EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Five

The following Monday, spring classes started up and I let myself fall back into my Boston rhythms—my new, fresh life where the past stayed in its place. So Principal Farghasian was a liar, too, apparently, although Aunt Amalia never specified how. What difference did that make to me?

A life I can be proud of. That's what Adam had told me we both needed to find, and that's what I had made every effort to do.

I woke up at six that Monday and headed over to campus to take a dive in the university pool. MIT had a swimming requirement for all students, something that had struck me as very odd when I had first arrived, because it seemed so arbitrary. "Why swimming?" I had asked the senior giving us the tour of campus back in August. "Why not, I don't know, archery or something?" "Because it's good for you," he had responded, an answer which seemed to satisfy everyone else on the tour.

Now I was grateful for it, as I had made it part of my morning ritual. I found my mind was clearer in the water, the effort of breathing at regular intervals, of using muscles in my shoulders I had forgotten existed, all of it bringing me into a trance-like state. Physics principles floated above my head as I made the laps, so clear I could almost touch them. Velocity and resistance. My body a machine, predictable and therefore complete.

I showered in the locker room after, placed my wet bathing suit in a sealed plastic bag, and dried my hair in the mirror. No makeup, just ChapStick. I felt rejuvenated as I headed over to my first class. And the feeling lingered as I took my seat in the middle of the huge lecture hall, the promise of the day opening up before me like a flower.

I smiled to myself as a familiar face entered from the back office and approached the podium at the front.

"Welcome to the future!" Lisa Sanchez beamed.

She laughed at her own joke, but nobody else in the lecture hall seemed to realize that she had made one. So she coughed the effort away and proceeded to read the next item on her agenda, projected larger than life onto the screen behind her.

I couldn't help but chuckle, though, remembering how warm and inviting Professor Sanchez had been when I'd met her in the spring at the El Gallo café for my in-person MIT interview. I had been hoping to find an opportunity to take one of her classes since I got here, so when I saw that she was teaching "Futurism: Smart Tech and Where We Go From Here" this semester, it seemed like fate.

"We'll spend some time at the beginning of the term talking more broadly about culture, sociology, the evolution of modern communities."

The girl next to me in the fourth row cleared her throat, and due to the cavernous design of the room, the sound reverberated off the walls and eventually came back to land in my ears a second time. Other students shuffled, and I caught a couple confused glances left and right.

"I can see some of you think you wandered into the wrong class," Lisa joked. "Don't worry, you're in the right place. But to understand where tech is going, we first have to understand why it's going there. What is technology, after all, but a society's attempts to solve communal problems?"

I jotted this down in my little blue notebook. Despite enormous social pressure to use my laptop for this purpose, I just couldn't get used to the idea of typing my notes as I went along. There was something about holding the pen in my hand, feeling the ragged flow of it across the paper, that cemented the ideas in my mind. I couldn't get the same sensation from a keyboard. Although the constant echoing click of fingers hitting keys all around informed me that I was alone in that camp.

"As the class progresses," she continued, "we'll brainstorm where we think all this tech is going. By semester's end, you'll have created a protype for your own invention. Don't worry, it doesn't have to be perfect. It's the ideas that matter at this stage."