Stowaways

by Matt Phillips

  "Nothing for you to worry about," Daniel said to Ani, once again using his most grown-up tone. He looked at Ernie, then back at Nathan. "Then it's settled!"

  Daniel thought about exploring space for the rest of the ride to school. He thought of the cool places his father had been and of all the weird things he must have seen as the school pod ascended back to the surface and slowed down. The convoy reached the education complex, and the pod convoy suddenly scattered, as individual pods neared their destinations.

  Their pod made two stops. First, it eased to a stop at the southern entrance of the Saulk and Ng Elementary Learning Center. Nathan climbed out of the pod and greeted some friends as he walked into the building leaving the others in the pod.

  The pod began moving again.

  "What were you guys talking about anyway?" Ani asked.

  "Nothing," Daniel said. He pretended to be interested in whatever was outside the window. He did not want her asking a lot of questions.

  "Something is going on," she said not knowing what else to say. "And I will find out what it is."

  Strange Biology

  The education complex was massive. Spanning more than twenty-five acres, it was dominated by large science and engineering laboratory buildings in the middle of the complex. There were laboratories for everything from biology to chemistry to aeronautics, each designed to provide hands-on learning and experiments. After dropping off Nathan, their pod moved slowly, zigging and zagging among pod and pedestrian traffic. It finally came to a stop in the center of the engineering and science complex.

  Daniel, Ernie, and Ani climbed out of the pod.

  "Later," Daniel said without looking back. He was anxious not to be seen with his fifth-grade brother and even more anxious not to be seen with a girl. He saw his friends and made a bee-line to them.

  "Hey," Daniel said by way of greeting his two best friends, Judah and Leandro. They grunted back.

  Towering above the boys like a glimmering ball was the middle-school biological sciences building. The fourteen-story tall, glass and steel geodesic dome reflected the morning sun across campus from its thousands of glass windows. The entire building rested on nearly two-dozen pillars around the building's perimeter and an even larger pillar in the center.

  Daniel and his friends stood outside the perimeter of the building, waiting for the bell to ring, which it did at precisely 8:10 AM. One by one, the building's eight wedge-shaped classrooms lowered from the building above them to the ground level. Each classroom had 18 desks and faced outward from the center of the building.

  "Hello, Daniel. Hello, Judah. Hello, Leandro," the school computer took attendance as the comp on each student's wrist connected with the school's master computer. Daniel and his friends stepped into their classroom wedge. Daniel took his usual seat between his two friends.

  The classroom filled up quickly. When all 18 desks were filled, a buzzer sounded and the classroom rose up like an elevator. The students barely noticed their classroom lift back up into the building. The other wedges soon followed, leaving the ground level empty once again.

  Daniel placed his hand on his desk. The embedded computer recognized the comp on his wrist, verified his palm print and logged him into the school computer system. His notebook, textbook, and calculator all appeared on the desk/computer screen; each was just as he had left it the day before. Along the left side of his desk, tabs appeared for other references or tools he sometimes needed and along the right were a selection of electronic writing tools, highlighters and so forth.

  Suddenly Judah said something that made Leandro laugh hysterically.

  "What's wrong with you?" Judah asked when he noticed that Daniel was not laughing.

  "Nothing," Daniel said. "Just thinking about something my brother said earlier."

  "Well, better pay attention. Remember what happened last time," Judah said. He motioned to the front of the room. As the classroom came up, Dr. Camberly came into view, already in front of the class writing on a large digital board. He began talking before the elevator classroom locked into position.

  "Good morning, everyone," Dr. Camberly said. Daniel opened a smaller screen at his desk and lifted it like a hologram in front of him. "I thought that today would be a good day to take a break from our chapter on generative biology and look at something truly unique. After all, tomorrow is spring break, and research tells us that you will not retain most of what we cover today anyway. So rather than waste my time and yours covering information that we will have to relearn, I want to show you something different."

  Dr. Camberly stood at a board in front of the class and began to write. P-H-O-T-O-...the science teacher's writing appeared on Daniel's smaller hologram. Daniel selected a green pen from the right side of his desk. Then he waited, curious about what unique thing Dr. Camberly would show them.

  ...S-Y-N-T-H-E-S-I-S. He underlined it several times. All of this showed up instantaneously on the students' smaller screens. Daniel looked at Leandro, who rolled his eyes with disappointment. They learned about photosynthesis at the very beginning of the school year.

  "Can anyone tell me what photosynthesis is?" the teacher asked.

  Daniel raised his hand but someone else shouted the answer from her seat in front of the class.

  "It is the process used by plants to convert sunlight into energy."

  "Correct, Jordan," Dr. Camberly said. "We covered that at the beginning of the year so it is good to see that at least some of you remembered. Now, can anyone remember what chlorophyll is?"

  In front of the class, Jordan's hand popped up instantly. Daniel watched Judah and Leandro compete to find the definition in their notes. He did not need them.

  "That's the pigment in plants that makes them green," Daniel called out before Jordan could answer again. He glanced at Judah and Leandro with a smile.

  "Correct, Daniel" Dr. Camberly said again. He stepped onto the classroom elevator. "I want you to keep those two words in mind as I take you to our new lab."

  Dr. Camberly tapped his wrist comp and stood silently as the classroom began to rise again. Dr. Camberly had a flair for the dramatic. Daniel remembered when he tried to convince the class that a giant talking worm was their substitute teacher. That it coincided with their chapter on worm dissections made it all the funnier.

  The first level of the science ball, as he and his friends called it, was where the teachers' offices, lab tables, and other science lab functions took place.

  Daniel's classroom passed through the ceiling of this level and into the first of three floors of hands-on biology laboratories. These floors housed self-contained ecosystems like a combination zoo and greenhouse, teeming with live plants, insects, birds, and small animals. The classroom passed through the Temperate Zone lab, representative of North American plant and animal life. Daniel and his class had visited the lab several times early in the year, but it was the only one they had experienced. The classroom continued to rise up through the Temperate Zone lab and the students whispered with excitement. They saw the treetops and several nests of native birds before passing through the ceiling to the next floor.

  Next, they passed a slightly smaller Tropical Zone laboratory, which took up only a half of a level. The class syllabus said that Daniel's class would spend some time here at the end of the school year. They would also visit the other ecosystem on this level, the Saharan Zone.

  As their classroom continued up through the Tropical Zone, a blue parrot squawked. At the top floor, the curved glass roof was prominent high above them. This lab barely took up a quarter of the floor space but appeared to be under construction, with tarps, ladders, and construction materials lying about.

  "This is not what I brought you here for," Dr. Camberly said with annoyance. "What I want to show you is next door."

  The classroom rotated horizontally until it passed into the next room, which was like nothing the class had ever seen.

  The new ecosystem had a complete glass ceiling which should have gi
ven the plants plenty of sunlight. But the first curious thing Daniel noticed was the additional ultraviolet lights, with their purple-ish hue aimed directly onto the trees and shrubs. The plants themselves were yellow, not green. The classroom stopped rotating and locked into place, amidst murmurs and whispers from the curious students.

  "What is wrong with these plants?" Judah whispered.

  Daniel shrugged as he looked around. He was no expert, but like Judah, he could see that something was clearly wrong.

  "So first you will notice that there is something obviously different with these plants," Dr. Camberly said.

  "Why are they yellow?" one of the students asked.

  "Why indeed," Dr. Camberly repeated. "Can anybody answer Frederick's question?"

  "Because they are dying," Daniel said to a round of laughter.

  "A good guess. A logical guess, but no," Dr. Camberly answered. "What makes them yellow is largely related to where they are from."

  "Maybe Australia, or someplace like that?"

  Dr. Camberly smiled a conspiratorial smile. "Oh no, these plants are from much farther away than that."

  "Mars?"

  "Now you are getting warmer, Leandro," Dr. Camberly said raising his hands in the air. He deepened his voice, sounding like a sports announcer: "Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first interstellar horticultural transplants. We are calling it Kappaquillian Domesticus. Sent to us courtesy of the first Earth Ambassador to the planet Kappaqilla, Dr. Maynard Archer."

  Dr. Camberly lowered his arms and stepped from the classroom onto the sandy soil.

  "Come on down everyone, and see what it would be like to explore another planet," Dr. Camberly said. "Ambassador Archer sent plants to a dozen schools around the world, a gift from the people of Kappaqilla. I certainly hope somebody is sending something back to them. At any rate, we are still trying to adapt these plants to Earth's conditions here in the lab. One thing we learned immediately – – "

  His sentence was interrupted by a loud crack and two boys next to Daniel fell onto the ground. Dr. Camberly's face sank immediately.

  "Oh no, no, no," he said rushing over to the tree. He ignored the students wiping the dirt from their clothes and examined the tree closely.

  "We must be very careful around them, as I was just saying. These branches are extremely fragile. Something else, too. Pick up that one we just broke."

  Daniel bent down to help pick up the large tree limb and was surprised to find he could lift it himself with one hand!

  "Whoa," someone shouted.

  Unimpressed, Judah and Leandro scrambled to grab the branch from their friend's hand. Leandro got there first and snatched it from Daniel. He waved it around the lab, which caused his classmates to duck and dive out of the way to avoid being clobbered by the large branch. Judah did not duck. Instead, he grabbed the other end and a good-natured tug-of-war ensued.

  "Okay. Okay. That's enough," Dr. Camberly called trying to regain control of the class. He pulled the thick branch from their unwilling hands, and carefully moved it toward the edge of the lab. He dropped it onto a pile of similar branches.

  "As I was saying," he said loudly. "What is unusual about Kappaquillian foliage is the over oxygenation of everything on the planet? Kappaqilla is much closer to its sun than we are to ours. Consequently, the process of photosynthesis takes less time, yet produces more oxygen than here on Earth. Everything has absorbed more oxygen, including the trees and branches, which make them more brittle. We think this shortened cycle of photosynthesis is also why the plants never get to a green state. The chlorophyll only manages to get to yellow before the cycle begins again."

  Dr. Camberley continued around the lab for the rest of the class. The color of the rocks, the color of the soil, and other oddities of Kappaqilla were all questioned in detail by the chattering class of seventh graders. Normally, learning about another planet would have been great fun to Daniel, but he tuned it out. His mind was back at home, at the cargo hatch on Dad's shuttle.

  Mr. Tremblay's Engineering Class

  Ernie heard his friend Javier before he saw him. Javier was arguing loudly with his older sister as the two climbed out of a pod nearby.

  "She is such a pain," Javier said.

  Ernie indicated his understanding with a grunt. Javier was one of Ernie's oldest friends. They had been in class together every year since pre-school.

  "We're going to the Engineering Lab today, right?" Javier said as they wandered across the campus.

  "Ever been in there before?" Ernie asked.

  "No," Javier replied.

  "I was there last year for my brother's graduation ceremony," replied a girl named Petra walking nearby. "It looked a lot different then."

  They walked into the huge building and then stopped, just inside the entrance. Javier and Ernie looked around with their mouths open. The Engineering Test Lab was a giant open space from one end to the other. The building was hundreds of feet long, nearly as wide, and about ten stories tall. Windows in the walls and ceiling high above let in the bright morning sun. There were no chairs or desks anywhere in sight.

  The rest of the class gathered nearby, in small groups in one corner of the mammoth, Engineering Test Lab. It was, as far as Ernie could tell, a giant, empty building. A group of high school students had already started their class in the far corner of the building. Ernie watched about 15 students standing around their teacher on a platform that was elevated nearly to the top of the ceiling. He could not tell what they were doing, but several drones hovered nearby.

  With a cough and a grunt, Ernie's teacher appeared in the middle of the group of children. He waited for everyone to quiet down.

  Mr. Tremblay cleared his throat again. He looked at the children as they finally settled down and turned their attention to their teacher. Mr. Tremblay appeared to be nearly 10 feet tall -- a giant.

  "Uh, Mr. Tremblay," one of the girls said. "I think the settings on your display are wrong." Several students laughed.

  "What? Oh... er... Sorry," Mr. Tremblay responded. His holographic image flicked off and he disappeared. It flicked on again, only now Mr. Tremblay appeared to be a normal-sized adult. He had a dark beard and mustache, wore a faded red button-down shirt and a yellow hardhat.

  "Good morning, class," he said. "First things first, have you all brought your homework today?"

  A wave of murmurs spread across the group, as the students reached into their various packs and bags. Each student removed a miniature bridge, some assembled from sticks of plastic, some from balsa wood, and some from other composite materials. Students held their projects in the air as blue and red beams of light from several directions passed across each student's miniature engineering marvel from several directions. Mr. Tremblay watched on his screen as the homework was scanned and sent to him.

  "Okay then, thanks. Please put your homework into your box," he said when the scanning was complete. A homework collection drone wheeled itself into the middle of the fifth-grade class. The students gathered around it, pushing and squeezing. Ernie had to circle the drone twice before he found his designated homework box. He tapped out his code on the box's small screen and the door popped open. After carefully sliding his miniature construction project into the box, he pushed the door closed again and stepped away from the crowd.

  "Now class, if you don't mind, please leave any extraneous bags against the wall and step onto the red panels. The red panels only please," Mr. Tremblay instructed.

  Ernie looked down at the floor and noticed the individual tiles as they started to change from black to red. It was then that he realized the entire floor of the giant engineering lab was made up of much smaller, six-sided tiles. The rubbery coding changed colors and he stepped quickly onto the red ones. The red tiles formed two large areas and his class split themselves up between them. Then they stood and waited.

  "Make sure your feet are entirely on the red tiles, please. Is everyone ready?" Mr. Tremblay asked with a smile. He looked
away from the camera and busied himself with something off-screen.

  Suddenly, Ernie felt the floor beneath him lurch upward. The red section of the floor that he and his classmates stood on began to rise into the air. A seconds later the other red section did the same. The class squealed and laughed as they rose up above the lab's main floor.

  The two red areas stopped fifteen feet above the main floor, resembling large plateaus, standing solidly in the middle of the engineering lab, with cliffs dropping back to the floor in every direction. Each plateau was about twenty feet across by forty feet long. It was an excessive amount of space for the eight students on Ernie's side, even more so for the six students on Ani's side. The plateaus were separated by about 12 feet at their closest point.

  "Okay, class," Mr. Tremblay said to the excited students. They peered down at the floor below and their fellow students across from them. Mr. Tremblay had to try several times to regain the class's attention. "Here at Apple Gorge, we are building a new suspension bridge for the static rail system." His camera zoomed out and the class saw the ongoing construction project and the deep gorge behind him. Autonomous and manned craft buzzed around the bridge. The image lacked detail but it was an impressive site nonetheless. "But before you can build a bridge like this, you need to learn to build basic structures."

  "For today's lab," Mr. Tremblay continued when he had adjusted the camera back on his face. "You are going to build a bridge across our simulated gorge."

  "But Mr. Tremblay," Ani shouted to be heard over the talking from her classmates. "Mr. Tremblay?"

  "Yes, Ani, what is it?"

  "What materials do we build the bridge with?"

  Mr. Tremblay looked surprised at the question. "Thank you, Ani, I nearly forgot."

  Then he murmured to himself while he looked away from the screen for a minute. Soon, two drones zipped into the lab through an opening high up on the ten-story structure. Suspended beneath each drone was a load of different sized planks, which they carefully delivered onto the two raised platforms where the students waited. Then the drones zipped away.