What have we made, my dears
Our thirst has created monsters without hearts
Our knowledge has become a lethal weapon
When it was meant to be an art...

The anxiety in this hallway is so high it is almost electric, and the silence is so profound that it is swallowing every emotion we try to express.

In a whitewashed building with masked and white coat clad adults, hundreds of thousands of teens are arriving in batches to have an extra storage inserted into their brain.

There are huge queues in front of the life-sized screen as teens anxiously check for their name on the time slot-wise list.

The dread of the surgery has made my throat dry, but my heart is beating and almost bursting out my ears due to thought of entering a queue with more than 20 bodies pushing and shoving against me, and in this chaos searching a huge digital list for my name, for my fate, for my Time.

In this building, our names are generated randomly, and as my luck would have it, none of my group members entered with me. I DARE myself to walk towards the screen, then hesitate, and as Cherry strolls past me with a smirk on her face, I give in to the urge that has been scratching at my mind for months, and roughly shoving her aside, I march up to the lists.

The screen is blue, the backlight giving it a melancholy effect, and my eyes struggle to focus as I am shoved back and forth by unfamiliar faces and sensations.

Scanning the list as far as my brain would rationally allow, I spot my name in a list on the far left, with the time stamp of an hour from now. Some of the crowd thins as the previous batch leaves, but before I can process the information of my surgery room and building, the crowd thickens like an angry wave swelling in the sea, and I can no longer force my body to move and find its way out of this tangle of dread.

My knees start losing sensation,but before I can forget to breathe, a hand grabs my wrist and steers me out of the queue and away from the lists.

I look up to see who my rescuer is, but my vision has gone black at the edges and whatever is left of it is disconnected from my brain. Hands on my shoulders gently push me to sit down, and as my senses return, I see that the rescuer is Jay.

We stare at each other in silence, because there is too much chaos in our minds to be captured by language, and as he sprints away to check for his name, I slowly stand back up and walk out of the building, the sound of humans crashing against humans growing fainter with each step.

          _______________________
               Two Hours Later

I step out of the surgery room with a bottle of vitamin supplement pills clutched in my hand. No one outside of the select team of government surgeons know the procedure of chip fitting, and no one has really had any lethal side effects and reactions up till now, but our Central scientists carry out some impressive cover ups and also,
Dead Men Tell No Tales I guess.

I walk towards the headquarters to call my family, and as soon as I reach a phone booth, I see a notice flashing on the screen--no talking about the initiation process.

I guess I can do that. Hell, I REALLY want to keep this to myself right now.
As I dial my house number into the phone, I feel a stare, and I look into the adjacent booth to see Bella, fully turned towards me and twirling the ends of her choker with an evil smile.
She half opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, my mom picks up the phone, and just for a minute, everything around me melts away.

The first thing we are ordered to do after the chip fitting is to collect our schedules from the headquarters.
The seven of us sit in a circle in our carrom room comparing classes and trying to push the dreadful day behind us.

My first class almost everyday is Weaponry, which, matches only with Astha. However, since Miranda, Jay and I all chose creative writing as our main extra class, we are all on the same time slot atleast thrice each week.

We all have weekends off, but we don't have a single class with seven of us together. But lecture schedules have done that to me since I first learnt how to read, so I am not much surprised.

That night after dinner, we all stay up in the sky watching building, a building with glass walls and roofs and atleast 200 telescopes. We look at the stars and point out constellations to each other till after midnight, the stress of the chip fitting finally melting away.

As we call it a night and start to leave, I suddenly feel someone sneakily open my backpack. Before I can turn, Jay has taken my secret diary out and as I flail to try to take it back, he stands up and runs away in the direction of our dorm.
I take off sprinting after him,with occasional curses bursting out of my otherwise closed mouth, and just as I round the corner to our big gaping-hole dorm entrance, I spot Jay standing leisurely at the very edge.

I try to throw out my arms to take hold of the diary, but my momentum is too great, and I am propelled forward and down the slide. As I reach the bottom faster than I thought was ever possible, I look up to see Jay chuckling, and after I throw some very offensive epithets at him, I start laughing too.

The thing is, I'm not really worried he will actually read my secrets. I think he did this just to pester me. I watch him wave and walk away, and I start doing the same, but before I realise what is happening, Jay slides down annoyingly smoothly and pressing the diary into my arms, smiles and walks away as swiftly as he had come down.

I smirk to myself and begin to walk away, but a dark-dressed figure crashes into me and walks off, and I look down to see a note pressed into my hand.

Taking a deep breath, I open the message, which says-

"Your capabilities and desires combined may make you fear them, but you must learn to respect and control them if you wish to survive."

And the mysteries start! Is the note from a well wisher or a rival? Make sure you follow the story to find out.