Author : B. York, Staff Writer

The bell rang and the world became a bustling mass of eager students. Halls were like vessels pumping the mind-blood of the future through the academy to give it life. Each brain pattern that registered into the student ID banks was safely secured inside these institutions of truth. Who wrote the truth? They must have been listening that day for as the bell rang Classroom 010 pumped no further cells past its doors.

If the Academy for Truth was any indication of a well-grown biosphere then Classroom 010 must have been seen as a flake of dry skin to some that day. The more truth-oriented mind would call it “a milestone of our purpose”.

What Detective Bartamus knew was that there were fourteen dead students and one dead philosopher. He was beginning his third hour on the scene with more frustrated confusion. His white coat displayed his caste of Investigator upon its shoulders, but in his heart Bartamus had more in common with the deceased instructor than anyone else.

The bodies sat peacefully at their desks, each as pristine as the day of their initiation into the Academy. None had fallen to the floor, all were still upright with books open. In each holo-notebook there was something different and yet each somehow similar. The contents of the pages became more incoherent as they progressed, thoughts trickling down through sentence structures to pictures and losing apparent meaning as the pages went on. In the end, there were just letters, none of them gave any sense of pattern at all.

The school was dedicated to the study of truth in all things. They kept their discoveries behind closed doors though, and Bartamus was convinced that the doors had been surely closed tightly on this one.

He approached the professor’s desk with tired but still determined eyes. His finger drew down the holo-projection of the professor’s itinerary for the class, and the lone investigator read each line carefully for the hundredth time, trying and make sense of it all.

LATE 21st CENTURY PHILOSOPHY
-PIONEERS
-BREAKTHROUGHS
-EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY

“We’re all rats in a maze you know… looking for the truth.” The voice made Bartamus’ head snap up. He beheld a young boy standing in the doorway, holding a scholar-pad apparently waiting for his next class.

Bartamus stood straight and addressed the boy as he would anyone else, calm, collected and without much emotion. “That is a theory. What do you think they found here?”

The boys eyes were staring into the room, taking in its fourteen deceased as he said simply, with equal lack of emotion “The end of the maze.”

___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow