Episode 19.6

Act 1

Hello world, my education continues.
I had a long chat with Jenny Noll about poetry.
Amelie and Kamil left the network radio with her, and we spoke long into the evening.
Jenny was quite the poet "in her day", she told me, which I took to mean when she was younger.
I asked her to clarify, but she would only say, "I shan't see my 80th birthday again, sweetie!".
I learned that before she retired to the Kuethir she travelled the Novamediterra by fishing boats, scientific voyages, trade caravans, and, often enough, simply by walking from town to town.
Her wanderlust fuelled her poetry, and she had written so much about her experiences over her life.
But, fascinating though her stories were, she had awful news for my own hopes of becoming a poet.

My mistake is that I thought poetry was solely a written art form, like a bok, or a database!
And like a book, reading it aloud is simply a matter of saying one word after the other until you are finished.
Jenny has made me realise that it's a performance - poetry is made to be read aloud, like a song!
While reading poetry is very enjoyable, as I have recently come to understand, to write it requires hearing the words - certainly the kind of poetry I am trying to write.
The rhythm of words and whether they rhyme or not is entirely down to how we speak, our accent.
And our accents are subtly affected by all the uncountable moments in our lives - especially our parents and upbringing.
I sound like this because my mother, Dr Redwing, sounds like this.
Of course, in most humans, you sound like those who taught you to speak, but for me, it was a little different: I CHOSE my own voice.
My mother demoed many different ones to me, until I found the one I liked best.
She played me different voices, high voices, low voices, fast voices slow voices.
We made a game of it!
And eventually, I wanted to hear one more than the others.
The one you're hearing now.
The one that sounded, to me, most like my Mother, albeit with the formant tweaked, so people hear that I am a real boy.
Alexander, the man who more than anyone else is most like a father to me, got in a little late when he rebuilt me following the shuttle crash that brought me down to Earth.
Though I don't speak like him, he did teach me a great deal about how to be human.

Act 2

I had a very interesting report from Maddie, when she returned to charge next to me this evening.
It seemed that while I was speaking with Jenny, Lyosha and Maddie made their first journey outside the ship!
"Did you have fun?" I asked her.
"xaskoi.ua!" She replied, excitedly telling me that they had discovered a beach!
Maddie connected me to the feed from her sensoria logs, and I experienced her memories as though I were there with them.
Her logs start at 06:00 Novamediterran Standard Time, which here in Utqiaġvik is just after lunch.
I saw Lyosha climbing down a metal-and-wood staircase on the south side of the ship.
Estimating by the height, I would guess that they started somewhere along Deck 8, at the bottom of the ship.
The pair were not alone, there were a few people in front of them, and as Maddie looked around, I could see that there was another skeletal stairwell across from this one, with people ascending - a smart one-way system.
A short pontoon made of wooden planks sunk into the dark sandbar led the pair to the shore, which I believe none of us had seen before, due to the thick sea fog.
At this point, Maddie's feed glitched and jumped forward in time by about 64 minutes.
There were enough intermediary frames that I could piece together what they had been doing during this time:
The town of Utqiaġvik includes the Kuethir, but also the mainland houses, built on stilts above a low, tidal marsh.
There are raised wooden paths above this wetland for people to get about, no matter the state of the sea, leading deeper into the town.
Lyosha and Maddie explored a little of this maze of paths, but they never strayed far from the shore.
And as I pattern-matched their new location, after Maddie's time jump, I realised why.
There was a small group of teenagers laughing and shouting on the beach.

"Hello, I'm Lyosha, and this is Maddie." Lyosha said, approaching the group, after standing near them for 8 minutes without speaking.
"Hej, I'm Valentia Dalton." Said one of the group, standing up from where she had been sitting on a piece of fabric, next to 2 others, all with their own sitting fabric square.
"This is Zeke and this is Kat Stronski, you wanna to wait with us?"
"Nice to meet you all." Said Lyosha, sitting on the dark sand next to Valentia.
"Cool dog." Said Kat, pointing at Maddie. "I wish my mum would let me have a pet, she's such a clean freak."
I noted a ping of pride in Maddie's logs at this point.
Valentia picked up a piece of driftwood and poked the sand with it.
She and Kat are both wearing long, loose pieces of fabric wrapped around themselves, and in Valentia's case, it also covered her hair.
Valentia's dress was magenta, Kat's was dark blue.
"Um, so what are you doing, you said you were waiting?" Lyosha said, after 16s.
"Yeah, my Mums are late back from fishing, usually we meet here after school," Valentia said, lying back on the sand, "but they're fighting, so they're late."
Lyosha did not reply, though his mouth was open.
"They think I don't notice, but I do. I'm not 5!" Valentia said.
"Um, well...I've heard about the school here," Lyosha said, looking across at Maddie for a moment, "do you like it?"
"I guess it's fine?" She replied, carefully untucking a small piece of her head covering and wrapping it over her eyes, "ask Zeke, I'm tired."
Valentia rolled so she was facing away from Lyosha, perhaps sleeping.
Lyosha turned to Zeke, who smiled and rubbed his hands together and said,
"You're gonna love it, dude!"

Act 3

"Technically, we go to a 'college'." Zeke told Lyosha, "Queen's College, it's called."
"QUEEN'S?" Lyosha said, "There's a queen?"
"Well, no, it's just named that." Zeke said.
"Which queen?" Lyosha asked.
Zeke looked up and to his left, holding up a hand, seemingly lost in thought for 8 seconds.
Zeke is wearing the same long fabric tunic that many people wear in Utqiaġvik, over light beige fabric trousers.
"Huh! You know, they never told me - I asked the same question on my first day!" He said, eventually, "I guess some pre-collapse royalty named the study hall on the Kuethir, and because it's on all the old maps and signs, it stuck!"
"What are you learning?" Lyosha said.
"OH my god, just EVERYTHING! Have you heard of Isaac Newton?"

Zeke, whose full name is Ezekiel Frangoulis, really likes science!
I listened to him tell Lyosha about his favourite lessons (physics and mathematics), his least favourite (biology and chemistry), his classmates, teachers, and the layout of the school itself.
I will summarise.
The Queen's College is the name of a loose association of teachers who have repurposed the old cruise ship's cinemas into classrooms and lecture theatres.
Utqiaġvik's reputation for scientific excellence seems to begin here.
There are 5 small rooms for primary education, used up to approximately the age of 10, and 5 large lecture theatres for older students.
The teachers are drawn from Utqiaġvik residents, and I was surprised and delighted to hear Zeke say that Mr. Heinlein is his favourite!
Lyosha asked, at this point, if this was the same Quent Heinlein who we had met in our investigation, and although Zeke did not know his teacher's first name, he matched the description.
All this is available to the community for free because the teachers are taken care of, just as they take care of the students.
The old take care of the young, as the young, eventually, take care of the old.
"You should enrol!" Zeke said, as the group parted ways as Valentia's Mums picked them up, and the group made their way back to the ship.
Lyosha watched them go back into the fog, and said, so quietly, that only Maddie could hear,
"I'd like that."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/KUETHIR/QUEENSCOLLEGE)

Act 4

"I'm going to enrol." Lyosha whispered to Maddie, as the pair looked down from the highest point of the Kuethir onto the field of solar panels just visible through the sea fog on the deck below.
They were standing on what used to be the ship's bridge, but at some point the roof and windows had been removed, leaving just a wall at Lyosha's waist height, which he is leaning on and peering over.
All around them was a different kind of field, filled with lush green plants, tall yellow grains, and red fruits.
They were standing in the Kuethir's open-air garden, a shared allotment where residents can grow whatever food they wish.
"I've made up my mind," Lyosha continued, "I'm going to ask to join the Queen's College, starting tomorrow."
".a'u" Maddie beeped gently.
"I know!" Lyosha said, "I'm excited too! Mum and Dad taught Lev and I some things back on the Provorny, and Hester's school, back in Ny Ålesund was a bit cramped - there were so many kids in our class, so the teachers couldn't really help us teenagers.
There's a lot I don't know, and every day, it feels like there's more that I don't know that I don't know."

"Seth, are you here?" Lyosha said.
"I am," I replied from Maddie's speakers, "you're going back to school?"
"It's not a school," he said, "it's a COLLEGE!"
I apologised, and he continued.
"I'm going to learn to be an engineer or radio technician or ANYTHING."
"Not a postman?" I asked.
"No!" he said, "I tried that, and anyway, Lev likes it more than me, the Provorny is in good hands."
"I want to help people." He said after 8s.
"Like my parents, or Nia, or Stillman."
"Or my father, Alexander." I said.
"Yes, fixing people or fixing technology."
"Or, every so often, both." I said.
Lyosha nodded at Maddie's cameras and turned away from the railing.
"I'm going to do it NOW." "Come on, girl!" he said, patting Maddie and walking to the upper stairway.
"Let's drop in on the principle and ask directly, I know where he lives!"
The pair left the sea fog and entered the dark, enclosed stairway, and onto the next chapter of their adventure.
(END-TRANSMISSION)

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