Jason Dug through His Backpack Until....

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec. 10, 2025

Jason dug through his backpack until he found the small blue plug. Then he tugged his shirttail out and inserted the plug into a receptacle in his left hipbone.

He pushed the plug all the way in, until the top of it was flush with his skin, and then he checked the display that popped up in his field of vision, comfortably to the side of his central vision. Then he scooped up his bag.

“Hey, wait for me,” he called after his friends, who had already boarded the bus.

He pushed through the doors and worked his way down the narrow aisle toward the stairs to the roof level, trying to ignore the bus’ safety message, which came into his field of vision automatically: black words on a yellow background that appeared a few at a time and were sounded in his ear. It was, as were all safety messages, on the channel that he could dim but not turn off.

He climbed up the stairs and collapsed into the seat in front of Cliff and Pongo, who were passing a bag of potato sticks back and forth. Already, Alex and Sandy were beeping him to play Zigzug, the new music roleplay game, but he didn't like Alex, so he blinked to a clear frame and turned around.

“Hey, gimme me some!” Jason said.

“No!” Pongo said in horror as he looked over at Cliff, who was holding the bag.

“You've had enough, Pongo!” Jason said as he reached over for the bag.

Cliff let him have it. “You can have the rest of it,” Cliff said, and then to Pongo, “There was only a couple of sticks left.”

Jason tensed the left side of his face for a moment, bringing up the school's student grace frame in his display. He used his tongue on the roof of his mouth to scroll down, then stopped and highlighted the line that said Cliff Crawford, 5th Grade. Again using his tongue, he moved the grace+ counter to five and blinked it home.

“Hey!” Cliff said as he heard the tone in his own ear. “Somebody just graced me!” He went to that frame in his own display. “Thanks, Jace!” he said when he saw that the grace had come from Jason.

“Thanks for the sticks,” Jason responded.

“Yeah,” Cliff said as he grabbed his bags and moved up one seat to join Jason. “You wanna play Blue Candle?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jason responded. “I'll join you, okay?”

“Okay,” Cliff said. He started going through the routine of blinking up the Blue Candle game frame and created a game. In another moment, his display blinked green, a marker tone sounded in his ear, and text in his visual field informed him that Jason Peavey wanted to join the game. Cliff used his tongue to click yes, and the image that Jason had chosen to represent himself strolled out onto the game field. Cliff moved a muscle in the side of his face, and the image in his visual display brightened, became less transparent, and moved so that it was in his central vision. He leaned back against the bus seat and exhaled slowly and he and Jason began participating in the Blue Candle game.

Then a girl was standing in the aisle next to Cliff. “What are you guys playing?” she asked.

Both boys ignored her, then both boys saw the girl's knock flash in their respective visual fields, and heard her knock tone in their ears. Cliff looked up, annoyed. “Get lost, honey. We're busy.”

“You're not supposed to be playing Blue Candle on the bus,” the girl said.

“It's not Blue Candle,” Jason lied as he continued to gaze into the game, moving his player around with twitches of his tongue, eyelids, and occasionally, a finger or two. “We're studying for the math test today.”

“Ha!” the girl snorted. “Yeah, right.” She moved on toward the back of the bus.

The bus arrived and their school day began. The kids started working their way towards the first period classroom. As the bell rang, Mr. Simmons closed the classroom door and flicked a nearby switch. There was an audible awwwiin the room as the implant block activated and 21 implants in 14 students deactivated and disconnected.

“Happy Wednesday, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Today we'll continue our discussion from yesterday about the decade of the 40s. Hector, Phillip, you guys going to be okay back there?” He shot a look at some boys who were seated all together all the way in the back, and they nodded back. “Okay, I'm going to leave you there, but cooperate with me, and then you can stay there, you understand.” They seemed to, so he turned his attention to the front part of the room, where a girl had her hand up. “Shelly,” the teacher said.

“Ah, Mr. Simmons, I need to go on, my mom wanted me to—”

Simmons cut her off. “Shelly, the machine's on. None of the implants will work when the machine's on. Now, class, let's transition to the front,” he said as he activated the large screen at the front of the room. At the same time, screens embedded in the students' desktops flickered on; they showed the same image as the screen at the front. The screen showed a man's head and shoulders—an older man, light-brown skin, African features. “Okay, who's this?”

A couple of hands went up—Simmons went to a student who didn't have his hand up. “Boris? Who is it?”

“Ne zhnayu,” the boy said.

Mr. Simmons didn’t need his implant to translate this—Boris had been in his class all year, often using snippets of Russian in his responses. “Pahzaloosa, v angliesky,” he responded smoothly.

“I said, I don’t know.”

“You were here yesterday, right?”

“Yah. Is it Martin Luther King?”

“Not even close,” Mr. Simmons replied cheerfully. “Helen.”

A girl at the back looked up from her desktop screen. “Barack Obama?”

“Guys, we talked about this yesterday. Here's a hint, he invented the nerve-wire interface.” Still there were hands up; they were joined by a few more. “Okay, Crystal, tell them who it is.”

“Oh, for God's sake, it's Robert Staffords,” she said plaintively.

All the hands went down. “That's right. Dr. Staffords here made it possible for those little ports we all have on one hipbone or the other to interface directly with our brains. Now, who's this person?” Another face flashed on the screen. This time, it was a woman; she wore a white lab coat and appeared to be standing on the street outside a large building. “Well?”

Crystal, the student who had provided the correct answer before, had her hand up, but that was the only one. “This is where we stopped yesterday, Mr. Simmons,” she said.

“Oh, right. Okay, this is Elizabeth Barker-Bolling, she wrote the first implant net operating system.” he said. “She was born in 1997 and died in 2041, at the age of 43,” he said.

“Why'd she die so young?” a boy up front asked.

“Cancer,” Simmons said. “They didn’t get that cured until 2050. Before her death, she netted together the first 28 people to have brain implants installed. In 2047, the technology was sold to the Crichtion Corporation, and they make about 70 percent of all implants sold and installed today.”

“What was it like before implants?” someone asked.

“Well, people carried little computers with them that could make calls and on which they could send and receive messages. I'm sure you have grandparents that use the word text for a short message sent directly from one person to another?”

Several students were nodding in agreement. “My dad said he used to have a gmail account,” a Black student said from the middle of the room; this comment netted a number of guffaws from the room.