Outside, a delivery truck honked. Inside, the professor’s dress shoes squeaked on the linoleum. Luíza’s original tablet, still blue and catatonic, lay on her old desk like a dead fish.
“System crash,” he whispered, as if saying it louder would trigger a pandemic. “You’ll have to migrate to the backup station.” prova digital vunesp/escola
Backup station. The words landed like a death sentence. The backup station was a single, ancient desktop computer in the corner, its monitor a fat, cream-colored beast from another century. To move there was to admit defeat. It was where the kid who had a fever went. The kid whose tablet ran out of battery. The symbol of failure. Outside, a delivery truck honked
She looked at the clock. Forty-five minutes left. Forty-five minutes to answer thirty-three questions on a machine that sounded like a coffee grinder. “System crash,” he whispered, as if saying it
Her hand shot up. “Professor?”
Luíza sat down. The old computer wheezed to life. The login took three minutes. The exam portal took two more. Meanwhile, question seventeen was a ghost. She had to find it again, re-read the long citation from Dom Casmurro , and reconstruct her reasoning from scratch.
The exam proctor, a man with a tie so tight it looked like a tourniquet, shuffled over. He clicked the power button. Nothing. He tried the reset sequence. Nothing. He looked at Luísa with the grave expression of a doctor delivering bad news.