Chapter 2

Ætherglow #29


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You wake up in your new dorm room at Translunar Academy. The first year dorms are in a building with two tall towers, and you were given a room on the upper levels. Here in this small colony, a few floors of a building makes a noticeable difference in the apparent strength of spin-gravity, and up here it is much more comfortable to Lunatics like you.

You get out of bed. Sunlight shines through your window, but you know it will be night again in a few minutes. It’s quite an adjustment from life on a world where day and night lasted two weeks.

You go to the closet to get your new school uniform. It’s much more than just a uniform, though, the first layer is a wearable full-body neural interface--grey leggings with yellow conduits running between sensor nodes along the path of your peripheral nervous system, and a tight grey shirt that covers your thorax, with conduits running along your spine. Wearing this, your body becomes a PCB.

On top of that is the outer layer. This comes in two forms, one with a skirt and one with pants. Every student is given both just to simplify logistics, and save the admins the trouble of documenting the vast complexity of gender that exists in a school of autistic technopaths. Naturally you opt for the skirt. This outfit comes in one piece, like a dress. The thick fabric is made up of wide blue sections--each class year is given a different color to easily distinguish them--separated with wide silver seams running down the sides and across the shoulders. The sleeves are a thinner silver fabric lined with more yellow neural conduits, with an attachment point for your terminal on the left arm. The dress has many pockets and compartments, often with wires inside of them, all connected to a battery on your belt. You can use these to power any peripheral device you will be using.

And over your heart is your nametag, an LED display that lights up as soon as you put on the dress. Your name:

Aydan

Your pronouns:

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Something to sort out later. Right now you have something to do. Classes won’t begin for a few days, giving new students time to adjust to the colony’s gravity and the campus layout. But today you need to finalize your class registration to determine your schedule for the semester. Some things will be required you’re sure, but you’re not certain which yet. You pull up the first year course list on your terminal.


What are you interested in taking?

1) Introductory Cybersecurity: 12 (12.0%)
2) Network Architecture I: 12 (12.0%)
3) Practical Arts I: 5 (5.0%)
4) History of Computer Systems: 5 (5.0%)
5) Programming I: 5 (5.0%)
6) Applications of Primitive Devices: 22 (22.0%)
7) Introductory Cybernetics Theory: 12 (12.0%)
8) Linear Algebra: 22 (22.0%)
9) Cryptography I: 5 (5.0%)
Expired 2 years ago (2022-01-27 15:06:00)

NOTICE: this poll was conducted on Ætherglow's previous home site. After total loss of the server, we only had records of which results won, not exact vote totals.