Chapter one:The beginning

The day was a normal summer day, sunny and bright. A young girl with bright red hair skipped down the sidewalk, humming a little tune.

"Finally it's the last day of school!" The girl exclaimed, much too excited to care about those around her.

A large brown building came into view, a sign saying Dandelion middle school. The girl slowed down her skipping, turning it instead into a slow paced walk. She hunched her back, staring down at the floor.

'Just three more hours until I'm finally free from the seventh grade!' The young girl thought excitedly. She pushed the curly hair away from her face as it was blocked her view.

It wasn't blocking anything important as she still was staring at the floor. Finally, after what seemed forever, the girl arrived at her homeroom.

The second she entered the room her ears were filled with the chatter of children. Her homeroom teacher stared at his phone, not even bothering to discipline the children. The teacher had given up on the class, letting them scroll through their phones.

The girl quietly made her way to her seat, successfully avoiding the people around her. She took her phone out and started to scroll through an app. She continued to scroll for four minutes as nothing had piqued her interest.

After what seemed like forever, something interesting came up. It was a short story describing A.I. taking over the world. It only had twenty chapters that totaled to twenty thousand words in total. This seemed to indicate that every chapter was exactly one thousand words long, at least what the girl thought.

She couldn't get far into the story before the bell rang, signaling that the teacher needed to take attendance. Despite the day only being a half day with no work, it still was counted as an official day in the grade book. Your parents would still have to call for an excused absence still.

Attendance was shorter than usual which was to be assumed.

"Ruby?" The teacher called out.

"Here." Ruby replied, snickering with her friends about something.

"Rose?" The teacher called out another name.

The girl looked up from her story before replying, "Present!"

Ruby looked back down to her phone immediately after, far too intrigued in the novel to care about those around her.

The bells had been changed to a different schedule to fit the half day. The bell rang as to the automated schedule.

'It's already eighth period? I was too invested in this book to even notice. At least I got to chapter five!' The novel told the talk about how people took the A.I. for granted and failed to notice their plans to take over the world. It was a new concept that Ruby hadn't read before, so it was refreshing to read.

"I don't really care what you do, just don't burn the building," the math teacher waved her hand, her other one too preoccupied with scrolling through her phone.

The class periods were twenty minutes long. Fifteen minutes had already past meaning that there were only five more minutes until the seventh grade was finished.

All of a sudden the announcements turned on, a muffled voice spoke out, "Run while you still can, you need t-" The sound of a gun shot was heard before the announcements were turned off. The sound of the gunshot had freaked people out, kids and adults pushing to leave the building. Ruby was crushed between people, barely being able to breathe.

Ruby finally got out of the building, running away like the others kids and adults. There were a few teachers trying to calm down everyone, it came to no avail of course.

There was an odd sound of buzzing coming from the sky causing Ruby to pause and look up. In the sky were dozens of large drones, painted white with cameras in the front. They were spraying out some sort of purple gas, presumably sleeping gas as the people around Ruby started to slow down. The girl covered her mouth with her sleeve, sprinting as far as her weak legs could take her.

She ran and ran until she tripped on a branch and fell into a hole. Ruby lacked the strength to lift herself out of the hole, she had inhaled the gas from earlier. The young girl laid in the hole, slowly waiting for fate to make its move.

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