After a few seconds’ deliberation, he realized he couldn’t delay any longer,. He opened the door. Salina stood there, black hair parted and running like silky water down the sides of her face, her eyes and teeth shining out at him. They both paused for a moment, looking at one another, hesitant, and then their hands came together without them even realizing it and before they knew it they were hugging one another. They pulled back a little then and looked at one another, just a few inches from each others’ faces, and then they kissed briefly on the lips. Shy desperately wanted to kiss her some more. He felt a warmth from her that suggested she wanted the same, but they both pulled away from one another laughing, their hands still holding on for a moment longer.
“So, what’s the plan?” Shy said.
“How are you feeling? Not too tired?”
“No, I’m fine. Why?”
“Well, I have to go and visit a community today. You could come with me if you like.”
“Sounds great,” Shy said.
Salina took his hand again and laughed.
During one of their meetings in Youtopia, Salina had explained to him what part of her mission was. Most Homo novus had what they considered a mission in life, and Youtopia as a whole also had a mission: to get free v-space, and more particularly Youtopia access, to as many people in the world as possible.
Youtopia wasn’t just a meeting point but offered a wide range of free services, especially free education. Unfortunately, not all of the corp-run states in the world were in agreement with this philosophy. They either wanted to limit the amount of education their citizens received, or they wanted to sell it to them themselves. They also wanted to sell them everything else in v-space. Having a world where they could get everything for free was not what they had in mind when they took a region over. Still, the Youtopians tried their best to spread Youtopia’s philosophy and resources, and Salina in particular had taken it upon herself to make poor kids in rural Guatemala aware of its existence.
Salina told Shy that the most popular Youtopia app in Guatemala was the AI program that taught people to read. This program had been developed by a software company that went broke and was then bought for Youtopia by an unknown benefactor. The program ran a simulation of a teacher who would sit down with the student, book in hand, and go through it with them. It didn’t teach writing, as most people these days used voice recognition writing apps that would take whatever you said and put it into proper English for you (or whatever language you chose) better than most humans could do. But reading, despite the fact that everything could be easily translated to audio, was still considered a worthwhile skill.
“Do these kids even have coms and access to v-space?” Shy said to Salina as they sat squished together on a bus crowded with not only as many people as could be squeezed into it but what seemed like a whole marketplace as well. Chickens squawked in cages and baskets, boxes of fruit were teetering between people’s heads and the roof, a bicycle was hanging out a window, and someone had a whole package of brightly colored blankets in a seat next to them.
“Yes, most of them do. A company called Guatel came in a few years ago and gave out coms for free. They then gave everyone wireless access to their own network, which of course only contained their sites.”
“So you’re hacking those?” Shy said. One of the hackers at Youtopia, Dealer, had devised a way to hack into most coms and also open up closed networks to the wider web. Since these hacks were illegal in most regions, Shy was surprised that Salina would be going around openly distributing them.
“Yes and no. A year ago, another company took over Guatemala’s government, Mexitel. In order to not have to redistribute coms to everyone, Mexitel simply changed the laws. Anyone who had a com could use it on any network they could get coverage on.”
“Let me guess. Mexitel is the only network available?”
“Exactly.”
“We have a hack for it, though, right?”
“Right.”
“So why haven’t you been arrested? Surely they don’t want people accessing Youtopia.”
“To be honest, I’m expecting to be arrested at any moment. We’re out in the backwater, here, though. I don’t think this region represents one of their largest spending markets. And most local communities I speak to understand the need for secrecy.”
“So you said you’re going around to the primary schools?”
“That’s where we’re headed today.”
“And what—you just give all the kids the open network patch and show them how to use it?”
“Pretty much. And the teachers. They love it the most. Educational resources are pretty bad around here, and they can’t afford the ones from Mexitel. So they’re often happier than the kids to discover all the stuff we offer at Youtopia.”
The bus jolted over some potholes in the road and Shy looked out the window to where some bulldozers were clearing a section of what remained of the forest in these parts. Shy felt a stab of pain shoot through him as a couple of men hacked into trees with chainsaws.
“What’s going on there?” he said to Salina, instinctively taking her hand.
“Farming, probably. People just don’t learn.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just over a thousand years ago, our ancestors, the Mayans, were almost wiped out because they overpopulated this region. The soil here just isn’t good enough to sustain constant agriculture, and we have seasonal droughts every few hundred years that are only made worse by deforestation. In a few years’ time, this place is going to be a wasteland like the rest of the country.”
As they’d flown in that morning, Shy had noticed large portions of the country that had been completely de-forested. He’d always imagined Guatemala as a tropical place, but from the air a lot of it had looked like a desert.
“So why are the people doing it?”
“They’re desperate, I guess. Nowhere to grow anything anymore. People are hungry.”
The bus arrived at a town of concrete houses clustered around a dusty square where half the people on the bus disembarked, including Shy and Salina. Salina took Shy’s hand and led him down a narrow street. They came to a low concrete wall, behind which was a dusty playground with a couple of rusting pieces of play equipment and some concrete buildings which had been painted bright green to try to cover the dreariness. A couple of multicolored cartoon dinosaurs made their way across one wall. Two trees with their leaves starting to shrivel stood in front of some glass doors. The rest of the place had been concreted over.
At the entrance to the school, Shy and Salina were stopped by two security guards bearing stun-guns. Shy had never seen a real stun-gun before and he was freaked out by it, clinging harder to Salina’s hand who spoke to them perfectly calmly as if having two men with stun-guns outside a primary school was a perfectly normal thing. The men seemed friendly, though, and pointed down a corridor.
Salina and Shy came to a window in a wall, where Salina asked an aging secretary for directions to Señora Gomez’s classroom. Once again they were pointed in the right direction.
Finally, they found the room they were looking for, a room with about thirty children spread across a tile floor. They were all jacked into v-space. Shy wondered why they bothered to come to school at all and didn’t just attend from home. Then he realized a lot of the parents probably had to go out to work. And work here was no doubt physical labor, not something that could be done from home like most work in his country.
Señora Gomez saw them and came over to greet them, giving Salina a kiss and a hug and kissing Shy on the cheek. Shy couldn’t stop himself from giving her a little hug as she did so but instead of pulling away from him like people in his own country tended to do, he was surprised to find that she hugged him back.
Shy and Salina spent the next hour helping Señora Gomez and her children to install software which would allow them free access to Youtopia. Once everyone were all logged in, they stood in the main quadrangle in Youtopia�
��s eternal sunshine, looking around them at the large buildings modeled on various styles from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, all appearing to be made of solid stone.
Shy watched the expressions on both the children and Señora Gomez’s faces as Salina asked them which part of Youtopia they would like to visit first—the schools and universities, the galleries, museums and theaters, or the games and entertainment areas.
“The games, the games,” cried all the children, but Señora Gomez told them they could visit the games at the end and to start with they would have a look at the museums.
The children groaned and complained, but when Salina clicked her fingers and a large floating rug appeared out of the sky, which all the children could climb onto, they let out cries of joy and surprise, and Shy felt his heart lift—nothing in the world was as fun and beautiful as Youtopia was, and there was nothing more pleasurable than showing it to people for the first time.
The kids screamed as the carpet flew across buildings and parks and then came to land outside the magnificent facade of the natural history museum, built as a replica of London’s once famous one that was now completely under water.
Inside the museum, Salina invited them all aboard a small spaceship, which she told them was very similar to the ones that humans had first used to go to Mars, except it was much faster. This one could go outside of the galaxy, some 60,000 light years away, in a matter of seconds. They weren’t going to go that fast, however, since she wanted to stop by and show them Mars, Jupiter and Saturn along the way.
As the ship took off and they were all thrust back against their seats, there was more screaming. Salina rotated their view so that they could see the earth disappearing into the distance behind them.
The ship flew quite close to Mars. Salina pointed out the new human settlements going up there, including a giant under-dome lake that was being created by melting ice from the north polar ice cap. Around it a number of small towns were being built.
Then they moved on to Jupiter, which was enormous compared to either Earth or Mars. Salina told them it was two and a half times the size of all the other planets combined, but that the surface consisted almost entirely of gas—hydrogen and helium.
“Why does it have different colors?” one student asked.
“That’s because it is covered in bands of cloud,” Salina replied. “And the clouds are made up of chemicals which reflect light differently.”
“Wow. So you couldn’t live down there, then?” a boy said.
“No, you couldn’t. Not unless you were a gas monster.”
“But it looks so pretty,” another girl said.
After passing Saturn and its rings, the spacecraft took off at a million times the speed of light. They watched as their galaxy receded behind them and then as the view started to fill with other galaxies. By the time they got back to the foyer of the natural history museum, the children were all pretty impressed at the sheer size and magnificence of the universe they lived in.
“We’re so small, and yet we’re so important,” one precocious little kid muttered, and Shy and Salina smiled at one another.
After the universe, the next exhibit they visited was the Amazon rainforest. They boarded a long canoe made of a single tree trunk and their guide, a small indigenous CG character, pointed out to them the huge range of birds and animals that they passed.
“Unfortunately most of this no longer exists now,” the man said to them.
“What happened to it?” a girl asked.
“Humans chopped it all down.”
The children all nodded. It seemed they were familiar with forests being chopped down.
Just as Shy and Salina were about to show the kids the virtual reading program, two figures came to the door. Shy, who was seated cross-legged on the floor along with everybody else in the room, switched off full-screen mode and looked towards them.
There was a lady in a dress that was buttoned up to her neck and a man in something which looked very similar—except for his was black with a white collar. Señora Gomez stood up to greet them and they started talking in hushed voices.
“What’s going on?” Shy asked Salina in silent mode.
“It’s a priest. And I think that woman might be the principal.”
“You mean a Catholic priest?”
“Yes. Guatemala is still partly Catholic.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“This school is funded by the church. The local council doesn’t give them enough money, and the corporation who runs the country even less. It’s not a good sign. The church doesn’t generally like what we’re doing—although each town seems to differ.”
Just then, Señora Gomez came over to them. “We seem to have a bit of a problem. Could you come over with me and help me explain what we’re doing here?”
“Of course,” Salina said. She stood up and Shy followed her.
“This is Señora Rivera,” Señora Gomez said, “and Señor Garcia.” She then introduced Salina and Shy and they all shook hands.
“So, what exactly is going on here?” the principal said. She was an overweight, middle-aged bureaucrat with a red, puffy face and Shy didn’t like their chances in explaining themselves to her.
“Well, Shy here is from Australia,” Salina explained to them, “and Lili here thought it might be nice for the children to learn a bit about different countries and cultures.” She nodded towards the teacher.
“I’ve heard about you,” the priest broke in. “Some of my brothers fore-warned me that you had been going around to schools in the local area and giving these children illegal access to a v-space world known as Youtopia.”
Shy wanted to say something, but thought it best to let Salina handle this.
“Accessing Youtopia is not illegal,” Salina said. “Youtopia is a completely free world that anyone is allowed to access.”
“Not through the Mexitel network, though.”
“I didn’t realize the church was now working for Mexitel, father,” Salina said.
“We’re not. We despise them. But this Youtopia world that you are giving the children access to is no better.”
“This world is amazing, father,” Señora Gomez said. “It has more educational resources than I could possibly imagine. And all for free.”
“That I don’t doubt,” the priest said. “But it is exactly what you are teaching that we are concerned about. And not only that—but in particular all the other, umm, let’s say activities that this world seems to offer.”
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” the teacher said.
“I think we’d better speak outside.” The priest motioned to them.
They all went outside the room into the concrete corridor.
“It has come to church’s attention that many unsavory practices take place inside this world of yours,” the priest said to Salina. “In particular, areas where people are encouraged to fornicate indiscriminately.”
“I’m aware of no such thing,” the teacher said. “Is this true, Salina?”
Salina stood there in shock. Shy could see that something about this conversation was hurting her deeply and he even felt it himself—despite the fact that this wasn’t his culture or these people his peers.
“Youtopia is a free world where people are allowed to participate in any activity which does not harm anyone else,” Shy said. “The world is a very big place, as I’m sure you understand, being a man of learning, and there are many practices that take place in it which may or may not agree with one’s own personal belief system. However, we like to respect the right of others to do as they please, provided that nobody else is negatively affected, and Youtopia provides for this. However, we do have certain filters that can be applied, so that each region may choose to only allow access to the parts of Youtopia that are in accordance with their belief system, and in granting these children access to that world we would be most careful not to expose them to anything that would challenge the ruling
authority here.” Shy had never spoken like this in his life, but for some reason it seemed the best way to address this man.
The priest put his hand up to his chin and rubbed at his mouth, glaring with beady eyes at Shy and Salina.
“Thanks,” came a message from Salina on Shy’s com.
“Well, I appreciate your understanding,” the priest said, “but I’m afraid that before we allow this to go any further you are going to have to provide us with full access to this world for evaluation.”
“It’s totally free,” Shy said. “You can access it any time you like.”
“I will discuss this with you later, Lili,” Señora Garcia said to the teacher. “I can’t believe you allowed this without first requesting authorization from me.”
“My responsibility is towards the children,” the teacher said. “And making sure they get as good an education as possible. I didn’t realize that I was required to request permission to do that.”
As Shy and Salina were led out of the school by one of the security guards, Shy turned to her.
“What are we going to do now?” he said.
“We’ll just have to go to the meeting and try to convince them,” Salina said. The priest had given them a v-card with his details and told them to contact him to arrange for a meeting with his staff and some of the other priests in the area.
“I guess if we filter out anything to do with sex then we should be all right,” Shy said, but Salina didn’t smile.
On the bus on the way home, Shy said: “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m fine. It just hurts, that’s all. Things like today are a reminder of what I had to grow up with.”
Connection Part I: A Dystopian Novel (Perfectible Animals Book 2) Page 2
