"Welcome Alexa," the computer's voice said as Sandra and I entered the room. The doors closed behind us with a fwoosh.

     "So, what is this again?" Sandra asked.

     "It's called ‘Bliss'. It's a virtual reality program that my brother Seth had made for me. It's his idea of what Utopia should be like. Computer, begin program." I ordered. Sandra's eyes were filled with skepticism as the room melted away into a sea of green space.

     "What is this place?"

    "It's a park." I said simply.

     "A park? But this doesn't look anything like a park."

     "Maybe not the kind of park that we're used to, but it's a park alright. This is what parks used to look like, only a little more so. Great-Gran was telling Seth and I about what parks were like in the 1900s."

    "But what's with the grass? And there are so many trees around!" I nodded and made a sweeping motion with my hand.

     "Apparently, all this was quite common back in the 1980s when Gran was growing up. Grass used to grow with roots in the ground, just like normal plants. The turf that we have was only used in football fields. As for the trees, there were a lot more of them, that is before the Dutch Elm Disease killed most of them off." I pointed down a street that was perpendicular to the park.

     "Hey, that's cool the way the trees arch over the streets, it's like a tunnel!"

     "Yeah. I saw pictures of where Gran lived, and I guess that a lot of the streets were like that. I suppose if we were to get technical, then this is more like ‘trees of the 80s to the nthdegree'. They didn't have quite as many trees as this, but still, there were far more than we have now."

     "Why not?"

     "Because people thought that they were in the way. They wanted the space to build the buildings that are commonplace to our generation. Since we have so few trees now, it's no wonder that we have to live in a biosphere with manufactured air so that we can still breathe, and have climate control, otherwise we'd be cooked alive. Stupid isn't it? Trees gave us the air we need to live and the ones that didn't die on their own, we had to kill?" I asked, but Sandra wasn't paying attention to me.

     "Why is there a garbage can right here?" She asked, moving to the cannister next to the chain-link fence.

     "The idea was that people would put their garbage in there when they were done with it."

     "Why?" Sandra asked with an odd look on her face. "Why didn't Seth just design the program so that you can throw it on the ground like normal?"

    "Because people should be responsible enough to clean up after themselves because they shouldn't want to live in filth."

     "But we don't live in filth!"

     "No, that's because around 2050, the government realized that people didn't care about their environment. We didn't ALWAYS leave our trash on the ground, in fact, there were organizations like Greenpeace that were always protesting against the various products of humanity that were destroying the planet, but eventually, they all gave up. There was so much garbage lying around, not just on the ground cause people were dumping stuff into the oceans. By the early part of the millennium, when the population really started to grow, the amount of garbage lying around doubled. All the environmental activists started giving up in the 20s. Hmm, what was it that Gran called us?" I thought a moment. "Oh right. She said we were all pigs. So, the government decided that they didn't want to live in filth, but they couldn't rely on people to actually put their trash in the proper receptacles. That's why they decided that garbage cans in public were obsolete. People could just throw their trash on the ground, and hired workers would go out and clean up a few times a day. Here, however, that's not an option. Watch this." I rifled through my pockets and found a piece of paper that was no longer needed and tossed it to the ground. It had hardly lain there for 5 seconds when the computer's voice said,

     "Please deposit trash in the nearest garbage receptacle."

     "And if you don't?" Sandra wondered.

     "It'll repeat the message until you do."

     "Well this is supposed to be a utopia of sorts so why bother with garbage at all?"

     "Because that's not possible. No matter how heavenly, something or someone will always be producing garbage."

     "Wow. That would be weird, not being able to just chuck your junk on the ground." Sandra contemplated the thought for all of a minute before her attention was drawn elsewhere. "Hey, what's that building over there?" she asked as she pointed down the block.

     "You truly do have the attention span of a gnat."

     "Shut up. C'mon, let's walk over there." As we walked down the block, I admired the shade that the trees provided and noticed that it felt much cooler than in the glaring heat of the sun. I did realize, however, that if we didn't have the climate control in the real world, the planet would be considerably hotter when you take into account that we live under a gigantic plastic dome that would intensify the heat from the sun. Sandra, I knew, was not concerned with the tactile experiences of "Bliss", but more with the odd things that she was seeing. "It looks sorta like a school." she commented.

     "That's because it is."

     "No way!"

     "Yep."

     "But what about these things?" She said, referring to the play structures. "I thought that these were banned back in the 60s because they were deemed unsafe for children. I mean, Mom was telling me how if you weren't careful, you could fly off a swing and break your leg." I chuckled.

     "Uh, yes. Gran, being as eloquent and articulate as she is, also had something to say about that too."

    "Whassat?"

     "She said, ‘Society nowadays, we're raising our kids to be a bunch of nambie-pambies. Kids are so sheltered these days, you wouldn't last an hour out in the wild.'" Sandra gave me one of her looks as she walked to the swings and touched them.

    "Well, I wouldn't want to try it."

     "I did. Seth and I tried it when he first showed me the program."

     "Weren't you scared that you'd fall off?"

     "No. I was having too much fun. Besides, there are added safety features in the program, just in case."

     "Such as?" In response to that, I quickly swept my foot underneath Sandra, knocking her down. She landed softly. "Hey! What was that for?!"

     "Well, you're not hurt, are you?" She was about to yell at me, but thought better of it when she realized she was okay.

     "Not as such..." Sandra felt the ground. "It's spongy!"

     "Yep. The floor is actually made of foam. It's sort of like a big mattress. Gran still says we're nambie-pambies, but can she blame us? I don't want to get hurt! Anyway... Want to go inside?" Sandra took one last look at the swings and nodded.

     "Yeah." She looked the school over as we walked to the doors. "Why is it so small?"

     "Because it's only supposed to house 250 students."

     "250? At what level?"

    "Kindergarten to grade six."

     "What?! That's seven levels!"

     "Not only that," I said as I steered her into the first classroom we happened upon, "there are no more than 5 students per class. This way, each student gets to know their class like a little family."

     "But what about socialization?"

     "They would become socialized from extra curricular activities. That's one thing about ‘Bliss' that Seth made similar to our society, no matter what your interest, there are extra curricular groups that the children can join and learn to get along with other people in those groups. But in school, at the primary levels, it's strictly learning book-stuff. After grade six they would go to a middle school, grades 7-9, then high school for 10-12. In grade 7, the classes would be a little larger, no more than 10 students per class, then in higher grades, no more than 20. Either way, when the children are first learning, they have the -almost- undivided attention of their instructor. In middle school they're integrated with more kids because they're more self sufficient in their learning skills and progressively they would have more classmates. Here, let me show you something." I went over to what would be the teacher's desk, but was actually a computer console and typed in a command. The classroom setting suddenly
changed to a room that was quite a bit larger than the previous one.

     "And what's this?"

     "This is a university lecture hall."

     "But... there are so few desks!"

     "No class would be larger than 40 or 50 people."

     "40 or 50?!" Sandra was astounded.

     "I know, crazy isn't it? Seth said that his smallest class at U of R is 400 people, and U of R is NOT a very big university. One of Seth's friends who went to McGill said that his smallest class is something like 900 people." Sandra stared, mouth gaping. "And guess what else?" I asked, then proceeded to whisper something in her ear. She gasped.

     "Tuition's FREE?!!" I laughed as I rubbed my ear, which was ringing a bit from Sandra's outburst.

     "Yes! Consider the fact that there are a bunch of people going to school who don't necessarily want to, but do, because their moms and dads are paying the $5000 a semester for them to do it, and that's only if you go to school locally." I added parenthetically. "Gran was saying that back in her day, when it was only $2000 a semester, she was very lucky to go to school because it opened so many opportunities for her in the work force, but that there were a lot of people who really would have liked to go to school, but couldn't afford it. She says that we've reverted to the middle ages since there's no middle class anymore. But think about it. If school was free, you'd be there because you WANTED to be there, not just because you feel obligated because you're paying a fortune to go! You'd actually WANT to learn! And even if you changed your major a million times, it wouldn't matter! You could stay and learn as much as possible until you decided in which profession you'd want to work."

     "I guess that makes sense. I know it's difficult for people who are sort of interested in a lot of things but not SUPER interested in only one thing. Those types often switch majors a few times and since it takes them longer to actually get a degree it costs them a lot more than someone who knows what they want to do right from the start. If you don't have to worry about the cost, and as long as you keep your grades up in all your classes so that they don't declare you a waste of a professor's time and boot you out, you could take all sorts of different classes until you found the ones that you excelled in considerably or the ones that you found to be the most interesting." Sandra nodded as she spoke, liking the idea presented before her.

     "I'm sure that most lower income citizens would like the opportunity to go to school. It's just unfortunate that they weren't born into a prosperous family the way we were. It's kind of sad to think that any given person's livelihood is based on the luck of the draw - what family you're born into. Under different circumstances, one or even both of us might have been born into a family of... oh I don't know... toilet cleaners. We probably wouldn't even be friends if that had been the case."

     "I shudder to think of it." Sandra muttered, visibly disgusted at the idea.

     "That's another thing that Seth was aiming at in the design of this program. There's no division of classes. Everyone has equal opportunity to everything."

     "To everything?"

     "Education, health care, employment, you name it. You can't be treated specially simply because you have more money than another person. If you need surgery or special tests done, you can't jump the wait lines because you have more money than anyone else and you can't go to a better school because of your social status and you can't get a cushy, well-paying job just because of connections your family may have."

     "Why not?"

     "No money used."

     "Huh?"

     "There's no money in Bliss. Love of money is the root of all evil, or at least it's one of them anyhow."

     "But what about jobs? Wouldn't a lot of people refuse to work if they weren't being paid?"

     "Some, naturally, but it would be more or less like the education system. Gran was telling us that when she was in her twenties, she was working as a bartender. The owners were seriously in debt and so they couldn't afford to hire anyone. Instead, they took volunteers, so she was only paid in tips. That was fine on weekends when they got lots of customers, but awful otherwise. She said that if she worked a Monday afternoon she was lucky if she made 5 bucks."

     "Five bucks? That's crazy! Why did she bother?"

    "Because she loved it! She said that it was a lot of fun. If it weren't for the fact that she had to pay for life's little necessities, she would have done it for free. But of course, school and paying for gas and car repairs and clothes and music, she had to get a real job. The same would apply to other jobs. I'm sure that people who have more prestigious jobs, such as being a veterinarian or a doctor would do their jobs because they love animals or because they like knowing that they're helping people with no pay, if they didn't have to worry about the cost of living. I suppose that it could cause problems initially because some would be too greedy to do things that they weren't being paid for, but I think people would get bored eventually. So why not go to school or get a job to better yourself?" Sandra looked skeptical.

     "I'm not sure that I would do something strictly for the knowledge that I'm bettering myself."

    "Sure you would. Think of math class."

     "What does math class have anything to do with anything here?"

    "Lots. That week when we started learning proofs, it was a living hell for everyone. You didn't understand it any better than most people, but instead of giving up, you kept working on it until you figured it out. But think about when it finally started to make sense. To make sure that you understood it, you tried a few more problems, and then later you looked like you were enjoying it when you were helping others to understand it too. Besides, I caught you doing some problems for fun when you finished the assignment early."

     "Alexa, you are such a liar." Sandra got defensive. I grinned.

     "Never! Well, sometimes. But the point is, you did look pleased when you were helping others to understand it. Were you being paid for it? No, but you still looked like you were having fun. And look at you now, you already know that you want to take education once you get to university, and you're only in grade 9. Most kids our age don't know what they want to do next week, never mind in the next few years."

     "That's true, but still, I can't see it working that way for everyone."

     "Naturally, there are some exceptionally lazy jerks who would be content to piggy back through life and live off others' efforts, but in theory, it would work. We'll never know unless we try it."

     "Well, I'd have to see that before I'd believe it. But these are interesting thoughts. Your brother's quite the little genius isn't he?"

    "Yeah, stupid over-achiever. I love my brother, but whenever my parents have a problem with the computer, or with anything computerized in the house, they expect me to know what to do to fix it. If I don't know what to do they pull a ‘but your brother is a computer engineer, why can't you be as smart as he is when it comes to this stuff?'"

     "Anyway," Sandra interrupted my little rant. "Is there anything else to this program? Or is that all there is to ‘Bliss'?"

     "That's it, for now at least. It's just limited to Seth's, and my, imagination - along with how many assignments Seth has at school and how much free time he has. Seth can add or change things in the program whenever he wants."

     "Must be nice, being able to just opt out from reality once in awhile."

     "It's not bad. The perfect world is a nice concept to which one can aspire." I admitted.

     "Can you make me a copy?" Sandra asked.

     "Sure thing." I nodded. "Maybe that's a good idea, if we distribute copies of ‘Bliss' then maybe people will start behaving in a more... utopian-like manner. Then maybe a hundred years from now, life will be more like ‘Bliss' than the conditions in which we're living right now."

     "It's a nice thought. Who knows, maybe it'll happen." I nodded as I shut down the program. After a moment I chuckled and added,  "Now, if only my brother could design the perfect man for me..." Sandra and I laughed as we walked out the door.

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