Episode 1

Start with Barely Normality

I wasn’t what you’d call your average teen girl of 2124. Several things were a factor in this. One was that my parents were still together after five years. The likelihood of a couple even reaching 1 year was at an all-time low. They even had a divorce office in the airport now, in case the couple were sick after coming home from their honeymoon. This made celebrity lives all the more scandalous.

Another one was that I wasn’t in any so-called ‘Clikk’. The overall Clikk idea was ridiculous. There was the ‘Goff Clikk’, which my best friend was proud to be a part of, the ‘Pinkies Clikk’ (which I particular detested for their snobby attitudes and superficial personalities), the ‘Trakkie botums Clikk’ (notoriously well known for being obsessed with all sport-related things) and countless other Clikks, all of them full for the most part of people that made me physically sick upon sight.

And there was finally that I was asexual. Yes, asexual. While my best friend had raging, bisexual hormones I seemed to have given her all of mine. I am not attracted to anybody. At all. Ever. The idea of sex just makes me roll my eyes in irritation.

This was one of the reasons my parents were not average. They would be absolutely over the moon if I got a boyfriend, even more so if we had underage sex and they’d be thrilled if we had an accidental child out of wedlock. Yep. They’re totally nuts and horrified by my lack-of-sexuality. Hell, they’d probably be very happy if they caught me making out with another chick, they were desperate for their only child to one day have a wedding.

I might one day. But not out of love, just to get my parents to shut the hell up. Just to a fellow asexual who wanted to dodge the harassment of his or her parents. Ah, how romantic.

In all regards, I was a freak of nature. I also hadn’t conceded to the mind-numbing notion of the Simplified Spelling, and for such I had been placed in an advanced group of my school. The advanced group didn’t replace words with numbers and used the same system that had served England well before the start of 2124.

Oh, and one more thing. I was fourteen and attending my first sleepover today. Most girls had their first sleepover at age seven. I can’t imagine why, it was some sort of assurance for girls to group together and giggle over boys, despite not even having attractions to them due to being absolutely nowhere near puberty.

But ignore that. Imagine now, a normal 2120s street. Basically it’s as many houses as physically possible squished next to one road under a spleen-pink sky. Don’t ask about the sky, it’s not been the same since 2062, apparently.

Now imagine a 14 year old girl with long, violet hair falling down to her arse, lugging a ridiculously overstuffed bag up to a red door and knocking on it, looking slightly impatient and wearing a seemingly random assortment of colours. Pause for a second on the blue-eyed girl glowering at the door.

That would be me, Kiki Smutten Firrson Yes, the one with the rainbow coloured shirt and clashing white trench coat and ripped-effect blue jeans, with the weird orange bobble hat to boot is me. Don’t ask about my name, it is shite. Everybody just calls me Smutt, usually. People, Mum and Dad included, say that Kiki sounds so much better, but I like Smutt. So deal with it. I’ll accept nothing else.

Now, play and watch in wonder. I tap my foot impatiently and rap my knuckles against the door again, beginning to lose my cool.

”Give me a goddamn minute!” my best friend screeches in reply. I grin to myself as she thunders down the stairs to open the door. Despite the fact it’s four in the afternoon, I’d be willing to bet any money that she rolled out of bed twenty minutes ago and had just finished applying her eyeliner. The door swings open to reveal a rather unnaturally thin girl in the doorway with black hair that flopped over one eye and a short ponytail. Now pause for minute again. Notice something interesting? Yep, she’s wearing a black raven necklace, the distinguishing mark of the Goff Clikk. This is none other than the extremely loyal Ank Buck, a proud and notable member of the Clikk. I’m opposed to the Clikks, but when I was 13 myself and Ank had fought.

I cannot remember for the life of me what it was about. We were talking in class, in a group and somehow us two managed to get in a fierce argument about something trivial and then we ended up fighting at break time.

We’ve been best friends ever since. Go figure. The unnaturally thin girl in question was wearing a white vest top which revealed her navel. Over which she wore an unbuttoned stripy black-and-white fleece (as usual, it was sort of her trademark) and she was also wearing a pair of black shorts with a ridiculous amount of pockets and zips crammed onto them. Yep. That’s Ank for you. No colour at all. It was bizarre to most that we weren’t mortal enemies, never mind best friends.

Now, you can stop pausing and continue watching.

I push my way past her unannounced and drop my bag at the foot of her stairs, stretching and yawning like it had been some great hike from the top of the street to her house. Ank clicks her tongue disapprovingly at my instant taking to her house and closes the door behind her.

“So, what we doing first? Movies, sweets, melting stuff? I liked melting stuff when I came over yours last Saturday,” I ask, amusing myself by turning on and off the lights. She slapped my arm and I stopped, still grinning cheekily.

“You’re a total freak Smutt, you know that?” she says with a weary smile, as if she’s sick of me already as we walk up the stairs and into Ank’s room, where I instantly take to poking about in the drawers for her diary as usual. Ank wrote the most amusing things in her diary. It was the only place you’d ever find her being intentionally funny. Then again, there was standard Goff poetry. I had often wondered if it was some sort of requirement to produce three pages of Goff poetry a week, but Ank would never tell me and I didn’t care enough to ask around.

”You love me really,” I reply quickly. I seemed to say that far too much. And I didn’t just mean around Ank. I meant around absolutely everybody. She sighs and collapses onto her bed, turning on the TV with her foot and flicking through the 3670.5 channels she had. I say point five because last month she was on the phone and ranting about the fact her favourite channel ‘only decides to freaking function half of the bloody time I want to watch it!’.

”Of course. Now finally I can ask you about that thing that happened on Friday,” Ank says and rolls onto her stomach, staring directly at me. Bah. Okay. I thought that when I left school Friday afternoon and received no phone calls yesterday (Saturday) I was getting away. But oh no, Ank somehow managed to grab hold of all the news. I swear to god the Goffs have their own secret radio station. I sit down as I found her diary and broke off the rather pathetic lock with my teeth. Again.

“What happened on Friday that you can finally ask me about, dude?” I ask, deciding to at least wind her up a little so that I can have a bit of fun before having to recall that stupid story again. It was just so…gah…stupid.

“You know exactly what I’m about to ask you about that happened on Friday that I’m about you ask you about!” she snaps. I burst out laughing at that. That sentence is just…gold. She wasn’t even intending to be funny. That’s the thing with Ank, you see. She never liked to be funny. She didn’t see the very distinct difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. She just always ends up making people laugh, and she absolutely freaking hates it. I am the only one who can get away with laughing at her unintentional humour without a smack to the face.

“Yes. Yes I do,” I say with a smile and flick through the pages of her diary. She didn’t care that I was reading it, she’s far too used to it by now. That’s why it wasn’t half as fun anymore. She used to wrestle me to the ground to snatch it back and I always would run away and hide somewhere. A game of Hide-and-Seek between an overly playful idiot and an overly serious Goff who had never yelled ‘Ready or not, here I come!’ in all her life and didn’t intend to.

“Well tell me then!” she yells. I grin and hold back a laugh at the sheer impatience in her tone. I only had two friends. Ank and a young boy from my science class called Markus. Okay, admittedly he was more of an ‘obvious-crusher’ than a friend, but he knew he was a asexual and I liked hanging around with the guy. Despite his annoying crush, he was a genuinely nice dude.

“Only if you make me some cookie dough. Oh, and melt some chocolate for me,” I say with a grin. She gives me a glare that could freeze the toes off a penguin, but I just snigger. That’s another thing about me. I never giggle, always snigger.

“I am not making you some goddamn…” she begins but I simply stick my fingers in my ears and start to sing ‘Lalalalalala!’ very loudly. This continues for a few minutes before Ank is sick of it and storms off downstairs to get my cookie dough and melted chocolate.

“Niice,” I muse to myself happily, flicking through the pages of the diary. Lately her entries had been becoming a bit dull. All I could find was Goff poetry and whiny entries about her parents splitting up. Her parents split up three months ago, just before their 1st wedding anniversary and Ank was quick to use this as ammunition for her poetry. I stand up and begin to bounce on her bed, rehearsing the poetry in a mournful voice,

“There is black starlight on my home

My heart has been torn from my chest

By a knife of betrayal! And hate!

There is no love in this house

A house I dared once call a home!” I scream. I roll my eyes. Geez. Goffs. Jeez. She even decorated it with little broken black hearts. I’ve gotten bored of this already so I flick through the pages for a few more seconds before tossing it aside. I bounce about on the bed a bit more and grab the remote, flicking through the channels before I finally find a good music channel. I quirk an eyebrow. This music was over hundred years old, dude! The lyrics were pretty good and before I know it I’m singing along to it. Awfully.

As I sing the last few ‘Can’t stand me now’s Ank walks in with two bowls and two metal spoons. She dumps them on the bed and I sit down, grinning as I shove a spoonful of melted chocolate into my mouth. Chocolate is heaven on earth, my mum always says.

Ank sits down and looks at me expectantly. I hold up one finger, telling her to wait as I lick the chocolate off the spoon purposefully slow.

“Come on!” Ank screams after I spend a few minutes torturing her and making her wait. I grin maliciously at her and recline against the poster-covered walls.

“Friday…Friday…Friday,” I mumble and scratch my chin thoughtfully. The taller girl loses her patience and hits me across the head with the back of her hand. Sheesh. So short-tempered.

“Just tell me what the hell happened in FFP!” she roars. I sigh. Pause. FFP, I guess I owe you an explanation. FFP stands for Fast Food Prep. Basically it’s a class where the failures of tomorrow are prepared for their life in fast food servitude. Ank get pretty good grades, so she gets out of this. The only things I really do well in are English Language (can’t write for crap) and art (I like to draw) otherwise I’m a bit of a dumbarse.

Obviously, doing well in an outdated language and being able to draw nice cartoons can only get you so far. I can’t do maths, computers absolutely hate me with a burning passion, in history I doodle all over my book and in science Markus and I just always end up breaking something. Don’t get me started on normal cooking class. Lets just say I ended up scorching a hole through the wall once. And my religion teacher is a complete nut. He just stands there all day preaching on about how we’re all going to die one day due to the Satanists. He never shuts up about the Satanists.

But more about the confusion of my school life later. Play.

“Alright,” I say and hold up my hands, “I was drawing in my book again when I was supposed to be drawing the diagram I needed of folding burger boxes out of perfectly square card. Which, by the way, I cannot do to save my life.” Ank glowers at me, saying silently that if I don’t get back on topic soon she’s going to rip my ovaries out with a spoon. I clear my throat and continue with the story, “Okay, you know that new kids, Frits? The only other kid not in a Clikk?”

“Yeah, but I thought the story went that you gave Ms Bulfrog a black eye,” Ank says, one green eye half-closed in confusion. I nod and make a hand gesture telling her to shut up.

”Goddamnit Ank, I’m getting to it,” I say with a scowl. I recline and touch my fingertips together, “Okay, so Ms Bulfrog had put Frits next to me. You notice something weird about that kid? How about the fact he has a chunk of metal freaking fused to his neck!?”

Ank snorts at me, looking sceptical. She rolls her eyes and folds her arms across her chest, a disapproving stare thrown casually my way.

”That’s probably just one of those daft piercing things,” Ank says dismissively. Did she want to hear the story, or did she just want to say everything I did or said was stupid? Jeez. Goffs, you couldn’t win with them at all.

“Just shut up and let me tell the damn story,” I say. She closes her mouth, still looking a very incredulous and I clear my throat and continue, “Well, I was all like ‘Dude, what is that?’ but he just blanked me and continued making notes. After a few minutes I got sick and grabbed it in my fingers and tried to pull it off. He hit me for that! Tuh. Yeah, so fair.”

“You tried to rip a chunk of metal, apparently imbedded into his skin, out of his goddamn neck, what did you expect you idiot!?” Ank yells and puts her hand on her hips, giving me a look of deep annoyance.

“You love me really,” I say again, smirking to myself. She rolls her eyes and I eat a few spoonfuls of cookie dough before I continue with my story, “Okay. So then I hit him back. Lightly. The teacher turns and sees us and we’re getting into a girly slap fight. Ms Bulfrog comes up behind us and he slaps me across the face and I fall back, slam into the teacher and give her a black-eye.”

”That’s all? Man, I was hoping you had really whacked her one,” Ank replies after a few seconds. I bristle. Jesus Christ on a bun, was there any way to win with this girl!? Ank stands up, looking slightly disappointed and I eat a bit more of my melted chocolate and cookie dough. I’ve probably got it all over my face by now, but I don’t care. It’s far too fun to stop.

“C’mon, we should go to the shops before my Dad comes. With the disappearances he’s been hella paranoid,” Ank says. I try and pull a puppy-dog-eye face (I just want to sit and eat my junk, thank you very much) but my best friend isn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to me. Tuh. Meanie-face.

“But I wanna eat the chocolate!” I whine in response, standing up anyway. She throws me a dirty look and I decide to not rebel. I stick the bowls of cookie mix and chocolate under the bed and follow Ank down the stairs. We go out into the street. It looks about ready to rain, there’s a few dark purple clouds in the sky. Remember what I said about the sky? Yeah, we humans screwed up big time with that one.

We walk along, me chattering endlessly about random things and Ank occasionally interjects, but really its just me doing a monologue. That’s fine with me, I love talking. Perhaps I make absolutely no sense, but I like to talk in front of people. The more, the better. Bizarre since that’s most teenagers’ idea of a nightmare, but meh.

I look to see that we’re nearing the store and Ank breathes a sigh of relief, glad to be away from me and my crazy preaching. We enter the store. It stinks of stale gum, barely stifled alcohol and the shopkeeper is rocking back and forth on his chair in much the same way a sane person wouldn’t. We agree to split up and I decide that I better gather up as many sweets and crisps as possible. Ank will probably blow all her money on boring shite.

I walk up to the cash register with bags of crisps and sweets overflowing from my hands and dump it in front of the very nuts shopkeeper, who stops for a second to total the amount. I wait for a minute. I wait for another minute. I looked blankly at him.

”Money please,” he says in a heavy accent I can’t really identify. I stare at him blankly a little more, as if just for effect. He hasn’t told me how much all this crap is! I glance at the register. £13.40? Sheesh, this better be good junk. I scrape together the money from the bottom of the my purse and slam in on the counter, stuffing my goods into a bag. I wait outside for a few seconds and Ank comes out of the shop, carrying shitloads of crap.

“Hey, you sure you got enough stuff?” I say cheekily. If it wasn’t for the fact it was taking both her hands to carry the bag, I’m sure she would have slapped me right about then. We walk back into the streets and the rain starts to fall. Its nice, usually we don’t get brisk showers like this. It’s storms, acid, hail, snow, but almost never just a cold shower. Thankfully, the acid rain alarms hadn’t gone off on the TV this morning, so we were free to do what we liked outside without fear of having our skulls mangled or something silly like that.

We walk before we see a group assembled at the end of the street. I groan to myself. Fantastic, just what we need. A visit from Beatz Clikk, both a comical and dangerous Clikk. Okay, pause.

The Beatz Clikk are those kids you see with their grey hoodies who are always freestyling it in the alleys. I’m surprised to see them out in the streets like this. Strange, really. They usually waste their time in the alleys doing some pitiful attempts at rap, smoking or spray-painting crap. If they’re feeling particularly adventurous, they’ll attempt to do a few of these things at the same time. Wow, party on dudes.

Thing is, they also get utterly and ridiculously uptight if somebody so much as dares look at them and this usually ends up in somebody being covered in bruises and cuts. By somebody, of course, I mean me. To make matters worse, they hate Goffs.

Okay, play. I tug on Ank’s arm and silently point at the assembled Beatz. Another thing I hate about them is their replacing of ‘s’ with ‘z’. Why? Just, why? Ank grimaces and we silently turn around and decide to take a quick detour through the back alley, rather than try and sneak past the aggressive and clearly sexually frustrated Beatz.

“Hey…whazzat?” I ask as we are halfway down the street, squinting and leaning forward. There’s this weird blue glow at the end of the alley…

“I dunno, doesn’t look friendly,” Ank replies and steps back. I, however, step forward curiously.

”Two humans detected!” a robotic voice says and I jump back in alarm as there is a crash and a beam of yellow light.

“What the fuck!?” I manage to scream before I fall back and turn over, placing my hands over my head and wondering what the hell was going on.

Pause! Okay, that right there? That is when my life went from ‘not quite average’ to ‘completely off the hook, over the top crazy insane’.