Paper Planes

Chapter One

The alarm rings, its incessant beeping relentlessly assaulting my ears, piercing my brain and forcing me to wake up, however much I try to resist. I open my eyes and sigh. School today. Or to be specific, college. I swing myself out of bed and stretch, yawning widely. To be perfectly honest with you, I’d much rather be sleeping. As would every other teenager on the planet but alas, the law requires me to attend (and stay) in education until I’m eighteen and then I’m ‘free’ to do what I want. If by free you mean slaving away working a dead-end job or giving myself a massive student loan if I go to university then yeah, that’s total freedom.

I sleep-shuffle downstairs into the kitchen and start getting everything ready for breakfast. Juice, milk, bowls, glasses, cutlery. Now put it on the table. Pour orange juice into bowl.

Shit.

That’s wrong. I pour away the orange juice and rub my tired eyes in an attempt to dispel the last dregs of sleep (which doesn’t work. As usual). After a while my mum comes down the stairs, squinting in the bright light of the kitchen. ‘Oh good you’re up,’ she says and then does the sleep-shuffle over to the table and plonks herself down next to me.

We sit in silence dimly aware of the mutterings of the radio in the background, whilst munching on cereal and toast. I finish, mumble something about getting ready and stumble upstairs.

As you may have guessed, I am not a morning person. I get dressed, brush my teeth, realize I’m late and sprint out of the door, yelling goodbye to my mum as I go. As I sprint down the road in the cold winter air, my body and brain wake up properly and begin to fight their battles against the cold air. I put on another burst of speed as I round the corner towards the bus. There is no bus at the stop and there are people waiting there, which means I haven’t missed it. I slow and come to a halt just outside the bus shelter and attempt to get my breath back.

The bus pulls in and I get on, swiping my wrist over the scanner as I step on. When we are born, we are chipped. These chips have everything about us on it. Criminal records, bank accounts, health number…even who your next of kin are. With a swipe of my wrist I can essentially do anything I want to. Within reason of course. The chips are designed to monitor us and if we endanger ourselves or others, they release a small dose of chloroform to knock us out. So if some psycho nutter came into my house and tried to kill me, he be counting sheep as soon as he started threatening me. Of course, the really dangerous criminals know to take out the chip but most forget. Dumbasses.

I stare out of the bus windows, watching the world go by. I spot a woman sitting on a bench rummaging in her bag. She pulls something out of her bag, a tablet I presume. But as the bus gets closer, it looks thicker and lighter in colour. And that’s when my stomach hit the floor.

A book.

The woman had a book. Not some tablet made to look like one but a real book, complete with cover and pages. Real sheets of paper. I thought I was going to faint from jealousy.

Let me explain something here. Ever since the people of the past put trees and plants under pressure of extermination, all paper and plant produce had to stop. Trees became one of the most protected parts of our lives. People finally realized that we needed them to breathe and to live. They finally listened to each other and worked together. Now globally, projects have sprung up everywhere to protect the trees and plants. Governments placed bans on using fossil fuels and factories that pumped out poisonous gasses were shut down. What people had been fighting for for years began to happen but at a heavy price. The financial cost was gargantuan and many countries went bankrupt trying to switch to natural power sources like solar, wind and geothermal. People rioted over whether it was really worth it. In the end, the people who opposed the Switch were expelled and sent out into the wastelands to fend for themselves. No one could survive in the wastes due to the radiation from previous nuclear wars. We were only on the cusp of learning we had to take better care of our planet.