text: “Pneumatic” is hard to spell. Every one of my students struggles with the non-phonetics, and only one of them managed to scratch out the nine letters in perfect form today. One single student. It’s not their fault. These kids can’t spell for shit. Autocompletion and predictive text modeling has ferried most of them through language courses up to this point. They think writing is a waste of their time. Honestly, they may have a point. As long as I can remember, most of our kids have had screens in their hands before they even knew what a pencil was. Some of the more involved parents made a point of teaching analog writing, but today I’m lucky if a student even recognizes the shape of one from an emoticon on an app or something. Regardless, it’s *my* job to teach it now. “Mr. Griff, I- I swear to God, I didn’t cheat.” Between his stammers and the noises in the background, I could barely make out Malcolm’s plea. Even through the grainy image of a video conference, the honesty behind his eyes was striking. I believed him. I muted the other students in the virtual class space before responding. “You did it once. You can do it again. Set up a new document file and add Vice Principal Ikiwa as a collaborator,” I chided back in a washed-up scare tactic. She’d never waste a second of her time reading these, and anyway Malcom’s cheated on tests before. The kid’s brilliant, but I patched him into my study hall to retake the quiz anyway. His eyes glazed over, and he rebuffed my hollow threat with a curse under his breath. Malcolm was used to lying to teachers, but he was even more familiar with adults lying to his face. He was already scribbling his second response when the document landed in my class dashboard. Why was the connection so bad? Malcolm’s classmates had teased him about the static many times, even once today, but the audio quality was clearly worse today. Ever since the Icarus Missions took flight a decade ago, almost ninety-percent of students had enrolled in the STEM track for middle school. Watching a man walk on Mars breeds a new set of idols for them. Mars, heaven incarnate. Better than nothing. I’ve watched the dreams of athletes die after the virus forced leagues to fold in the twenties. eSports were all the rage, but no one had a hope of making it into those leagues without top-shelf GPUs and private broadband. My students were lucky to go a day without a rolling blackout in their neighborhood. After robotics started lowering the hospital’s bottom-line, I witnessed a generation of doctors close off their hearts to school. I would have thought a virus that ended every social gathering would spur more kids to medicine, but there’s no money in it. Anyways, these kids grew up behind screens. They don’t even know what life used to be like. At least they still believe in something. I hid my drink from the webcam and snuck in a sip. Guess I’m drinking in the afternoons now. “Mr. Griff, why the hell you got me scribbling this bullshit again? We can just use autocorrect, and I have math--” “Curse again, and I’ll take the five points you earned earlier,” I cut him off before we started the same conversation we’d had during every analog writing assignment. How could a little kid curse like that? Where did he even learn those words? This class was meaningless to him, just like his peers. My ploy was a cheap shot, but he needed the redirection. All of the other students who requested a retake had completed their quizzes and logged off. Just like in class, Malcolm was the last one still writing. He spat another few insults under his breath before his stylus lit up in my dashboard again. He’d settled into a focused pace now. Turning out about one letter every three seconds. Writing by hand was clearly frustrating the young boy. I watched the awkward etching delivered in real-time, sneaking another pull on my flask. Thirty minutes elapsed, and he had not yet spelled a single word correctly. I wanted to help him. Sublimate the answers in his mind somehow, but this struggle was the best version of that for him. I knew this. I’ve known this for years, but still it’s hard to watch a bright kid lose faith in themselves. I turned to my window that overlooked the low levels of the city. A patchwork of pale light fought through the haze. This kid deserves a better world than the one we left him. My generation looked to Mars because we already failed the children here. Now, they spend their most formative years behind whichever walls we afforded them. Twenty-five of my students don’t even have walls to call home. Their daily commute to the satellite learning centers may be the only time anyone in their generation gets to go outside. When the virus first mutated, we did nothing. We continued what we knew, what we wanted. We politicized science to keep profits high and engines turning. The only idol we worshipped was ourselves, masked as the “economy”, rationalized as “normalcy”. Now, my houseless students will *never* be able to take off their masks to share time with loved ones, not even for a second. I snuck another sip of whiskey. We’ll just do the same to Mars. A shout from Malcom’s little brother broke through the veil of white noise and grounded me back to my desk. “Try holding it with your left hand.” “What?” Malcolm broke his line in the middle of an illegible “g”. He was actually sweating at this point, the flares of his nostrils communicating more than the stylus. “Hold the pen in your left hand, and see if you like it. Worst-case-scenario, you can just switch back, right?” It had already been an hour past my contracted time, so there was no harm in a gamble at this point. He looked puzzled, like he’d never given it consideration before now. Maybe he hadn’t. “Any better?” He finished scribbling “photograph” with two “f”s. The vain attempt took him the same amount of time as every other item on the quiz, but that surprised even me. His pen hit the sensor with even more intention than before. He smiled. “Yeah, maybe a little.” Letter after letter, his marks began to take more definition. Malcolm began churning out ill-fated spelling attempts in half the time now. His grin widened, and he plugged along. I caught a glimpse of my own smirk in the dashboard. The kid caught a second wind. Sweat began to bead on a determined brow at this point. Malcolm’s tense fidgets had melted into fluid action. That’s when I heard it. I don’t know how such a faint sound stood out from the cries of his siblings in the background, but it did. It was a subtle, rhythmic hissing sound, like brakes on a train. I had heard it many times before, but never once from a child, let alone a student of mine. I lowered my own volume, and minimized the monitor panel on my screen. I whisked through dashboard settings, minimizing the background interference, bringing up the symptom biometrics software offered publicly for the first time last year. It was Malcolm’s breathing. Short, faint gasps. My heart sunk in my chest. My computer's biometric display was awash with red flags and warning indicators. I muted my own microphone and called his parents immediately. The salty sweat on my fingers caked the touchscreen while I reported the indicators to the school administration. How could I have missed this earlier? I know I ran the scans in class. I know I followed every protocol they put in place for this. Would that second-class, derivative software even have picked up on this if I had run it twice? I glanced back down at the flask, my own breaths absent at this point. I did run the scan in class today, right? Of course. I must have. I checked the logs anyway. “Malcolm Hopkins: Grade: 6 Homeroom: Keller Infrared Flag: Negative Pupil Dilation: Negative Breathing Rate: Negative Discharge: (1) cough(s) reported at 10:17A.M. ...” I stopped reading. Left to his devices, Malcolm began spelling the last item on the list. He was beaming at this point. He rounded off the ninth letter of “pneumatic” and called out. “Mr. Griff, I’m done!” I opened the monitor again to meet the twelve-year-old’s delighted face. He’d missed every single word except the last one, but Malcolm had no way of knowing at this point. “How was it the second time?” I asked, with little concern for this child’s writing skills at this point. “It was a lot better! I think I’m left-handed Mr. Griff. That’s crazy! Maybe my little brothers are left-handed too!” Malcolm turned to shine his pride toward the younger children whirring in the bedroom. “Awesome!” I said with confidence before a whimper of fear bit my breath. “You know Mr. Griff, I like that word “pneumatic”! We talked about that one in science class. That’s what they use for brakes on the trains here, but Ms. Keller says those won’t work on Mars. She says we have to use magnets or something. You know Mr. Griff, I’m gonna build those trains on Mars someday.” “Y-you make sure you get that math homework done alright? We need the best and brightest on Mars.” He held up his right thumb in confirmation, but switched to his left with a playful laugh. He didn’t notice his mother's state-issued respirator adorned as she pulled his siblings out of the room. I stared at the status panel on the side of my screen for a little over an hour. “Malcolm Hopkins: Disconnected” The sun had already begun setting, and the glare on my screen didn’t even break the trance. I just kept staring at those three words. It wasn’t until the glint of the flask tucked under my monitor caught my eye that I reached impulsively. With hesitation, I lowered my arm, stood up and walked over to lie in my bed. Malcolm never logged back into my class after that. I never touched that flask again.