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Teacher of the Century
    by

    Robert T. Jeschonek
    *****

    Also by Robert T. Jeschonek
    Science Fiction
    6 Scifi Stories
    My Cannibal Lover
    Playing Doctor
    Serial Killer vs. E-Merica
    The Greatest Serial Killer in the Universe
    The Love Quest of Smidgen the Snack Cake
    Superheroes
    A Matter of Size (mature readers)
    Forced Retirement
    Heroes of Global Warming
    The Masked Family – a novel
    The Trek Trilogy
    Trek Fail!
    Trek Off!
    Trek This!

    *****
    Teacher of the Century
    As the ring of students tightened around her, America’s Teacher of the Century nominee Cilla Franklin offered to reduce the homework assignment. Thirty seconds later, she offered to eliminate it altogether. It didn’t make any difference.
    Muscles tense beneath naked flesh, the boys and girls continued to edge toward her. She didn’t know why they were so upset, since they never did homework anyway and were never punished for it. The assignment should not have been taxing for anyone in the class, whatever their aptitude level; further, nothing about it impinged on anyone’s personal rights or definition of political correctness.
    Periods One through Four hadn’t had any problem with the homework. Then again, Period Five was just a bad group. They were all bad, but Five was the worst.
    One minute after Cilla had transmitted the details of the assignment to their brainware wireless implants, the kids had risen as one from their hammocks and formed a circle around her. One of the boys had come up behind her and urinated on her legs; as she spun around, he had directed the stream upward, spraying her hips and abdomen and even splashing her face.
    Though Cilla did not understand most of what the godlings (that was what they called themselves) did or said, she knew what this much meant: she was marked for death.
    It had happened six times before in her fifty-year career. Each time, she had managed to save herself by begging for mercy from the class Chief or moving to a new school...but it was always possible that death could claim her like this. She knew of colleagues who had died this way; only three out of thirty thousand teachers nationwide died per year in executions by godlings, so the odds weren’t bad...but her own mentor, Ruby Churchill, had been one of the unlucky few.
    Dying at the hands of a tribe of hive-minded, techno-savage students wasn’t anything she had envisioned while playing school as a child with her friends decades ago.
    Times had changed. For Cilla Franklin and the other teachers at All Einstein High School, every day was another chapter in Lord of the Flies .
    Slowly, the ring of twelfth-graders pressed toward her. Their heads were bowed, and every last one of them glared up at her with a wicked, hungry smile. None of them carried a weapon, but Cilla knew they didn’t need weapons; to some extent, they were all genetically and cybernetically enhanced. She had already seen a small group of them tear apart a floater car (her own) with their bare hands, and she had seen individual godlings punch holes through the cement block walls of the school.
    At seventy-five years old, fit and healthy as she was, Cilla wouldn’t even slow the godlings down. She knew she was dead meat.
    The godlings would all be adding to their tattoos tonight, commemorating her murder with colorful new markings on their chests or bellies or buttocks, as was their custom. She wondered if there was any truth to the rumors she had heard that the godlings also devoured their victims’ remains nowadays.
    It wouldn’t surprise her.
    â€œChief Ludwig!” she said, turning to the tallest boy in the circle. “What is the nature of my offense?”
    Ludwig was shaved hairless like all the other males his age. His pale, naked skin was decorated with tattoos of eagles, tongues of flame, quantum equations, and DNA molecules. “Coowa chi patea,” he said slowly, overenunciating each syllable. “Logwa fachi sifata