Free Worldweavers: Spellspam by Alma Alexander Page A

leaning forward eagerly, began scanning the monitors. Mrs. Chen appeared to have stopped herself from saying something by an act of heroic will, and Magpie glanced up just in time to see Principal Harris lay a reassuring hand on her arm and say, very softly, “It’s all right, Margaret. The future has always been theirs.”
     
    They had a week of grace, while Terry attended classes during the day and wrestled with the Nexus almost every other waking hour. He caught and destroyed four different spellspams on the first afternoon of his acquaintance with the supercomputer, running on very little sleep and pure adrenaline. The principal spent a lot of time with Terry in the Nexus room and caught the early errors before they got out of hand—and Terry rarely made the same mistake twice. But the spellspam onslaught didn’t appear to be letting up, and finally even this doubled vigilanceproved not to be enough.
    On the following Monday morning, the firestorm broke.
    It started out innocently enough. Thea and Magpie passed a group of students in a corridor and happened to overhear a disgruntled-looking senior, someone whose athletic prowess had always exceeded his academic abilities, utter a mouthful of words Thea wouldn’t have thought he was even aware of, let alone knew how to use correctly.
    “This cessation of telecommunication is especially vexing,” he was complaining.
    “It is pretty inconsequential,” someone replied. “It is an annoyance, not a calamity. I would think that the systems would have needed an upgrade long before their primitivistic nature was overwhelmed by circumstances…”
    Thea exchanged a baffled look with Magpie as they passed out of earshot.
    “What was that about?” Magpie said.
    “I have no idea,” Thea said. “And I strongly suspect they don’t either. Did I miss the class where memorizing the dictionary was handed out as homework?”
    The two of them barely made it to their nextclass on time. It was math, with Mr. Siffer in a particularly unlovely mood.
    “Can you explain to me,” Mr. Siffer thundered at a cowed student, “just why it is that I have to repeat everything five times before your brain will retain even a quarter of anything I say?”
    “It is probably overnervousness, and a disproportionate apprehension of what you are likely to dispense as punishment,” the hapless boy blurted, and then sat there with such genuinely slack-jawed astonishment at what had just come out of his mouth that Thea suddenly felt a cold shiver run down her spine.
    “Are you trying to be smart with me, boy?” Mr. Siffer said in a dangerously calm voice.
    “It isn’t my fault! I am just osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary 1 ,” squeaked the boy, miraculously without even a stutter, and then winced, waiting for Mr. Siffer’s inevitable retaliation.
    A murmur of voices exploded helplessly in the class as other students stared at one another in complete bewilderment.
    “What in blazes does that mean ? If anything?” Thea hissed at Magpie. “Is it even a word?”
    “It’s Latin, I think ,” Magpie whispered back.
    “You think? You take Latin, you’re supposed to know —what does it mean?”
    But Mr. Siffer was speaking again.
    “You will,” Mr. Siffer said, still calmly, speaking to the original student and ignoring everyone else, “report to the principal’s office immediately after this class, Mr. Williams. I will not be mocked.”
    But Thea was suddenly sitting up, cold shivers running down her spine.
    “It’s spellspam,” she whispered to Magpie. “It’s got to be. Those other kids, too, back in the corridor—”
    Mr. Siffer began to turn around, to sweep the classroom with a gimlet eye. “I will have silence in this class!” he bellowed. “Or there will be—”
    “I apologize, sir, I most profoundly apologize—I have no idea why I am so discombobulated.”
    Something blinked, passed almost too fast to notice. The classroom settled back into