The two middle-school girls were dressed in the cutest clothes middle-school girls could find. Mandy usually made a threesome, but today she was absent from school. Raven had the news for Ashley.
"Did you hear? Mandy's going to reset."
"Get out─really?
"That's what her mom told mine this morning."
"That's a shame. I really liked her."
"Yeah, now we'll have to find another friend." With this, they turned their attention to algebra, Mandy's least favorite class.
* * *
Gabby Johnson, the head counselor for Parkerhaven Middle School hung up the phone and stared into space. She too, had just gotten the news that Mandy Flannigan had decided to reset her life. Her secretary noticed the distressed look on her face.
"What's the matter, Gabby?"
"I can't believe a 12-year-old girl thinks she's made such a mess of her life that she would be willing to reset. Hell, I can't believe that her parents would let her."
"Sounds like maybe the parents are making her."
Resetting, as it was called, was a psycho-surgical procedure that allowed a person with an embedded brain chip, or EBC, to revert to the last save point, usually the person's last birthday.
Medicorp, the company that made the EBC, had marketed them extensively to parents in the late 2030s, touting them as a way to improve learning and expand intellectual capacity. By 2050, newborn infants routinely received a PKU test and an EBC implant as standard procedure in most hospitals. Parents often felt pressured to give their children all the advantages available to them, especially the chip.
Justin Wortham's accident in 2048 with a high-voltage electrical wire showed the world the possibility of resetting. Wortham was a 30-year-old electrical lineman for Dallas Public Utilities. He had gotten the implant as an adult, hoping it would help him get through law school. Instead, on the afternoon of May 18, 2048, Wortham made history.
While Justin was changing out a transformer, a new coworker mistakenly removed a tagout key, and powered up the system. Wortham was shocked with one hundred thousand volts for approximately 2 seconds before the coworker realized his mistake. When Wortham began recovering from his injuries, doctors soon realized that everything except what had been saved to his EBC had been erased.
Wortham knew everything he had learned in law school up to the end of the previous semester, but he could not dress himself. He had to re-learn to walk. When his physician contacted Medicorp for help, they were more than happy to take over Justin's care, and pay for it, provided they could record every detail about his condition. Justin, whose parents were less than enthusiastic about potty-training their 30-year-old son again, readily agreed.
For the next six years, Justin lived at what became the Medicorp Rehabilitation Clinic in Waco. There he re-learned all the skills he had lost. He was an expert on contract law who could not tie his shoes for about two years. Medicorp put its best minds on his case, working to rehabilitate him and documenting everything about his recovery. It also put the word out seeking other electrocution victims with the chip. Soon there were several dozen people living with Justin, and Medicorp improved its product by several orders of magnitude.
By 2056, the Medicorp held a patent on an EBC that could save experiences and skills at set intervals. Two years later, it patented a procedure to erase the patient's entire brain except what was stored on the chip. The procedure became known as "resetting."
Resetting was a boon for the troubled. Criminals with the chips could be reset by a court order. After a brief period of reconditioning, they could be returned to society, and it was hoped, would lead productive lives. There was a bit of recidivism, but the good people at Medicorp worked tirelessly to iron out the kinks. Most experts in criminal justice held out much hope for eradicating crime by the end of the century.
© 2009, Claire DeCloux
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Comments: 24 ( 1 removed by Claire DeCloux )
But, I can say that the execution of the story is rather good.
I didn't see any glaring errors.
I rated this a TEN, only because they won't let me go higher.
Graphics for Disney Comments</center>THANKS FOR SHARING
I never read science fiction or paranormal and rarely read fantasy, for the same reason I will critizice what you have written.
I don't like fiction based on ideas, but fiction based on feelings.
I read some Harry Potter because the writing style is fascinating.
Science fiction is about an idea.
But even science fiction, or other fantasy genres must include feelings to make it seem interesting.
There was one story I enjoyed a lot, and you may be familiar with it. I believe it might have been written by Kurt Vonngetu (A writer I also did not like).
It was about a computer who fell in love with a girl.
My point is that this computer endeared the reader to it. We cared about the computer, and wept when it did not work out.
I read this story when I was 12 in the Scholastic reader.
What you have here could be very interesting, but you need to make it human. You need to make us care about the character. As it is, this is a sketch, not a story.
I think you also should write this under your real name. Your real voice shines through in all your other writings, even though they are non-fiction.
We need to know that the girl lives and breathes. You have made the 'reset' as the focus of the story, but really the girl is the focus. Start differently. Start with the girl and her life - what she is about, what she cares about and doesn't care about, make su FEEL for her and want her to be happy.
Other than to say I found the introductory sentence clumsy and incomplete (as if setting a scene for a play instead of describing the main characters?), I'm not much help when it comes to actual hard-nosed critiquing but with some polishing, this piece would shine as a first chapter!
Seeing as it is set well into the future- anything is possible. I'm off to read the next chapter. An excellent write!
Do not listen to off-topic rants they are self-serving and easily skipped over. Continue to develop this storyline and best wishes.
her bath
The writing is grammatically clean, but there is at least one structure problem, it seems to me, that wrecks the premise. You have Justin having to be potty-trained and dress himself and, we must assume, reverting to near-childishness in all things. Except that somehow by your rules, he can read and write law perfectly well. There are other skills, such as speech, that would be forgotten if he didn’t have them in his brain and the whole concept sounds just too selectively gimmicky for a premise to me. If I had written this and read it to myself objectively, I would see the conflicts in that premise and would re-write to fix it so that it is plausible on its own terms. I realize that sci-fi can be fantastic, but the best seems to rest on a firm and conceivable premise. This one just doesn’t hold logical deconstruction!
Medicorp put its best minds on his case, working to rehabilitate him and documenting everything about his recovery. It also put the word out seeking other electrocution victims with the chip.
This would be more effective if you switched to a more personal pov after Medicorp: Medicorp puts its best minds on his case. They worked to rehabilitate him and documented everything about his recovery. They also put the word out seeking other trauma victims with the chip.
Switching to “they” makes it more personal—people are doing this, not a corporate “thing.” I would change “electrocution” to “trauma” simply to allow myself more types of victim. Clearly, Mandy has not been the victim of physical trauma and Medicorp should be interested in her as well, right?
The last paragraph screams for some expansion and clarification. The only criminals who could be “fixed” by resetting are those who already committed a crime so on what is the assumption that crime would end based? The only logical success they could hope for would be an alteration of recidivism numbers, not ending crime. How could Medicorp predict which citizens, with or without chips, would commit a criminal act?
The premise of sci-fi is perhaps the most important part, it seems to me. You have to make the premise clear and workable or the rest of the structure won’t hold. Right now there is too much to argue with in the premise as it is.
I’ll see if I change my mind in Part 2. BTW I don't give you a number because I assume you want to write for more than numbers. If this was a contest, I'd reluctantly play by those rules!
"Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.