He looked over to the seat beside him. No one was there, and somehow that still surprised him. It had been long enough that the shock should have been past, but somehow it remained. The ache was always there, but in spite of that fact and the myriad reminders of Annie's departure, he always expected to see her beside him, smiling and laughing as she reached out to play with his hair.
He drove past the sign the town council had put up some five years before: Welcome to Loston, Pop. 1472 and counting.
The mountains loomed behind him. Colorado was nothing but one large mountain, it seemed, but parts of it stood higher than the rest. The mountains that guarded Loston were solid sentinels, vigilantly aware of all that transpired before them. The mountains had always made Annie feel safe.
John turned into the driveway of the high school, located right next to Town Hall. He parked the Pathfinder, got out without locking the door - no one had ever had a car broken into in Loston - and went into the office.
It was quiet inside, which was normal. The office was a well-oiled mechanism that functioned with the smoothness and efficiency of a luxury automobile. That was due in no small part to the woman whose flashing and - to the students - highly intimidating gaze now focused upon him.
Mertyl Breckman, the office secretary, noticed him immediately upon his arrival, as she noticed everyone who dared to brave her domain. Though she had lost the last of her teeth some four years previous, it seemed the two hundred students at Loston High still lived in mortal fear that she would bite them. Not even the principal commanded the respect that Mertyl did. When she was especially agitated her mouth firmed into a line that was colder than a Nordic glacier, and slower to warm. Rumors abounded that the reason LHS had such a small graduating class each year was that Mertyl ate anyone who was found wandering into the office without a pass.
John had no pass, but in spite of that Mertyl did something that would have shocked the collective student body.
She smiled at him.
He smiled back at her. When Annie died, Mertyl was one of the first people at his door, bringing a party platter of meats and breads. "You won’t want to eat any of this, and you’re a big boy, so I won’t make you," she’d said, "but you remember that people will be calling on you and they’ll want something to eat."
She had been right on both counts. Food had tasted like dry ash to him, burning and soiled. But the party platter didn’t last through the day, as well-wishers and mourners came to pay their respects and visit with one another and then eat a sandwich, as though Annie's death marked the grand opening of some strange new restaurant.
"How are you, John?" she asked.
"Same as yesterday, just a day older. You got anything for me?" He nodded to the orderly mail slots behind her. She kept them clean and tidy, just like the rest of the office, and, by extension, the school.
"Just a smile," she answered.
"You know what I like."
He continued his walk through the office, veering around the filing cabinets and out the back door, leaving Mertyl to her world of typing and clerical work.
It was less than twenty feet to his classroom, and as usual, the room was already full. John was a popular teacher - perhaps the only popular teacher at LHS - and his kids usually beat him in there each morning.
He stepped in just as the bell rang, a bell that was more likely to signal his tardiness than that of the students. Before Annie died, he tended to arrive an hour to an hour and a half early, turning on the computers and preparing for the day ahead. He would also be there so that any students who might be having problems with their schoolwork, home life, or anything else could come by and get his advice.
No longer. He just didn't have the strength. But he still loved the kids he taught, and they knew it and loved him back. The nightmares were what got him out of bed each day, but these children were the only thing that convinced him to leave his house. They needed him, almost as much as he needed them.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he said, sitting down at his desk. The role sheet had already been filled out by one of his pupils, and he didn’t bother double-checking it.
Their computers were already up and running, as well, the screens seeming to roll a bit under the phased light of the fluorescents overhead. They waited for nothing but him. He looked at them for a moment, then a quick smile flitted across his lips.
"Let’s lock and load."
Almost as one, the children slipped their disks into the computers. Hard drives whirred (a few of the older ones made a raspy noise, like the discs were being scoured by brillo pads), and the new web pages they were designing appeared on their screens.
John walked between them for a few minutes, nodding, complimenting, pointing out ways that each could be improved. The children smiled at him as he passed between the aisles of the computer science classroom, and he smiled back. He would have thanked God for them every moment of every day, if he still believed in God.
One of the kids was particularly involved in his work, to the point that he didn’t notice John quietly move behind him to observe. His name was Dallas Howard, and John watched him silently for a few moments. The young man worked quickly, fingers skipping quickly over the keyboard as he typed. John smiled as he watched the work progress.
Dallas had been a trouble student when he came to John’s class. Failing most of his classes, in trouble with all the teachers, he brought a lifetime of attitude with him. The rest of the teachers at the school had given up on him, and he took their poor expectations of him and did his best to live down to them.
Not John, though. He firmly believed that no kid was a lost cause. He focused intensely on the boy from the first, pushing him to do better, to be more than he had been. Surly in the beginning, Dallas had gradually begun to respond to John’s gentle prodding. Soon he was smiling when he sat down at his desk, waiting for the next assignment to be handed out, the next challenge to overcome.
John lay a hand on his student’s shoulder.
"Good job, Dallas," he said, "pretty soon you’ll be able to outdesign me."
Dallas didn’t so much as pause in his work, but he did snort lightly, as if to say, "I already can."
"That good, are you?"
Dallas stopped typing for a moment, looking at John with playful teasing. "The worlds I create in here are already better than the piss-poor one God did for us."
He grinned widely, and John smiled back. A few of the nearby kids in the class heard the comment and snickered. One of them, a girl with a pair of rings in her nose, spoke up. "Want to be God, eh? You’re the wrong sex, little man."
More laughter came with that comment, and John was pleased to see that Dallas could smile as well; that he was not taking himself so seriously anymore.
"You bring up a good point, Patricia," he said to the girl, then raised his voice to address the whole class. They grew silent instantly, all side-chatter ceasing as he spoke. John appreciated the fact that they liked to listen to him, but also felt the pressure each time as he strove to find something to say that would both interest and inform his students.
"Remember, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "the world is fast moving into an age where the computer-illiterate won’t stand a chance. Tomorrow’s world is going to be run by and through computers: a new age of machines merged with people, where they do the work we are either unwilling or unable to do for ourselves."
He paused for a moment, trying to figure out where he was going with this particular strand of thought. Very often when he taught, John found himself saying things that he had not thought about beforehand. It was as though the words came from someone else at times, emerging so quickly that they left him breathless and wondering just what part of his brain had come up with that idea.
Then he felt himself continue, saying, "So let’s say Mr. Howard here is right, and he is becoming a god of computers." A few titters at that, and more than a few of the girls batted their eyes at Dallas, who was blushing a bit under the class’s scrutiny. Blushing, but John noted with approval that he was not looking away from them. He was becoming a very strong and self-assured teen, so very different from the attitudinal, beaten-down youth of only a few months before.
John turned his attention from Dallas back to the class. "So what does it mean to be a god? How many of us have thought about the ethics of the computer age?"
John looked around the room. The kids all stared back at him, blank-faced.
"I see. Does anyone even know what I’m talking about?"
"Porn," said one of the kids. The rest of the class snickered. John laughed a bit, too, though for a different reason. It never ceased to amaze him that in all the changes in all the kids through all the years, one thing stayed constant: mention of anything sexual or any kind of bodily function was guaranteed to elicit a laugh.
"Yes, that’s one thing we might have ethical concerns over, and certainly a subject we could spend a lot of time discussing. But I’m afraid that if we talked about that, then I’d just find out how hopelessly old fashioned I am and you would all have me blushing inside five minutes." More laughs. John drew a deep breath, still not sure where he was going with this but determined to find out.
"But there are a lot of other things to consider, too. Remember," he said, warming to his topic, "when you are given access to something powerful, you have a responsibility to use it well. The more power, the more responsibility. And I think we can all agree that one of the most powerful tools ever made is the computer and the other machines associated with it. We have to think about our responsibilities in using it well. And I’m not just talking about porn."
"What else?" asked Dallas, raptly attentive.
John paused. He liked to wait for several seconds after such shouted questions. Often the other students would rise to the challenge and begin an interesting discussion. No takers this time, though, so after a moment John continued speaking. "How about video games?" he asked. The class continued to stare at him in that semi-blank way that students did when they weren’t thinking; when they hadn’t been kick-started
into
thinking. John was losing his audience. He had to get more participation.
"Does anyone know what the first video game was?" he asked.
One of the kids raised a hand. "Pac Man?" A few more shouted answers rang out as each student tried to guess the answer.
John let the guesses continue for a time, then shook his head. "Good guesses, but wrong. The first video game was called Pong. There were two lines and a ball that bounced back and forth between them. That’s it. Nothing else."
"Booooring," drawled Dallas, his voice sounding like a foghorn as he drew out the vowel. The class laughed again, and Dallas clasped his hands over his head and shook them in victory.
Geez, thought John, he’s coming along great!
Aloud, he said, "Thank you for that compelling gamer review, Mr. Dallas." Another round of laughs. "So who of you plays video games now?"
Three quarters of the hands in the class went up.
"What are some video games you like?"
The words came quickly, a shouted chorus of the newest titles.
"Duke Nuke ‘Em."
"Tomb Raider."
"Double-0 Seven."
"Metal Gear Solid."
"Resident Evil."
John waited until everyone had made a contribution, then held out his hands for silence. Immediately the students quieted, waiting for his point. "Good list there, ladies and gentlemen. Now, consider: in recent years, a major selling point for new systems is how life-like they can make their games. How real are they? How many pixels calculated per second? How fast?"
He stopped a moment, then turned to a young lady named Jerianne, a sallow-faced girl who wasn’t interested in speaking much. John called on her a lot for that very reason, trying to include her and encourage her. Some students needed to be held back a bit, to be reigned in and corralled. Others needed someone to set them free.
"What do you think, Ms. Halley?
"Huh?"
"How fast are games now?"
"Dunno."
"They’re making games that perform over six billion pixel calculations per second. That’s more than enough to make exceptionally realistic games. Cartoon-like, or even life-like."
A few of the students nodded, and John smiled inwardly. They were starting to focus on what he was saying.
"So here’s a question, or maybe just a thought: when a five-year old played Pong, what was he doing?"
Silence. Then Jerianne answered.
"Playing a video game."
The class snickered again, but John silenced them quickly. "No, don’t laugh. That’s exactly right. He - or she - was playing a game. But now, when a five year old plays one of the modern breed of games, what is that child doing?"
"Playing a game," someone said. John shook his head slightly.
The class waited, then finally Dallas spoke. The kid was smart, and he gave the answer that was so simple it sounded stupid...which of course was why John wanted someone to say it.
"He’s making decisions."
"What?" asked John.
"He’s making life-and-death decisions."
Someone hummed Darth Vader music. More snickers. John chuckled, too, but his eyes were serious.
"Sounds funny, doesn’t it? But maybe that’s right. Isn’t it just possible that a five-year old, someone whose own sense of reality isn’t fully shaped yet, could confuse real life with a game? When you can’t tell the difference between the people next door and the people on your video game, is there a difference? Are the people in the machines more real to some of us than the people in the supermarket?"
The class quieted. John smiled to himself again. He could see that some of them - most of them - didn’t think his statement was correct. But that was all right. They were at least thinking about it, instead of just absorbing every single word he said without trying to make sense of it for themselves. "Kids today are all supermodels," he had told Mertyl once. "If they aren’t physically bingeing and purging, they’re doing it intellectually, swallowing everything that you give them and then puking it back at you at exams and hoping it doesn’t leave a bad taste in their mouths. I want to be someone who teaches them how to eat a good, balanced meal that will actually help them in some way."