Ninth Term

My class schedule was much the same the next term, with more recent history and different science and fifth-year classes, including fifth-year astronomy. By the time I completed this term, with the level of knowledge in the intro classes for each science and a computer class, I understood the level of technology and what I was up against.

This world has computers. They have advanced beyond the toy computers of the first generation of home computers, and at this time were basically at the second generation of computers at the end of Earth’s 20th century. This was in a period of rapid advancement in computing power on Earth, and it seemed to be here, too; It had been about 100 years since the first home computers here, about 20 Earth years, which was about as far past Earth’s first home computers as the technology level was here.

They have some telescopes that can see well beyond any reasonably perceptible visible light, but they are not yet at the point where they can make images of planets around other stars. The cutting-edge telescopes were post-war developments, set up in the cold, unlivable spaces far from light pollution. There are no space telescopes yet.

They did land on the moon, just years before I was born on this world. The moon here is much smaller and farther from the planet than Earth’s, and was perhaps less tempting and more difficult of a target than Earth’s, which we landed on within a decade of sending a man into space. Here, it took 150 of the much shorter years, about 30 of Earth’s years.

The moon here barely has any gravity, and it’s a huge chunk of lithium, beryllium, silicon, and other metals useful for electronics, with a pretty minor layer of dust over it because the gravity there is too small to collect much. I could easily see them someday mining it, but there were likely more easily accessible resources in the cold parts of this world that they’d exploit first.

The limit of their subatomic theory is quarks. And they are at the stage where quantum theory is at odds with the macroscopic scientific laws, without understanding why.

I hoped that by the time I tried to contact Earth, the state of the art would have advanced, but even with significant advancement, what I would be doing would be utterly beyond explanation to any of the people here. The classes I took before leaving Earth should allow me to build an ether communicator, but I knew it would take a lot of time. But I was determined to study the capabilities of this world’s technology and take advantage of as much of it as I could in this endeavor.

One World Government

In addition to the core math, language, and physical education classes, in 10th term I took Computer Programming for four years, second-level Biology and second-level Physics for two each, and Government and Logic among my 5th year classes.

The Government class was interesting in that the government here is nothing like anything I am familiar with. I’d gotten some basic parts of this system from civics class years ago, but that class was very broad. Now I got the whole system in detail. Some of the countries of the world ceased to exist after the war, and the ones that remained formed a union. Surprisingly, that union is a monarchy, even though some of the constituent countries were and are democracies. The former countries, now called by a name I am going to translate as districts, each choose a representative to royal court by a method defined by law within that district, many of them in a general election. But these are not voting representatives, just courtiers to plead for the needs of the people they represent. The Queen is an absolute monarch, and imposes some strict rules and has a lot of power over how districts operate, but they all also have their own individual laws and governments. The one language rule and others that define the post-war unified culture arose from the first Queen’s edicts.

The class explained how this system came about as the world was imperiled by war. Seeing themselves all threatened by a common enemy, but not being able to get their separate militaries to agree how to proceed, they united under whom they saw as a temporary leader in order to put up a unified fight. Once the war was over and the world was in shambles, they again needed a world leader to direct resources worldwide to save as many people as they could. And once people were living stable lives again, people wanted to avoid any possibility of the differences in language, culture, and such among the different parts of the world from ever letting that happen again.

There hadn’t been a succession system set up; the original Queen was meant to be a temporary role. But the Queen realized there was going to be an issue if she didn’t make plans, and with her absolute authority, she did so in a way everybody could accept. Since her children had all been killed in the war and she was past the age to have more, she adopted an heir from the Destroyed Countries and dictated that the position would thereafter be hereditary. The first Queen was very good at coming up with compromises like this, setting up a neutral situation from which people worried that the alternatives might be worse for them, so they went along with it, and she taught the same to her heir.

I should point out that this adoption was a bit of a formality, to make the heir legally the Queen’s daughter; she was already an adult and had been a diplomat before the war. There was also a lot of adoption of children in the immediate post-war era, some of them rescued children whose parents died in the fallout and some children living in safe areas whose parents who had died fighting. Destroyed Countries refers to regions, and specifically whole former countries, which are now unlivable due to the nuclear fallout. During the immediate post-war period, the survivors there were relocated to parts of the other countries, which themselves lost many people due to conventional fighting in the war, so there was plenty of need for them.

The heir was initiated into government in the role of Representative for the Destroyed Countries. Though the survivors voted as members of their new districts, this role ensured that they were treated as equals in their new homes. So she traveled a lot, to every district, seeing how people lived, and getting to know all the regions of what would in the future be her realm. There was a second Representative for the Destroyed Countries during the second Queen’s reign and a bit into the third, but once there were few survivors of the Destroyed Countries still living, the position was abolished.

There is some sort of constraint on the Queen’s powers. Supposedly, if she tries anything too repugnant, it is expected that the courtiers will depose the queen and install one of their own as the new Queen. I’ve never seen it stated whether this is some sort of formal vote or a coup or regicide or what, except that it is a collective action. But despite the extensive measures she has taken, this has never actually happened. In fact, there have only been three Queens, the one who led the country during the war and 100 years thereafter, stepping down when she was in too ill health to continue; the chosen heir; and the current Queen, the heir’s daughter. So it was that the Queen followed a “benevolent dictator for life” role.

Effectively, everybody works for the Queen, regardless of whether they are in the Queen’s Company or a private company. The Queen’s Company is an umbrella term for direct government employees, from the military to district governments to the people who maintain the roads and handle garbage. Private companies exist by the will of the Queen, and can be given specific orders when needed, but unless she has good reason to do otherwise, the Queen generally lets private companies do what they want. During and shortly after the war, though, the Queen exercised this power many times. For instance, there had been dozens of companies devoted to mining, smelting, and recycling steel during the war, and afterwards, some of the mining and smelting companies had been directed into either recycling (to reprocess war equipment for other uses) or mining for different materials.

The Queen appoints a set of regents to watch over the districts in more detail. It is their job to determine what issues most need attention within each district, and she takes the responses from these regents in combination with the requests from district representatives in making her decisions. She might choose to move some members of Her Company to operate in another district where they are more needed, or retrain some of them to do different jobs. The Queen might likewise issue orders to private companies to support the representatives’ requests. The Queen can disband underperforming companies, scale back their efforts, direct them to abandon specific projects deemed not worthy, or pick up other projects within the general purview of a specific company.

Everybody is paid for their work, somewhat in proportion to the importance of their job, but unlike capitalist systems on Earth where the leaders of large companies sometimes get more than 1000 times the pay of the lowest paid workers, here the difference is only about a factor of 2. Salaries for different levels of work are defined in the law. The lowest paid workers can afford to eat well if they skip all but the necessities, or they can eat cheaply and still get some other nice things. The history class explained how before the war it was more like Earth’s capitalist systems. During the war, highly paid executives were forced to give their excess pay to support the war effort. After the end of the war, the funds were needed to help victims of radiation poisoning, help relocate people from unlivable zones, educate people in the new unified language, and later to prop up declining populations, and other causes. In more recent times they have gone into education and public works projects. At some point, instead of levying the heavy taxes, they just reduced the high salaries. Successful companies pay their excess profits, which might have otherwise been given to executives, directly to the Queen to support those programs, while unsuccessful companies are downsized, disbanded, or reassigned, in some cases receiving some of this money to help them reorient their businesses.

One thing I learned in the earlier classes was that a rather small number of people go to jail, about 0.0006% of the population (1 in 160000). I don’t have the exact numbers for Earth, but I know every country at the time I left and for much of recorded history had incarceration rates orders of magnitude higher than this. This is because the laws are respected here, and there were also very few crimes defined in the law. The crimes defined in their religious text are also defined in the law; this includes murder, theft, doing harm to a person, and deceit. Doing harm to a person could broadly encompass assault and other physical injuries, but note that the nature of the reproductive mechanisms of the people here make sexual assault simply nonexistent; if there was a way to do it, it would fall under this clause. Deceit encompasses fraud, perjury, slander, false advertising, and similar crimes built upon lies. An additional crime is theft from the Queen, which means taking for yourself anything that was meant to belong to the people in general. It didn’t mean taking personally from the Queen. But that’s it.

Other crimes defined in the religious texts, largely ones prohibiting following other religions, were ignored, both in the unified religion and in the post-war law. Although the old religions had been forcibly combined during wartime, there wasn’t anything saying you had to follow this religion nor that you couldn’t make up another one. While not everybody believes in the religion, nobody has made another religion that attracted enough followers to even become known as a fringe cult. The one religion basically exists for those who want religion and is ignored by others.

There are district and local laws as well, but people don’t go to jail over those. A lot of them are focused on zoning, where you can or cannot operate certain businesses, and violating one might mean your business gets shut down or is forced to move to another location.

The broad application of these few laws and harsh sentences, along with no jury system, discourages the people here from committing crimes, or even anything that might be construed as a crime. It works as a deterrent much, much better than the laws of any country on Earth. Or maybe there is something different about the nature of the people here. It clearly hasn’t always been that way, since they suffered a world war worse than any of Earth’s history.

The law against theft from the Queen allows for the existence of things like public loaner bicycles. In large parks it is common to find racks of unlocked bicycles each marked as the property of the Queen. People can take them and ride around the park and nearby areas, but they have to return them to the park when they are done. And they do.

There isn’t, for instance, copyright. Writers, artists, musicians and the like are encouraged to publish their works, and those liked by the public are supported by the Queen to produce more, while the makers of unsuccessful ones are, after some number of attempts, asked to try something else. You can make copies of any of it yourself, or incorporate other works into your own, but the Queen’s Company manufactures and sells these items broadly at rates that make individual copying uncommon, except where people are making derivative works.

Computers and Biology

The computer programming class I took tenth term began with a short history of computers on this world.

Interestingly, they developed nuclear weapons on this world (indeed, two countries did so separately) even before they developed the vacuum-tube computers. That was all done with the equivalent of abaci and slide rules, while Earth had room-sized computers with vacuum tubes and relays and such large-scale circuitry. They seemingly never built such large devices here. The vacuum tube era produced refrigerator-sized calculators, which were only used at all because of the ease with which they could produce high-precision calculations. Few jobs needed such high precision, so the few produced were used to develop miniaturized electronics, the transistor and the integrated circuit. This led to hand-size calculators, a real product people actually found useful, so after that point there was no lack of support from the Queen. They then made the toy computers and game machines, then the first computers sophisticated enough to store small databases, like the IBM PC, and onward from there. They are still hopelessly far behind the ones I knew, but they are on the technology curve.

Software followed a similar development cycle as well. They skipped the punched card era since they never had the room-sized computers that used them, but they had the equivalent of BASIC and assembly programming on the early computers before they developed more sophisticated procedural languages which are in use now. It was fortunate that the intro programming class everybody took in school by my time on Earth covered the basic concepts. That helped those who had the right knack learn how to program, and once you know those basics, you can relearn them quickly in any language. There are conditional statements, there are loops, there are ways to branch to a another part of the program, and there are ways to label where to jump to. There are ways to define and set variables and arrays, and to perform calculations. The more challenging part was the dreadfully ancient (by my standards) computers. Most of the assignments took trivial time to run, but they came up with a couple later in the class where it was important to be efficient.

The second biology class also gave me important insights. They knew about DNA and genes here, which were the same basic structures known on Earth, but I remembered enough cellular biology from Earth to know that much of the other internal cellular organization of the creatures here works differently.

And I was pretty sure by this point that there were no other ethertravelers in my city. I’d established good friendships with several of my classmates, including Sarah, who I’d been good friends with for a while. Some of them might, when we sexually matured, turn out to be compatible mates. It was clear to me that it would not be acceptable in this society to stay single. You either found somebody compatible, or you participated in one of the programs to match up everybody else, so I went along with that.

Eleventh Term

This term I took second-level and third-level computer programming occupying the main science slot. I also took third-level chemistry third and fourth years, and history of science and atomic energy fifth term.

The mere existence of the “atomic energy” course was surprising to me. They were only just introducing computers to the masses, but they were teaching atomic energy to high school students? The class only actually taught the most fundamental aspects of atomic energy, the theories they had for why heavy elements were radioactive, and the principles behind nuclear fusion and why they had not managed to harness fusion as an energy source. I knew well that fusion was a tough bugger to get right, and until they had much more advanced computers here they had no chance. For that matter, even though they had atomic bombs 80 years before computers, it seemed like they had only started employing nuclear reactors on a large scale around the time I was born, well after they had computers. The nukes they used in the war were probably very crude, slam two sub-critical-fission masses together and let it blow up. Those weren’t terribly efficient (though still far stronger than conventional weapons), but they were also were very dirty and distributed not just radiation but a lot of radioactive matter around the areas they struck, which explained why so much of the world is still uninhabitable today. The class also covered the theory of relativity and other concepts to support the main ones. The presence of this class in the standard curriculum suggested that the Queen was pushing hard to figure out fusion, or figure out how to clean up and use radioactive wastes in the wild making much of the world unlivable, or some agenda item of that sort.

One thing I looked for and didn’t see were academic competitions. It was part of the noncompetitive nature of this world to not have those, I guess. They would have been a way for me to meet up with bright students from other schools and other cities, which might have given me a chance to find another Terran. But it didn’t seem like these programs existed.

There was one thing that was a sort of competition. There was something comparable to college here, all paid for by the Queen, which approximately the brightest 7% of students were invited to. There was a series of standardized tests covering every subject which were used to determine who got in. You didn’t have to do well on all of them, but you had to do well on enough of them to qualify on one of several tracks, perhaps broader than the college majors I was used to. One of the tracks dealt with all things even vaguely related to computers: programming, circuits, physics, chemistry, and more. Of course I wanted to get on that one.

You have to be at least in twelfth term before you can start taking these tests, and there are several opportunities. Once a year, so five times per term, there is a weekend during which you can take two subject tests. They told us about these when we were planning our schedules for eleventh year so we could make sure we took any classes we wanted to use to prepare ourselves for these tests. I was already on a plan to take just about every class I could want for all the tracks I was even remotely interested in, so I didn’t adjust my class schedules any.

There was a lot of advice available for those taking the tests, too. Three main strategies were offered: If you wanted college but didn’t have any idea what track, take all the tests once, and use the final two sessions to retake ones you want to improve on, or some for your top track if you’ve picked one by then. If you wanted one of a set of related tracks with some overlap, take all the tests for those tracks twice. And if you knew your track, you could take most or all of the tests for that track three times, or everything for the track twice and some related ones as backup to make you eligible for other tracks. And if you aced some tests the first time, you could skip out on re-taking them and take something else. I was going to use that last strategy, flexible but targeted.

Sarah realized this year I was on the college-bound track. She wasn’t, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t be together. Keeping compatible couples together was such a big thing that they had something like married housing in college for those who’d found compatible partners. The way she mentioned that, and other things she said and did, made me realize I was her only choice. While I had other friends I could consider, for her, it was me or one of the programs to find a mate. I thought at one point she might be an ethertraveler who was strongly concealing it, but she showed no reaction to my TERRA art, and just looked confused when I dropped references to things from Earth into conversation.

Twelfth Term

Twelfth term, I had more computer programming, a second-year circuits class, statistics, and a couple classes whose names do not translate well and whose subject matter was a collection of things that would have been taught in other science classes on Earth, or which I wouldn’t have gotten until college. With no phys ed this term, I had an extra slot to take other classes.

From the first opportunity I started signing up for college tests at each opportunity, starting with classes whose curricula I had already completed such as chemistry and physics. The tests were tough and quite thorough, and I know I missed some questions. The usual attitude of assuming students were not cheating, which seemed the norm at the schools here, did not hold for these exams. There were multiple proctors in the room watching us, and while we could study between test sections, there was a box we had to put all our notes in, and a proctor locked them for each row of tables at once as we were getting ready to start each round - two rounds per test, with one test before lunch and one after. I got back a score of 740 out of 1000 on chemistry, which was considered good enough unless you wanted chemistry as your primary focus. Physics I aced with an 890; such a score was generally considered good enough for any program. I progressed through other subjects, retaking the chemistry one and improving to 760, and taking the language test twice with scores of 660 and 680, not great but not likely to hold me back.

Sarah had figured out some ideas for nontechnical jobs she might do after graduation. There were a lot of jobs at the college that paid the minimum but it was a way to get started. We didn’t actually know for sure we’d be compatible, but Sarah was banking on it.

In the last year of the term, on a Saturday morning, Sarah excitedly called me and told me it was time. I knew from all she had talked about it that it meant her penisbirth was starting and she wanted me there to witness it, so I rushed over. She was a little young for that, but it wasn’t unheard of for it to happen that soon.

One of Sarah’s parents, Micah, answered the door, told me Sarah was expecting me and said to go on upstairs to her room. When I got there, Sarah was half-lying, half-sitting in bed, naked. She had a towel under her butt and legs, and her legs were spread a bit. Her other parent, Liz, was there too, and said, “Good, you came. Sarah wanted you here for comfort while she goes through this.”

“It’s not supposed to be painful, is it?”

“No, but she’s feeling a little traumatic over such a fundamental part of her changing, and a lot anxious over whether she and you will be compatible.”

“Yeah, I have figured that out. I wasn’t surprised I’m the one she invited over to witness this.”

Sarah who had so far not said anything, though she was breathing heavily. “How it is, Sarah?”

“It’s just not happening. I can feel it, but it’s not coming down.”

“Maybe you need to get up and move a bit,” I suggested.

“How?”

“Let’s dance. Right here in your room.”

“OK, I suppose.”

I helped her out of the bed, and Liz spread the towel out on the floor for her to stand on, then left and came back with two more towels to give us a space to move. We did a little dance, holding one hand and then the other, spinning her and then me around, and after a few minutes of this, Sarah exclaimed, “Oh, I felt it move! This is working! Thanks, Becca!”

We kept dancing vigorously, and it took about 20 more minutes, by which time I was feeling rather tired, when Sarah yelled, “It’s here!”

Liz put one of the towels back on the bed and helped Sarah get back on top of it. Sarah pushed and pushed, and I could see the bulge coming from her vagina, stretching out her pouch. That process took about 15 minutes, and at the end of it, the tip of her penis just protruded from the opening of the pouch. Sarah was overjoyed.

It was still going to take a day or two before her pouch would be able to retract, but our families arranged to be together the next afternoon and evening. That meant most of them did family things together, and Sarah and I spent most of the time in her room, doing things romantic couples did here. There were cuddling sessions much like people on Earth, and games that wouldn’t be thought romantic activity at all on Earth. There wasn’t kissing here. There was, however, a thing couples did where they stood back-to-back, naked, arms spread. The idea was to take steps together to turn a full circle with the arms remaining in contact but without our tails ever touching. If we felt the tails touch, we had to start over. We managed to accomplish that after several tries, but Sarah’s pouch didn’t retract that evening.

Thirteenth Term

I took that final programming class, and a variety of others, including a couple well off my charted path but which were required for graduation.

Along with retaking the tests I’d scored lowest on last year, I took the history test first year, scoring 720. I took the programming test second year, near the end of my last course, and got a 955, which was considered outstanding and should make it a sure thing for me to get into college as long as I did well on my math test. I took that third year and got an 860, also excellent. Fourth year I took the logical thinking test, the last required one for my track, which I scored a 950 on. It was the one I’d been least worried about. I retook the math and circuits tests the last year and managed to improve my scores slightly, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t needed.

Early in the third year of this term, I had my penisbirth one evening, and invited Sarah over to watch. My other close friends had penisbirthed and established partnerships already, so if I couldn’t make it work with Sarah, I was going to end up going to college single. That was still OK, as it turned out, but most people tried to have already found partners.

Even when she first arrived, clothed, the way Sarah’s skirt poked out in front told me she had a massive erection and her pouch was retracted, allowing it to fall away from her body. There were undergarments some people wore during male phase specifically designed to prevent that, and Sarah clearly wasn’t wearing one.

My penisbirth was easier than hers, and we celebrated a bit. Sarah and I got together most weekends after that when I wasn’t taking tests, usually with time alone together naked, and while Sarah frequently had a retracted pouch, it didn’t happen for me.

Three days after the end of classes I got a phone call confirming my acceptance into college. I got official notice of my graduation from school the same day. There was no ceremonial march here as was customary on Earth, just a notification that you’d passed. My parents already had a graduation party scheduled the following day, and I was going to Sarah’s the afternoon I got the news, during which I told her. I was male at the time, and we had also agreed that this was also our last chance. If my pouch would not retract, then we’d stop trying and look for other mates. And it didn’t happen. I was sad, but Sarah was dreadfully upset, but still, we hugged and said our goodbyes. I invited her to come to my party, but she chose to stay away, sad over this event.

The party was, well, a party. There were five families on our block with graduating kids and we all got together to celebrate.