It was a bright, sunny fall day in Seattle, the kind of rare event that made children fidget when kept inside and prompted spontaneous smiles from strangers on the street. Those whose bedrooms had an east-facing window were awakened early by the sun, and those whose commutes led them to drive east remembered why their cars had sun visors.
Caitlin Emory was no exception to the list of fidgeting eight-year-olds, but she didn't know that it was sunny. She was never closer than 400 kilometers from a playground, but rarely regretted that. And though she looked forward to the privileges granted to older children and teenagers, the thought of getting a driver's license never crossed her mind.
After all, she was a student at a school where the best and brightest, quickest and cleverest children were trained for the good of their world. She called Battle School home, and two years of artificial gravity had changed her sufficiently that she'd no longer be quite comfortable in a natural gravity well. But even though she couldn't see the sun, nor know that her former classmates were fidgeting more than usual... Caitlin was contributing her fair share of restless shifting and eyeing the clock.
She wasn't particularly interested in history under the best of circumstances, and her teacher had spent the entire class period expounding on a series of comparisons between the mass suicides at Jonestown, Guyana and the hopeless, eventually suicidal standoff against the Roman forces at Masada.
About the only thing I've learned today is to be wary of grape-flavored drinks , Caitlin mused, her mental "voice" colored with sarcasm and impatience. Her uniform contributed to her restlessness, as it was much looser than her last. This was a welcome change, since the last had begun to feel too tight, and look more than a bit short in the legs. But bigger changes had come with the uniform than just its size.
Instead of bland cyan, ornamented only by a small yellow circle over her heart, the uniform was mostly black, with bright red and yellow decorations. Her barracks, too, had more decoration than a yellow-ringed circle of cyan, bearing a colorful centipede instead. She was now answerable to a toon leader, then a commander, before the teachers. And battleroom practice, instead of being mid-morning before lunch, was right after breakfast.
So Caitlin fidgeted, not just because she was bored, not just because her uniform fit in a different way, but because she was required to stay (mostly) still, and her body remembered that only two days ago she'd been in free-fall at this time, learning the joys of null gravity combat.
The bell for next class seemed later than usual, but Caitlin was far from the last student to race from the classroom. Her flashy uniform gave her (in her own mind, at least) the authority to nudge smaller children out of the way and to pause for none except those directly in authority over her, as she hurried to get a good place in the lunch line.
Her landside counterparts would hardly recognize her.