|YA featured story|
Welcome to 2325.
The natural world is no longer habitable, the government has been all but privatised and the 15-billion strong population has spent the last 170 years crammed into a single man-made continent.
When her father's...
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Professor Finnlay finished putting his bag on and started to scamper for the door. "Whatever you came to ask, I can't help you."
Delta blocked his path in two strides. "Can't or won't Professor?"
He bristled for a moment before pushing past her. "Both, I'm not getting involved with anything here."
"From what we hear, you already are," Delta said, catching up to him easily with strides longer than his.
He halted, whirling on her. "Who have you been talking to?"
Delta grinned, casting a theatrical glance in my direction. "Ah we wouldn't want to implicate anyone now professor."
He sighed, shaking his head. "Call me Rus," he said, giving her wary look. "I guess you better come with me."
"Sure thing Rus." Delta put a sarcastic lilt on his name, smirking at me as I followed the two of them through a back door and into a glass corridor.
"We can talk in my office," Rus said, leading the way to a practically new glass elevator, it seemed the office wing was also part of the modernised campus expansion.
As we travelled in silence to the tenth floor, I gazed out of the elevator's transparent walls onto the campus garden below. The neatly kept lawn was speckled with groups of students studying and enjoying the sun. It was ridiculous to think I was supposed to be attending advanced academy next year. It was as though those ambitions had belonged to a stranger—too at odds with reality now to be my own.
We stepped out into another glass corridor on the tenth floor and I tried to shake the headrush that came with thinking about how quickly my world had tipped upside down. I focused on the back of the professor's thinning hair as we neared his office. He muttered something to himself as he scanned his thumb on the door and held it open for us.
The room was a modest size, almost cosy—with solid walls made from faux wood panelling. The bright daylight from the transparent corridor was shut out the moment Rus closed the door behind him.
"So," he said, dumping his satchel on his desk and sinking into a large office chair that almost swallowed him whole. "What do you want to know?"
Delta fell into one of the plastic guest chairs opposite him and fixed the professor with a look I hadn't seen before—it was almost hungry. "I read your curriculum. How does it take an entire week to learn code commenting?" she asked, a judgemental edge to her question.
The professor's brow furrowed. "I thought you were here to talk about Alistair?"
"We are," I answered quickly, giving Delta a questioning look. What was she playing at?
She raised her hand in apology. "Sorry, it's just I'm not used to being in the company of the hacking legend who leaked government documents to expose an insider trading scandal involving the sale of the Department of Building and Infrastructure to ZenBrand."
