Raista, 9 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox calendar;
Wednesday, 14 May 2007, Native regional reckoning
New Orleans, Gamia Province, American Sector
He hated heat.
Blowing out his breath, Jason fanned the neck of his tee shirt as he scurried across the campus of Tulane University, lugging a heavy backpack full of assorted things around, just one of the many racing around campus like psychotic ants, trying to get wherever they were going as quickly as possible to escape the withering heat. Why did it get this hot so early in the year down here? Back home in Maine, there would still be snow in sheltered, shady pockets on the ground!
It was almost enough to make him want to be sent to a farm, but with his luck, they'd stick him on one of the rice or sugar plantations they had down here, instead of a nice wheat farm up in New England. It was just ridiculous. He looked at his watch and saw that he was going to be nearly a half an hour early, but he didn't care. He'd stand out in the hall and wait if only to be in air conditioning. It had to be nearly a hundred degrees! For him, that was outrageous, given back home in Portland, it was a news event if the thermometer hit eighty!
How did these people manage to live down here, anyway? He was sure that they would have melted by now.
The overshirt and backpack didn't help, but he couldn't help that. The overshirt, nothing more than a button-up, short sleeve, light blue denim shirt that was worn unbuttoned was a vanity of his. He'd worn shirts like that for so long that he felt naked if he wasn't wearing a shirt and an overshirt over it. The backpack was roasting his back where it was against him, but there wasn't much he could do but pull it down and switch to the other shoulder. It was a bit heavy today, but that was because he had today's project in there in addition to his panel display, the universal computer-like device that all students were issued, that acted as a textbook, notebook, assignment book, and personal computer. His cell phone (which he was required to carry at all times), earphones, several music and data sticks-crystalline devices that looked like little inch-long pencils made of crystal which stored information-and a few good old fashioned paper notebooks were also in the pack, adding to the weight but not about to be left behind.
If only Professor Ailan had let him build a smaller model. His project was for Advanced Plasma Fundamentals, and he had to build a functioning plasma flow model, complete with a plasma power generator, conduit for the plasma to take at least two separate paths, and an ion exchange module at both junctions. The Faey had microscopic versions of what he had in his pack, a massive dog of a device that weighed nearly thirty pounds, but he had to use the supplies that were available to him. It was a ridiculously easy project, truth be told, because all a student had to do was get the parts and put them together. His model had three paths instead of two, because he was the last student to get to the part bin, and had to use the leftovers. Professor Ailan had kept him at the podium on purpose, he privately suspected, keeping him from being able to get the necessary two-path split exchanger and merge exchanger to build the simplest version of the model. He managed to get a three-path split exchanger and two two-path merge exchangers, and used those to build a cascading model where the primary conduit was split into three paths, then two merged, then that joined path merged with the last before returning to the PPG.
Ailan was alright, at least for a Faey. Jason didn't like Faey, because they were conquering occupiers. It was well known that Jason was an objector, a vocal dissident, but he never allowed his opinions to appear to be anything more than opinions, and he also had the highest grade point average among second semester students in the university. The crux of his attitude towards Ailan dealt with a philosophical position. Because the Faey had stripped Jason of his freedom and rights, he was opposed to their system. But individual Faey were just that, individuals, and often voiced the same objections he himself raised. But since they were Faey, he had a moral obligation to avoid them, and do his best not to like them. That wasn't easy when all his instructors were Faey, and Faey like Ailan were friendly, personable, and actually rather funny. Ailan was a male Faey, which weren't often seen on Earth. The Faey was a female-dominated society whose entire core was based on telepathic power. Females tended to have stronger telepathic abilities, so they had emerged as the dominant gender. Females and males were the same size and roughly the same strength, but it was that disparity in telepathic might that made all the difference. Males did have a place in the society, but they were not allowed, by law, to enter into any occupation that was considered overly hazardous or dangerous, outside of serving on the large starships. Male Faey tended to be scientists, engineers, inventors, doctors, and teachers, while females were just about the only Faey that most people dealt with. All military Faey were female, including the occupational forces, who served as the new police. In addition to being military, females were also allowed to enter into any career they could manage to qualify for, and pull enough strings with whichever noble ruled them to manage to get in.
That was one reason Jason got so aggravated with the Faey system. It was a feudal bureaucracy, where every Faey was tested to see where they excelled, and allowed to pursue careers within those fields. The personal choice of the person had nothing to do with these choices, which was why Jason cursed his own role every day. When the Faey took over Earth, the tested each and every human on the planet, tests of intelligence, reasoning, and aptitude. Prior education and training had little impact on these tests, and everyone tried their absolute hardest when taking them. People who scored poorly were sent to farms, and being put on a farm was a fate that every human on Earth who was not already on a farm strove mightily to avoid. In that regard, the Faey system was a great deal like the military. But people who had money or connections could get out of that mandatory placement and go wherever they wanted. They just had to have enough credits or the right lineage. Nobles never served in the military in any role other than fleet officers or non-combat logistics officers for those who washed out of the academy, because they could buy those positions. If Jason had had enough money, he could have bribed his placement assessor to get any job he wanted. Not that it mattered for humans, for virtually all forms of old Earth currency was now worthless except for gold and silver. Some rich millionaires did manage to have enough gold or silver assets on hand to buy themselves out of working on a farm, but not many.
The main reason Jason hated his position was because he scored very high on those tests, high enough to be classified as able to comprehend Faey technology. And because of that, now he was in school to learn their technology. They didn't consider that a risk because of their formidable telepathy, which would let them catch him long before he tried to use his education in some kind of harmful manner. He would be trained in some kind of Faey technology, and then become a part of the Imperium by serving it. And he hated that. He'd be serving no matter what job he was doing, even farming, but it seemed so wrong to him to be trained in their technology and then work for them. It was almost as if he were betraying the American ideals he had held so dear, cooperating with the enemy.
It was doubly agonizing for him because he was fascinated by their technology. They used plasma as a power source, and had mastered the science of manipulating space itself for use as propulsion, containing the fusion reactions that supplied plasma to power their systems, communicating over the entire galaxy, and had even learned to use it to breach the spacial boundaries and allow ships to jump through artificial wormholes…the closest thing to teleportation that had been devised so far by any race. They used plasma for everything, from lighting their homes to the energy of their weapons, and had learned techniques to alter the nature of plasma to make it safe for commercial and residential use. They used the manipulation of space as propulsion, as a means of travel beyond propulsion, and had even learned a way to form micro-wormholes that allowed communications to pass through, giving their Imperium real-time communications over their vast empire of nearly seventy star systems. It was all so incredibly fascinating, and yet he felt he was violating his ethics and morals by enjoying his education. He hated the Faey, and yet was learning to be a productive member of their society. He hated being nothing more than a slave, yet his was the gilded cage, for they had put him in a place he loved to be.
Too hot. He had another half a block to go. Tulane and another university called Loyola had existed side by side here in the Garden District of New Orleans, but Loyola had been dissolved, its buildings taken over by Tulane to form a single campus. Not that it was Tulane anymore, it was simply called Tulane because that was the university whose buildings were still standing. Officially, it was the Basic Technology Academy, Gamia Province. His next class was all the way on the other side of the campus, in a brand new facility that had been built where the centuries-old Loyola building had once stood. Scornful of the rich history of that venerable institution, the Faey had razed the building to the ground and in its place built their five-story nightmare of glass and synthetic plastic-like material that was stronger than steel but lighter than aluminum. It was called the Plasma Dynamics building, or what the students called the "Plaid" due to the checkerboard appearance of glass and dark plastic that formed the front façade of the building, and it was where all lab-oriented Plasma courses were taught. How did these people deal with it? And it was only May!
Two Faey females in that strange form-fitting body armor came across Saint Charles Avenue, their rifles slung over their shoulders. He wondered how they could even breathe in those things. They were truly form-fitting, showing off all those lovely curves for which many human men secretly pined. Faey women were very lovely, all the military women were athletically thin, and most of them were curvy and very appealing. Jason had a feeling that the tight fit of the armor had something to do with its protective aspects, since it didn't hinder their movement in any way. If there was no void space within it, there would be no jostling inside the armor. He once saw a Faey soldier get hit by an SUV that had to be going about fifty miles an hour back when they first arrived, before they got the hang of crosswalks and realized that traffic wasn't just going to stop just because they stepped out into the street. She got thrown about thirty feet after the impact, then she got up and simply dusted herself off. The SUV was completely trashed. The armor was more than just showing off their forms, it was a powerful protective shell that surrounded them. These two had their helmets off, slung by small cords over the barrels of their rifles. They were patent Faey, high cheekbones, large, almond-shaped eyes, small, pert little noses, full lips, and that strange bluish skin. The taller one had gray eyes and auburn red hair cut short, combed over one side of her head, which seemed odd with her blue-hued skin, and the shorter one had blue eyes and hair so blond it was virtually white, short and straight as straw. Both had black armor, which denoted them not as regular army, but as Marines. They were the ones that a human had to watch out for, for they were rough, impatient, and tended to hand out very harsh punishments for the most benign of offenses. They resented their jobs as police, and took it out on the people they policed. Jason rushed past them, head down, not glancing to either side, his mind carefully neutral, betraying nothing.