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

“Dad, can I operate the digital camera on vacation?” Jane asks. I agree, and she bounces off the stairs to retrieve it from the desk in the living room. I finish packing her suitcase, and then transport the lot downstairs, to the hall. One last check reminds me of the charger for the camera batteries, which I quickly toss into my suitcase, along with my copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. “OK kids, one last check. Do we have all we want to take?” My little helpers think long and hard, but are interrupted by a car horn outside. “Well, no time anymore, so let's go”. I open the door for the taxi driver, who introduces himself as Tom. I help him carry our suitcases to the back of the car. Plenty of space there, it's a big SUV. We finish loading the luggage just in time to break up the girls, who are fighting over the front seat. Keeping in mind that I'd just allowed Jane to be our designated photographer, I let Valerie have the seat next to Tom, a guy who's barely twenty. And if I know my daughter's taste, she'll be only to happy to sit beside him on the two hour trip to Berlin Airport. Jane positions us in front of the taxi to officially document the start of our journey, after which we take our designated seats, and pull out of Goethe Lane to start our vacation.

With the girls chattering on about their plans for the trip, I just sit back and enjoy the ride. Valerie has been downloading Egyptian music all week, and now I discover why: “Tom, can your stereo play MP3 CD's?” Tom looks at her and nods. Val pulls a jewel case from her purse, and hands it to him. “Will you play this for us? I made it specially for our holiday to Egypt.” Soon enough, the mysterious sounds of various Egyptian artists fill the car. Valerie asks Tom: “Why did you become a taxi driver?” Tom smiles, and remarks: “It's my second choice, because the role of the Godfather was already taken!” The girls and me burst out laughing, and Tom and Valerie chat on, about numerous other things. I quietly observe Tom. His driving seems unaffected by the music and the chattering girl. We zoom along the German autobahn with an impressive speed of about one hundred miles per hour, which is perfectly legal here: no speed limit. We come up on a slower vehicle; Tom checks his mirrors and veers left to overtake it. My heart jumps, as the horn of another car blares at us from behind. It's a fiery red Lamborghini Diablo, itching to overtake us. Tom stays calm, finishes passing the other car, and goes to the right lane again. “I checked”, he explains: “there was no car behind me, so this wacko must have been doing well over two hundred miles an hour.”

The girls settle down, and Tom points out the Berlin skyline to Jane, who quickly pulls out the Sony. I warn the girls not to bother Tom anymore, because he'll need his mind to be on the heavy Berlin traffic. But the girls are far too busy looking at the city. They point out stuff to one another, and ask me millions of questions. Like them, I visit Berlin for the first time, so “I don't know...” is one of the most used sentences in the next fifteen minutes. That's how long it takes us to reach the huge Berlin airport, where the second leg of our journey is about to start. Tom helps me put the cases on a cart, and we finish with the financial aspects of the ride. He honks and waves, leaving us on the sidewalk in front of the large revolving doors. “Where do we have to go?” Val asks. “Check-in first, do you have the tickets?”, I reply. I know she doesn't, because I have them safely tucked away in my left inside pocket. Panic clouds her pretty face: “I don't have them, maybe Jane does?” Jane denies having them, and Valerie slumps down onto the suitcase cart. “Great, there goes our vacation!” I pat her on the back, and remind her that it's April first. She looks at me deviously, and punches me in the gut. “That's for scaring me half to death!” She goes off, leading the way to the check-in counter, where long lines of people are patiently waiting. Jane and I follow, me pushing the cart with the three suitcases. After some ten minutes, I hand over our tickets to the young lady behind the desk. She labels the bags as I hoist them onto the conveyor belt, and tells me that Jane's suitcase is over weight. Fortunately, my youngest beauty stuffed her carry on luggage into her suitcase, so we take it out, and find the suitcase to be weighing a perfect twenty kilograms. Daphne (I checked her badge) hands me our boarding passes, and we drop the cart at its designated parking spot on the way into the depths of the airport.

Strolling through the vast tax free shopping area, we are a bit lost. Both my girls aren't really mall rats, and personally I also don't find it hard to resist the incessant temptation to buy stuff. So it's mostly window shopping for us. Mostly, but not totally: a display of a jumbo sized Swiss Army knife catches my eye. When the kids see me ogling the thing, they dive into the nearby news stand, for a little reading material on the way. I enter the classy store, and let the salesman demonstrate a knife. He's ecstatic about it: “Not your everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety, but a well balanced mix of tools that will fulfill almost all of your demands”, he claims. “Do I need to rub it three times?” I joke, but I can see his point. He goes on to point out that the knife is made of carbon parts, and is far more resilient to wear and tear than traditional steel knives. I briefly consider that it might make me look like a terrorist if I am caught in possession of such a tool, but at only forty-two Euros it is hard to pass up. I give in to the urge, and hang the prize on my belt in its plain canvas sheath. At that exact moment, the girls enter the store: “You finished yet?”. I greet them, and gesture towards the door. “Time to catch our flight, ladies”.

I open the door for them, and follow them towards the customs counter. I watch as the customs officer leafs through our passports, looks at the screen as our bags go through the X-ray machine. One by one we step through the portal, without any irritating alarms going off to spoil our vacation. Next comes boarding, where the attendant rips off the stubs of our boarding passes, and shows us the way in. As we walk into the chute, Jane looks at the passes and exclaims: “They've split us up!” She's right: seats five, six and seventeen is what the three cards say. We quickly confer, and decide to let it slide. The girls will take five and six, and I will be a few rows behind them. As the girls stuff their bags into the overhead compartments, I wriggle past them, to reach my own seat. But then, synchronicity kicks in: Next to my seat, in seat number sixteen, is a face I know well. ”Gina, on your way to Cairo too?”, I say as I sit down. It turns out that Gina, the former web mistress of my favorite New Age site, has chosen the exact same destination to vacation. Guess she's just as excited to see the pyramids as my ladies and I are. We agree to not wait any longer, and do the excursion to Giza the moment the Sun comes up. The remainder of the flight we talk about millions of things, from the corruptness of the Bush regime, to the latest Sheldan Nidle update. As we approach Cairo airport, I sense a certain excitement where the girls are sitting. I see them bend over towards the window, and glance in the same direction, only to behold one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the pyramids of Giza, bathing in all different colors of light. Apparently there are some festivities down below, creating such a magnificent sight. Minutes later, our captain announces the airport, and places us gently onto the tarmac. We take a taxi to the Cairo Marriott, for a late dinner, and a well deserved rest.

4444AD, Day 222, 11:42, Home

Hmmm, feels good to read this after all these years. Actually I'd already stored all those memories in background storage, just in case they were ever needed. And apparently now they are, if only for my amusement.

Back then I really didn't quite know what was going on. I had ideas, but they just wouldn't stick together in a coherent manner. And of course I could have helped myself from here, if I'd only had the common sense to ask anyone back then.

Yeah, I know: you people were warned off by the Back to the Future trilogy, about meddling with the past. Scared shitless that you'd wipe out the present by changing too much. But some of you learned: Terminator and its sequels advocated leveraging the Now from the future. By now, we've figured out how to safely do this, so we can make our pasts as enjoyable as possible.

The main thing you have to learn about molding the past, is that it can't go against free will, period! But then again, nothing in the entire Cosmos can. Oh, you can fool the system locally, but it always comes back to bite you in the butt! So if you're smart, you'll stick to what's allowed. And that, by the way, is quite a bit!

Like for instance, the inspiration to start the Going Within novel didn't come out of thin air: back then I seriously raised my hands to Heaven and asked for an idea to write a book around. Although it seemed like I picked the first idea that came to mind, that idea didn't just surface: I inspired myself back in 2007 to explore Inner Earth for a change... from the expectation of what I was about to read in the manuscript I got from Denisa this morning.

And even though the primary idea originated here, my 2007 counterpart used the full spectrum of his thoughts and ideas back then to will it into existence. Or those of his two daughters: the taxi driver for one was a hint of his eldest, volunteering her classmate Tom for the job.

It was around the time I met Selina, but back then I had not realized the importance of my connection to her. That's why she never made it into Going Within. And knowing myself, and my preferences back then, it might not be unwise to inspire myself some more. After all, once in a lifetime opportunities should be cherished, even if we help a bit from here. I'm sure I won't mind the help, as far as I remember my state of mind back then.

Time for some technical R&R: Still working on that idea of the self-aware neural net, which surfaced in my mind back when I was in hospital for being manic back in 1996 I think it was. Back then I desperately wanted to build it, but let my self be scared off by a more conservative faction of the current world population. They seem to think that the evolution of life is something that must be guarded against, to avoid cross-contamination of the species. But their actions are somewhat erratic at times: after they'd stopped