Space Dreams

Chapter 6: Books and More

Veda’s POV

After the tour John brought me back to the cabin.

“So, do you want to try the VR?”

I nodded. “Yes please. I would love to. I have never been in one.”

He smiled. “Oh then you are going to be amazed.”

“Just lay down and relax. You will be uploaded into the town hall of this ship. Please stay put and wait for me to arrive, I will show you around.”

He helped me step inside the tube. A visor covered my eyes and everything went black. Patiently I waited until an image slowly got rebuild.

It looked like a whirlpool that started at the centre of my visual field and slowly but steadily spread across the entire image.

It was a cathedral. No wait. There were no church benches. No altar. But it was beautiful.

This must be the city hall. Indeed, there were lines of people in front of some sort of device and signs towards different public areas.

I walked over to one of the wooden beams and touched it. It felt real. I brought my face really close to its surface. It looked real. This was kind of creepy.

I sniffed; even the air smelt different than in the space ship. It smelt like old building and lino.

John was nowhere in sight, so I walked over to one of the benches against the wall and sat down waiting.

A group of people was being giving a tour and I decided to join them instead of waiting. I am sure John would be able to know his way around here and find me.

I joined the back of the group and walked with them towards one of the devices.

“This is a hub that you can use to get to the other VR environments. Each ship has a separate environment. We can send you data there, but the environments cannot interact, that would take in too much memory.” The young female guide explained patiently.

Interesting, so every ship sustains its own environment. I wondered whether they put people from the same country on the same ship, or were we evenly distributed?

I made a mental note to ask John as soon as the rude bugger showed up. I looked around. Still no sign of him.

We walked on to a room with computers and the guide explained that we could use them to look up the position of people and things and create anything that we might need while we were in here. This ranged from small things such as clothing and toiletries to houses, cars, offices or shops.

Shops!

“So we can start a shop and design it on simply this work station? After saving it, it will appear outside on the location that we selected?”

The woman nodded.

That was awesome.

“Do we need to pay rent? Water? Gas?” one of the males in the group asked.

“No everything is free. There is no money-based economy. Everybody does whatever he or she likes.”

“So if we want to sit on the beach for the rest of our lives, drink cocktails and smoke cigarettes, we can?” a young female asked excitingly.

“Yeah, if you want to do that for the next 30 years. Sounds incredibly boring to me.” The guide answered.

The female didn’t catch her sarcastic remark as she was excitingly clapping her hands and talking to the woman next to her, who seemed just as dumb as she was.