A strong breeze kicked up and the grass around Jun swayed as he sat on the ground. Based on the tense, wordless trip through the emergency exit tunnel and back up outside, Todd sensed that Jun wasn’t feeling to great. Now, he sat and stared at the miles of field which stretched out from the back of the school.
“You alright man?” Todd asked. Every other time Todd inquired, Jun gave no response, and this time was no different. “I’m sure your friend is okay.” Everything happened so fast, Todd wasn’t able to get a clear understanding of what happened back there. He checked his phone and grimaced. Todd didn’t want to skip the few actual classes on his schedule. Obviously he was concerned, Principal Park would flip out if he saw Jun at the moment, but he really did need to get back to studies. A deep guilt for not working started to settle into his mind.
“Go inside.” Jun said. His tone was sharp, but his voice was small, tired.
“I don’t want to leave you feeling awful.” Todd said. He was already a few feet closer to the building. He rocked back and forth. Jun waved him off and Todd sped towards the building. “He’ll be fine...probably.” Todd said as he skipped up the stairs.
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Todd bit his pencil and scratched the side of his head. The work for Mr. Scofield’s class was more than making up for the rest of his light schedule. Every question was a combination of various subjects all tightly and intricately crafted. It felt at if parts didn’t even make sense until you figured out the preceding portions; and of course they all flowed so expertly into each other that Todd lost track of how many he’d completed as one turned into two, into three, four, five. He was only slightly aware now because the current question was so difficult.
Never before had Todd needed to read and reread one assignment so many times. He would read it, get a sense, then would lose track of what he was doing. On top of that, he felt fatigued, as if he were in a mental fog. When he stopped to switch out his tattered shirt for his gym shirt, Todd felt fine; excited to get to work actually. Now he felt drained, yet compelled to press onward. He knew he was on the verge of a breakthrough, if only all idiots in his class would quiet down. He frowned as the scratching of pencil to paper, tapping on screens, and muttering bore into his brain. He broke his pencil and gripped the edge of his desk.
“So can you make a rabbit disappear and saw it in half or what?” Jun’s voice was distant and muffled then suddenly very clear. Todd shook as if he’d just woken up from a deep sleep.
“What?’ What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Why are all the pages blank? Are you really making up your own tricks?” Jun slouched in his chair, with his feet on his desk and held the book above his head.
“Give me that.” Todd said. He reached for the book but Jun moved it out of the way. “What are you doing in...” Todd trailed off as he looked around. He was just in study hall, how long had he’d been in Mr. Scofield’s classroom? “Aren’t you worried about relegation tomorrow?” Todd asked. Jun turned his head slightly and glanced at Todd’s desk.
“I’ll be fine.” he said. Todd straightened up in his desk.
“Are you fine?” Todd asked. “Dr. Slovea says that all emotions deserve a voice. It’s okay to not be fine.” Jun slowly turned his head and sat up.
“Can I see a magic trick?” he asked.
“Sure!” Todd said. He looked around then reached into his bag for the deck of cards. As soon as he set them on his desk, Jun grabbed the box and threw it across the room. The deck hit a girl in the front row in the back of the head.
“Wow. I feel fine now.” He put his hood over his head and stared at the ceiling again.
“Not cool man.” Todd said. He walked to the front of the room full of intent to throw all blame on Jun. “Sorry.” He said, as he picked up the deck. “This guy I am no associated with threw-”
“You ruined my concentration!” the girl screamed as she grabbed Todd’s shirt. She shoved him, harder than Todd would have expected, and he slammed into the wall near the white board. Todd had a dazed look on his face as he looked around the room. To his surprise, nobody seemed to notice; even the girl was back to her furious pace of taking notes. Todd started to walk away when he heard the sound of a loud bang come from within the teacher’s office.
“It’s your job to keep those ingrates off my back.” Nedd said. The door was cracked open slightly and Todd saw Nedd in his green flannel coding something on the computer while video call was on the second monitor. Whoever he was speaking with chose to use an avatar instead of their real face.
“The board is growing impatient. ” a someone responded. Through the speaker, her voice sounded almost bored. “You’ve got a lot money tied up, with zero communication on the project.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“I can’t reveal it yet. Operational se-”
“Operational security is not a blank check to do whatever you wish.”
“Funny, my name’s on the checkbook.”
“The book is three hundred million checks thinner Nedd. The company cannot afford another incident. Last year-”
“Was valuable R&D.”
“It was a disaster. Nedd, action is being threatened.” the woman said. Nedd stopped typing and glared at the video call.
“The district is mollified. The alumni can be as connected as they want, they’ll still do as they’re told.”
“Frankly, we’re running out of tether with the board. We need something to keep them occupied. It’s time we revealed-”
“No.” Nedd said, his voice deepened to almost a growl. He slammed his fist on the table and Todd heard the sound of cracking wood. “You know better than to even discuss that.”
“If they find out what you’re doing, they’ll force the issue.”
“They can try.” Nedd said. He ended the video call and sat hunched over in his chair. His shoulders tensed and Todd heard ragged breathing. “Not now.” he growled A wisp of light yellow smoke appeared and thickened into a small cloud. Todd leaned away from the door as the smoke started to take the shape of facial features. He could feel his arms tremble as the smoke formed eyes.
The eyes flicked in his direction a chill ran down Todd’s back. He immediately backed away from the door, but bumped into someone. Todd turned around came face to face with the oafish man, he’d seen on the first day of school. He was wearing a white button up shirt with the sleeves ripped of to expose his sizeable biceps.
“Uh.” Todd stammered.
“What did you hear? ” Nedd asked as he stood in the doorway. “Everything was proprietary information and by taking my class you agreed to a non-compete clause. I will sue-”
“Nothing. I didn’t hear anything.” Todd said. He held his hands up and Nedd squinted. “I just wanted to report a small altercation.” Todd said quickly.
“Unless you defeated another student and absorbed their grades, I don’t care.” Nedd turned to head back into the office, but stopped. “You...didn’t do that did you?”
“What?” Todd asked.
“No. Of course not...that wouldn’t manifest...yet...” Nedd muttered. Something in the back of Todd’s mind drove him to dive deeper into what Nedd was talking about.
“So is this your first year of testing the program?” Todd shouted.
“What did you ask?” Nedd turned around.
“I just meant it’s such complex software, I’m...amazed that you could have it running smoothly out the gate.” Nedd smirked.
“You’d obviously think so, but this is the first official pilot. Yes, of course, I’m that talented, but the software self teaches builds out from the smallest data set ever recorded.”
“That’s incredible.” Todd said. This time he actually meant the compliment. “But wait, where did that first bit of school data come from?” Nedd’s smile dropped.
“You should get back to work Mr. Stewart.” he said. He and the large man walked into his office door and Todd heard the sound of a lock.
----------------------------------------
Todd rubbed his eyes as he sat in the darkened computer lab. He’d been working for several hours with little results to show. The moment Nedd went back into his office, Todd left the classroom and headed straight for the lab to try and poke around online. Todd needed to get to the bottom of why everything that surrounded Nedd’s arrival to school was so bizarre. Of course there were less natural questions Todd probably needed answers for, his mind drifted to the Codex, but the realm of the natural was his wheelhouse, and that’s where Todd intended to stay.
Unfortunately the mountain of information available about Nedd was useless. The man didn’t shy away from publicity, but that meant Todd had to dig through useless article after useless article about the latest thing that Nedd developed and became the runner up to a more popular version.
Todd tried to think back to the conversation he overheard to pick out anything specific which he could use to get a lead, but for some reason it was a little fuzzy in his memory. “Think. Think.” Todd said as he tapped the side of his head. “Payout.” Todd said, his eyes wide. He searched ‘Scofield Industries + payout’ but came up empty. His shoulders slumped. It was such a wide concept, his company could have paid anyone any amount of money for any reason. Not to mention, according to movies, companies could hide it by paying someone else like a charity.
“Or a school.” Todd said as he sat up in his chair. The woman on the phone mentioned paying out to the district. Todd searched every combination he could think of and finally landed on a press release for the district announcing a budgetary increase from over the summer. It wasn’t much to go off of, but Todd followed that to a link on the district website to a financial break down.
The so called break down was just a colored bar graph with a couple of labels, but there was a link for administrative staff to see more information. Todd nearly leaped out of his seat as he remembered Jun’s mucking about that wound up giving him admin privileges. Todd put in his school credentials and crossed his fingers as the paged loaded. “Oh yes.” More than just a better bar graph, Todd was seeing a spreadsheet.
He searched through the entries until he came across an itemized breakdown, and scrolled until he saw a line of revenue for fifty million dollars. It was large, but much less than the three hundred million the woman mentioned. Todd started to scroll further when noticed another fifty million, then a third, to a total of six entries all listed under ‘alumni donation.’ “Three hundred million.” Todd whispered. While he took notes, light from the hallway outside shined into the room then disappeared.
It wasn’t the strongest connection, but it was a huge point in the right direction; something did happen between Nedd and the district last year. Todd tried to search further but there was zero mention of any prior collaboration or connection online. “There’s no way that Nedd could resist publicizing a donation.” Todd said. He snapped his fingers, the conversation didn’t sound as if the payout was supposed to happen. Todd ran query looking for any sort of negative incident which could have occurred. He found a solitary article: ‘Riot at Viltburg blamed on test stress.” He clicked the link, but the page redirected to Viltburg’s homepage.
“I don’t remember any riot.” Todd took the URL and placed it into an archival website, which returned one several previous revisions. There article alternated between being written, erased, then rewritten, until it was locked. Todd found the earliest version and skimmed through it. “What the-” a bag was thrown over Todd’s head.