Selfie (a YA technothriller)

Chapter 1

"Wake up, Honey," my mom's voice says softly in my ear. "Wake up."

I groan and rub my eyes. When I open them I realize I'm alone. I fell asleep with my earbuds in again. My mom probably went to work hours ago like usual.

"Music." I say to my phone, which is on my desk resting on its wireless charger. "Upbeat."

I have my thumb and ring finger of my right hand pressed together so the phone knows I'm talking to it. A fast tempo song starts playing through the nearly invisible wireless earbuds that I keep in almost all the time.

"Schedule?" I ask out loud.

"Another wonderful day of school," a woman's voice says into my ears. "Don't forget the social studies paper that's due in 3rd period. Your mom left lunch on the table. And Jens wants to know whether you can practice xxx after school."

My phone's AI is called Gloria. She's a bit like I imagine a nagging secretary would be.

Shit, I thought. I forgot about the paper. I grabbed my phone and ran a program to search for a pre-2000 high school level social studies paper stored in offline data caches and skimmed through the results. I found a Word doc about familial structures in Ethiopia, downloaded it to my phone and changed the name and date.

Brianna Harmond. 10th Grade.

Then I sent it to the printer in Dad's office and headed to the kitchen to grab breakfast.

"Morning Bree," my dad was already sitting at the table with some toast and a glass of OJ, reading the morning paper. My little sister Megan was there too eating cereal. I tapped my forefinger and thumb together again and ordered breakfast, "Coffee. Toast."

I grabbed a slice of toast and put it in the machine just as the lever went down, and put a mug under the coffee machine spout.

Megan rolled her eyes. My Dad peeked over the top of his paper.

"Would it really be that hard to press the button?" he said.

"What good is technology if we don't use it?" I said. "Besides, if it saves me a few seconds here or there, that adds up to serious study time."

"As if you ever study," Megan said. I shot her a look that shut her up. Her hair was a mess, so I braided it while I was scarfing down my breakfast. Then I picked up the paper from Dad's office and stuffed it in my backpack.

"Bye!" I yelled behind me, as I grabbed my skateboard and held it close to my mouth, whispering the secret password. I'd programmed it to respond only to an ASMR version of my voice, which included not just the sound, but the subtle physical vibrations as well. Last year I'd bought a little device a classmate had made in his garage that powered the wheels and a self-guided navigation system. "School" I said, pressing my fingers together. Gloria communicated with the device on skateboard, and also tapped into the traffic cams and signals. It wasn't foolproof, but the system would usually get me to school in one piece while I stood there listening to music and reading novels on my phone.

School is a joke. Why would we ever need to learn everything? We have instant access to all the world's wisdom, the history of mankind's greatest achievements, and our smart phone is able to use that information better than we will ever be able to. Why struggle trying to figure out geometry or algebra, doing the sums and adding up things in our minds, when our phone could solve the problem in a nanosecond? Why even learn to hold a pencil or write by hand? Who does that anymore?

They're still teaching us stuff they thought we needed to learn twenty years ago to have a successful future, but it's completely irrelevant now. What we should be learning is how to do more. How to solve real problems. How to think creatively and use our devices to actually improve the world. At least that's what most of my friends think. So we cheat to get through our classes and keep our teachers and parents happy, but we save our brains for the real challenges. The interesting stuff is all happening on the down-low, between periods or after school. We're inventing or trading technology that's more advanced than anything you could get on the market.