The Line

Chapter 1.
"Jack Trikker, could I have your attention please?"
Jack's eyes snapped back to the front of the room and sniggers ran through the group of students as the teacher singled him out.
"Yes sir?" Jack had been staring out the window of the classroom, gazing towards the massive grey line on the horizon, merely five kilometres away.
I'll probably end up over there one day. Jack thought as the teacher scolded him hastily, before moving back to the diagram behind him on the holo-board.
This mentality often concerned Jack's parents, the thought that their son was only seventeen and already contemplating life on the other side.
"Not gonna happen, buddy." Archer whispered in Jack's ear, causing his friend to jump violently.
Jack's gaze had once again drifted left, out the window, and Archer's voice cut through the haze of the morning lime no other voice could.
"Don't do that." Jack raised a hand and pushed Archer back, then stole a glance at Archer's desk.
According to Archer's parents, Archer had some attention thingy, and what Jack saw hardly surprised him.
On the shining white desktop that sat before Archer, scrawled with incredible detail, was an elaborate diagram of a 2JZ motor, it's inner workings labelled and drawn perfectly, if not to scale.
From what Jack could see, his friend had left no parts out, and he sighed as he realised Archer's beautifully complicated sketch would disappear without a trace once they left the room.
Suddenly a shrill, peircing buzz sounded, and the flat white room exploded with noise as students rushed to exit the classroom as quickly as possible.
Shouldering their bags, Jack and Archer left the classroom, and one last look over his shoulder was all Jack got before the desks glowed a brilliant white, as if they might explode.
Then, as they had been when Jack and Archer had taken their seats in the morning, all forty seven desktops in the room were once again that same, flat white that the rest of the room wore.

"You'll have to come and see my SAAB one day." Jack grinned awkwardly as his grandfather smiled widely, before correcting himself. "Although, you're probably into more modern cars, right?"
"Yeah, although classics are much nicer." Jack nodded slowly, and his father, Greg Trikker, redirected the conversation once again.
"That would be nice, but our car probably couldn't handle the snow very well." Greg smiled his typical perfect grin and everyone in the room instantly knew the reason for this excuse.
Greg and Jack's grandfather had recently had a disagreement over Jack's education, which had ended in a lot of yelling and a smashed tele-comm.
Jack was reminded by the event by the glaring red sticker that adorned their brand new tele-comm, which was in fact five inches taller than their old one.
As an awkward silence settled over the room, Jack noticed a regular flicker in the picture display of the tele-comm, the flickers only about ten seconds apart each time.
Maybe a bad signal? Jack thought, then dismissed that as he remembered that the whole suburb, heck, the whole city, got their internet from a network of optic fibre cables that had recently been revamped as part of a government scheme.
Eventually someone had to break the awkward silence, and it was Jack's grandmother, Felicity Trikker who unwittingly saved the day, bursting into the room behind Jack's grandfather with a tray of what was supposed to be cookies, but looked instead like something that had been dug up from Pompei.
"Whoa." Jack's younger brother, Steven let the quiet exclamation slip from his mouth at the sight of the particularly blackened cookies, before