As the narrator says: I grew up in the mountains. There are still some homes without electricity or indoor plumbing. I know because I was brought up in one. We ate wild game on the good days. On the bad ones, we would forages or make do with whatever was on the already-bare pantry shelves. My father didn’t believe in charity or government handouts, so we got neither. He would rather starve, and so that extended to us, that he would rather see us starve than take a handout. At least I was an only child. That was most likely the sole bit of good luck my family has ever seen. When I was six, I realized some nearby children would go someplace during the day. I asked my mother about it, and she said I shouldn’t talk about it anymore. Schools are of the devil, she said, and reading never did anyone any good because the only things to read were sad and painful things.

The genre is science fiction/school story. The mood is educational and a bit playful. Or, to use a zeugma, it’s a bunch of bits of writing and computer memory.

Whenever we as a species are truly able to perform this task, I feel that it would be a vital part of our overall development. This is the kind of activity that will be revolutionary. It will thoroughly alter the course of our history. As such, it deserves a far more subtle and in-depth treatment than in this little throwaway story.

I had to fudge the ‘facts’ by making the alternative material horribly polluting. It was the only way to make this tiny piece work at all.

…how many real girls of the tenth century would have lost their lives for no reason apart from being female and not dying when a brother did? We would most likely never know the details. But it was rather possible. The people of this time frame were very superstitious.

I really like the idea of the buzz from coffee waking us all up from our slumbers. And then, with the narrator, waking them up from simply blindly accepting every single little thing that goes on in the unnamed religious order.