[color=Gray][i]14 March 2200.[/i][/color]
	Luther's ears were met with the soft whirr of the maglev monorail as it glided over the tracks. A distant-sounding, routine voice announced the ETA to the next station before fading into the sounds of news on the monorail radio: another protest in the neighboring district, a steady Martian wind, and incoming supplies from Earth. That day in March was as regular as all the others even if on some days the situation only seemed to grow worse. Luther's fingers scrolled through social media on his holotablet, and his eyes squinted past the morning sun's glare on the glass. Luther had contemplated driving his motorcycle to school instead, but he figured that he didn't require that level of privacy. He was just going to school anyway, and such an ordinary trip didn't warrant use of his bike.

	[color=7ea7d8]'[i]Would've been[/i] really [i]badass though[/i].'[/color]

	[color=Gray][i]And the air was full
	Of various storms and saints
	Parading in the streets
	As the banks began to break...[/i][/color]

	The day dragged ever slowly on at school. Luther got through each class by stealing glances at boys in his classes, barely managing to stay awake, and idly doodling on his holotablet notes with a stylus pen. His eyes peeled the equations from the board at the front of the classroom, and in his eyes Luther saw the numbers resolved. The variables danced in his head, the equation balanced on his shoulders, and the graph drew itself. Luther observed the illusion as the product of his thoughts, swimming around his brain like a weird soup. His intellect had been like this for a little over a month now; Luther learned everything at a much quicker pace than he used to. If his teachers knew, the fact of it would really explain the sudden boost in performance. Luckily the boy didn't hog the airwaves with his voice, else they would have taken a shock and sent him to the genius school, or something stupid like that.

	Mr. Salter, Luther's calculus teacher who was a short-haired blond in his 40s with crow's feet and a few wrinkles in his forehead, called on Luther just as the student was drifting to sleep. "Luther, can [i]you[/i] solve this integral?"

	Luther jolted awake suddenly and blinked to the typical chuckle of the class. He would've laughed too, if he wasn't the one who had fallen asleep. [color=7ea7d8]'[i]Shit[/i].'[/color] He squinted at the problem scribbled on the screen: the definite integral of [i]x[/i] squared times the natural logarithm of [i]x[/i] from 0 to 1. Like lightspeed, Luther walked through the steps himself as if it were a cakewalk, and he arrived at the answer much faster than he would have before. When he had it figured, every eye in the classroom fixed itself on Luther and pointed at him like the sight of a rifle. [color=7ea7d8]"Uh... negative one-ninth."[/color]

	Mr. Salter stared back at the calculator on his holotablet and tapped a few keys on the screen. "Mhm. That's right," the teacher confirmed by writing the answer on the board before flipping to the next slide.

	Luther nearly breathed a sigh of relief.

	The rest of the day went without a hitch. At lunch, Luther scanned over his friend Jacob from afar with a little blush; in physics, Luther breezed through the test over the law of conservation of momentum; and in English, he skimmed through the reading and the essay over it. The hours passed listlessly by as he made his way through the day, up to the moment he stepped on the monorail. The ride back home mirrored the ride to school, with the same idle activity on the monorail to the tune of its low hum, and he took his seat next to a friend of his, whom he chatted casually with. His friend left him too, and she hopped off the monorail car at the station just before his with a wave and a goodbye. It wasn't long before he also had to get off and walk home, and damn did he have a long walk ahead of him. It was maybe a block or so down the road from the station before Luther came upon a protest in front of a bank across the street.