Dreams of New Earth

I have a little flying saucer. It’s very cute and very fast.

Basically, all you need to do is set the coordinates for the destination and the route you want to take. As for the rest – steering, not flying into mountains, not colliding with other saucers and so on – all of that’s taken care of automatically, which is such a relief after driving a car. You can just relax and enjoy the view.

It can zap me over to the other side of the world in an hour and a quarter if I want to spend the weekend with my sister. And I can take a different route each time, and see places I’ve never seen before. The walls can go transparent, (using fibre optics) so nothing gets in the way of the view!

And I can go up above the atmosphere, and see our beautiful Earth from space. I love to see how far the green has extended across the Sahara Desert, and how the regeneration of the rain forests is going.

Some of my friends have spent time further afield – on Mars or the Pleiades or even Andromeda. I’ve been to Sirius on holiday – which was a wonder from beginning to end – but I don’t want to stray too far from Earth right now. Here is where my work is, and my love and my passion. For the moment.

Some people live in villages or towns or cities. I’ve always preferred to be in the middle of nature, and now I can be – without hurting it. But at the same time, because of my saucer, I’m not cut off.

I have some lovely neighbours scattered over the area. And there’s a small community twenty kilometres away where I go several times a week to work in the community garden or meet friends for coffee or boogie-board in the sea.

The city is a hundred and fifty kilometres away, and I go there to sing in the choir, go dancing, do my study course, and spend time with my partner, who’s a member of the city council (when he’s not being a cook or a gardener or a surfer). He’s training to become a City Representative, so it’s best for him to be there. And to tell you the truth, he’s a city boy. So we can both live where we want to but still spend plenty of time together – and that’s all down to our beloved saucers.

To get around in the city, there are jump stations – little rooms like lifts – stationed all over the place. You go in, the doors close, you say which station you want to go to, the doors open, and you’re there!

There are a few people living in rural areas who don’t have saucers, and use the local taxi services instead, run by sociable people who like being on the go and spending most of their time in the air. Payment is whatever they both agree – home baking, help in the garden, whatever. But an increasing number of people aren’t bothering to take payment for services rendered. We all know that what goes around comes around – and faster than ever these days!

For longer journeys on Earth there are still airports, but with antigravity craft and no runways. And no tickets, no customs, no passports, no security.

You do need to apply for a ticket to fly out of the Interplanetary Terminal, but that’s just for logistical reasons; the tickets are free and come through pretty quickly. To go further afield – Sirius or the Pleiades, for example – you go via the Interstellar Terminal, near the Jupiter Portal.

Despite all this fancy technology, we haven’t lost the use of our bodies! But we exercise when we want to do it, and we do what we like to do. I like to dance and boogie-board. Oh, and to walk in nature, of course, but I’m more of an ambler than a hiker.

My brothers are keen cyclists, and they’ve been involved in the design and construction of some wonderful new cycle tracks in the UK. Now that most of the roads have been removed (with the help of the new technologies) and great swathes of land have been freed up, you can have cycle tracks and walking tracks which follow the landscape without having their routes interrupted by roads.

Of course, we’re all learning to teleport – some of us taking to it more easily than others. The children can do it almost from the word go. If they weren’t so good and loving and the world wasn’t so safe, this could be a major problem in the making. But as it is, it’s fine. No parents driving children to school or ferrying them to and from classes in the evening. No traffic jams, no rush hour. The children just turn up where they need to be, when they need to be there, alert and happy and full of beans.

© Sue J Davis 2015

Please see Copyright Notice on the ‘About’ Page.