Meet Alt <<”Hi Alt!”>>, just an average young adult of the present world, or so I made you think. Alt is not average. For one thing, his back is itching crazily at the moment as he sits in front of his computer screen, furiously typing his article due in half an hour. He yearned to scratch it, but as hard as he tried, as many seconds of pain he suffered, and the awkward cracking sound of his neck… just couldn’t reach it.
29 minutes until it must be submitted electronically. He hated this electronic submission system. On one hand, it was convenient. On the other hand, it wasn’t lenient. Three more paragraphs to go!
Focus! He told himself. Concentrate! But that back itch was bugging him to no end. How to describe this itch? Well imagine someone handing you that toy you wanted when you were six years old… but it’s always just a bit out of reach. Forever taunting, forever unattainable.
Alt searched his drawers for a back scratcher, or a makeshift one. This is not a task as easy as one can imagine. Piles of dirty clothes bearing colonies of dust mites slew throughout the room. Late at night, Alt can hear the trumpets of the dust mites as they battle for territory. A fragile stack of paper known as Homework threatened to topple over the edge of the table into the abyss of Garbage Can. Why was there a stack of paper there? Nobody knows. Alt assumed the dust mites used it as a strategic point in their battles.
A cursory search into the odourous depth of fabric brought nothing but a buzzing headache. Then, Alt heard French. Or was it Spanish? No.. it’s French, he recognized a few too many of the words. In other words, the non-numerical or the ones not on Dora the Explorer (his sole teacher in Espanol).
22 minutes left. A cup of milk and heavy aerosol spray calmed his olfactory nerves. However that back itch undoubtly persisted.
Precisely 0.74821214920214 kilometers 22 degrees West, 30 metres down (vertical) from Alt’s position was a girl named Alessandro who was having trouble with her iPod… but since I have no idea what a girl would do when her iPod breaks, the story is coming back to Alt.
He managed to scrape out a paragraph. To him, three sentences is a paragraph, however on some occasions 2.5 sentences is acceptable. Several thousand kilometres away somewhere in Australia, Thea was writing her Chemistry Exam to be considered for an International Bacclaureate program. She lowered her left hand below her chair, and tapped the back left leg of the chair. At the back of the room, a resonance detector was catching the faint signals in Morse Code and converting them to letters. On a swing set two blocks from the school, her genius friend Becky was on her laptop receiving the inquiries.
“The pressure gas law is…” Becky said into her headset.
A little antenna on the earpiece of Thea’s glasses picked up wireless signals, and processed them into vibration sequences to her braces, that vibrated her teeth, thereby giving her sound but not to anyone else.
“… what are you talking about, mate?” Becky concluded. “This acronym isnt anything we agreed on. Hell, no acronym is fifty letters long!”
Thea was puzzled, and looked up at the clock. Two more hours of drudging pain. Then she noticed the guy sitting in front of her was tapping his chair leg furiously. Was it denting?
10 minutes left for Alt in Canada. The gravity of the situation knocked him into action. He threw the Darwin Awards book out of his sight… and onto Homework. However, he didn’t notice. He scanned through his illegible notes, and typed down sentence after sentence of gibberish.
5 minutes. The article still looked like string of asdfjkl; repeated several hundred times. Alt turned the monitor around, tried looking at it upside down… stood upside down with the monitor on one side… and thats when an idea struck him. Almost immediately following the idea-strike, his head struck the ground.
1 minute left. Ferocious typing helped by voice commands turned out one and a half pages of beautiful text in semi-coherent structures. Excited and proud, he went on to submit. However, as Murphy’s Law puts it nicely… well, you’ll have to read the list, it’s quite amusing actually. His word processor hit an unexpected error and needed to close. An alert box popped up. Program needs to close. Save document? No, Cancel.
..- -. – .-. ..-. .-. -. -.-. . Thea tapped (shorthand for interference). She slouched down a bit, let her legs slide forward. Then with one jolting motion, kicked the guy in front of her. However, she did not expect to slip. Her seat slipped back, hit the table behind her, severely damaging a careful diagram the student was drawing. In an attempt to catch her balance with wild flailing, she grabbed hold of the table to her right, but slipped anyways as the exam paper her arm landed on gave next to no friction.
58 seconds left for Alt. “Where’s the yes option?” he asked himself. He pressed enter out of habit, and the processor closed without saving his work. He quickly opened up notepad and tried to think for something to write. 30 seconds left. He started typing, then stopped, then tried again, and stopped again. With only 6 seconds left, he submitted his work.
The exam proctor rushed to Thea’s help, to her dismay. The guy in front, the guy behind, and the girl to her right were obviously dissatisfied. Well, at least the rest of the exam room found it highly amusing… all 192 other exam writers. Embarrassed, Thea looked down, and noticed in her right hand was an exam. Not hers. Hers fluttered nearby.
“Well I must say, you have a most creative form of cheating, young lady,” said the proctor, snatching the exam from her and returning the one she accidentally took, and apologized. “Pack up your things… Thea,” the proctor read off the top of her exam, “we’ll have a talk about ethics shortly”
Alt’s phone rang.
“Hey Alt! We’re going to the movies, you coming?”
“Sure thing Bill!” replied Alt. Shortly after he was with his friends in a car going through a snowy road. All along the way, and throughout the movie, that back itch annoyed Alt to no end.
Mental note to self: buy a back scratcher.
What’s going to happen to Thea? What did Alt submit?
Well, I’m not sure yet, but
hey,
saw your link on “politics+religion=disaster” on facebook, this is pretty cool, I would love to read it once it is done- I would love to hear a bit written form the perspective of one of the dustmites, lol.
anyhow, good luck with this story, I’m sure it will turn out great
“I am not young enough to know everything.” – Oscar Wilde
Help with Chemistry…
The specific heat of H2O(l) is approximately constant at 4.18 J/g*C….
Nice… do tell us about the dust mite wars!
Dermatophagoides farinae, otherwise known as dust mites, are vicious little creatures with an unending thirst for war against the animal on which they live on, and each other. The ones in Alt’s room had their diet altered from lack of food (Alt’s skin secretes a certain enzyme that is fatal to dust mites but inert otherwise). These dust mites fight eternally over claim of the Ultimate Trash Can. Competing for this grand prize cost the life of millions, billions perhaps, and the war wages on. At times, there is a third party, a spider, cockroach, or “great winged species” interfering with the war, and the mites for the moment stick together to repel / survive the invasion. Alt, of course, is quite oblivious, however in his dreams sometimes he can hear the thunderous footstep of a marching mite army…
all hail the mitey mite’s might!