The Empire's Corps: Book 07 - Reality Check Read online

  “Class dismissed,” Miss Simpson said. “I ...”

  Her next words were drowned out as half of the class fled. Kailee saw Gary running for his life, with his two tormentors walking after him in a calculated manner they’d learned from countless bad entertainment flicks. Gary wasn't bad-looking, she knew – his short brown hair gave him a kind look - and he was nicer than most of the boys in the class, but he couldn't have hoped to protect her. Pity, really.

  But given the way he stared when she was near him, perhaps it was for the best.

  The girls waited until they were all ready, then left the room and towards the canteen as a body. Kailee glanced back, just in time to see Miss Simpson slump into the chair and cover her eyes with her hands. She felt a moment of sympathy, which was washed away in a flood of cynicism. Miss Simpson would have been through the same school system as Kailee and the others, hadn't she? What had she been thinking when she'd applied to become a teacher?

  Maybe she thought it could be better if she was in charge, Kailee thought. And she was wrong.

  She scowled, bitterly. As always, she felt hopelessly vulnerable while at school ...

  Because she knew that, whoever was in charge, it wasn't the teachers.

  Chapter Two

  The secondary purpose of education is to imbue the child with the values, ideals and social mores of the surrounding society. No man (or child) is an island; sooner or later the child will have to leave the family home and interact with outsiders. When he or she does so, education provides the training to navigate such a potentially hostile minefield successfully.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. Education and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.

  Another fucking essay, Gary thought, as he stepped into the canteen. Another goddamned fucking essay.

  Swearing in his head didn't do much for his feelings. He had too much work to do already, starting with the standard coursework and moving on to the extra credit materials he did in a desperate attempt to boost his grades. Thankfully, the essay didn't seem too complicated ... but there was a nasty sting in the tale. The sensible answer might not be the one they were looking for.

  He considered, briefly, just refusing to enter the competition. Most of his fellow pupils would do just that, he was sure. Few of them had the determination or the drive to leave the cityblocks where their parents and grandparents had lived out their lives; they knew, as clearly as Gary himself, that it was possible to live without good grades. After all, there were no real consequences for bad grades, unless it was remaining in the towering cityblocks. But if one wanted to leave, one had to have near-perfect grades. Gary didn't dare get a black mark on his record, not now. And not entering the competition might well earn him a markdown from whoever was in charge of collecting the essays.

  There was no sign of Moe or Barry as he joined the line of students waiting to be served their food. Gary let out a sigh of relief, although he knew that the two bullies were probably on their way. It was forbidden to bring food in from outside the school and parents could be fined if their children were caught with non-school food, something that was surprisingly effective in keeping it out of the compound. Gary could only wonder why the authorities didn't use similar methods to keep the worst pupils under control. After all, some of them picked on tutors and teachers as well as their fellow students.

  He took a plate of food and eyed it doubtfully. It was little more than a plate of algae-based stew, which they had been told provided everything that a growing child needed to stay healthy. After twelve years in the school system, Gary knew that it was almost completely tasteless, even though it would have been easy to add a flavour to the gruel. He'd once tried to find out why the food was never flavoured, only to draw a complete blank. The only answer he could think of that made sense was that there was no money in flavouring school food. If the people in charge – whoever they were – thought nothing of allowing bullying to run rampant through the school, they probably didn't care about making the food tasty as well as healthy.

  If it is healthy, he thought, as he took a bite. It was lukewarm and felt unpleasant against his tongue, so he washed it down with water. He remembered all too clearly the first time he had been introduced to school food. Swallowing it as a boy of four had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I wouldn't put money on it.

  He placed his reader on the table beside him and started to think, hoping to distract himself from the tasteless food. The essay would have to be completed as soon as possible, perhaps in the afterschool classes that were compulsory for all students. But what answer were they actually looking for? The truth – that he didn't want to go to a colony world, even for a few short months – wouldn't go down well with whoever was marking the essays. But what answer did they actually want?

  Why would they want me to go to a colony world? The question buzzed through his head, he turned it around and around. They’d want me to show the locals how to live.

  It seemed a plausible answer, he decided. They hadn't been told much about the colony worlds, but what they had been told wasn't very encouraging. The colonies were founded by settlers from Earth, yet they lacked the true civilisation that made Earth such a wonderful place to live. Gary, who knew perfectly well that Earth was not a decent place to live, found it hard to imagine anywhere worse. And yet the images they’d been shown had told them of men scrabbling to pull foodstuffs out of the soil and women desperately trying to survive the pangs of childbirth. Earth’s vast social security network was simply not present on the colonies.

  Carefully, he shaped the answer in his mind. He would like to go so that he could show the value of living on Earth. It was toadying, he knew, but there were quite a few teachers and professors who appreciated it when the student recited official dogma back at them. He made a mental note to look up the textbooks on the colonies, then add quotes to suggest how Earth’s solutions would fit the colonies and solve all of their problems. It would be completely absurd, he suspected, but that wouldn't matter. If there was one thing he had learned after years of schooling, it was that the right answer was the answer they wanted, not the one that made the most sense.

  The only danger, he decided, as he stood up and carried his tray over to the waste disposal tube, was that he might actually win the competition. But it seemed unlikely. Assuming that only ten students could go – and Miss Simpson hadn't been precise about the exact number – and only a third of the school entered the competition, there would still be hundreds of thousands of possible winners. The odds of not going were in his favour. Somehow, he doubted that the teachers would actually read the essays and mark them, not when the poor bastards barely had the time to handle their classes. They used the readers and examination machines to save time ...

  Shaking his head, he walked out of the canteen and down towards the history classroom. If he were lucky, he would be able to get inside and wait for the teacher there. Neither Barry nor Moe were likely to go to the classroom a moment before they absolutely had to go, not when their parents would probably be fined too. Gary had occasionally wondered why the teachers simply didn't let them skive off from school – everyone would win – but it wasn't the teachers who monitored the students. That was the job of yet another department.

  He slipped inside the classroom and sat down, pulling his reader out of his pocket. All he could do now was wait – and, perhaps, start working on the essay.

  ***

  “A trip to the colonies,” Sally proclaimed, as the girls picked at their food. “Can you imagine it?”

  Kailee could. A week or two away from civilisation, away from sophisticated medical treatments that helped keep her face flawless and her body slim. None of the images she’d seen of the colony worlds had suggested that they were good places to live, although they’d all shared a giggle at the sight of topless men in the fields, bringing in the crops. She took another bite of her food, then pushed the rest of the tray towards one of her friends. She’d be hungry for the rest of the da
y, but it was better than overeating. Dangerously slim was in at the moment and she didn't dare put on weight.

  “Just enter a blank piece of paper,” Joanne suggested. “They never bother to read these essays anyway.”

  “But then they wouldn't know who deserved to win,” Sally objected, with mock horror. “Imagine going out there and breaking a nail.”

  Kailee tuned them out and started to daydream about her future career. One more year of schooling, then she could start applying to talent scouts and casting agencies. She knew, without false modesty, that she was beautiful, very much like the current crop of celebrities who dominated the entertainment channels. All she would have to do was impress the scouts and she would be on her way. It was a shame that they weren't allowed to act in school, but the one time she'd asked about putting on a school play she'd been told that they were elitist and threatened with having her grades marked down when she'd asked why. After that, she’d given up and practiced her acting at home.

  She could easily see herself in a dozen different roles. Stellar Star, Queen of the Spaceways; there were over a hundred entertainment flicks based around those stories, starring twenty different actresses in the lead role. Or galactic super-spy Jonny Barracuda ... maybe she couldn't take the lead role in that franchise, but she could play the incredibly hot female agent who was assigned to him whenever he landed on a new world. She’d be reluctant to take part in a soap opera – she had always found them boring – yet one of them might launch her career into high orbit. Or ...

  The daydreaming kept her occupied as the girls finished their meals and dumped the remainder in the disposal tubes. At first, they’d been lectured on not wasting food, even though they had struggled to finish their meals. Later, they’d discovered that there were no real consequences for throwing away half their trays and just carried on – or given the food to the handful of students who actually liked it. In theory, that too was forbidden, but the teachers tended to turn a blind eye. Whenever Kailee bothered to think about it, the dull illogic of the school puzzled her. But she had long since chosen her own course, one taking her well away from her CityBlock.

  She walked with the other girls down towards the history classroom, keeping one eye out for trouble. It just wasn't safe, even in what was meant to be a supervised environment. She still recalled the shock of a gang of boys invading the girls toilet, four years ago. The immature little brats had run in, catcalled at the girls and then fled before anyone could catch them, although she knew that they would probably have escaped punishment. If pupils could get away with harming their teachers, they could get away with being creepy and invading toilets.

  Inside, they sat down and chatted about nothing. Kailee tuned them out effortlessly and went back to daydreaming. It was so much better than reality.

  ***

  Darrin hadn't bothered to give the question of why he would want to go to the colonies much thought. The truth was that he couldn't decide if he actually wanted to go or not. Part of him thought that it would be an adventure, just like those he saw on the entertainment channels, but the rest of him suspected that the teachers would find a way to suck all the interesting parts out and leave them with dry dust and boredom. It was astonishing just how subjects that might have been interesting had been drained of life by the schools.

  “Class, be seated,” Mr. Rogers said. “We shall resume our study of the Unification Treaties that ended the wars.”

  He went on without waiting for the class to quiet down. “In 80EE, the third set of treaties were signed between the Empire and various interested parties. Those treaties ensured that the Empire would remain unchallenged in the sectors surrounding Sol and laid the groundwork for the assimilation of those parties into the Empire ...”

  Darrin rolled his eyes. The Unification Treaties – and the importance of Unification – were probably important, but he knew almost nothing about them. Who had been fighting the Empire – and why had they been fighting? The lectures were vague, almost completely imprecise, until he could regurgitate facts without having any idea of their context. And when he'd asked about the Unification Wars, as a young child, he'd been sent to a counsellor for an examination. The wars were largely a forbidden subject, barely touched about and almost always in passing.

  He would have liked to know the truth behind the entertainment videos. There was no shortage of war movies freely available on the planetary datanet. But the schools refused to talk about the whole issue, leaving him bored out of his mind. Who gave a damn about the treaties anyway? Surely the wars before them were much more exciting.

  “These treaties were important because they established a framework of law that they used to build the Empire,” Mr. Rogers continued. “For the first time in thousands of years, there was a unified code of law. This was important because previously there were many different codes of law; what was permitted on one planet might be forbidden on others. This led to problems when someone committed, all unknowing, a crime that caused a diplomatic incident. Now, those problems were eliminated at the stroke of a pen.”

  Darrin snorted to himself. The boredom was threatening to overwhelm him. He glanced around and saw that several students were taking advantage of the class to catch up on their sleep, placing their heads on the desk and closing their eyes. Judy was sitting with the other girls, sadly; Darrin tried to catch her eye, but she either missed his glance or ignored it completely. He briefly considered trying to get some sleep himself, before deciding that he needed some other entertainment. Carefully leaning forward, he kicked the back of Gary’s chair. The nerd let out a surprisingly loud yelp.

  “Yes, Mr. Seaman?” Mr. Rogers asked. “Is there a problem?”

  The back of Gary’s neck turned red as the class tittered. Darrin smiled; it was just the nerd’s rotten luck that he had a name that could be turned into an object of easy mockery. But if he would only stand up for himself once or twice ... not that he could. Gary wasn't strong or tough or determined to hurt his enemies even if he were to be hurt worse. He was just a wimp and the cityblocks had no place for wimps.

  “No, sir,” Gary said. He shuffled forwards, although with the chairs bolted to the floor it was impossible to move out of Darrin’s reach. “No problem.”

  Darrin saw Barry and Moe smirking and grinned to himself, then sobered. If there was one lesson that everyone learned quickly in the cityblocks, it was that you had to look after yourself or submit yourself to someone else who would look after you. It was why Darrin’s mother had married his stepfather, trading the occasional beating from him for safety from everyone else. The man was a sadist – Darrin wanted to kill him one day – but he did manage to protect his wife from everyone else. Gary ... had no such protection, nor did he have any friends who might help him defend himself.

  “Glad to hear it,” Mr. Rogers said. He exercised his sarcasm on the students who didn't have the nerve to fight back, either directly or indirectly. “Please be quiet while we resume our study of history.”

  He clasped his hands behind his back as he addressed the class. “These treaties also gave the Empire the legitimacy to unify the remaining inhabited worlds, even if their inhabitants objected to becoming part of the Empire. In addition, vast numbers of people who wished their own colony worlds were shipped to new places where they could live, subject only to the Empire. The First Emperor ...”

  Darrin rolled his eyes as the teacher droned on. He’d actually read several biographies of the First Emperor after watching an entertainment flick about his life, but it hadn’t taken him long to realise that each biography had contradicted the others. The man’s life was more myth than reality, with some books claiming that he had been born on Earth and others that he was a superior being who had descended from the heavens to rule the human race. If he had so much as stubbed his toe, it hadn't made it into any of the biographies. Maybe Darrin was just cynical, but he couldn't help wondering if the First Emperor had really existed. How did they know he’d lived?

&n
bsp; “For homework,” Mr. Rogers concluded, “you will write an outline of the basic treaties and submit it at the end of the week, then log into the school datanet and answer the questions on the test. Class dismissed.”

  Darrin rose to his feet, hastily. He hadn't been paying attention, but Mr. Rogers was one of the teachers who rarely bothered to collect homework; if it wasn't handed in, he just didn't care. Nerds like Gary would hand it in, he was sure, but nothing seemed to happen to the children who didn't give a shit. Besides, there were more important matters than homework, particularly history homework. His name was down for playing basketball after class, during the mandatory afterschool classes. It was about the only thing they did at school that interested him, even though none of them were actually allowed to win.

  And we keep the scores in our head, he said, turning so he could see Judy as she stood up. He could ask her out for the weekend, if he moved quickly. She would be willing, he was sure ... or maybe he should ask one of the other girls. Perhaps a real challenge, like Kailee. There was no shortage of bragging among the boys over their conquests, but Kailee had never been lured into bed by anyone. Maybe he could try ...

  Grinning at the thought, he followed the other pupils out of the room, towards their next class.

  Chapter Three

  In addition, the child must learn how to interact with his or her peers. This is not easy; children are, by nature, selfish. They must learn to come to terms with the fact that they are not unique and that society does not, must not, put them first.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. Education and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.

  Gary let out a sigh of relief as he made his way into the classroom that was reserved for afterschool studies. Few of his fellow pupils would willingly come into the classroom, not when they bitterly resented having to remain in school for an additional two hours. Gary himself resented it; he could work just as easily at home, without having to worry that Barry or Moe would come after him. Even they would hesitate before breaking into an apartment complex.