Lottie

Lottie waited in the hallway with her class. School was about to start. She looked down at her smock. The number 7 in raised stitching was expertly placed. She rubbed her thumb over the threads. It was her desk number, her food hatch locker number and her assigned workbox ID. It was an intimidating number for her- two strokes that connected with an assertion she felt she didn’t have. She preferred the look of 6 or 8. Both looked like they were in the middle of a beautiful dream. But 7 was her.

A disk above the door started to rotate. Lottie followed in single file to her designated work desk. Metal desk units lined the room three rows of four. Designed by a panel of cultural anthropologists, the room was a cube of muted grey with a screen as the front wall. Students attend school in their corporal state because the political authority on Neptune Station encourage, with rather lengthy policies, the importance of a routine that includes a modicum of daily exercise.

It was a familiar routine. It was a familiar space. All the 12-year-old children in the room placed their workbox in the drawer of their unit and waited for the central screen to load. The screen flashed. All 12 profiles looked up.

“Today is H59/9th hour. Continuing on from…”

The screen scrawled into a fury of lines. At first, everyone assumed it was storm interference. Neptune has at least two mammoth storms throughout the day and sometimes they make a ripple through the station’s power grid. But the screen beeped and blurred for another minute and it wasn’t until it narrowed down to a defeatist black that one of the students said, “I think it’s broken”.

Feet stirred. Heads moved to the direction of the door. Usually, any technical glitch is backed up by a determined group of assistants ready to perform an efficient ballet of solutions.

Lottie was distracted. Lately, she was finding it hard to stay focused. She would blink and not realize that 10 minutes would go by. Last week, after her sister’s funeral, she found herself in the department of sustainable foods and she saw a single white balloon hovering over a patch of blue AstroTurf. It was a display advertising ellopatic nuggets. When she got home, she realized she had been staring at that one display for over an hour. She didn’t understand why.

Before she walked away, she took a single blade of fake grass from the display and put it in her pocket. It was still in there. She reached for it and then changed her mind, knocking her hand against the desk wall.

The desk units were walled on the right. Each desk had a touchpad and a printer that churned out small receipts of code that were filed in each student’s own workbox. Her fumble had shifted her printer, so she re-aligned it against the wall. A layer of thin metal snapped and fell. It rested on the printer in a sound that was almost silent. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed. No- one. She surmised that the crack was big enough to put her hand in and she shoved it in before she even had time to think about it.

She found a notebook. Hard cover. Rounded edges. Well kept. Elastic banded. Black.

Lottie had seen notebooks before. She knew what they were. They were in the sealed section of her parent’s library. Of course, she wasn’t allowed to touch them. Her dad brought one down one night and showed her what was inside one. His great grandmother’s handwriting flowed across pages and pages of ruled paper. Even though it was in Standard English, it looked like it came from another universe. It wasn’t something you read if you were bored or just wanted to be entertained. You read it because you wanted to know something about someone who meant something to someone you love. That one person you love. She opened it slowly.

A yellow she didn’t know was yellow flung out of the book and hit her hard in the face. It was a Van Gogh field of sunflower yellow. A yellow that had never entered her visual vocabulary. In almost pain she turned the page- another yellow- a yellow that looked like the sun reflecting off a wheat field. She wanted to cry. Markings of erratic sunbeams were shooting through what looked like a glorious sky of sunset, of pure light. What was this color? Who did this?

Neptune is blue. Neptune is God. What is yellow? She put her nose to the page. She felt she could smell the faint remainder of a chemical dye. She gently put her thumb on the thickest line of ink. It didn’t transfer to her finger. She turned another page. A slip of paper fell to the floor. It was rectangular- the shape of a receipt. In a simple font it read, Neptune colony -$20, 000 UW dollars. The font was nice. The 0’s were like little hills in a still landscape. It was a good weight, grain, and the signature code was embossed.

The cheque moved to the left of her desk. She knows what it is. She knows its value. The tech team have finally arrived. She closes the notebook. A rhythm of efficiency changes the atmosphere in the classroom. Lachlan sits to her left and he always has kind eyes. She wants to show him what she has in her hands. She stops. She looks at Lachlan. It isn’t time. She will take this notebook and add it to her pocket of important objects and slowly, slowly try and discover what it is she has really found. Yellow.