The Twins

Chapter 7: Back to the Future

Part 1: Silver

     School had gotten back into a nice easy pattern. The new teacher in Matthew's history class had quickly become his least favourite though. He knew what he was doing, but he was terrible at teaching it, constantly degrading students for not understanding a concept and giving out useless worksheets. Even Marie's grades were suffering. It was rare for a bad teacher to be teaching on Edis since the school system has gone through many reforms in both teaching methods for students and for teachers, but every once in a while a bad teacher would work their way up to the top and end up getting a job.

     On Monday the class started a new project. It was on an invention or your choice that helped build Edis or became an integral part of the city's functions. Matthew had already chosen to do his project on the teleports.

     It was a good topic for Matthew because he has always found the machines interesting. Unlike a lot of machines teleports were made using a completely different science. The science of time and space is what it was called or S.T.S for short. Teleports had been invented before WW3 but hadn't really been used due to their expense and the effort it would take to install them into already built cities. The other reason teleports were a good topic for Matthew to research was the fact that Matthew's mother worked at Hawkins, the company that created the teleports.

     Matthew sat down at the school computer and placed his books beside the modem. Soon the login screen appeared and the hologram was activated as Matthew put in his login information. He accessed the internet and, with a few clicks on the keyboard, had several files on the teleports and their history.

     The internet was another interesting aspect of Edis for Matthew. After WW3 almost all communications were cut off and no computer could access the internet, effectively crashing the whole system. An impressive amount of files were able to be salvaged by some IT technisions and they sifted through the data to pick out the important information. The "new" internet was smaller but more consise. This internet was split into two sides. One where carefully selected and undeniably true information could be accessed. This side was set up by the authorities to make sure that there was a place that information could be reliable. Of course these files were usually a broad overview of a subject and if someone wanted to learn something specific they had to switch over to the second side of the internet.

     This side could be edited or created by anyone, just like in the old internet. The information was not always accurate but it could still help often when looking for something specific. This side was where you could find opinion essays and art as well. People would post tutorials on different topics or simply snow off their creations. The more "free-spirited" people often called it the fun side of the internet.

     Matthew's files were all from the "fact" side of the internet. The first one that Matthew opened was about the history of his mother's company, Hawkins. He read through and wrote down notes on a typing program in another window. Apparently,the company was named after a man named Stephan Hawkins who was a brilliant theoretical physicist and wrote a book called ,"a Brief History of Time". The file stated that this man's ideas about time helped create the first teleport. Matthew wrote down a few notes about his life and switched to another file about the first teleport, created by a Japanese woman.

    Matthew continued his research for a while. He felt like he was making a lot of progress and was pleased with the amount of useful notes he could find. Then, on a whim, he decided to switch to the "opinion" side of the internet. There he found a bunch of articles written by amature historians about the history of teleports, and a few diagrams and explanations on how they worked. As he scrolled through the list of files he came across an opinion essay titled "the Dark Side of Hawkings". Matthew scoffed quietly. It seemed like a conspiracy theory essay, and not a  very well written one at that, but  Matthew opened the file anyways. He began to read.

    "Hawkings company creates secret teleports that bring people to the surface! All those that disappeared from Edis have been sent there! This is an abominaetion of man rights and should be stopped! Click here for proof!"

     Matthew sighed,"so It's a scam." He thought. With a few clicks Matthew had reported the file and exited out of it,"didn't even bother to spell-check." He muttered thinking back to the spelling errors in the file. That was another thing to be careful of on the opinion side of the internet.

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Amani: Cool project man, I've always liked the teleports too.

Matthew: yeah I thought it would be fun to do. I can just ask my mom questions about it too since she works there.

Amani: YOUR MOM WORKS AT HAWKINGS??!!!

Matthew: uh. Yeah.

Amani: THAT IS SO COOL

Matthew: XD wow you really are a nerd

Amani: I am and I'm proud of it :)

Matthew: aMAni'S A nErD

Amani: shut up XD