The Tower

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The Tower
The second chapter of a complete free sci-fi / horror story by Dean Thorpe.

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Chapter 2

9:05

Eventually the bus got to the main entrance of Bexatonia College. The rain was getting heavier and fork lightning was streaking across the sky. I do not think I have ever had a colder and wetter start to my first day at a college. I had felt soaked to the skin and my clothes were heavy with all the water they had adsorbed, so much for trying to look cool. I had been to the college once before and that was for my interview, but that was the one and only time. The whole college was a very intimidating place. The main building had not changed much in all the hundred or so years it had been there, but everything else had. You could see the sci-tech research tower standing like a dark guardian over the rest of the college. It looked like around twenty floors of steel and blacked out windows. It had a dark and dangerous look to it. Lighting had streaked across the sky behind the tower turning it into an evil looking monolithic silhouette. I did not want to go into that place, but unfortunately I knew that most of my lessons were going to be in there. Trust me to have had IT as my main subject. The other thing I did not like about this college was all the security. There were camera's everywhere and retinal scanners on all the doors keeping the college secure from prying eyes. I know people are more security conscious these days, but this was ridiculous. It was as if they had some dark secret to hide. I do not know what I was thinking of when I signed up for this college. They may have the best pass rates in the southeast and a high amount of people getting top jobs straight after leaving, but at what cost. Bexatonia College had a reputation for being very strict and I had also heard that all the best facilities were for alien use only. I have been told that only a few of the most intelligent humans were ever allowed into these classes. I hoped I would be one of the lucky ones. I had always been gifted when it came to computers, but I did not know if that would be enough. Amyger's could be very annoying some times and I had been in a few fights with them at my last college. I had lost all of them as they are much stronger than humans. I had only lost really badly once and that was against one of them that called himself Loader. He had smashed my leg and put me in hospital for two weeks. My leg had healed quite well, but still gives me trouble sometimes. The problem with Amyger's is that they are a telepathic species. They can not read minds, just send messages to other Amyger's. You could see them looking at you and then they would all laugh. This has always really irritated me as I was always paranoid that they were laughing at me.

9:10

I headed for the main office and was greeted by an android. The office was small and had dull grey walls, there were bars on the window and it felt like being in some twentieth century prison cell.

The android seemed pleasant enough, but I had always had a distrust for them. They preferred to be called synthetic life forms and they could get quite angry if you called them anything else. They are shaped like a human and all based on the person who invented them. This had always made it hard to tell them apart. They had hair that they were allowed to style anyway they wanted, but they still all looked alike. This one had a short blonde hair and a long ponytail. Scientists had tried for years to get them perfect, but still could not get them quite right. The one in front of me was an old 500 model. You could spot these ones a mile off as they were created before polymorphic skin and so they had a silver tint to their skin. I told him the courses I was going to do and he asked me to step up to the retinal scanner. After a few seconds a bright flash hit my eye and when my vision cleared I could see all my details on the wall display. I felt surprised that they did not have the size of my dick as they seemed to have just about everything else about me anyone could possibly have ever want to know. They must have been linked into many databases to find out all this much information about me. The android told me to go straight up to my form room which is room 504 in the tower. I left the office and headed down the corridor towards it. The glass roof along the corridor allows you to get a really good look at the tower. Up close it looked even bigger then it had from outside. I made my way out of the double doors at the back of the main building. I used the retinal scanner to open the tower doors and headed inside. The tower was built on the site of the old sports centre. When construction had started a lot of the local people had complained about the size of it. There was talk at the time about bribery going on as the local council granted permission without even asking the opinion of any of the local people. This was very unusual as these days you had at least six months of red tape and questionnaires just to put a little green house in your own garden. I did not care anyway as I lived a few miles away down by the air port. You learn not to act like you care about this sort of thing. People who have complained in the past seemed to have ended up involved in fatal accidents. Corruption is very bad around here. Basically anything that the aliens want, the aliens can get without any questions asked. Even the government turns a blind eye. Space travel would be nowhere near as advanced if it was not for the aliens help. Without their help work on the Dimension drive would never have even been started. the aliens could have just told us how to build it, but instead they just gave us a few clues and pointed us in the right direction. The Dimension drive used space folding technology to make you technically travel faster than light. It must use a lot of power, but the aliens have never allowed them to give out the details to people not directly involved in the project. I have heard rumours that some of the early design work went on right here at the college. There has always been a lot of rumours about what kind of research goes on up there on floor 18. I do not think any human had ever been up on that floor. I was determined that I would find a way to get up there one day. The wonders that must have been contained up there locked away from prying eyes like mine.

9:15

I decided that I better stop day dreaming and get to the form room before I got into more trouble than I wanted on my first day. When I got there I introduced myself to the form tutor. He seems normal enough to me, I had put up with much worse in the past. He was human, around thirty and was dressed quite casually in a black shirt and navy blue trousers. He introduced me to the rest of the class and they seemed like quite a mixed bunch of students. About a quarter of them were human and the rest were aliens. The tutor gave me a boring talk on the rules of the college, fire regulations and their use of computer laws. It all sounded pretty strict to me, but I was not bothered by it as I planned to keep myself to myself and just try to work as hard as I could. All I wanted to do was to get all my qualifications and get back out again to the real world, too much studying can really do your head in.

Next he gave me a map of the college and a timetable with all my classes on it. I had a pretty full timetable as I was doing a number of subjects. I have had a few near misses with the principle at my last college for messing with the computers, but that was the only fun I had in life and I was not going to give up now. I sat down and listened to him telling everybody about some boring day trip to a small local computer firm that was happening soon. I had been on plenty of these trips and these businesses all seemed the same to me. Before long he had waffled on through the whole of the tutor period and it was time for me to make my way to the class.

9:45

My first class of the day was Information Technology Applications and this pleased me as it was one of my best subjects. I went up all those stairs to floor 17 and entered room 1701. There is a lift, but unfortunately humans are not allowed to use it. The claim it is so fast it goes from the ground floor right up to floor 18 in under five seconds. The aliens can cope with this, but the G-forces are much too high for the fragile human body to be able to withstand. I wished I were in better shape. I suppose that after a few months of these stairs I would be in great shape.

I had been worried that the class might be difficult as I was coming in half way through the academic year. I need not have worried as it was child's play for me. I have had many years of experience as a programmer writing all my own software and I had also worked as a systems analyst for a while. There were also a few years of experience as a hacker that I could not put on my entrance application form. Hacking is looked down upon very seriously. I have never done any hacking that could hurt anybody. I just had a curious mind and this had got me into trouble more than a few times. Luckily for me I had never been caught for anything big, but I still made sure that nobody at the college knew about the shadier side of my past. The class was about using computers to plot flight paths in space. I had been doing this since my first year at senior school. All you have to do is calculate a course involving speed changes and the effect of the gravity fields from other planets. I did my work in half the time of any of the other students and then just sat there for the rest of the lesson listening to the others moaning about how hard it was and all the problems they were having. I was really disappointed with this class as I hoped that as it was a good qualification that the work would really be something to get my teeth into and not just this pathetic kids stuff. The alien teacher had seemed very surprised that I had been able to do the work this quickly. If I had kept this quality of work up, I might have had a chance of getting into those special research classes I had been so interested in after all.

10:30

The next lesson was back in the main building, which meant going back down all those stairs again. By the time I had got to the next class I was very tired and sweaty. I had been dreading this lesson as it was history, but I was pleasantly surprised. The lesson was on the music of the late twentieth century. I had always had a thing for some of the more interesting music of this period. The teacher was a human lady of around eighty with hair that must have been dyed as it had been jet black when by her age it would have definitely been very grey. She was dressed in old fashioned flowery clothes that would still have looked out of date even in the twentieth century that we were supposed to be studying. The teacher started waffling on about 'Kylie Minogue' and 'Take That'. About half way through the class it changed to the subject of heavy metal and how it had corrupted the brains of the youths of that time. I could not believe the garbage that the teacher was talking. My granddad had been a great fan of this type of music and he had turned out normal enough. I suppose it was just the government trying to oppress freedom of speech again. I started a project on the group 'Megadeth'. I had always liked Megadeth since the time I found some in the attic of my granddads house. I wished I could include music in my project, but it was illegal to even listen to this music.

I suddenly had a fun idea and although it was a slightly dangerous idea, I did not care as I had felt like having some fun. I inserted one of my DADE disks I had brought from home and accessed one of my virus files. It was a special virus I had written for use at school, but I thought this would be a good time to use it. When it was activated it moved itself into the college computers memory. It was a stealth virus and so it moved around the protection software they had installed. Once it was in position it accessed the college PA system and heavy metal music came out of every speaker in the college. It only took the system about 20 seconds to track down the virus and eradicate it. The teacher guessed that it must have been somebody in the class as it was what we were studying. I clicked on another file and all of the log files that show who had transferred the file were destroyed. It had been stupid to play music while in that class, but they could not track down who did it. My final touch was to leave a symbiotic virus that would crass any terminal that tried to locate who created the virus. I continued my project and downloaded a few pictures of the group from my computer at home. I added some text agreeing that this type of music was a bad influence on people and that it was good that it had been banned. I wished that I could have told the truth, but I did not want to get kicked out of college on my first day.

11:15

Lunch time came next and I headed down to the cafeteria and ordered some food. The cafeteria was a very large room painted with bright shades of blue. This was in total contrast to the bland grey of the rest of the college buildings. Unfortunately with the blue coloured room and powerful air conditioning the room had felt very cold and uninviting. There were only around fifty humans eating their lunches, but just like the rest of the college there were a lot more aliens. To me it looked like there must have been at least two hundred of them. They were just sitting there silently eating, but I bet they were all communicating telepathically as you could see there facial expressions changing as if they were having normal conversations. I could tell their emotions much easier than I could those of humans because you did not have the words to confuse you. When humans are talking they can sound happy, but are they really feeling like that or is it just an act. When all you know is their facial expressions it is a lot easier to tell. Suddenly a group of the aliens all turned and looked straight at me, for once I wished I could not tell their emotions as they all had hate in their eyes. I was a human and they did not seem to like the idea of humans being in 'their' college, especially when some of them had been in my IT class this morning and I had managed to do my work faster than they could. My food arrived and the bland lump of food that had been placed in front of me was not at all appetizing. The law states that food served for humans at places like colleges must be good for you, but this seemed a little extreme. I ate what I could and threw most of it in the bin. The aliens students did not have to eat the same rubbish as us, but by the look of the leftover food on their plates, what they had been eating was not much better than ours. I headed out of the big double doors by a drinks machine and noticed a few students hanging around by a shelter. I decided to go and see what they were up to as they looked kind of suspicious. When I entered the shelter I could smell a wonderful fragrance and knew that it could only be some sort of illegal substances as nothing legal could smell so delicious these days. My suspicions were confirmed when I walked over to the small group of humans. One of them had a small food generator and he was creating beef burgers. All of the remaining cow's and sheep that had not been eaten by humanity had then become extinct in 2020 by the CQB241 virus. After that all types meat and that had included artificial beef was now highly illegal. I was so tempted I asked if I could try one of them. I would not normally have tried such a thing as I had never been interested in eating illegal foods. Apart from hacking I had always been good when it came to the law. I could never understand why people wanted to waste their lives by taking drugs and drinking alcoholic fluids. They looked worried as they did not know me and they could get into a lot of trouble if anyone found out what they were selling. After a lot of persuading I managed to get them to sell me one of the burgers. As I took the first bite I knew it was wrong, but I would not have stopped eating for all the money in the world. This was the first time I had ever tasted meat and it tasted good. I had read that in the 20th century when you were still allowed to eat meat that people had actually decided to give up meat and become vegetarians. I could not understand how anybody could not like the taste of meat, but then again if more people had been like that then more animals might have survived and they would not just be something to look at in the display cases at the environmental history museum in London. I thanked them for my burger and they told me that they could get other things for me if I wanted. I asked what they meant and they said that they had drugs if I wanted some. I told them that I was not interested in that sort of thing, but they gave me a free sample of something anyway. I went back into the college and put the drugs in the nearest waste disposal unit. They could throw their lives away with that stuff if they wanted, but there was no way I was going to join them.

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