I sat in the back of the cluttered classroom, foot idly tapping away at a song in my head – music players could be confiscated by overzealous teachers, I’d learned, but they couldn’t do anything about the hundreds of albums I’d been memorising since I was a toddler.

The teacher was droning on about something at the front of the room, gesturing limply at an equation on the board with his worn-down piece of chalk – probably a rousing lecture on where to buy foot care products in Cheltenham, or whatever boring thing adults cared about when they got old and started to experience new and exciting varieties of foot pain.

Whatever he was going on about, I had no doubt I would never need it in my life. Trigonometry? Please. My phone could do more maths in five seconds than Einstein could have managed in his entire life – and it wasn’t even particularly close. History? Every encyclopaedia ever written had been digitised a decade ago and uploaded to one website or another. English was a tricker one, until those AI chatbots were invented not too long ago…

So, yeah. I didn’t much see the point of hearing someone ancient drone on about something I didn’t want or need to care about, just because some bureaucrat, who had already been retired for thirty years, decided in a meeting once that I needed to have this bit of information told to me, in this order.

Hell, maybe I would have been paying attention if it was something unexpected, like learning about different arch support options.

I became aware of a sudden silence and lack of movement in the room, and looked up from my distracted daze, the record in my head scratching to a stop.

‘Well, Ms. Jones?’ the teacher asked from the front of the class, arms folded sternly.

‘What’s that now?’ I frowned.

‘The answer,’ he said, exasperatedly tapping at the equation on the board. ‘How do we solve for it?’

‘Oh,’ I laughed. ‘Oh, that’s easy. One sec…’

I reached into my bag to pull out my phone.