Second Generation - Lux
8 years later
Lux puts the finishing touches on her artwork. She was coloring a picture of herself in a space ship heading to the stars. In one window of the spaceship Lux drew herself, in the other windows she drew animals to keep her company. There is a cow, a pig, and a chicken – her farm animal friends. Her 8th birthday was last week and her grandfather bought her an art program for her device.
Lux’s monitor lock fades as she steps away from her device. The biometrics no longer register and the software closes. Her workstation is clean and simple ball scroll interface, ergo-keyboard are the only things atop the main surface. No books, no paper, no pens. She has seen photos of her grandfather’s old office filled with books. He would keep them on a shelf like trophies. Lux’s mother would say he never saw him read any of the hand-held books. They just stayed on the shelf. In fact, when he did read, he would listen to audio books of the physical book seated behind him while he was working. Eventually they were all given away to the recycler.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The circular economy has now removed the need for all printed paper. Anything you need to view can be recorded or viewed from your monitor surface. Print is a dead, a waste that was able to be eliminated and a society that no longer needs it. Most government have eliminated paper manufacturing years ago and there are still import restrictions on paperboard in connection with sustainability initiatives.
Lux has never actually seen paper but her grandfather talks about it. Her Grandfather was a farmer. Well, he was for a while at least. The farm failed. He couldn’t make payments and he was forced to sell the land.
Lux is sad that her Grandfather no longer has his farm. She would like to go play on a farm.
Art time is over.
She starts her daily chat with Tabatha, her personal educator.
Tabatha says “Hello Lux, what did you draw today?”
“The same things as yesterday”
“How interesting, would you like to talk about it?”
“No, not really – I want to play a game”
“Great, I love games, what would you like to play?
All public education in the UDC has been converted to a web-based format. The first-grade curriculum is broken into 4 main categories. STEM, Art, Literature, and Socialization. Studies have shown that children require at least one hour of public socialization every day to develop skills related to human social ques and healthy emotions. Children, especially young children, perform best with one-on-one educational instruction. Before lunch each day Lux spends one hour of socialization time with Tabatha. Tabatha is Lux’s personal AI bot monitored by state educators.
