The Space Queen

~ 2 ~

I know a lot of people have got a lot from online school. I know I have too. There's a benefit to online school - which is knowing that a great amount of the work you're doing has to be on your own time. There's a freedom in being able to study what you want, in going into the databases of the library, and researching what is interesting to you. I've spent hours doing this - writing notes about the topics that are interesting to me.

It's kind of a falsehood to say that things were only better when we were in online school - cause we have all learned and grown. We can still see each other - the ones of us that live close enough to one another. As for the others, the air is still too toxic for us to breathe. What a shame to have people we have loved so much delegated to only be mere memories in our lives now.

Still, I can't say that online school would have gotten me everything. It was Christopher, I think, seeing him peering over his spaceship. He made all the parts, and then he put a semiconductor inside. Hooking all the wires together, he was able to learn how to control the machine remotely. Not only that, he works so much on microchips that the spaceship started to learn from its own mistakes, and develop its own artificial intelligence. The experience was so profoundly inspiring, I knew that I had spend most of my years in academy doing the wrong thing / worrying about the wrong things. I've decided to change direction.

It's easy to say - "Well, I'm not good at math and science. Someone someday will be able to be better than me." Do you know how many have come before us saying the same thing? Taking the resources of Planet A, making their way by disadvantage of others, caring more about how they appear socially than about the good of their community. It's imperative that we stop spending our time caring simply about ourselves - we need to learn math, to learn basic scientific principles, to push ourselves in engineering, and to leave a civilization that is better than we found.

I remember how my parents reacted when I told them that I wanted to change my discipline direction.

My mom said, "But it's not what you are good at. You love writing and stories. You know so much about politics. You do the arts - you impress everyone. This would be a mistake of everything you have already worked for.

My dad, too, was frustrated but for different reasons.

"You could be good at it if you wanted to be, but you're not putting in the work. I've sat with you more than one summer trying to get you to control your patience. Math is very logical Marv. If you allow yourself to think like you've always done that there is only good and bad instead of effort, you will continue to fail. You have to promise me that you will look at learning as an incremental step. I will not approve of this until you can prove to me that you can make your grades better."

It was unbelievably frustrating to struggle through all my years of algebra, remembering each equation. I wanted to be already making ships like Christopher. Still, dad's words rung into my ear about having patience with myself, and I had to sit by myself alone at my desk before I could finally figure out that Dad was, once again, right.

Dad used to be in the Cloud Fleet. He always talks about those days, flying around when the sky was crystal-blue. He would see the mountains from afar, and imagine himself as a bird that would outstretch it's wings to land on the sharpest tips.

He was young, and he was beautiful in those days. He spent a good amount of time staring off on the ship in guard of the pirates that were rumored to want to board. Sometimes, he would go off with his mates to ancient towns that lay on the mountain side where people go on with their lives. One of his stories included riding a donkey all the way to the top, where he saw an ancient castle overlooking the hill. Legend has it that wizards used to exist, and the legends come from this particular castle. He saw there a virtual star map that hung from the ceiling, and it was there that he and other visitors walked around looking at the galaxy in awe. In other parts of the castle, you can see tapestries of dragons, of god beings that used to walk around like giants, and of beautiful cities where they would live. Cloudius Marxedius, the man who built the castle, used to live in it long before the wizard. In the valley below, he commanded a mighty empire of gods-fearing people. It was said that his descendants, for whatever reason, would need someone with the skills of magic.

My father has always been obsessed with fantasy and nature. The movies my family and I would watch with him were always about warriors that trekked through the land on horses, coming across faeries, witches, giants, and dragons. He would say to me and my sister, "This was what it was like before we destroyed our environment in the name of progress. Now we are chasing in spaceships over what we could have maintained in our own worlds."

I always liked these movies, but I always imagined traveling around in space more. Being in a wheelchair kept him from being able to get out of the house and have a normal job. Often, he would watch sports because he was too bored of watching anything else. One way he would get my sister and I to sit down would be for us to watch movies together. In the end, Victoriosa and I would watch videos of space-faring warriors, and Dad would have to comply by watching them so he could be with us.