Daily Archives: August 8, 2021

4th Period – Journal Entry #2

Posted
Filed under Writing

This song. I don’t listen to it very often. Actually, I rarely listen to it at all. Usually just by mistake. I’ll pull out an old CD that I made years ago. Old CDs are the best way to remember things. They really take you back. Force you into a time you’ve already lived before. A free ticket back into the past.

Anyway, I’m sitting in my room and listening to this CD and enjoying it til this song came on and my emotions did a complete flip. This song, once beautiful, now something that almost burns my ears. Tempted to skip over it… my fingers won’t move.

This song is about a boy who nobody likes. The sort of boy who sits in the back of the room unnoticed, and stays home from school dances. At first, I suppose the song mostly appealed to me because of the music. You hear the words and recognize that they are sad, but for the most part they don’t really touch you emotionally, until you meet that kid.

I had never really liked seeing kids sitting by themselves. He was. So I changed that by sitting with him. I must have figured something would change, because when I saw him alone again the next day I was surprised. After that, I made a note of saying “hi” to him and sitting with him each day.

The thing most kids don’t realize is that even the quiet, shy kids are interesting too. He loved to read books, that’s probably why he was so quiet. It was his own personal escape from reality. What he loved most were Star Wars books, and Lord of the Rings books, and any sort of story that was as far from modern as possible. He love Star Wars best though. He often drew his own deep space scenarios involving Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker and all the characters. He was a fantastic artist too. He was in a couple art classes. He always finished the assignments early so he would have time to draw his own pictures with the art supplies provided. He never turned in anything other than what was assigned though. And he only did moderate work on what was assigned. He did it so the teachers wouldn’t recognize him as anything special. I told him it was wrong.

He had a funny walk too. He said it was because he broke his leg when he was young. At first I thought he was walking that way because his feet were wet and he was walking on linoleum floors and didn’t want to fall. But I learned that wasn’t the case.

I never made fun of him like the other kids did. I think after spending so much time with him I must have fallen in love in my own way. On Valentine’s day he drew me a beautiful picture of a young rose. Life got to the point where I could hardly imagine life without him sitting in his corner in the hall. But that is exactly what happened. One day he wasn’t there and I was the one left alone. He wasn’t there the next day, or the one after that, or any day for the rest of the year. After I had taken time to think about it, I know what had happened. I, alone, wasn’t enough to pull him out of the hole he had fallen into. I had really tried though.

And so this song I once loved, now feels like knives to my soul. That is why I rarely to never listen to this song anymore.

4th Period – Journal Entry #11

Posted
Filed under Writing

8 21, 2084

Our maid found my other notes and threw them away. That’s the problem with them, they just throw everything and anything away. It took me a really long time to find any more paper. I suppose its strange to be doing this though. After all, now a days no one ‘writes’ anymore. Not by hand at least. Now the recipe for a good story is a computer and microphone. That’s how I should really be doing this. Good old fashioned auto-speak diaries. Computers record everything you say and puts it into the vast memory of the computer. That’s how all of the great contemporary classics were produced. I feel as though I have a lot of thoughts to be recorded though. Thoughts I don’t want the Network to monitor.

Anyway. The other day our maid died. She actually died. Just on her own. I came out into the living room to tell her to clean my room next, and there she was, just lying there on the floor. I pushed the emergency panic button and a team of roboticians came in. We’ve only had to call them over one other time. Our last maid was acting really weird. She kept throwing things on the floor. The roboticians rewired her, but it was no use. This time, our robot maid just died.

20 years ago all the robots were updated to look just like humans. To help them fit in better. The only way to tell the difference between robots and humans was to somehow get inside them. When I walked into the living room and saw her, I nearly screamed. I realized in that moment, that for the first time in my life, I’d have to clean my room myself.

9 3, 2084

Our NewsClip of the day was filled with reports of robots acting out. Lately they’ve all been acting weird. It’s so hard to find good work these days. If our robots stop doing the work we make them to do then we, the people are going to have to do it. The roboticians have been working overtime. They’re thinking of scrapping all the old model robots and starting over. As if it’s not stressful enough having our teleporter break, now all the robots are malfunctioning. My grandma once told me that way back in the olden days, people walked everywhere. “Cars” were only used to transport someone long distances. Like between housing units. I can hardly imagine. Now, people just teleport everywhere they want to go. Although we all know it’s because the cars of the olden days ran on a strange kind of fuel that was eating away at our ozone. So now, we don’t use “cars.” Although, it’s not like anyone would want to walk anywhere anyway, teleporting is just easier. Each building is about two miles from the next. My grandma said it was a scheme. The Network says they did it for the people. “It’s all for the best.” My grandma says they’re trying to make us all “lazy.” I still don’t know what that word means.

9 10, 2084

I remember one time I was playing my daily game of virtual chess with some kid in the Game Center. There was something about the kid that made me a bit uncomfortable. I think most of the kids my age felt it. Kids. My grandma told me that the Network controls us through the Youth of the Nation. I think I finally understands what she meant by that.

Our NewsClip today was one story over and over and over. And as if it weren’t strange enough in the first place that the kid was out walking around instead of teleporting, he was being followed by a couple of kids my age. I had overheard them once talking about how they believed he was really a robot. I never thought they’d take action on it. The kids like trying to impress the Network. We all know the only way to discover a robot is by getting inside them. These kids took the kid to the top of an abandoned building and began slicing him up. They must have known there was a camera up there, but that’s how kids are these days. They try hard to show everyone that they are following America’s Standards to their fullest, and that our nation is heading in the right direction.

I’m against the idea of robots thinking for themselves as much as the next person, but what these kids did was wrong in the eyes of everyone. And they played the surveillance video of it over and over on the NewsClip. It was horrible. I’m sorry, I can’t write more about it right now. I think I need to take a walk.