Back to Junior High; VR; Nanotechnology Spy vs. Spy

I had to go back to junior high school to take four classes I’d somehow missed, in order to satisfy requirements for my degree program, though I was worried that they might not accept them. Outside the school on the first morning I met the teacher from one of my classes back in 1978, but she appeared to be in her late 30s. She’d apparently had some kind of eye surgery, and was temporarily wearing special protective glasses.

She asked me if I could bring in one of my old exams. I said that I’d try to find it, and bring it on Monday. She was disappointed, and then I realized that today was Monday, not Friday as I’d thought, so I said that I’d try to bring it in by Wednesday.

I went inside, but I wasn’t sure which builidng and room my class was in. Fortunately I was able to find my class schedule, and made it to the room on time. The teacher was a man in his mid 40s. He had us work in class on a paper, using the internet for research. I needed definitions of some obscure terms for a glossary for my paper, and a web search only found a single web site in Russia. They did have the definitions in English, though they weren’t quite what I expected.

The teacher said that for future class sessions, he expected that when he entered the room he would find us seated with our heads on our desks.

Class was over around 10 AM, and I checked my schedule again. My next class wasn’t until 2:30 PM. There weren’t any students entering the room for another class, so I decided that I would stay in the room for a while to study, as did a few of my fellow students.

One of my classmates set up a display and was trying to sell some kind of gold university insignias. He had them for a lot of different universities, but not the one that I had applied to. He said that he could order one for me if I paid a non-refundable deposit up front, but I didn’t want to do that since I hadn’t yet been accepted. He invited another student and me into his office, which was in some kind of virtual reality environment. The other student became very agitated at the abstract nature of the surroundings, and badgered him into changing it into a more normal set of rooms, like a typical home. Finally that student left. I played a game of backgammon with the proprietor, though he had some really strange rules involving roling dice to determine the stakes. Finally I had to leave

I met the woman teacher again, and she invited me to her place for coffee. She lived in the penthouse of a highrise. It was very luxuriously furnished. While we were drinking coffee I heard sirens, and looked down from the balcony to the street. Police cars were converging on the building. That’s when I realized that she was in league with them.

She insisted that whatever the police were up to had nothing to do with me, but I knew better. I ran down the stairwell a few flights, then into a small utility closet. I was able to use nanotechnology to change my appearance significantly, making me look like an elderly black woman, but I knew that the enemy would expect such disguises and would be searching everyone leaving the building. I could do more elaborate transformations with nanotechnology, but it used a lot of power, and I had very limited reserves.

I made it partway to the lobby before an enemy agent suspected me, and the chase was on in ernest. I ducked into the mail room. There didn’t appear to be any escape route, so I was cornered. I dived into a mail cart, and invoked an emergency nanotech transformation to split into thousands of pieces each of which resembled a piece of mail. Unfortunately this significantly reduced my level of self-awareness, and it was very risky. There was a fair amount of redundancy, so loss of some fragments wouldn’t be harmful, but if too many were lost or destroyed I’d never be able to transform back.

Since there were many mail carts there, it would take the enemy a while to find the right one. The enemy figured out immediately what I’d done, and rather than attempting to identify the specific mail cart, believed (incorrectly) that in this form water would be harmful to me. Enemy agents dumped the contents of all of the mail carts into the swimming pool.

A series of further transformations and chases ensued, the details of which are no longer clear, but eventually I escaped.

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