Make IT Real! by Sander R.B.E. Beals (good books to read for young adults TXT) 📕

In the meantime, we have reached quite an altitude. The surprise at not being weightless is very short-lived. No doubt this machine has a solution even for that problem. LeeYooh flips the saucer over, so our ceiling is pointing to Earth. “Now it's easier to see home”, he explains. I never thought I'd ever see this sight with my own eyes: our pretty little planet up there for all of us to see. Apparently the others are equally impressed, because for over a minute there is an absolute silence. Valerie is the first to break it: “I can see home!” she yells. We all look in the direction of her pointing finger, and indeed: after identifying the British Isles, it isn't hard to cross the North Sea, and arrive in the good old Netherlands. LeeYooh listened in on us, and is quite willing to help. On his command, the disc accelerates, and we quickly see Holland zooming in. It's a bit like Google Maps, only this map is the real thing!

I stealthily make my way to our pilot, with nobody noticing. A quick whisper, a meaningful look, and I join the others again. They are still engulfed in the rapid approach of our homeland, unaware of the surprise I prepared for them. Gina points out Assen. Her hometown called Witten is only a stone's throw away from it. The disc flies south, and pretty soon my girls are coming to a conclusion: “Dad, we're almost home. Did you by any chance tell the pilot about that?”, Jane asks. “Guilty as charged”, I reply with a wink. “But you'd better look outside again, because I just saw Apeldoorn whizzing by”. And indeed, mere minutes later, we are floating above “de Mene”, the elementary school that is right across from my front yard. “What time is it out there?”, I ask LeeYooh. He quickly checks a display: “about two fifteen by your reckoning”, he answers. I ask him to move the disc over to the courtyard, so I can quickly buzz over to my home, to check the mail and pick up some items that might be of use. “Dad, can I come?”, Jane asks. She wants to unload the camera, so she'll have plenty of space again. We step onto the lift pad, and descend onto the street. Looking up, I must admire their technology: the disc is absolutely invisible, so to anyone looking, it would have looked like we appeared out of thin air. A shiver runs down my spine when I think of our resident hobo. He often sleeps on the bench facing the courtyard, and would definitely see us, had he been awake. But his snoring is even louder than the shuttle's engine!

Weird to be home again, knowing that we'll be gone again in five minutes flat. I open the door, and pick up the mail. There's no huge pile of it, because I have a sticker on the mail slot that keeps out all the advertising. No use in wasting paper that I don't read anyway. Jane dashes into the living room to fire up the laptop. It'll take her quite some time to empty that four gigabyte memory card, especially since it is nearly full. I quickly leaf through the mail, but it's mostly bills that can wait until I really return. There is however a letter from my publisher that warrants opening the envelope. They report my royalties over 2007, for my first novel. Despite the fact that it was written in Dutch, which lessens the potential audience, the bottom line brings a smile to my face. It seems that the next laptop for our upgrade plan will be bought as soon as we return from vacation.

As I look around the room, it occurs to me that it is extremely clean. Apparently Joyce, the girls' mother, has taken it upon herself to do some housekeeping before she went away on vacation herself. I get Jane and me some water, while we wait for the camera to send all those wonderful images to the laptop. As Windows 7 counts down the last few seconds, Jane finishes her glass, takes mine too, and brings them to the kitchen. Quickly I locate the MP3 file that we recorded of Dieter's imitator earlier, and mail it to the original Dieter. I then disconnect the camera from the laptop, and the laptop from everything else, and close the lid. “Are you taking that?”, Jane asks. “Seeing what they did to the camera batteries? Yeah!”, I reply. She smiles, at the thought of a laptop that keeps on going...

We walk back to the disc, and quickly check if our hobo friend is still sleeping. Wouldn't want to panic him, there's no need for that. We step onto the pad, and are quickly lifted back into the interior of the craft. By the time we reach the others, Zutphen city is long gone, like a thief in the night.

“LeeYooh, could we visit the moon?”, Gina asks. I know what she's after: we both heard the rumor that the moon is not a natural satellite, but a construction of some kind. And there's no time like the present to go see for ourselves! As Gina explains that story to the kids, she is immediately backed up by Kayim. He tells the girls that in Inner Earth, that story is known to be fact instead of fiction. LeeYooh makes some sketching moves across his panel, and then joins us. “It will take some time”, he says. “an hour, two?”, I react. “No, merely nineteen minutes”, he smiles. The whole crew crowds the back window, where Earth is rapidly diminishing in size. I never had any problem imagining the vastness of space, but seeing it illustrated this way brings tears to my eyes. Then Gina calls me to the front window, where our good old moon is bigger than I'd ever seen it. Yes, not even Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty brought it quite that close. Great movie by the way, if you love a God that makes you laugh every now and then.

“Did you ever wonder about the trajectory of the moon? How it consistently shows the same part of it's surface to us?”, Gina asks. I agree that it is highly unlikely that natural tendencies would have made it do exactly one rotation for every orbit around Earth. Even if the ratio was off by a thousandth of a percent, we would have seen much more of the surface over the last few centuries. But no, the moon still looks as it has always looked. Unless of course, the moon is like a loaded die, heavy on one side. Then gravity might cause it to always have one side towards us.

As we fly towards it, we see it lit from the side by Sol, our bigger brother. LeeYooh sends our vehicle towards the light, so we can look at the lit portion of the far side of the moon. It looks just as I remember it from the Luna 3 mission back in 1959. “Andy, look over here”, Gina says, and points at a panel on the shuttle's dashboard. It obviously lists data about the object that now takes up a considerable part of our view. “LeeYooh, are these figures what we think they are?”, Gina asks. Our pilot nods: “I put them there for you, specifically in your language. And yes, this is current information, straight from our external sensors”. So the question for me is what I believe: Do I go for the calculations and estimates of a people that have only put a handful of humans on the Lunar surface, or do I place my faith into my Inner Earth fellows, who show themselves to be way ahead of us surface dwellers? The display shows that our moon is not nearly as heavy as science has always claimed it is. Its density appears to be remarkably lower, as if it was hollow. “That proves it”, Gina says: “the moon is hollow, or entirely made of Styrofoam”. LeeYooh laughs, a deep, warm laugh, kinda like a large, dark nigger (not meant degradingly). “Of course the Moon is hollow, why else do you think we Inner Earth people come here?” He explains in some detail that aeons ago, it was built and put into orbit to replace the Earths two original moons. Its so called synchronous orbit, with only one side facing Earth all the time is by design, so it would be easy to enter and exit at the rear. “You guys forced our hand back around the 1950's. Fortunately we could hide our tracks just in time for the Luna 3 to send you images of a pristine far side of the moon”, LeeYooh said. He went on to explain that until that time, the portal to the moon's interior had never been camouflaged, because no humans could see it anyway.

“Can we go inside?”, Valerie wanted to know. “I don't see why not.”, our pilot replied. He made another move across the panel, and uttered some gibberish into his headset. We couldn't hear the reply, but it would have been equally intelligible. As a result, a hexagon of light suddenly appeared on the surface down below. It was especially visible, because it was on the unlit portion of the far side. Our transport dove in, and we rapidly descended towards the light, which proved to be an opening about a mile wide. “That must be some doors”, I said to LeeYooh. “Nope”, he replied: “no doors, but a ring of holographic generators, six in all. They reproduce that square mile of barren wasteland, just the way your astronauts expect it to be”. Talk about masters of illusion......

4444AD, Day 257, 17:42, Home

“Lean back, my lovely one, I'm cooking tonight”. I kiss my love as I pass her by, in the direction of the kitchen. Some things you'll not find in our kitchen, like a gas-guzzling stove. No, ours is electrical, but the principle used for heating makes it as responsive as a gas stove. No dishwasher here, because I can simply ask our home to remember the kitchen as it was before I start cooking, and ask it to restore that checkpoint later on. That of course goes for any room in our spacious villa. Great invention for people with kids, ain't it?

I love cooking. But then I love a lot of the activities that humans do, I'm not an RBE for nothing. Weird acronym though, because it used to stand for Real Biological Entity, meaning 'human'. But in my name, the middle initials R.B.E. stand for Realistic Biological Entity, which means I'm designed to look like one, act like one even, but have capabilities that outperform the original.

But that is where my love of everyday activities comes from, and today I will use that to prepare my love and me a feast: YeeHaw Texas Chili, straight from Allrecipes.com.

Maybe you're wondering, how sites from your era can possibly still exist in ours? Sure, the maintainers of them are not the same, but the information on the Web just kept migrating to ever faster and bigger servers, until it finally became a truly ubiquitous, virtualized network. No longer was it possible to lose information, because like RAID5, everything was stored in several places, and served up seamlessly to whoever wanted it. Since then removing became a crime to perform, so we simply let the old stuff peacefully coexist with the new info, and thus are still able to use information from as far back as the 1970's, and talking about stuff even further back.

Of course, we add to that ancient recipe, in that our kitchen provides us with several nifty gadgets. You'll find a 'refrigerator' there alright, but mostly when you open it, it is just empty space. You have to fill it