TRIP TO CORSUN

Chapter 1: ARDU

The biology teacher, Yalinda Portman, walks faster on the hallway on her short chubby legs to room 163. As she opens the door, panting, the senior year homeroom teacher of class C, George Winston, gestures her to hurry in and close the door behind her. 

Ms. Portman walks across the class with her head bent so as to not obstruct the screen. She stands between the older man, George, and the younger physics teacher, Greg Milton. 

She sees someone setting up the projector at the front of the class and sighs in relief. She did not want to miss the introduction. Then she looks across the students sitting in the room, to check if all twenty-three students of class C are there. They are. Her eyes briefly stop at her favorite student, Samantha Warren. 

This trip will be a great experience for all the students, but even more so for Samantha, Yalinda thinks, since Samantha is the brightest student the prestigious Umber Norman High School has ever seen. 

"It's ready," says the guy who connected the projector. The white screen behind him turns black. 

Other than the teachers and students, there are five more people in the room, including the guy who set up the projector. The five are dressed in all black outfits and each have a golden pin over the left side on their chests that shows the logo of ARDU: Aquatica Research and Development Unit. 

One of the ARDU representatives, a woman in her early thirties, steps forward and stands before the class. 

"Good morning, everyone, my name is Tessa Reagan. I'm a senior executive at ARDU. They are my colleagues: Peter, Irene, Harris and Parker," she says pointing at each of the four behind her. Her black coat and pencil skirt look creaseless, and her hair is pulled back in a bun without a single stray on sight. 

She continues, "I'm sure your school has already informed you of why we are here today, but it's my job to make sure you know everything you need to know about this program. Today is just an introduction. You'll be briefed further on this at the site in two days. By show of hands tell me how many of you know about ARDU?" 

All hands except four shoot up in the class. George looks disapprovingly at four of his students sitting at the last row: Carter Jones, Kim Su Hyun, Philip Manis and Travis Scott. All of them are star players of the school's football team, with Carter being the captain and Kim, his second in command. 

Naturally, these four are also the most popular boys in the school, especially Carter. They never raise their hands in class, even when they know the answers. 

Tessa gives a satisfactory nod to the class. "Good," she says. "Then as you all may already know, ARDU is one of the many subunits of our parent company, Freidman Co. Freidman is a multi-national umbrella company whose operations vary from agriculture, to space technology, to artificial intelligence, to social media. There's no discipline our company has not invested in. And as a side note, Freidman is also the world's richest privately owned company." 

Few of the kids laugh at Tessa's side note. She continues, "You might've heard of some of the most notable technological and scientific achievements in human history by our sister units. A super vaccine for viral infections by Cerobis Pharmaceuticals. Construction of YMOB in Mars — an advanced lab and living quarters for the NASA scientists — by GENK Projects. And the engineering of the microbes, Ethanoscibyllis, by Biocorp Cene, that efficiently transfer excess atmospheric carbon dioxide back to earth, reversing and stabilizing global warming." 

"However, the most notable achievement has been by ARDU when we discovered the existence of an entirely new biological ecosystem, thousands of miles under the seabed in Antarctica, called CORSUN II. The discovery was done a couple of years ago by a group of our researchers who had been scoring the bed of the oceans using our advanced underwater research and travel equipments."