face like her character Eugene in SimLife Interactive. Chad whined a lot and it sounded like he was always sniffing over his com-mike. Definitely not attractive.
“Any questions?” Teacher-mom interrupted again.
Hailey glanced at her screen, noting the class time for School Live! had mercifully come to an end. She posted NO! in 44 point red font and hit the enter key on the keyboard. She then clicked the “Save Homework” button and the “Exit” button nearly simultaneously in her rush to be logged off.
Grabbing her Gadget, Hailey sorted through the quick text options searching for the one she used four days a week to signal her little brother Max that it was his time for two hours of School Live! torture. She hit the send key with a sense of freedom that only the three day off cycle brings.
Max’s reply showed up almost instantaneously and held all the promise of the twelve-year-old’s literary future.
“…so Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as his response to Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt on supposed communists in the entertainment industry. He used the play as an allegory.
“If you can define allegory, I’d like you to please post your response definition to the whiteboard chat space now,” Kate Belair add, speaking in the slightly exaggerated way that annoyed Hailey to no end about her mother when she was in ‘teacher mode’.
“I know it, mom!” Hailey shouted from her bedroom forgetting to cover her com-microphone and hearing her own voice blast through her headset.
“Please post it on your whiteboard, Hailey, so everyone in class can see it, and remember not to shout into your com-mike.” The reprimand came over Hailey’s headset, and she cringed at the thought of her friends and not-so-friends alike hearing Mrs. Belair, their teacher and Hailey’s mom, correct her publicly. She hated having her mom as her teacher.
As Hailey typed her definition of allegory, she noted her friends Jeff and Deanna had already posted. Wrong answers – both of them. She loved them, but they were not the sharpest tools in the shed when it came to American lit. An allegory was not “a comparison using like or as” (Jeff’s definition), and it was not a “particularly gruesome story” (Deanna’s version). She giggled reading Deanna’s definition – the part where Proctor was hanged had really made an impact apparently. Hailey had this English course stuff down cold; you can’t be the kid of a cyber teacher without just absorbing the bits and bytes of subject matter through the wi-fi, she supposed. It was probably even genetic somehow. Hailey was practically a blonde, blue-eyed eBook of high school English literature and grammar.
She hit the enter key after typing her definition (the representation of abstract ideas in story form) with a flourish and spun a 360 in her desk chair waiting for the rest of the class to finish posting. It always took a few minutes for the live chat sessions to get flowing – some kids just never did learn to type up-to-speed in 2nd and 3rd grade like they should’ve – and it still slowed them down now in high school.
Hailey sighed, bored, and eyed her new Gadget. She’d downloaded the three latest tunes by Deckhand and couldn’t wait to listen, but her mom’s wi-fi snooper would probably pick up the signal and bust her. This was School Live! time and Hailey wasn’t up for being grounded, again. No multi-tasking allowed in the Belair household. God, her mother thought like such an antique! Doing one thing at a time was such a monumental waste of time, not to mention wasting like 3/4ths of her brain. Hailey picked up her silver-blue Gadget, letting her thumb softly caress the power button without actually turning it on.
I’m no different than this Gadget, she thought. I can easily do lots of things at one time and do them well. Hailey’s Gadget, fresh out of the beta testing lab since her dad was a salesman for the company, contained all the newest upgrades. Mp6 player, 3Dphone, tracker, SimLife Interactive projection capabilities – even Jeff’s Gadget didn’t have that yet, plus all the standards: KreditKeeper, Cyberschool stuff, and even some hacking tools Max programmed in for her when she’d helped him with his Algebra homework. Plus, at 2 inches square and metallic blue – it just looked uncharted – as in uncharted waters – Deanna’s favorite new catch phrase for when something was really new, and about to be considered “valuable”.
“Treasure was always found in uncharted territory,” she’d posted one day in US History class. And then in a private message to Hailey, “I found this song by Deckhand on a great uncharted website – lol!” She sent the Mp6 file also. Hailey had to admit, the song was great, the website – definitely uncharted – and the word just stayed, with a new meaning for them. Pretty soon the rest of their friends were texting, blogging, and IM’ing the new word all over cyber space and it became a part of their everyday vocabulary.
“I see Chad in Edinburgh has posted a very interesting definition of allegory. Chad, can you give an example of another eBook or ePlay we’ve read that illustrates what you mean?” Kate Belair’s voice brought Hailey back around from her daydreaming to see that most of the class had been posting about allegory and discussing without her.
As soon as Chad began to speak, Hailey rolled her eyes and comically dropped her chin to her chest in a dramatic pantomime of someone being dulled to sleep. His decidedly uninspiring voice droned in her earpiece. She could care less what one Scottish teen thought of a classic American drama and whether he could find a fitting comparative example. He was only attending the cyber school on an exchange student basis anyway.
Deanna gushed on and on in emails and Gadget texts about his Scottish accent, but Hailey just found him to be boring. He sounded like the proverbial 80-pound weakling who would get sand kicked in his face like her character Eugene in SimLife Interactive. Chad whined a lot and it sounded like he was always sniffing over his com-mike. Definitely not attractive.
“Any questions?” Teacher-mom interrupted again.
Hailey glanced at her screen, noting the class time for School Live! had mercifully come to an end. She posted NO! in 44 point red font and hit the enter key on the keyboard. She then clicked the “Save Homework” button and the “Exit” button nearly simultaneously in her rush to be logged off.
Grabbing her Gadget, Hailey sorted through the quick text options searching for the one she used four days a week to signal her little brother Max that it was his time for two hours of School Live! torture. She hit the send key with a sense of freedom that only the three day off cycle brings.
I surrender the bandwidth to you!
Max’s reply showed up almost instantaneously and held all the promise of the twelve-year-old’s literary future.
Crap.
