Somehow, they were a family of gnats that had gotten the attention of an goliaphant.
Vere looked at Norrin, waiting for an answer. His uniform was crisply pressed, and Norrin instinctively knew that he could look all day and not find a single, stray piece of lint on it.
Norrin looked at his own wrinkled school uniform, stained in places from the last lunch one of the school bullies made him wear, and felt quite inferior. “I...guess I just don’t like school, I guess.”
“Well, that’s understandable, isn’t it? I’ve never met a healthy lad yet who actually liked sitting in a desk for six hours a day. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Mek? Of course not. Plus, Norrin,” he leaned in and looked at Norrin, changing the mood of the room instantly, “it can be very, very intimidating to have parents so well accomplished, can it not? However nice they may be, as I know your parents are. The implied expectations we put upon ourselves can be an even greater burden than expectations that are specifically spoken- wouldn’t you say?”
Norrin swallowed. Something in Vere’s voice made him choke up a bit, and he didn’t know why.
“Mr. and Mrs. Mek, let me explain why I’m really here today.” He touched a button on his belt while pointing at his datapad on the table. A picture of Norrin’s school appeared, made of green lines of light and rotating a foot above the datapad.
“This, as you know, is your son’s school. Renowned for its academic achievements and the students it produces, graduates from its halls invariably find excellent posts either in the Republic bureaucracy and various branches of the Authority, or the Corporate offices of their families.
“Unfortunately, your son has been having a difficult time of things. After I discussed things with his teachers and the school principal, it appears that Norrin has been the victim of bullying by a number of well-connected children of various Corporate and at least one high-level family in the Transport clan.”
“Norrin? You’re being bullied?” said his dad. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“You were always in the lab,” Norrin said, “busy with your latest breakthrough.”
“Norrin, that’s not fair and you know it. The Empire approves of my latest breakthrough in exhaust port technology. Only two meters wide, and the thing can blow out and pull in fresh hydrogen atoms in the vacuum of space, even in a space station the size of a small moo-”
“Oh, but it’s not his bullying that drew my attention, Mr. Mek,” said Captain Vere, interrupting politely. “It’s how he addressed it. First, it appears he designed a gadget that shocked his tormentor when he tried to punch Norrin in the stomach.”
The datapad shifted into a shower of sparkles, then reformed into the view from the eyes of a security-bot that had hovered in the halls on the day Norrin had been accosted by a half-dozen toadies of some Corp-executive’s son.
“If you watch right...there! Did you see that? When he struck Norrin, notice how he fell down and began having a seizure? That was a direct result of the protective field his little invention made around him.”
“Did the bullying stop, then?”
“No, mom,” Norrin said. “Someone figured it out, and the next day they came at me wearing rubber gloves.”
“What happened?”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“This was the next reason I found your son’s adventures so intriguing, Mrs. Mek. Most bullied children either try to slide under the awareness of their attackers, or hope that the level of abuse will reach a fairly constant level and just stay there. Or, occasionally, they hope that fighting back once will fix everything, but that is quite rare, really. I suspect your son knows this from experience.”
Norrin nodded. His parents looked horrified.
“What your son did next was a stroke of near brilliance, Mr. and Mrs. Mek. He anticipated the next attack, and then prepared more than adequately for it. See, here...”
Another security bot camera eye view appeared above the datapad, this time showing the interior of one of the bathrooms. The grainy, green-stippled picture had no sound accompanying it, but only showed Norrin silently walking into the bathroom and going to one of the sinks. The same six boys from the last view suddenly entered the room and surrounded Norrin, his short, skinny frame dwarfed by the large upperclassmen who grabbed his arms and pulled him back to a corner of the room.
The door opened again, and the large boy who’d punched Norrin in the stomach before approached him with a swaggering air that was visible even in the poor quality of the security-bot’s camera eye. The boys held Norrin firmly while the largest boy put a pair of gloves on his hands.
“This next part may be hard to watch, Mrs. Mek, but there is a happy ending, I assure you,” said Captain Vere.
The larger boy punched Norrin once, twice, three times in the stomach.
On the couch watching the little show, Norrin chuckled.
“How can you find this funny?” Norrin’s mother asked, shocked.
“Mom, he was such an idiot. I’d been walking around with a microweave shock absorber under my shirt. I acted like I’d been hurt, but I didn’t feel a thing.”
“Moreover,” said Vere, “here’s the real ending of the fight. See the maintenance droid that just wheeled in?”
“Wait,” dad said, standing and adjusting his glasses, “that’s not a school maintenance droid- that’s an astromech! An R-series, no less! And they have it mopping floors?”
“Dad, the school has so much money that it doesn’t use standard droids to sweep the floors and fix the pipes. Some big-name parent donated a half-dozen R2-units, and they patrol the school keeping just about everything running smooth as a tachyon flow.”
“And now...” said Vere, drawing their attention back to the holographic screen. The R2 unit stopped behind the lead bully. They could just barely see a panel open up on the barrel-shaped front of the droid, and a skeletal-shaped metal prod extend from it.
ZAP! A bolt of energy leapt from the droid’s arm towards the bully. He fell to the ground, his body jerking spasmodically. The other boys holding Norrin released him, making a run for the door past the droid, who zapped three more of the group while Norrin stood looking over them with his arms crossed in satisfaction.
“Stop,” said Vere. The small green figures in the holotape stopped moving.
“But it was this next piece that really caught my attention, Mr. And Mrs. Mek. Or, more accurately, it caught the attention of one of my crewmen.”
A new display appeared on the holoscreen. Norrin was tapping away at a datapad in class while a dozen other students did so at their desks. Norrin was the only one without a partner at the long desk.
“Why are you working alone, Norrin?” Vere asked. Norrin shrugged his shoulders. Dad looked sadly at Norrin, a look of sympathy crossing his face.
“Mr. and Mrs. Mek, if you will continue to watch the display, I’ll explain what happened. Norrin was attempting to bypass a number of security codes in the school’s database in order to access student files and other pieces of interest to him.”
Norrin’s picture, with the teacher still talking and Norrin taking little notice but still working quickly, suddenly shrank into the top lefthand corner of the display. A dotted arrow began to move from Norrin’s picture, downwards.
“Norrin, after he changed his grades in Literature from Low to High, and gave the leader of the bullies a month’s detention, decided to look at a particular bit of experimental data that our researchers, people working at different departments attached to the school, have been working on.”
Lines of code began to fill the screen. Norrin began to sink into his seat. “Wait, wait just a moment,” Dad said, adjusting his glasses and looking closer at the holo display hovering in the air above the table....
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TO BE CONTINUED...