Do moonshiners still run after the singularity?

Here's the first page or so of my new story.


Hovering over a blue marble Jett saw a porcupine's back of orange pyramids raise across its globe. The automated learners voice, seated firmly in the back of Jett's skull droned on explaining “the purpose of neural nets, and its interlink of network beacons on the earth side. How, with the aide of a Neuro-transmitter, created after the third war of attrition with russio-pan-asian states(would you like to know more?) what was once a communication network know as the “Internets” became a global conscienceness interaction, fueling a one world government(Look here for notes on other governmental methods) blaha blah making us all happy and same and….” Jetts mind wandered off unable to follow the flow of info emitting from learners dialog stream.

Jett's frustration with the Learner's lesson flooded out into the classroom and he felt the hot sting of his classmate’s laughter at his distress over something so taken for granted by them. He had obviousless disrupted the class again. In another place Jett felt his hand raise to the back of his closely shaven head, his middle finger pawing at the curled up edge of the poly-vinyl neuro-sticker on the back of his skull. He didn’t know these people and he was pretty sure the “teacher” was just a machine leading them through some orange Day-Glo lesson on social studies. Who would notice if he just dropped out and left his attic room to the sun and fiel……

“Any student who leaves the classroom early will be considered a drop out and forced to retake all social studies courses for this section!” The Teacher-head thing musta caught wind of his thoughts and jumped in to stop him. Yet again the burning chastisement from the other students in Jetss head flowed over him as the Teacher-thing seemed incapable of directing towards one student.

Jett hated his learning, it felt more like someone was trying to smooth over his brain and make him feel like the rest of faceless, bodiless voices and feelings that swarmed into his brain during classes. And this fact made him stick out all the further in his classroom’s collective. He often wondered if the blandness of the others was just a side effect of the neural-web interface, but he tried more than once to socialize with all these kids from across the globe. Talk with them about their cities and lives. Follow them to the Web-arcades after class. Play the adventure games all kids had access to and were encouraged to play. Everyone was just another carbon copy it seemed. Boring to the point where it seemed he could just guess what they were going to say before they even said it. The culmutive effect of which on Jett just made him think the neural nets were even more surreal in his head than they even were.

The Class ended with two great gloved, cartoony hands coming together palm to palm in front of a sun, and a great cymbal crash in the background. Jett thought he knew why he hated the class so much because it obviously was one of those pan-asian slap jobs used to make classes cheaper for his school. Or at least that what his older brother, Simon said. Not knowing what any other school was like, Jett just had to believe that was the reason why he especially hated it.

Back in reality Jett grabbed the neural sticker and peeled it and the classroom off of his head. A bit of disorientation grabbed him as he had to re-adjust to the much darker room he was now sitting in. He took the clear and black sticker and placed crookedly back on the backing from where it came. It was only meant to be used once or twice, but Ma hadn’t gotten into town yet due to the Hay season ending so he’d have to keep it safe from dust and hairs for the next few days. Most kids his age already had one of the permanent transmitters implanted under the skin in the back of their skulls. But those were usually city kids, or from family’s that cared if little Norma Jean had a full head of hair at nine.