At the time, in 2064, I was going to this little public school tucked between four corpo suburbs like an unwanted bookmark. It was a nightmare.

The fun started with four factions of kids, each indoctrinated in their distinct corpo-burg’s culture, tossed into the mixing pot and left to simmer. The school itself was so underfunded it could be a poster-child for austerity, the type of place that breeds its own gangs, makes its own drugs, and has a drop-out rate in the double-digit percentages.

I almost went to a private school, you know? One of those for C-Class citizens’ kids, but my dad... well, he wanted me to have the public school experience, just like he’d gotten. He was the varsity quarterback, the school’s darling. I don’t think he ever realized how privileged his teenage years were. Mine certainly weren’t anything like that. I loved that man, he made me what I am. But in that one respect, I think he was wrong.

Green Leaf Arbor District High School was awful.

The people in it were infinitely worse.

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March 21, 2064

The mirror didn’t recognize me anymore, and neither did I.

It was a cracked sheet of smartglass, something the school installed in all the bathrooms three years ago, the year before I started at Green Leaf. The smartglass wanted to pair with my DAC—my Digital Assistant Chip—but it wasn’t working right.

I wasn’t sure if it was because of a problem with my credentials with SchoolOS, or because the mirror was broken. There was lipstick on its surface, and someone had scratched a smiley face on the glass. In the corner, someone had painted over the camera with a giant glob of foundation and scrawled Fuck the NESA across it using their thumbnail.

In either case, I wasn’t looking at it both because I was worried that the camera in the mirror could pick out my face despite the makeup caking it and because I didn’t want to see what was lurking around my own reflection. I… I didn’t want to see those silhouettes crowding around me, didn’t want to see whose face would be layered over top of my own this time.

I pushed past the sinks and into one of the stalls. A timer popped up in my DAC when I pressed my thumb to the lock’s scanner, informing me that I had a one-minute grace period before my student account would begin being debited at a rate of one secubuck per five seconds. Something else tried to pop up, but it got blocked before it could even finish forming. The only good thing about how outdated SchoolOS was was that its malware was a joke too.

I was so tired.

I’d overslept after staying up until two in the morning redoing that stupid history paper on the 2027 Rerona bioplague for the third time. Every time I turned it in, SchoolOS confirmed receipt, then wiped it from my cloud ‘to prevent plagiarism.’ I’d checked in with Mr. Hadley after the second time, only for him to tell me that it still wasn’t there. I’d forwarded him the receipt, again, and he agreed that the OS must have malfunctioned, again. He gave me an extension to rewrite it, but I wasn’t sure I’d get another.

So here I was, in a bathroom stall, trying to submit a project due two weeks ago because I couldn’t walk into the library without SchoolOS knowing where I was and what I was doing. And for some reason, if SchoolOS knew, it seemed like… I shook that thought away. I only needed a few minutes to finish up and then I could go home.

SchoolOS pushed back my submission with a simple ‘rejected.’ That happened sometimes. Servers were busy, or the file transfer got corrupted, or some wire was loose somewhere and the IT staff hadn’t found it yet, but it seemed to happen to me an awful lot. I’d come prepared this time, however. I tried again with a second copy, saved with a different name under a different format. Same result.

It had to work. I’d done the project. I did the research myself, I wrote it all at home. I hadn’t used a single AI to help me, and yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the school’s operating system to accept it. It couldn’t be because I’d saved multiple copies? It would crawl through my cloud and find all the draft versions to delete anyway, so that shouldn’t have stopped it.

I took in a deep breath from my nose, tried to stop the voices murmuring in my head, and blinked quickly to clear my eyes.

Again. I’d try again.

My dad, bless his soul, always used to smile at me when I messed something up. He had this little saying. “Try, fail, and debug.” Whenever he’d repeat it, Mom would roll her eyes, but he said that it worked on her just fine and...

And those were happier times.

I heard someone stepping into the bathroom, sneakers squelching as they stepped on the sticky linoleum. “Oh yeah, she’s definitely here. You can tell by the smell,” Izzy Hesston said.

“Cherish?” another girl said in a little sing-song voice. “Where are you?”

I flinched. Liz Miller. Was she straight up stalking me now? I’d been in the bathroom for less than three minutes before she found me. There was no way that was a coincidence. Worse, she’d brought her muscle with her.

I drew my legs up off the floor so they wouldn’t be visible under the door and kept silent. Please just go away. I’d pay the fees to sit in the stall for the next half hour if that’s what it took, just so long as they didn’t find me.

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One of the stall doors smacked against the wall at the far end of the row. “Not in this one,” Izzy said. Another door cracked against the plastic hard enough that she had to have kicked it. “Not here either.”

One by one, they went down the row, pushing each door open until they got to mine. It thumped when Izzy kicked it, but the lock was still engaged, and draining money from my student account by this point. “I know you’re in there, you ripe piece of shit,” Izzy murmured. “No one else could smell that bad.”

“Now, now, it’s not her fault. She can’t afford showers, not with that bottom feeder of a mom sucking every cock that comes by trying to keep her job and a hundred secubucks in her account. Fucking embarrassment to C-Class citizens everywhere,” Liz told Izzy. Then she pitched her voice higher and added, “But don’t worry, Cherish, we’re here to help. Just open up the door.”

Liz Miller was the school’s darling. She was in the same year as me, and was as perfect as someone could be, at least within Green Leaf. Her family were top C-class citizens and practically ran one of the nearby burgs.It felt like every day, I heard her bragging about how her dad was this close to a promotion to B-Class, and then she’d be out of here.

Liz wanted to be a tech expert, and she was good at it, too. Our computer class teacher said that she was a gifted prodigy, that she would grow up to do a lot of good. But mostly she used her skills to mess with me. I was pretty sure those AI-generated images of me in compromising positions that were spread around last year were her work. There was nothing I could do about it except ignore them. I stared at the little debit counter my DAC showed me slowly ticking up every five seconds. I could wait them out. They’d get bored eventually and leave. The best thing to do was to just ignore them and keep trying to get SchoolOS to accept my homework.

The lock clicked open on its own.

Eyes wide, I brought my legs up to brace the door and hold it closed, but it was no use. Izzy ran for the track team and played softball. She was so good that she had three different state records commemorating her achievements, which I knew because every time I had to load up SchoolOS’s main page to turn in an assignment, there was a picture of her next to a big banner letting everyone know that she was the best. A C-Classer’s kid with no physical augs whatsoever winning records on behalf of good ol’ Green Leaf Arbor District.

Izzy turned all that physical prowess towards contesting the position I wanted that door in, and she won pretty much immediately. My legs held out for maybe a full second before quivering muscle gave way and the door swung open, smacking my knee in the process. I winced and, tears springing to my eyes, faced the terrible smirking duo.

Izzy made fake gagging noises as I came into view, but it was Liz who really scared me. She looked… satisfied. Whatever she was planning, she thought she was going to get away with it. Then I saw what she had in her hands. It was a plastic jug, plain white but for the narrow band of identifying plastic around the neck. K-Clark brand robo-use sanispray concentrate. I wasn’t sure what the recommended dilution ratio was for it, but I was willing to bet they hadn’t done it.

“It’s okay. This will all be over soon,” Liz said soothingly, like she was talking to a little kid or a lost puppy. “We’ll get you all cleaned up. It’s for your own good.”

“For everyone’s, really,” Izzy said, her nose crinkled up in disgust..

Then she shook the jug into the stall, throwing thick, syrupy globs of sanispray into the air to splatter all over me.

I tried to jump back, but there was nowhere for me to go, nothing to do but cover my face and take it. Liz advanced a step forward so she was standing in the stall next to me and upended the jug over my head, pouring what was left of it directly onto me and soaking me through. She made a show of giving it a couple hard shakes and smacking the side to make sure every last drop had fallen out, then carelessly tossed the jug into the stall with me as she walked away.

The air grew thick with an overpowering orangey scent, and my gasps turned to coughs as it burned the back of my throat.

The jug bounced off my head with a hollow whump.

I watched from between my fingers as the two girls walked away, laughing and congratulating themselves on cleaning the school up and making it a better smelling place. Their shapes were nothing but blurs through the haze of tears in my eyes, but after a few seconds, I heard the door open, then close.

The voices in my head were overwhelming. Some of them roared with anger, others hissed out demands for vengeance. A few were indifferent, silent. Those were the easiest ones to deal with.

Please stop talking. Just stop!

I didn’t know what the voices were, but they listened and went quiet, turning into a low murmur so that I could hear myself think once more.

So far, I’d managed to rule out a few possibilities. I knew I wasn’t reading anyone’s mind. The voices reacted to whatever was happening around me. None of them sounded like people I knew. They were all unique, and there were enough of them that it was hard to keep track of who was talking. Some of them hardly ever spoke; others had something to say about everything.

I was pretty sure I knew what it meant. I was an Empowered.

Once the chatter died down, I shook off the weirdness and stepped out of the stall.

The silver lining: the stall stopped nickeling and diming me after the lock went rogue and opened on its own. Another silver lining: most of the sanispray gunk had landed on my way-too-big hoodie. The thing was like a poncho, super oversized, but it sucked up a bunch of that sticky mess. It kept my skin from getting too grossed out. I ditched it, and it hit the floor with a wet thud.

It was ruined now. The chemical cleaner had already bleached it through and was eating away at the threads. Even if we could afford to have it cleaned, there was no time to save it. I might as well throw it in the trash on my way out.

That hoodie had belonged to my dad.

I sniffed and wiped my nose on the back of my hand, then approached the sink to clean myself off as much as I could. There was no point in avoiding the smartglass now; Liz had known exactly where I was anyway.

She always knew, no matter where I went. I was all but certain she’d gotten faculty privileges to SchoolOS. Either she had backdoor access, or her dad--who was at the very peak of C-Class--had paid off the right people.

The only person in the whole world who wanted her dad to get promoted up to B-Class more than him was me. That way, Liz would transfer to a different school and get out of my life. Until that joyous day, I was stuck being her punching bag. With my luck, she’d find ways to torment me even from another school.

I splashed water against my face, turning the timer-tap back on every few seconds to get a bit more water to work with and losing a few secubucks with each liter used. My hoodie wasn’t salvageable, but I couldn’t just leave it behind. I gathered it in my arms, folded it as best I could to keep the ruined wet spots inside, and carried it home with me.