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

be revealed on stage once the show starts. With that promise, I go up too, to dress for the occasion. As I come back down again, the Grand Hall is already filling up. Valerie is on stage, with her MP3 player. Mike stands in the center of the room, his hands outstretched to the big sphere that will provide for the sound. He signals Valerie to say something, and adjusts the sphere so her voice is loud and clear. Next comes the music. As our star activates the MP3 player, the familiar tuning in of the music fills the room. Once it's finished, Mike tells Valerie to move around on the stage. Satisfied that his system has no trouble following her, he finalizes the settings, and wishes the girl all the success in the world.

Then, as if they have been warned that something is about to happen, the murmur dies down, leaving a shattering silence. It is as if everybody is waiting for something quite extra-ordinary to happen. Kim has found a place on the side of the stage, ready to cheer her best friend on. After a while, I can become the proud dad that I am, because my daughter just came up on stage, for about one hundred eager guests. I for one would not easily do the same thing, so I wonder who's given her that gene. I'm glad we bought her that particular MP3 player though. This afternoon, she spent quite some time sequencing the songs that she is going to perform tonight. And now she stands there, dressed in her favorite jacket, in front of an object of some sorts that's hidden under a shroud. As she starts the player, and the first guitar tones hesitantly roll through the hall, the shroud lifts, revealing a scene directly from Madame Tussaud's: All four members of Tokio Hotel, large as life, there to support my little girl. To this day, I cannot fathom how Mike did it, but based on about ten two dimensional photographs, he's crafted a perfect three dimensional replica of the band, in under half an hour. I guess sufficiently advanced civilizations will always look like magic to the lower civilizations.

By now, Valerie has gotten to the singing part of Forgotten Children. Her clear but still somewhat shaky voice is somewhat dwarfed by Bill's. As the song progresses, the audience starts to get into it. Here and there, heads are bobbing to the beat, and those kinds of encouragement are just what the doctor ordered. Line by line, Valerie's sound becomes more steady, matching Bill's voice as if they are both there on stage together. Forgotten Children turns into Schrei, and I quickly make my way to the center of the hall, and Mike at the controls. A single question, a nod, and as the chorus kicks in, Bill fades out, leaving a somewhat surprised Valerie carrying the song to it's grand finale. By now the girl goes wild: In Leb die Sekunde she shows that she doesn't really need her idol to make an impression. “How many of the people in the room can actually understand what she's singing?”, I ask Mike. Not that many, I would assume. “Haven't you seen the program leaflet that was made for the show?” He explains that he'd asked Valerie beforehand which songs she was gonna play, and had a friend translate the lyrics into Solara Maru. “OK, they wont be able to sing along like all Tokio Hotel fans upstairs, but they'll know quite well about what she's singing”, he concludes. By that time, Valerie has finished up the show with Don't Jump, accompanied by Bill who mysteriously got his voice back. As the last tones die out, silence kicks in. For a moment, I see Valerie's face cloud over, until the crowd goes wild.....

I walk up to the stage, to hug my eldest. She's thoroughly amazed at the enthusiasm of the crowd, that are still cheering for more. Oddly enough, they are asking for her to sing a song from her own repertoire. Valerie briefly confers with Mike, and selects another song on her player. As she falls in, I sit down on the stairs to the stage, because the hug will have to wait....

An encore that seems to go on forever, and applause and cheers as Valerie crosses the Grand Hall to the back entrance. We follow her, and together we ascend to the seventh floor, for our own little afterparty.

4444AD, Day 291, 09:12, Home

As I land the Liberator 7 in our spacious driveway, Selina appears at the front door. She fanatically applauds the new arrival, and (I hope) me....

“No silly, just the ship”, she replies when I jokingly ask her. Together we board her, and inspect our new home for the next nine months or so. There's still a lot to be done, not because we are in a rule-driven society, but because our own sense of order needs to be satisfied. No pets, which is actually good, because then we don't have to find them a new place to stay. Pets on board a spaceship are allowed, but hardly advisable.

No, the real hard part is deciding which of our things stay, and which go with us. And since we'll be gone long, moving in a sense, it wouldn't be effective to keep the house either. But that we can decide later, first we will explore the Liberator together.

She's a four engine craft, and is capable of vertical takeoff. Resting on six retractable landing struts, you can board her midships, via a ramp. The control room is up front of course, and has twin consoles. Despite its age, the ship is in prime condition, and will easily last us the nine month trip.

Both me and Selina will assimilate the training manual tonight, although for me that is a mere formality: I've flown dozens of different ships, even some from this particular product family. Flying them is about as taxing as an extended stay under a sunny sky, with more than adequate refreshments. Aft we find two state rooms, both with double beds. Thus, we could even decide to pick up some passengers, for the added company.

No galley, but a Connaisseur Replicator, so we'll not starve to death, far from it even. And since we have the same type in our home, I'll be downloading all our perfected recipes to it, to make us feel like we never left.

The engines are so-called displacement drives, large toroids outside the hull, that are capable of creating gravitational displacements. What this in fact does, is to warp space in the direction of where we're going, so the ship sort of falls into them. They can be very precisely controlled, have no exhaust streams, and make only very modest noise. If Selina hadn't been anxiously waiting to see me arrive, she might very well have missed the landing if she were indoors.

Port and starboard side in between control room and state rooms is the area where the required technology to power the vessel is housed. A double corridor on either side of the entry ramp connects forward and aft.

The state rooms have large, transparent ceilings, that make the night sky in space look like it's indoors. Immediately aft of the entry ramp we find the ship's transporter, which concludes the tour of this fine vessel. With the entry ramp closed, we allow the transporter to zap us to our living room, to commence the further planning stages.

“I love it!”, Selina shouts while we materialize and fall down on the couch. I get thoroughly thanked for having found the ship, and transported it here. For a while at least, all intentions towards further planning are discarded in favor of some good old-fashioned loving. After all, some things are just that much more important than others.....

“Actually, we should have broken in the ship”, Selina declares with a naughty grin. “Plenty of time to do that properly”, I add to her remark: “We might even need that second state room for a nursery if we're not careful...”

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010, 21:14

It is awesome how synchronicity keeps creeping up on me, leading me to believe there is a valid reason for this sheer endless stream of coincidences that are just to darn coincidental to merely be that.

When I came home for instance, I did the website and decided to find me some music to top it off. Even before I had actually searched Youtube, it gave me a song from several years ago, which I maybe only heard once or twice: “I want you back in my life”, just how synchronistic can you get? And the fact that its sung by a female DJ might mean that it is not representative of me, but of the female element I want back in my life.

But does she want me back, or have I thoroughly messed things up by writing this novel? I'm sure she'll know it is her described so lovingly here, and her colleagues might, if they knew about it, but I don't write under alias for nothing....

So no, the secret is quite safe out here in the open. And knowing synchronicity, I've set one up of almost impossible probability. Which means there is almost no way it will not play out! And that's fine with me, because I've got a bet with my daughters about just who 'the One' will turn out to be....

Smells of personal gain, I hear some of you Charmed fans mutter. But I claim that's just a clause aimed at holding us back. Because in order to help others, you first have to take care of yourself, right? Now I've always been helpful, which in fact is personal gain as well, because I get a kick out of being able to help. So either way, always breaking the personal gain rule, I'm destined for Hell, in case it actually exists, which I don't believe.....

4444AD, Day 294, 10:22, Home

OK, I'm almost finished with the Liberator's data upgrade: any and all information from our home system that's in the least bit helpful, has been transferred to the new four TeraQuad memory bank that I had installed there. Most of it is easily useable, because both the Liberator and our home use a similar Linux-derived operating system.

I've cleared a fair bit of floor space in the living room, and placed a transport marker there. Together with Selina, I stack everything that has to come along around it: the stuff we brought from my past self's old home, our two favorite gym systems. Selina went for the ski trainer, and I picked the running pad. No room for additional machines, so they'll have to do. Of course my lovely can't do without at least a sizable part of her sensuous wardrobe, and we also pack some more normal clothes.

It is exhilarating, to plan this. The awesome idea that we'll be en route in about one hour makes it all the more intense. “Hey, didn't Ernesto say he loved our home? Can't we give it to him?”, Selina suggests. Not a half bad idea, especially since then it is easier to leave some stuff behind. We call him, and he zaps right over, to seal the deal and say goodbye to us. What we didn't know is that he called around a bit before popping over, so while we are talking to him, our transporter pad is having a bad case of rush hour traffic: all our friends and family drop by to pay their respects, give us that one last hug, and send us off.

With the whole motley crew assembled on the lawn, we finally board the Liberator, and perform the pre-launch check. Everything checks out, and with a flick of the wrist I level the toroids horizontally, and let them gently create lift. Inch by inch the deep space workhorse lifts itself from the driveway. I maneuver it so we'll have a clear view of friends and family from the