A Dream for the Future ...

I have a dream. A dream ... of the future ( ur! ur! ur!)! Not my future. THE future.

In this dream, there is a history class. Children dressed like they just came out of filming Devo video come hovering into class on their neat little hover jet-packs. The jet packs shoot little rings to indicate they are doing something, but the rings are nothing - a simple visual effect.

These children settle into their seats, the hover-packs folding neatly into liquid-metal cybernetic implants installed in the shoulder blades of each child around their eighth birthday. They begin to flick their wrists, producing from a wrist-mounted device a simple, palm-sized holo-emitter. These devices, the iSights, were provided to the students free of charge by the good folks over at Apple, one of a handful of beneficial megacorporations working to better the world for the simple sake of bettering the world.

After some calm but insistent instruction from a teacher with a dancer's figure, a bookish look to her, and an air of confidence (also dark hair, green eyes, glasses and ... oh, what the hell, a short skirt), the students prepare for their lesson. A boy and girl in the corner switch their iSights away from the Nintendo (an entertainment megacorp) channel and their long-running Pokemon battle. Another boy shoos away the children crowded around him and subtly turns off the channel he is using to hack the scoreboard of a game of blurnsball a world away - literally on Mars. One after another, the children open up their classroom channels, each holding above their hands a weightless, floating, interactive hologram of a history book.

The pretty, confident teacher (who secretly moonlights in various dance clubs, and has had her own hover-pack modded to resemble angelic wings) begins to read aloud. She reads of something called "banks," institutions that were the core of a system of "finances" - the trading of meaningless tokens in exchange for goods and services rendered. This draws chuckles from the class. When she mentions that many of these "financial systems" were supposedly based on the values of precious metals and gems, that indeed, the world itself was simply driven by the pursuit of these meaningless minerals, a girl in the middle of the room raises her hand.

This girl is tall for her age, but a bit awkward, with frayed red haired. But she is respected by her classmates for her intellectual curiosity and imagination. She asks why people worked for paper and coins that were really without any value at all, how these tokens could mean the same thing and carry the same value to different people, all of whom felt they were doing a good day's work, all of whom were contributing to their society in some way. She asks why people who didn't contribute in any meaningful way also received amounts of these tokens. She asks why people were so obsessed with precious metals and gems when most of these people could not have had any real use for them. She inquires as to the megacorporations and everything they have done for the world - not in the interest of money, but in the interest of people - and what they did in this odd system of paid laziness and unpaid effort.

Frankly, if this girl has a flaw, it's that she asks entirely too many questions at one time. But her teacher just smiles her flawless smile and explains: The world they are learning of was not one wherein people were allowed to do whatever they wanted, as long as it contributed to society. The world they are learning of is one where true contribution to society required extra effort, and sacrifice, and that this sacrifice was material and unreturned, unrequited. She explained that no one could really help anyone else even if they wanted to, because it cost too much of these meaningless baubles.

The world used to be a place where one was not rewarded for a hard day's work with what they needed to survive, let alone what they wanted to pass the extra hours. The entire world was driven by the pursuit of what was utterly meaningless. The entertainers of that bygone age actually had better lives than the people who saved lives - not that there is anything wrong with being an entertainer, but that was not an age of equality. It was an age of escapism and sadness and exhaustion. Corporations and people and countries hoarded resources so that they could use them to gain more resources that they simple spent to gain still more resources, with no feasible goal in sight, no true purpose to any of it.

Certainly not to make a world a better place, certainly not happiness, not even really for themselves. They gathered resources for the simple sake of gathering resources, and the resources were simply not good for anything.

The children are quiet for a moment after this explanation. And then, as one, they burst out laughing. The teacher cannot help herself, she joins in. After a moment, she explains the contrast of their society to that one: Here, entertainers are appreciated for their talents, but they aren't handed a better life than anyone else. Here, megacorporations like Apple are staffed by people who simply love to work on the technology Apple creates. Here, there truly aren't thousands upon thousands of businesses, all using as many people as they could to gain as much of the pie as they could. Here, there was simply enough pie to go around, because people were simply allowed to do what they wanted to do, and received what they needed to survive for doing it. And then some.

Their system is closer to a barter system used in a far-gone age. One where you pick a trade and you work at it, providing those things people want and need and simply receiving those things you want and need in return. Sure, some people still like those precious metals and gems simply as they are, but it's far more common that they are used up in the technology that powers this world.

This world where one's reward for a good day's work is knowledge that you've done good, and in return for taking care of the people around you, they take care of you.

I can't decide if I like this one better, or the tribal, post-apocalyptic dystopia.