All chaos broke out. It was the most exciting thing that ever happened here. Our Principal had six fuming ProParents in her office, and another forty officially registering concern. After that, the culprit got transferred to Correctional for his last three months in Next Step, and we all had to use unlock plates instead of voice commands.
Issette stood outside, arms full of old toys, her face registering total despair. ‘I’ll never find space for all this.’
‘I’m in trouble too, and I’ll be moving dig site several times during the year. I’ll have to keep unpacking and repacking it all.’ I tried to be practical. ‘I suppose we could throw some stuff out.’
‘I can’t throw them away,’ wailed Issette. ‘I can’t throw out Whoopiz the Zen and all the fluffies.’ Issette was very attached to her toys in Nursery, especially the strange skinny purple object that she called Whoopiz the Zen. She didn’t seem to have entirely grown out of it.
I didn’t want to toss all my old familiar clutter down a waste chute either, so we dragged everything over to a hired storage unit. It was surprisingly hard to close the door on the sad jumbled relics of our years in Nursery, Home and Next Step, and return to a stripped, impersonal room.
I didn’t sleep very well, but the next morning I could laze in bed until late. I was due at my course at ten in the morning, but this time I’d remembered to allow for the time zones. The first part of my course was in America North, so I had five spare hours.
My last bit of packing took only a few minutes. I spent a while helping out Issette, and then we both headed down to the entrance hall with our luggage. I just had to press my key fob, and my bags gathered up in a tight group behind me, bouncing up and down slightly in mid air, like obedient but excited puppies. Issette’s bags didn’t have hover pads, so she had them loaded on a hired hover trolley.
In the entrance hall we met five other hover trolleys, another two sets of hover pad luggage, and their owners. The nine of us stood in an awkward group, with nothing to say except the goodbyes we’d already said, but feeling unable to actually leave. This was the big moment that we’d dreamed of for years. No more Principal giving us orders. No more rules. No more room sensors nagging us. We could go anywhere we liked, and do anything we wanted. We were adults, we were free, and we were scared.
We’d probably have stood there all day, if the Principal hadn’t arrived. She did a quick head count, saw we were all ready to go, and put us out of our misery by waving us off.
We dutifully formed an orderly queue for the portal, and took out our lookups to check our destination codes. One by one we dialled, stepped into the portal, and vanished. I let the others go first, because they all had internal Europe destinations, and I was going inter-continent.
I portalled to the closest Europe Transit, wandered past the information signs about inter-continent portal charges, and portalled to America. AIPTH, that’s Automated Intercontinental Passenger Traffic Handling, randomly allocated me an American Transit destination, and I popped out in America Transit 2.
That’s where I made a really nardle-brained decision. I could have dialled straight to my destination from any local portal in America Transit 2, but I had the bright idea of going via America Off-world since that was where a genuine off-world student would arrive. I felt this would help me get in character as Jarra the Military kid.
It was a seriously bad move. I thought America Off-world would be nice and quiet by now. Around eight in the morning, it would be busy of course, the plaza full of Earth norm kids gathering up ready to portal through on the way to their off-world schools. The authorities generously pay for them to portal off world daily to school, but they aren’t completely insane about it. The big cost is establishing the portal, not keeping it open, so they march the kids through in batches of up to a hundred to keep the cost per head down to the minimum.
The mass off-world kiddie commute would be over by now, so I expected things to be peaceful, but I stepped out of the portal into chaos. It was the day after Year Day and every university course was starting. America Off-world was teeming with Handicapped parents sending their normal kids away to off-world universities. There were also off-world history and medical students flooding in. The problem wasn’t so much the people, but the quantities of luggage chasing their owners in all directions.
I weaved my way through the mob, avoiding the area with big red information signs about the colossal off-world portal charges, and went to another local portal. Anyone watching would think I was mad, coming here and then just going from one local portal to another. They’d be right too.
I was relieved when I made it without losing myself, let alone my luggage. I entered the code for the dome on New York Dig Site, where our course would be based for the first couple of months, and the portal started talking to me.
‘Warning, your destination is a restricted access area,’ it told me. ‘If your scanned genetic code is not listed as authorized for access, then your portal will not establish but your personal account will still be charged for this journey.’
I hesitated, with last-minute cowardly thoughts running through my head, and an acid voice spoke from behind me.
‘You may have all day, but I don’t!’
I glanced behind me at an impatient, elderly woman, who reminded me of my scary science teacher at school, turned back to face the portal and took a deep breath. I was Jarra, a Military kid, trained in unarmed combat. A history lecturer and twenty-nine other history students wouldn’t scare me.
I stepped into the portal and a new identity.
4
I arrived in a very basic accommodation dome. There had been no attempt to disguise the curve of the outside wall, or even colour the flexiplas from its depressing natural grey. I hadn’t expected anything better, because I’d been to several dig sites before with the school history club.
A harassed looking man of about thirty had been watching a trail of bobbing luggage head out of the door, presumably following its owner. He turned to face me and my own shoal of bags. ‘Welcome to University Asgard Pre-history Foundation course at the New York Dig Site. I’m Lecturer Playdon. You are …?’ He scrolled down a list of names on his lookup.
‘Jarra Reeath,’ I told him.
He first looked startled, and then as if he’d just noticed a very bad smell. ‘You’re in room 6,’ he said, stabbing his lookup with a vicious finger to check my name off on his list. ‘Student greet is in the dining hall in one hour.’
Someone else had just come through the portal. Lecturer Playdon turned to the new arrival, and I led my little procession of bags through the door and went in search of room 6. I’d learnt a few useful things in the one-minute encounter. Lecturer Playdon obviously knew what I was, and didn’t like it, but he was being professional and he wasn’t going to tell the other students. That was good news, but even better was the fact he hadn’t been able to tell at first glance that I was the ape girl. Rationally, I knew there was no truth in all the exo jokes about the look and smell of apes, but eighteen years of seeing them on the vid channels had still worn away at my confidence.
I tracked down room 6, which for some reason was between room 4 and room 12. It wasn’t bad for a room on a dig site. Bed. Storage space. Even a very small wall vid. I unpacked my bags, and then it was time to face the student greet. I’d survived meeting one enemy, and now I was going to meet another twenty-nine. I comforted myself with the fact that Playdon knew what I was, but
