Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #8

Over the past decade, we have had clear indications that what we were seeing of the rest of the world on our holopods was not all as rosy as it appeared. We knew, for example, that some of the holocoms we’d seen coming out of our own nation of New Vermont differed in curious ways from the reality we knew. We laughed cynically whenever we saw images projected by the Chamber of Commerce of New Vermont that showed the beautiful tree-covered slopes of the Green Mountains, as we knew full well that these mountains had been treeless since the early years of the Great Change, having been clear-cut in a desperate and short-sighted government program to provide lumber and firewood to its citizens.

More troubling than these C of C sleights of hand, though, were the strange tales we heard from the Nomads that occasionally came to our valley. On their visits to New Vermont, these folks regaled us with surprising accounts of places they’d visited, sights they’d seen, and people they’d met. Their stories, so at odds with the holographic images we saw everyday, are dismissed by most people we know as the ravings of what the Authorities describe as “deviants who subsist largely on hallucinogenic molds and herbs and are involved in a conspiracy to undermine the confidence of the populace in their leaders.” However, it seems to me (and my family) that it’s more likely that the Authorities of the world are the ones involved in a conspiracy--- one that is intended to shore up their powers by preventing ordinary citizens from learning the truth about the conditions under which people are living in other countries and in inaccessible regions of their own countries.

Any reader from around the world who was alive in the early part of the 21st Century is asked to share with fellow readers what life was really like in their part of the world after the Great Change, in contrast to how the Authorities portrayed it.