If you are interested in attending a school outside of Human territory, there are many GC educational institutions with reciprocal admission agreements with the HDCHE. Admission conditions vary greatly, so please contact an HDCHE adviser for information specific to your desired school.
Based on your listed location, your nearest source for HDCHE informational meetings is:
Asteria Emigrant Resource Centre, Deck 2, Plaza 16
We highly encourage you to attend an informational meeting. All questions are welcome.
Happy studies!
Ras (18:80): how’d you do?
Ras (18:81): I got a 908
Ras (18:81): going to mars, baby
Ras (18:81): big cred time
Ras (18:94): dude will you please talk to me
Ras (19:03): whatever
Ras (19:12): I don’t get why you’re being such an asshole
Node identifier disconnected
System log: device deactivated
Isabel
Isabel rarely went to the theatre in the dark hours, so she couldn’t say what the usual crowd was during that time. There were a few people in the audience who were easy to predict. Old folks like her, scattered around the mostly empty hall. A young father, dozed off on the floor, his tiny child asleep on his chest, the exhausted conclusion to what had likely been a long night of walking the mostly vacant public corridors with a crying infant. But there was one member of the audience she did not expect. She sat down next to him, as she would with an old friend.
‘Hello, Kip,’ she whispered. ‘Mind if I join you?’
Kip was taken aback. Wherever he’d been, he hadn’t expected her to rouse him. ‘Uh . . . yeah, sure, M.’
Isabel folded her arms across her lap and took in the view. The projected environment was a rich tapestry of thick reeds, waving sheets of grass, protective trees, scummy water, and the calls of chittering birds with pointed opinions. ‘Wetlands,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been to a wetlands recording in a while. I tend to favour deserts. This is a nice change.’
Kip was quiet – not a contemplative quiet, but the unsure kind of quiet that kids his age sometimes fell into when addressed by an adult. Maybe he was just shy. Maybe he wanted to be left alone.
Isabel kept talking anyway. ‘Why aren’t you asleep, Kip?’
Kip shifted. ‘Why aren’t you?’
She chuckled. ‘Fair. My wife has a bad pair of legs. They wake her up a lot, and that woke me up enough times tonight that there wasn’t any going back from it.’
‘That sucks,’ Kip said.
‘That it does.’
He was quiet, again. The recorded trees rustled. The water lapped. ‘I haven’t slept great since . . . y’know,’ Kip said.
‘Understandable. Have you talked to someone about it?’
Another long pause. ‘My parents won’t stop talking to me about it. And I get they’re just trying to help, but like . . . sometimes I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Yes,’ Isabel said, with a nod. ‘I get that.’
Kip shuffled, as restless as the reeds. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, no, I asked. I appreciate you being honest.’ She watched as a great grey and white bird – some kind of predator – glided past on motionless wings. ‘So why here? Why not the sim hub, or the Linkings, or . . . ?’
‘I dunno. It’s . . . it’s quiet. I like that.’ He shifted again. ‘I like pretending I’m somewhere else.’ Isabel would’ve changed the subject at that, had he not continued: ‘That’s what the theatre’s for, right?’
Isabel turned her head toward Kip, his face silhouetted against the bright muddy green. ‘Is it?’ she asked.
‘Well, and so we know what it’s like to live on planets. So the ancestors wouldn’t freak out if they made it to the ground. They’d know what the sky looked like and . . . and yeah.’
Isabel looked back to the blue sky – that edgeless blue, streaked with clouds and birds whose names few knew off-hand. ‘Do you have somewhere to be anytime soon?’
‘Uh . . . no?’
‘Come on,’ she said, giving his arm a definitive pat. ‘I want to show you something.’ She stood. He hesitated. ‘There’s a bean cake in it for you.’
Kip got up.
The Archives were on the same side of the plaza as the theatre, so getting there took little time. Isabel swiped her patch over the locked entrance. Doors opened and lights bloomed awake. She looked around. None of her colleagues were there. Good. They would’ve gotten a scolding about still being up if they had been. No Ghuh’loloan, either, who was likely packing her things and preparing her goodbyes. Isabel and the boy were alone.
‘You spend much time in the Archives?’ Isabel asked as they took the lift down to the lowest level of her place of work.
Kip shrugged. ‘Namings and stuff. Sometimes for school.’
‘But never just to look, hmm?’
‘Uh, not really. When I was little, I guess.’
That wasn’t a surprise to Isabel. Why paw through boring old memories when you could go out and make your own?
The lift came to a halt, and Isabel led the way into the centre of the data room. Seemingly endless towers of globular nodes spiralled out around them, each pulsing with the soft blue light that meant all was well. Isabel smiled proudly. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
Judging by Kip’s expression, he was making a valiant effort to be polite – or maybe he just really wanted that bean cake. ‘It’s cool, yeah.’
Isabel folded her hands in front of herself and continued to admire their surroundings.
Kip waited. He shuffled. He stopped waiting. ‘I’ve been down here before, M.’
‘I’m sure you have. School visit?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Mmm. I’m sure you got a very technical explanation of how it all works, like I’m sure you did with water reclamation and engine tech and solar harvesters.’ She sighed. ‘Kip, what’s the most important cargo the Fleet carries?’
‘Um . . . food?’
‘Wrong.’
He frowned. ‘Water. Air.’
‘Both wrong.’ She pointed to the racks. ‘This.’
Kip was unconvinced. ‘We’d die without air, M.’
‘We die one way or another. That’s a given. What’s not is being remembered after the fact. To ensure that, you have to put in some effort.’ She reached out and touched one of the racks, feeling the warring balance of cold metal and warm energy. ‘Without this, we’re merely surviving. And that’s not enough, is it?’ Isabel looked at the boy, who was still confused. She patted the rack and began to walk. ‘Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves – that’s still true, don’t forget that for a minute – but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.’ She looked around at all the lights, all the memories. ‘It is easy to remember that story here, in the Fleet. Every time you touch a bulkhead, every time you tend a garden, every time you watch the water in your hex’s cistern dip a little lower, you remember. You know what the story is here. But outside of here, there’s a different story. There’s sky. There’s ground. There are cities and money and water you can take for granted. Are you following?’