IQ 138 by Ainsley Dillon (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📖

Prologue-The Surge

“What is the square root of 144?” That was how my first day of kindergarten started 8 years ago. After the United Nations decided we should become one civilization, and not have any different governments, and have everyone speak the same language; english, the new generation of everyone on the planet was presumed to be geniuses in every way.

 

That’s when the surge happened.

 

One day, around the year 2148, a man named Jesse Handleton was in his study, focusing on his new assignment from the government. Handleton was assigned to making a new hybrid human, one that could withstand anything that the Earth throws at it, a new generation of perfect soldiers.

 

When Handleton had successfully completed his mission, the government agents from around the world started to hand out the vaccine to give to pregnant mothers at the hospital. Of course, the mothers couldn’t know what was happening to the children, it was a top secret mission. Luckily, no mothers or children were harmed by this new invention, or so it seemed.

 

With the children that were vaccinated, after about two years of their existence, the children started to exhibit new habits. I, for one, used to change the color of my hair to the rate of my happiness all day. So, when my older brother Adam would push me down, my hair turned blue and I would cry. But, when I ate ice cream for dinner, my hair would turn a fluorescent pink. The government started calling this new hybrid of humans Morphs.

 

Since the creation of the Morphs, the government decided that by age thirteen the IQ of a juvenile should be above 140; the IQ of a genius. My testing day was in two weeks, and there was a lot of things they expected us to know. As an example, we had to know the first 500 numbers of the Fibonacci Code. Which would be easy, you think, given that the Code is just simply the two previous numbers together to come up with the next one. But, then comes History. I think that History is mostly useless, so I have to study hard for this part of the exam. All of the kings, queens, basically all of the predecessors of the U.S. Government.The test propaganda was that the first section was 356 pages long and you had 45 minutes to complete it. What?!

My brother just passed the test 5 years ago, but we haven't seen him since, even though the letters from his regime reassure us every month that he will start to make regular visits. My mother says we will probably never see him again, because my father disappeared just the same, but my mother hasn't seen him for almost 14 years.

Chapter 1- I Still Hate History

 

       

       Chapter 1: I Still Hate History

 

Today was the IQ testing, and I wasn’t hungry. Actually I was quite the opposite. My stomach doing backflips, frontflips, side flips?! Just, anything that I could fail in gymnastics, that was what my stomach was doing. And yet, my mother kept pestering me. “You need to eat Maiah,” she says. “No one ever passed the IQ test on an empty stomach!” Really she just wanted me to eat the Cheerios that expired last year. “Well, then I’ll be the first to accomplish the feat!” And I stab my fork into the moldy Cheerios that started to turn green a couple of weeks ago.

 

Finally, to convince my mother that I was okay, I forced a couple bites of the revolting cereal into my mouth. She reminded me three times over that today should be just the math and science fraction of the test. History should be the last day, which I am glad for, I need five days to study before that part. For the 6 days that I would be in the IQ facility, a.k.a, “My Death Setting”, I would have to share a bunk with another student. My only hopes is that it wouldn’t be with Ally Henderson. Gosh, that girl makes me want to snap my pencil every time she speaks in that too-high, five-year-old girl voice. And everytime I tell her that her voice has yet to hit puberty, she huffs and goes over to her friends and starts talking about how, “Well, she has a high voice too!” And- Oh, I think I can spare you from her horrendous comebacks.

 

As I stumble out the door, my mother piles me with kisses and sends me up to the tram station where I will be picked up at 8 a.m. sharp. I’ve always been a morning person, but my best friend, Cally, was not. She waddles out of her house down the street with her over-stuffed bag of books and food that would feed an elephant for days, and almost falls asleep on my shoulder.

She starts to drool.

 

“Eww!” I exclaim, and shrug her off, probably harder than I had to. “If you’re going to drool over anything, should drool over Zachary.” Zachary Gefferson was probably the closest thing Cally had ever gotten to having a crush. She would stop rambling about him after she realized that him and I sat next to each other in History. In my opinion, he was the most stuck-up, annoying guy I’ve ever met.

 

Cally shoves me and whispers something that no human could hear as he walks by. Then Zachary does the most unexplainable thing, he winks at me. Cally squeals with delight and pulls me off to the side as Zachary goes to talk to his friends.

 

“Oh. My. God. He actually looked at you. You two could so be a thing. I could see it now.”

 

I scowled and opened up to my bookmark in the deep center of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This book makes me laugh so hard I can barely breathe. I mean, they die, just to end a family feud. I only get passed a few pages when I hear the unmistakeable sound of a tram horn. The bus stops to pick us up. I gasp. This isn’t a school tram, it’s a government transport tram. No one, not even my father or brother has ever ridden one of these. As far as I’ve heard, no one in this part of town has even ridden one. I board, and I am delighted to see a coffee and fruit stand. I settle on a decaf with 1 cup of sugar and a hint of cream. (I like to drink coffee, it makes me feel grown up. But, I still don’t like the taste of it.) Then I grab the whole plate of chocolate covered strawberries, which I assume is supposed to serve everyone, and I go to the very back of the tram, toddling over the weight of all of my stuff.

 

Cally comes along, looking as though she’s had a couple of shots of the extreme espresso, and sits in the seat next to me. And then, my day is ruined. Zachary comes down the aisle and sits in the sit directly across from me, and winks again. This time I don’t hide my emotions. I groan and rotate myself so that my book is facing his annoying face. He laughs, and then settles on reading, The Mighty Thor, which looked as though I could’ve read it when I was two. Cally giggles next to me and pops a strawberry in her mouth. I sigh and continue reading.

 

The trip is supposed to take us six hours to get to the heart of the city, but it feels like forever. I finished Romeo and Juliet, and had started on Hamlet when Zachary started to talk to me.

 

“You better not read that book one more time, it looks like it’s about to fall apart.” Obviously. I loved Hamlet. It was well written, and I had been reading it since third grade. The pages were yellow and torn, my mother used to joke that it had a spine made of scotch tape.

 

“Well, I’m still going to read it without a consideration of your opinion.” I said, and stuffed my face inside the book to play the part of my book-worm self. Zachary laughed, and went back to Thor.

“Why a third grade book?” I asked. “I thought we were all supposed to be geniuses.”

 

Zachary said nothing, for once. I took it as a compliment and went back to reading.

 

All of a sudden, BAM!!, the tram screeches to a stop and we were all shoved off of the bus with our immense luggage. Cally and I walked towards the back of the line to the IQ testing facility, again followed by Zachary and his posse. When we get to the building, a girl named Kai shows us to our rooms.

 

“Now I expect we can all be mature enough to have girls and boys on the same floor! Boys in the odd numbered doors and girls on the evens. For the first two days you can choose your roommates, but from further on they will be assigned.”

 

That got a cheer from most of us, and we all ran to the first room we saw, while tugging our friends. I started to unpack my bags, while Cally continued to talk about Zachary. So, I did the natural thing. I put in my headphones while I unpacked, but acted like I was still listening.

 

After the two hours that Cally talked fluently through, we went to the cafeteria where we were served lunch. The cafeteria was a big circular room with 15 long tables with the fun-spinny office chairs. The buffet was huge, consisting of anything anyone could eat for an entire lifetime.

 

The line was equally as big.

 

Cally and I stood towards the back of the line, which was moving as fast as turtles stampeding through peanut butter. Finally, I got to the first station, fresh fruit. No. Anything reasonably healthy I passed on.

 

So, at the end of it all, I settled with mashed potatoes and ice cream. Not kidding, they actually tasted pretty good together. Ally looked across her table, just so she could stare at me, and then realized what I was eating. She laughed and pretended to throw up at my eating habits. Zachary sat across from me and I could tell Cally was really holding in a romantic comment. I continued eating, pretending I didn’t notice his presence. Then Cally and I started talking about the test. I told her how we are supposed to be taking the math and science portions of the assessment. She looked like she was about to pee her pants. Cally hated science. She preferred reading and writing.

 

When we were all done with our lunches, we threw our plates in the recycling bin and sat back down. Then a lady with a tight pressed pant-suit came to the stage in front of us and explained what part of the assessment we were going to do today.

 

“Now,” she said. “You will all be completing the History portion of the assessment today.”