I had my first real teacher at thirteen years of age.
Not those soppy pencil-pushers press-ganged into government service with chalk in their hand and their backs turned to thirty-eight children they hate with all their hearts. No, my first real teacher would never have been caught dead in a classroom, or anywhere that even briefly involved contact with the sprawling web of Hong Kong bureaucracy. Mainly because he was a ghost, wanted in eighteen countries, laying low in a tiny one-window room in downtown Kowloon. His skin was the colour of candlewax, anaemic and fallow, and his command of both Cantonese and English was so good that I could never really figure out his ethnicity.
My first real teacher had no name. He only had a handle: deathrow. When I asked, he said that was what he faced if he was ever caught. Of course, later he told me that the real reason was that it was the name of the street he was born in, in his native language.
My first teacher taught me to code. Really code, for a purpose. I still don't know why he did it. Maybe he just needed to kill time, bored out of his mind while in hiding. Maybe he wanted to pass it on, some bit of himself to a random nondescript schoolboy, never knowing when it would all end for him. Maybe he just fell prey to the tendency of every hacker to show off whenever he could.
On an old, patchwork laptop resuscitated with wires and external encrypted drives, he gave me the keys to the machine that turned the breathing wheel of the world.
My first teacher passed on to me my first real tools. In the helplessness, in the lost swirling meaningless shithole of community relief programs, he gave me what I needed to begin tearing away at my reality.
Ten years later, I find my first teacher strapped upside down to a pipe in Ciudad Juarez, his arms opened wrist-to-elbow with a machete, bled dry like a pig. Cartels had finally caught up to him. The ALPANU clean-up crew simply grab his hard drive, wipe the place clean and leave within the hour.
Eight days after that, I find the favela cunt who killed him.
A day later, I toss a wet, heavy garbage bag into an overflowing storm drain in Guadalajara.
And a day after that, I am on a flight back to Bern.
Anyways. Where was I?
Yes, teachers. My point being, my experience with teachers hasn't been the most—orthodox. Unfortunately, right now the situation calls for my ability to play a whole other kind of teacher. The dry punch-clock tie-wearing bastards who suck the energy out of a classroom like a sinkhole. This is bullshit.
I straighten my tie, button my coat, and follow Monika into the classroom.
The closest girl is at her desk, elbows resting on the wooden surface, arms tucked in. Long cascading tresses of dark hair tinged with purple tumble over her slim shoulders, reaching past her face. Through the gaps of the curtain of hair, I spot an open book.
Then her eyes turn upwards to meet mine, and Yuri straightens up like an uncoiling spring. "Oh—oh!"
"Okay everyone!" Monika perks up. "Welcome to the first meeting of the Literature Club this term!"
She turns to me, offering a polite bow, the motion causing the ribbons of her bow to dance in the air. "This is our new—club advisor, Mr Jin. He will be helping us with the club from today!"
"Don't mind me," I add, waving a hand. "I'll just be at the back if you need me."
"A teacher! We've never had a teacher in our club before!" Sayori clasps her hands together. "I hope you like our literature club!"
"I'm sure I will!" I reply cheerfully, my eyes scanning the room.
All the while, I reroute incoming data streams to my prefrontal cortex. Helps me continue to run diagnostics without breaking concentration.
Sayori beams—positively beams—and titters to the side, making way for me. I notice she hasn't actually made eye contact.
"Well—you look a little young to be a teacher." A mutter comes from my left.
I turn to lock eyes with a diminutive, slim girl. Bright pink bangs frame her dainty face, her lips locked in a pout. Her arms are folded across her modest figure, her rose-pink eyes size me up from top to bottom.
"I get that a lot." I beam at Natsuki. "You'll be surprised how often I get mistaken for a student's older brother."
While my mouth delivered trivialities, my eyes wandered over Natsuki's features. Petite, probably scraping five feet flat. Up close, I see the expertly-applied layers of makeup, and instantly realise that their purpose was not to flatter—but conceal.
Her pale skin, betraying her infrequent meals.
The reddish crusting at the side of her lips, half-covered with foundation, lines spreading just beyond the borders of vermillion. Angular cheilitis—iron and vitamin B deficiency. Malnutrition.
Something else is tugging at my attention. Something just under the current of conscious thought. Sometimes the brain picks things up before it even knows they have been sensed.
Something isn't right here. Something doesn't fit.
"Um, excuse me—" I turn my eyes back to the desk.
"Um, if I may—what do you teach? I don't think I've seen you here before…" Yuri's hands play nervously with the ends of her hair. She bites her lip as if immediately regretting speaking, sending a bloom of red to her cheeks.
"Well, I'm the guidance counsellor." I smile reassuringly. "Most of the time I'm in my office, and students come and see me whenever they have things to talk about."
"Oh," she replies simply, then falls silent.
Her finger still clutch the book in her hand, her knuckles turning pale from the tightening grip. Her fingertips press dimples into the surface of the paperback. Portrait of Markov.
I watch Yuri's face. The way her eyes flit involuntarily, her gaze averting mine. The minor twitches in her expression, the barely-noticeable swell of colour along the side of her nose bridge. The nervous tic in her finger she is neither aware of or can control.
I notice the sleeves of her uniform, fully covering her arms. The way her fingers firmly grip the hem of her sleeves whenever she moves, lest they fall down and expose her arms.
I nod politely, and then take a seat in the back of the class.
Of fucking course they don't trust me.
The one flaw in my plan. I made myself an authority figure. To blend into a group of young adults who perhaps have had the most cause to distrust authority figures.
It's a step forward, maybe one backwards diagonally. The downside is how much harder it is to work my way into the dynamics of these four girls, with the addition of social and professional barriers as well. The upside—the flexibility. School personnel can move around with greater freedom, ask questions with the assumption that they would receive answers, and enjoy a general sense of deference from the student body.
Need to play my cards right, and not alienate anyone. Which means to shut up—and listen.
The second thing is the more cause for concern.
Where the fuck is that MC bastard?
"Hey Sayori," Yuri chimes in, with a voice as quiet as a nightingale's song, "weren't you going to bring a friend to our club?"
"Oh." Sayori is visibly crestfallen, her shoulders slumping. "He—um, he said he'd join us next week."
I sit up just a tiny bit straighter. My expression doesn't change. But out the corner of my eyes, I watch Monika.
"He wanted to check out the anime club—" Sayori trails off, her dainty shoulders shrugging ever so slightly.
I see Monika trying her level best to keep her expression passive, but the narrowing of her eyes, flaring of her nostrils, and the ever so slight tremor of her lower lip give it all away. She blinks twice, and the moisture gathering on the corners of her eyes cling to her lashes like raindrops.
I lean back in my chair and reassess the situation.
On the one hand, Monika is now a loose cannon on deck. She was emotional enough to play havoc with the base code and take a digital sledgehammer to the columns of data making up the character files before. There's no telling what she'd do now, that she think she's either being toyed with—or worse, that I've quit the game entirely, and that she's stuck back in the hellish loop of irrevocable paths towards a generic dating sim ending. The only way to put a stop to this, is for me to make contact once again.
On the other hand, the change in situation is also a huge tactical advantage. Now, she doesn't know where I am—who I am—and what I can do. With all her attention and emotional angst fixated on that useless schoolboy, I'm free to operate at will. This is time—precious time—for me to start recompiling the code blocks she so carelessly scrambled.
So where do I go from here?
First things first, locate the guy.
I send out a ripple of code, pinging off his distinct signature. Like sonar, the script reverberates through the school in the fraction of an instant.
I see the side of Monika's eye twitch. Barely perceptible.
She feels it. She may not know what it means, but if it happens often enough, she'll start picking things up. Things that it would be problematic for her to know. I need to be cautious with my coding. Conservative.
In any case, the return signal reaches me seamlessly. The idiot is one floor down, still walking unsurely down the corridor, attempting to find whichever collection of mouth-breathers makes up the anime club.
I make the decision in an instant. It's time to close the loose ends and bring them together. One way, or another.
Under the table, I touch my index finger and thumb together.
I give Monika the faintest of smiles. Whatever she's done, whatever she thinks, she hasn't even seen the beginning of possibility for the world of coding.
He walks, down the corridor of locked classrooms and shuttered windows. Hopelessly lost, he pulls out his smartphone and curses the dying battery.
One floor down, the only light is from the sun filtered through the classroom windows and then again through the glazed glass of the outward-facing windows. The rays of light are scattered and dispersed. Just as well. Proper lighting would give things away in an instant, once the script begins to run.
It happens, in the instant of his half-step, before his foot makes contact with the ground.
In the next instant, the confused and unkempt schoolboy stands at the threshold of another classroom, in another corridor one floor up, his shirt untucked and his tie loosened. Staring, in mute surprise, at the four girls staring back at him.
I break the loop of my fingers, and sigh in satisfaction.
That was of the very first scripts I learned, compiled on some extremely illegal software.
Taught to me by a man who wrote an entire programming language based off declassified West German neurocognition projects dating back to when the Berlin Wall still stood. A potent shortcut, like the prow of an icebreaker, allowing jumps between directories that bypassed routine network securities and shortened access time from hours to seconds.
We coded together, in the sparse cramped slum-like quarters of a man with half a billion dollars he could not access. And in that time, I began to see. Outside the window, I no longer saw the world wearing its skin. Now, I saw it as it was, naked and vulnerable. Traffic lights and electronic displays running on tech forty years old. Power grids open to attack from any direction. Thousands of computers, with unsecured cameras and microphones. Bank accounts laughably exposed, like a chest of hundred-dollar bills secured with a bike lock.
Monika saw the world beyond, through the hole in her wall. My hole in the wall was the greenlit screen of a tiny, jerry-rigged computer rigged up to five external hard drives and cooled with a cheap Chinese-made standing fan.
Most teachers teach students to obey rules.
My teacher taught me to break shit.
Now to watch things fall into place.