Inside his office there was a man dressing up in a white shirt. He was looking out his picture window, behind his big desk. Everything was swanky in that room, like an 1800s hotel or something. Most things there were made of redwood. Now redwood is not really red, but caramel-glazed. A more vibrant shade of brown, almost orange. The man was working his tie, also orange. He stood very straight like a plank. He had glasses with orange rims. He was a redhead too, hair slicked back. Somehow he didn’t have freckles, though.
His phone rang. He pulled out a flip phone and jolted it open with his wrist.
“The A.D.M. is here, sir. They want to see you, now.”
“Very well… I shall descend to meet them.”
He worked up his suit, with smooth yet mechanical movements. The suit was orange also. He looked quite dapper, to say something nice of him. He evenly strutted out the room.
He opened the big entrance doors.
“Hey! You the principal?” came the uncouth, somehow raspy voice of a young teenage girl. She had shorter white hair that hung over her forehead. It was all messy. She looked like she didn’t shower much. She was in a white slip-in hoodie and sport shorts with red streaks and sneakers. Two dudes walled her in from each side. One was skinny and had his hat on backward and the other fat, with his stomach hanging proudly out of his shirt.
After a scan that produced disgust, the principal adjusted his glasses and said, “Indeed. I am Mr. Redwood, the founder and principal of Different High. How may I help you?”
“Huh? What’d you mean ‘how may I help you?’ You don’t know there is a giant-ass UFO over your school right now?”
“Huh?” Mr. Redwood waltzed down the stairs and looked where the girl pointed. One copy of the Panopticon UFO was still hovering up there, over the schoolyard. The kids were beginning to notice it. “Yo! That thing’s in the news!” Kids were crying, shouting, recording it.
Mr. Redwood panted and said, “My God! And what is that fandango about?!”
“Fan—“ “Dan—“ Go!” said the three dunces in succession.
“What’s this guy’s deal?” whispered the girl to the others. “I don’t know,” said the lanky one.
“H-hey, listen,” said the girl nicely, “we’ll take care of it, alright? Your students will be save. Promise.” She made the “good luck” sign with her fingers.
“That … will not be necessary,” said Mr. Redwood with complete solemnity.
They all panted. “W-what? Why?” said the fat one.
“I’ll take care of it myself.”
“Y-you, you can’t!” yelled the girl. “Are you an idiot?” said the lanky one.
“The Constitution, amendment 5: ‘If a private citizen so chooses, they shall be free to refuse even the most generous and heroic aid provided by the Anti-Delinquent Militia.’
They looked stunned. “But,” started the girl, “this is a school!”
“This,” began Mr. Redwood, “is a private institution. The Constitution, chapter 46, section 8, third paragraph: ‘In a privately-held institution, the majority shareholder shall determine any and all decisions that pertain to amendment 5 of the law.’ That would be me,” he said, without an ounce of pity.
The girl was red with anger. “Hey, I have an amendment too! Hold on, let me find it!” She started to muck around her sweater and pants. Then she shoved a middle finger into Mr. Redwood’s face. “There it is!” They sneered.
“Huh. How childish… Well, vamoose, people.” He made the “shoo-shoo” gesture and began to walk up the stairs.
“Vam—“ “Did he just say v-v-v-v-v…” “Vamoose!” the girl said. “Hey!” she said.
Redwood turned back around. “Yes?”
“W-we don’t say ‘vamoose!’ That’s downtown talk!” The others nodded.
“Hm.” Redwood adjusted his glasses, evilly and viciously. “I just thought you’d better get used to saying it…”
“How’d you mean?” she asked.
“Huhu. Once the commander catches wind of this … little incident … I’m positive she will demote you—along with your little … ‘fraternity’—well below The Equator. Huhuhu.”
“Y-you can’t!” She began charging at Redwood, but the fraternity held her back. “We don’t belong beyond The Equator!” the fat one cried. “Yeah! We’re better than that!” the lanky one said.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Better?!” His expression went dead serious. “You and 'better' have no common denominator… You and 'better' exist on two different planes… Better? No. You are not … 'better.' He paused. “I am better… 20 years ago, when I graduated Perfect City Teacher’s College, I had but one goal in mind: perfection. A pretty word, no doubt, and one that has nothing to do with this city. I thought, why has no one called out this blatant contradiction? Why does everyone just go along with it, as if the city really were perfect? This mystery drove me to the brink of insanity. I wanted nothing more than to fix it. I realized early on that education was the only cure for this sickness … the sickness of imperfection. So I decided to enroll in the Teacher’s College, graduating at the top of my class. If nobody else was going to do it, I thought, then I will. But I realized something… The schools did absolutely nothing to fix the problem. Rich and healthy students would get ahead, while poor and unhealthy students would fall by the wayside, becoming delinquents instead… Indeed, these are the students the A.D.M. registers as “green-collar delinquents.” How cruel?! To call a child a delinquent?! The system, the schools, the government, the church, the A.D.M., the 4 Legs of Power, had no clue what the hell they were doing. Their solution to the problem was simply to ignore it! So I quit my job as a teacher and decided to found my own school… After I founded the school, I scoured the whole city, looking to sign up delinquent students. Slowly, I built up the school from nothing. In the meantime, I sought to attain knowledge in every field known to man, so that I could build the best curriculum for my students… Today, I have 70 degrees and counting. The school has a graduation rate of 99%. The best in all of Perfect City. A school that only accepts students that are not accepted anywhere else, and we are the best… Better… Almost. Perfect.”
The crew was stunted for a while. Finally the fat one said, “H-he’s crazy.” “Yeah, pay no mind to him, Gi-en.” They took Gi-en by the arms and sought to deposit her in the van. The big bold white sign on the van read “A.D.M.”
As they struggled to deposit her, Redwood kept yelling out, “Vamoose! Vamoose!” Finally, they threw her in, climbed in and shut the sliding door as Redwood yelled, “Vamoose, people!”
“North-West Beta, do you copy?”
“Yep,” said an old man with a big white moustache, which branched down into two more moustaches on each side of the main moustache. He was a box-faced geezer with a big, box-shaped nose, and bald save for the streak of white ponytail running down the crown of his head into a mop with rainbow colors in the back. It did actually look like the hairs on a mop.
The man in the radio sighed. “Good. North-West Alpha got the boot. The principal appealed to the law, that crazy bastard.”
“Gi-en’s crew? They work in a triad anyway, send ‘em packin’ to Gamma or Delta: they’re more densely populated than up here anyway.”
“You don’t need ‘em?”
“No. We got the full dozen.”
“Roger.”
The man pulled out his tablet and looked at it: It showed four quadrants. In each quadrant were another four quadrants. Down the middle was a thick line typecast as “The Equator.” In the center of the map were four tower-like structures, one falling into each outer quadrant at the edges. They were collectively typecast as “The 4 Legs.” They walled in a circle drawn around the intersection of the quadrants. Outside the map the four directions were labeled: “N-W,” S-W,” “N-E,” “S-E.”
The moustache man tapped into “N-W” and inside were the inner quadrants: the top-right was labeled “α,” the top-left “β, the bottom-right “γ” and the bottom-left “δ.” He saw a red X moving from “α” towards “δ.” There was already a red X in “δ” and another in “γ.” In “β” the X was blinking in green and black with the text “You” above it.
He put the tablet away. He was in an A.D.M. van parked in a pleasant uptown street. He peeked out the back of the van and saw one copy of the Panopticon UFO hovering above.
“Serverboy, you pickin’ up anybody?”
“Shadow and Shadowee are on their way, serge Doublestash.” Serverboy was a skinny kid of college age dressed in bland gray and black with a sweater hanging off him like loose fat and a beanie which hugged his head unevenly. The van was fitted with a “control panel” for Serverboy to work. He had heaps of monitors and weird buttons and things you could tweak or switch. Also, Serverboy had an ungodly blotch of hair on his chin.
“Serverboy,” said the voice of Doublestash, who seemed to be holding a cam and recording Serverboy. They were in a hangar of sorts, spacious and white. “A.D.M. Testing Unit” was written in bold black letters on walls. That’s something you could make out while Doublestash worked his untold magic, shaking the cam left right and center, which made you wanna puke from motion sickness. After some choice cursing and lip-smacking, he finally got the hang of it and secured a close-up of Serverboy, who was here a teenager, and just as much a lady-killer as you can imagine. He probably got laid 10 times a day.
“Serverboy has eyes and ears everywhere. He is DIY talent I recruited just the other day: the first member of my squad: Squad Doublestash. Anyway, he is able to make a communication device out of anything. Isn’t that right, Serverboy?”
“Yeah.” He was picking his nose.
“Stop picking your nose! Here,” he said and tossed Serverboy a banana. “Make a phone out of it.” Serverboy took some wires out of his sweater, shoved them in the banana and threaded them like he was sewing up a wound. Then he pressed on it and said, “Someone ringing?”
Doublestash panned into a group of bananas and tore out one, still recording. He moved it to his head. You could see the stem of it. “Do you hear me, Serge Doublestash?” It was Serverboy’s voice. “What the—“ he panned to the left and Serverboy was all the way back in the hangar. He waved with the banana pressed to his ear, and smiled. Doublestash zoomed in to see. He laughed. “There, that’s magic.”
“Hehehe. What are you trying to do in there, Squad Doublestash?” It was Jonas again, speaking from his control room. He was on their case. “I guess I’ll just block ya.” He pulled on two levers on his control board. A ray gun was lowered on a platform out of the UFO. Jonas took a joystick and aimed with the joystick on the van. He pushed up the levers and laughed evilly. “DATA OVERDRIVE!” A laser beam shot down on the van, and screens showing different things that melted into incomprehensible noise started to assemble into a dome.
Serverboy and Doublestash peeked out the back of the van, whose doors were open. “What the fuck?” They jumped out and looked. The dome grew bigger and bigger. “Run!” yelled Serverboy. They ran towards the edge, but the dome was already too tall to escape. Plus, the blaring noise coming out of the screens was unbearable. They were forced to retreat into the van as the dome enveloped them completely.