School Of Hard Knox

Johnno zipped up in his school-suit – he’d just been fitted for it. Kindergarten started tomorrow. The suit utilised nanotech to strengthen the kevlar base of the skin and it should stop most rounds, and even work to slow down anything specialised. Taser, pepper spray, all packed. The school encouraged defensive measures for everyone now – it was accepted that they couldn’t hope to control the issues around guns and psychiatric patients who wanted to kill children, so rather than feel hopeless they decided to do something. His mum had spared no expense with this thing – she wanted him to be safe. He hated wearing the hood and the face-plate but so many killers were just going for the headshot rather than the body because they wanted to kill and not injure.

All teachers had to be weapons-trained now. Doors were only ident-lockable by teachers. School secretaries had executive hack orders at their disposal – there was no kind of security that they couldn’t penetrate through. School caretakers were equipped with mind-linked puppet drones to dispose of bombs. It was hard-core working for the education system these days, but it paid well … it was equivalent to signing up for the army; most schools were warzones.

Johnno spent the first two weeks of school with no idea what anyone looked like. Until they had done extensive background checks on everyone, including full medical work-ups to make sure that they weren’t bio-bonded to any kind of weaponised disease or anything like that – only then could they have a lesson where they weren’t suited up. Freedom came at a high price, but it was a price tht most parents were willing to pay.

In his first three years of school nothing happened, but the self-replicating machinery in his suit meant that it kept pace with his rapid rate of growth. The suit looked as new as it had on the first day that he had put it on. It had been through several upgrades, and the school had intensified it’s security many times in the intervening years. That third year though someone, skirting the bleeding edge of technology, disgruntled because of lack of recognition of his genius, and gifted with endless supplies of money by his guilt-purchase parents, had got through the security system, and had come gunning for Johnno and his class.

The bullets that hit Johnno were painful, and he would need medical attention afterwards, but that was acceptable given that he survived the attack.

The attacker wasn’t so lucky. Whereas Johnno’s suit was defensive, it was perfectly acceptable, and backed by law, for someone to have an offensive suit, and that is what took care of the man. He was painted red with a laser and a whole series of bullets entered that point and opened a crater up in his back.

Outrage filled the airwaves for a while, but that died down like it always did. Apathy loaded every chamber and squeezed every trigger, and apathy kept that chamber spinning like it was rigged to the wheel of samsara and wanted to keep people rotating like Sisyphus, so fast that they might achieve some kind of escape velocity just by doing the sameold shit. It was madness.