Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #9

In keeping with my nature as a curious and politically progressive person, I became determined to find out the truth about the new world order. To accomplish this, my family and I began five years ago to plan a series of voyages around the world by sailing ship. Our idea was to see for ourselves what various parts of the world were like and if they turned out to be different from what we had seen on our holopods, we would find a way to securely holocom what we see back to the rest of our family in New Vermont and they, in turn, would get these spoken words and images out to the rest of the world. We would discover and share the truth— veritas.

We realized from the outset of our planning that to succeed in these voyages of re-discovery, we had first to accomplish two very large tasks: (1) to build and launch a sailing ship, small enough so it did not raise suspicions among the Authorities of the lands we’d visit, yet large enough to transport a sizable group of us and our supplies and equipment through lakes, canals, rivers, and ultimately across oceans; (2) to figure out a way to holocom the truth about what we were seeing without our messages being intercepted and destroyed or worse: altered by regional government censors.

Working closely with several skilled shipwrights from New Vermont, we completed the Veritas last summer. However, we delayed launch until June to wait for the perennial spring floods along the Mississippi River to subside and because we had to perfect and test our censor-avoidance technology, which had proven to be the more challenging of the two tasks. (If only we’d been able to complete this task first, we would have been able to holocom with shipwrights in other parts of the world without fear of Authority AI censor interception and so would not have had to rely so completely on our local shipwrights, whose knowledge, unfortunately doesn’t include ocean-going vessels. We hope this limitation will not turn out to be a serious problem when we sail the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.)

Reminder: We have taken every precaution in our holocoms to disguise who we really are. Any names used in our Ship’s Holog, including those of the members of our crew, those we meet along the way, our ship’s name, and the region from which we come, are fictitious, so that the Authorities will be less likely to find us or any members of our family back in New Vermont, as they forward on our holologs. It is also for this reason that all the faces you see and the voices you hear on our holocoms are digitally altered. We do not want to take the chance that in an attempt to find us the Authorities might interrogate (or worse) those with whom we have met and interacted.