Hartan Expanding Ch. 01

Other country's systems (many across Asia) required students to memorize the exact words spoken by the instructor and parrot them back. It made grading easier, maybe?

In the USA and EU and richer nations, they emphasized independent thought, critical thinking, inventiveness and creativity. Ad-hoc problem solving was Required.

UNCHC shifted to the USA and EU education models. Since UNCHC was starting to control everything (by necessity), education systems unified and got lots more efficient for STEM fields.

Worldwide, even in poor agricultural areas, instead of helping around the house or farm, kids and grown-ups alike were sent to schools and given all the tools to learn skills useful to growing our ability to fight the Hartans.

Factories started churning out big ag equipment, whole massive hydroponics warehouses, condensed specialized fertilizers, etc., and people were better able to eat, healthy food and enough of it. That freed up a lot of kids and parents to go to school or restart it, and start crafting solutions to their specific problems based on working smarter not harder.

Of course, changing schools was resisted strongly.

That said? It's hard to argue for scripture study when the giant alien spaceship with death rays is headed towards you and your family!

The UN, with software and handheld device makers, pushed for universal availability of tablet education and got schools built and expanded, curriculums unified, etc. Almost everyone worldwide could (and was encouraged) to learn English. Cultural norms (taught in history lessons that emphasized the uncertainty and diversity of mankind) of tolerance and compassion started flowing through as well, mandated lessons that flowed with UNCHC equipment and school construction.

The percent of kids enrolled in schools up to age 18 rose nearly overnight to 90%+, and factories making early versions of personal Devices (for learning) churned out enough to ensure absolutely every student, no matter their age, got one.

Whole economies changed, as they needed to. Luxuries evaporated. Much of the defense industry's former focus points - artillery and tanks - went away. There's no use in building weapons of war, even tanks, when that tank has roughly the same protection from gamma lasers as a bicycle.

In fact, the bicycle was better - it was faster through complex terrain - and the best protection from a gamma laser was Not Being There!!!!

That said, aircraft makers went into super-high gear, and robot makers built square kilometers of factory floors to churn out ever-larger, ever-more-powerful robots.

Being in school and focused on serious stuff, but then adding a relationship when you turn 18, that got to be a sort-of known thing as a life plan.

At the same time, what we talked about, and what we weren't allowed to talk about, was very, very, very strict. Some things we just didn't discuss. What I saw, I didn't speculate on, out loud at least.

If I wasn't supposed to know something, and that was obvious, I purposefully ignored it.

There was strong social pressure to act like this. If you didn't, people asked you why you were gossiping, or they told you that you asked too many questions, etc. The ONLY focus was to be schoolwork!

Do. Or. Die.

As for marriage, that was largely hidden - I didn't see a lot of marriages. Relationships? Sure. Marriages, far more rare. The closer people got to being 22, the more likely they'd go to a distant institute specializing in something, or to a mine or factory, or to space, or just stayed in town to teach the refugee kids that were constantly arriving.

I didn't have time to think about marriage - I was too damn busy with schoolwork.

But, as I grew up and got closer and closer to the start-dating age of 18, and since I'd seen so much death and devastation and how cruel life and death could be, it got a lot more real and personal. The very real possibility was I would not live to age 30.

We didn't know how long Earth would last. We didn't know if a new Hartan ship would land near us and we'd be burned alive, tomorrow morning - but we did know one thing for damn sure:

Study the fuck out of everything.

Shit was real.

No relaxing is allowed when you're reminded daily - by an influx of people who quite obviously were running away from Death - that in a world of this many people, you had to swim hard and you might make the cut, might get a boost off-world or to a Safe Place.

There was even pushback to get marriage ages lowered even further just to have more kids. This was a big debate. The other side was, ensuring both sexes got educated to age 18+.

In my bio, sex, physiology, sociology, and other classes, we read that doctors established that yes, some people's parts might happen to work when they were younger than that, BUT we should regard life skills as a parent as important, too. It's no good to be a parent and not know what you're doing!

Plus, we needed EVERYONE's brain trained-up and GOING! Fast!

The thing is, getting to basic competency for everyone was required for a very specific reason: Genius is frequently hidden until after a certain age or achievement level.

What I did see around me were LOTS of relationships, all among the over-18 crowd. Most were on the sly, people kissing, and I knew that we had to get our romance and love-chances where we could in case the chance we missed was followed by a too-soon death.

Mostly, though, my life wasn't concerned with love and romance. My life was tumbled together in a fast-and-furious race to brain-fill asap with next units of math, physics, chemistry, etc., and to cope with the oddball stuff that life at home was throwing at me.

My home life was NOT static.

Refugee women and children were assigned a living spot by a local (county, in the USA) level organization called the HA, the Housing Authority. Everyone owning or renting a house had to take in people, and lots of office buildings were converted to be living spaces, too.

When I was 8, we had 3 people move in: Shayzhoo (a woman, age 28), Bree (a girl, age 10, and Leia (another girl, age 14). None of them knew each other before they got to our house. Even though they all were from China, the same country, they didn't speak the same language. Shay spoke Cantonese, Bree spoke Mandarin, and Leia spoke Buryat since she was from near Mongolia.

They all moved into my sister's room, since our house was a 3-bedroom 1-bath with a single car garage and an unfinished basement that was too cold in the winter and smelled bad.

Shay (tall, skinny, pretty, and mostly quiet) was middle aged from my perspective. She had worked in a factory near Shanghai (a huge city of 20m people that had just been wiped away) making plastic toys. She had been separated from her husband and 4-year-old daughter and didn't even know if they were alive.

Right after Shay moved in, she took over cooking food, cleaning, laundry, and other household tasks, mostly because my mom's job as a Presbyterian minister took way more than normal work hours. Shay almost never smiled, but when she did, she lit up the room and laughed loudly. At the start, she'd talk with me every chance she got, and was always busy studying with Bree and Leia to learn English. After 2 or 3 months, all 3 of them could speak well enough to get an idea across, though Shay's accent was a bit thick sometimes.

On a side note, I know there was some tension between my parents and Shay, and I only learned about it when I was much older, from my sister. About 6 months after Shay came to us, Shay decided she wanted to have another baby. She asked my father to help her. My father declined, so Shay asked my mother to ask my dad to reconsider.

This debate went on for a couple of weeks; we didn't know why but we could see the tension between them. Shay had grown up on a farm near some coal mines and had not been allowed to finish school. She had seen how people died in mines and on farms and didn't want to die. She knew that mothers of small children weren't sent to the mines often, so she figured her best option for staying alive was to have a baby.

The government also had incentives to have kids, so this would mean money or ration card points, too.

My dad wasn't around much to help anyway. I didn't see him much, generally, he was on the morning schedule, but honestly most of the time he was traveling to nearby factories or the state capitol buildings.

Being a city engineer was a lot more complicated than it used to be, especially with so many ad-hoc changes to living situations. His job wasn't political, but he had to be aware of the implications of appearances, he'd said frequently. He couldn't appear to be taking advantage of any situation, or he'd be in trouble ethically, and that'd be Big Trouble.

So, Shay couldn't get help from my father, and with few other choices, Shay started going out at night. By the next month, she was pregnant.

I knew none of this at the time (I got the scuttlebutt later).

At the time? All I knew was, as soon as Shay arrived, the house became spotless. Even our yard was clean and well-tended. She cleaned the basement out, and had a garage sale for my parents, getting rid of a lot of old stuff they didn't need. Everyone was doing garage sales; so many household goods were needed by the new immigrants that trading it around made total sense.

The stuff didn't bring much, but absolutely everything sold.

(Government jobs were absolutely needed and after we got refugee kids, Shay had a job caring for them as well as her own young one, and later, ones. The payments were small since food and housing were provided free. In econ we talked about how adding people and keeping the money supply the same would have generated super-destructive deflation and we had to avoid that. Prices were controlled and goods rationed, we were in a war. The jobs around us were mostly childcare, education, construction or ditch-digging, social services, agriculture, etc.)

The one thing we didn't get rid of was books. My parents had a bunch, from novels to engineering stuff, even some Greek and Hebrew textbooks my mom had to study in seminary.

We definitely kept all of my kid books, and a lot of my toys. Certainly we couldn't keep all of them since so many families have none and we could trade around.

I even helped out with that by using a chop saw to make wood blocks out of 2x4s, then letting them soak in canola oil and coffee grounds, or food coloring. They were pretty easy to make, and I got a super huge thrill out of giving little kids toys that I made myself.

A few years later, the natural gas supply stopped, so there was neither hot water nor home heating, but it was March by then so we all just put up with the colder sleeping conditions. Of course, taking a cold shower is a lot easier said than done, so we made do with a quick rinse, soap up, and another quick rinse. The school had hot water, though, it was electric and had National Priority rationing so we could shower after gym or cross country if we needed it.

Eventually, mom and dad got a new electric water heater delivered and installed, some special kind that could run forever. The president said there was a lot more power available, and they told us we didn't have to worry about electricity prices ever again.

More and more people came to live with us. The Housing Authority managed this, sent inspectors out to look around and find more space. Our outside garage got cleaned out, set of bunkbeds and old furniture added, insulation and wall panels, and a water line. They had to use the backyard latrine and an outside shower (weather permitting), but it was a place to live.

The new housemates were predominantly female of most ages up to 25-ish, but most were younger, in the junior high to high school age range, as I was growing up. They moved around, living with us for a while then moving on as the HA transferred them to better places. There was a lot of housing in small towns in rural Colorado and we were in the Denver near-suburbs, with better schools, so people needing more schools were closer to us.

For a while there was a debate about what to call people that lived in our house. Terms like refugee and immigrant - or just migrant - and emigree, or houseguest, or new-fam, ex-fam (extended family), migs (migrants), tigs (teenage indigent girls/guys), feeps (don't know - flop-house persons?), vags (vagabonds, though I suspected the term vagina was the undertone and it wasn't nice), or even hobos.

Neutral terms turned nasty, nasty terms were normalized to neutral, obscure terms were created to keep non-native-English speakers guessing, and generally people ranged from being nice to being total dicks. It wasn't always the Americans talking about the immigrants, sometimes it was the immigrants talking about 'skank-waffles' (girls who would give immigrant guys a 'bumpy/rough ride' like the top of a waffle), or even less kind terms.

I tried to stay out of it and generally ignored what I heard and only used proper terms. I knew if I said the wrong thing my mother - a MINISTER - would hear about it.

Or, my father, a city engineer, would have his job affected by the politics of a family member expressing bad things about immigrants, where the politics was already chancy and complicated. He described that part, early, and I got an earful about how this group or that wanted to do this or that unusual thing.

Mostly that was early on. Dad lived on the morning shift and was just Always at the office, initially a nice building with a park and lake in front that I vaguely remember. A huge office building, 15 stories tall and four city blocks wide went in over the top of that lake. They had to process a huge number of people, 'that Denver just sluffed off on us like we could do anything' (per my dad).

I'm going to ignore, for the purposes of describing my childhood, most of these housemates (the correct term since I was 11). I can't name them all, I didn't actually meet a lot of them since they were on opposite shifts sometimes or just didn't interact.

In later years, after I was in high school at about age 14, Mom tried to have us all gather in the front room for birthday celebrations or special holidays or births (showing off a new baby), etc.

So, ignoring most of these people, I'll mention the ones that were special - but it's important to note that I'm just leaving out lots of people. Some of them I knew pretty well and might be insulted or hurt I'm not mentioning them (sorry!!!) but I can't and it doesn't serve the story-of-my-life well to name random names.

Besides, some of them were kids and I think the ethics of this kind memoir are that you aren't supposed to name names when it comes to kids since they might have out-migrated to colonies or underground habitats and be trying to keep their pasts secret for some reason.

The most notable housemates were afternoon shift morning-shower people who lived in my sister's room or the front and dining room bunks.

Special to me (starting when I was about 16 or 17) were Akari (7, Japanese girl), Hana (17, Japanese girl), and Erhi (17, Mongolian girl).

By then, my room had lots of occupants and my dad had to add a second bunk-bed combo to make four mattresses. This left very little room for walking, but it couldn't be helped, there had to be places for people to sleep.

Ehri was on the morning shift, and Akari stayed in my sister's room, where there were 3 bunk beds, one of which was a triple level (floor-mid-upper) thin-foam queen mattress setup. The thig was, each of the queen mattresses had 3 people sharing it.

There wasn't much space - anywhere... Almost.

The 'almost' part comes from my parent's rule - respected by the Housing Authority - that as a their natural-born son and a teenage guy, I could have a minimum number of square feet. This allowed me to have only ONE extra roommate at night (my sleeping shift = 'night').

Thus it was only myself and Hana, slightly under a year older than me, in my room. This led to having two empty bunk beds, under us. I felt bad that the mattress spots weren't used, but at the same time, it was sweet to have the space, compared to my sister.

I should mention that for short durations and under-the-radar, those spots were filled, but the girls that stayed there left after a few months to go live in other houses, traded around by the Housing Authority with limited ability to object.

Still, the girls seemed relatively happy to leave, so it seemed like they were getting to go to a place with more space.

Living in a room with girls was a bit odd. I had a sister, sort of. Technically she was my cousin, but we referred to each other as sister/brother, and so did my parents. It simplified things for the new housemates, not having to explain about mom's sister's family.

There wasn't much contention in living tight like that except over the bathroom. The only concern on anyone's part was that Hana was sleeping in the same room as me, and changing clothes was a hassle, for privacy reasons.

We solved this with a thick cloth curtain hung off the end of a bunk bed next to the closet to make a changing-cubicle, almost. It was super-easy to duck in just to change underwear, then I could have it back normally to put on the rest of my school uniform in the morning. I slept in underwear, so it wasn't a problem in the evening.

Even then, I tried to face away from her when changing to keep our privacy at least a little intact.

Hana, for her part, had her own 'cube' by the end of the bed and used that, it worked for her and I didn't try to spy on her. It wouldn't be right.

The conflicts in my head were huge. Hana had lived with us for a while, so she was almost my sister, but she also very much wasn't. She was living with me, but we weren't dating. She was sexy but off limits. She spoke English but badly. She liked me but we had enforced boundaries.

Hana was a housemate.

There were rules about being housemates, debated over lunch tables.

Each house had its own rules, but while those were slightly different we all talked enough that I suspected they were uniform across town and maybe even across the USA. Other people moved in and out, we would have heard if California or Alabama or Quebec were different.

We got more relaxed around our housemates after a while.

Generally though, with so little privacy in the house, all of us guarded what little we had.

I wasn't that shy about nudity when I showered at school, for sure. I had to, otherwise I'd have to be around people in classes afterwards - and even at home sleeping - and be stinky.

The girl in my bunk opposite shift was Erhi, the same age as me. We did meet up sometimes at school during Overlaps, Sunday mornings sometimes, and on cycle days.

Though we could leave each other notes via texts, we didn't communicate much. I tried to be really respectful of her since it couldn't be easy sleeping in the bed of the son of the homeowners.

Shay changed the sheets house-wide on a schedule, usually weekly, though if there were problems we could do it, too. Regardless, hot bunking was enough of a hassle and risk that we all tried to conform to customs to make it easy on each other.

Being clean before getting into bed was thus important and I showered at school after my last workout. Ehri wouldn't like being in bedsheets that had just been rubbing against my 'sweaty bum', so being clean for both of us was important, as it was for a lot of us. The pattern for the girls was to wear nightshirts to keep the sheets cleaner, but as a guy (and during hot summers) I usually just wore underwear.

As more people showed up, we created habits to live with each other and still have some privacy where it mattered. NONE of any accidental skin-showing was sexy, it was something we closed our eyes to and actively avoided to help smooth the social aspect of it all.