Waking Up is a short story written by Andrea J. Buchanan, author of The Daring Book for Girls and GIFT. Set 20 Minutes into the Future, where people are divided into groups based on how old they are, a girl named Talia Troy is set for Transition Day, where she and all the other Elevens like her are taken away to become Twelves. Rumors of this mysterious process are all over the Ultranet (a souped up version of The Internet), but actual hard facts about the Transition into a Twelve are kept safe under lock and key. When Talia realizes what this process entails, she fights back along with her brother Arek, who underwent the Transition eight years ago and hasn't returned since.
Waking Up has received only positive reviews on Amazon so far, and has garnered a lot of attention through word-of-mouth. For a meager 99 cents on Amazon, there's no reason for you not to check it out for yourself.
The following tropes appear in Waking Up:
- Achilles' Heel: Ultranet's biggest vulnerability is that, since it's powered by the collective thoughts of hundreds of sleeping Twelves and older, if just one person wakes up, the Ultranet goes down completely. One guess as to what Talia has to do at the end of the novel.
- All Just a Dream: This is what Talia wants to believe, once she knows the truth about Ultranet and the Transition.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Pretty commonplace in the 2040's. A few chapters are even devoted to Talia and her mother trying to sneak around the surveillance.
- Fun with Acronyms: the T.E.A.C.H.E.R.S (Tech-Enabled Artificially Conscious Holographic Educational Robots), which run virtual classrooms.
- Half-Human Hybrid:
- Most of the adults have cybernetic implants, such as screens or medical patch dispensers built into the hand. And the people who come back from Transition never lose their connection to Ultranet, they just don't realize it.
- The T.E.A.C.H.E.R.S like Professor Madeline, oddly enough, are inversions: they're A.I.s with human minds!
- Human Popsicle: Sort of. There's no cryogenics involved (Talia even mentions that cryogenics are antiquated), but the fate of the Twelves and all those older involve suspension.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: Boys who Transition go to the Academy if they're smart, the Factory if they're not, and Re-Education if they're able to be rehabilitated into instruction-following fighting machines. For girls like Talia, their only choice is to become housewives. Talia doesn't take that choice too well. At least, that's what the Elevens are told.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Ultranet is powered by the collective unconscious thoughts of all Twelves and above, who are kept asleep and in suspension in huge government hospitals.
