Her eight-year-old brother was already seated at his desk, virtual reality googles on and engrossed in his computer. Nerd, she thought to herself. She yawned and for the millionth-time cursed living in the Pacific time zone. It was so unfair that her classmates on the East Coast got to sleep in until 9:00 AM. Nevertheless, she settled into her cushy armchair, placed on her goggles and powered up her computer. Entering the online classroom, her professor’s holographic figure stood at the front, a digital projection board behind her outlining the days’ objectives. History of Space Colonization was up first. Ugh, Rachel silently groaned and longed for breakout when she could freely chat with her friends.
For the next five hours Rachel was completely immersed, and oblivious to all her physical surroundings. Her younger brother sat a mere ten feet away, but could have been 10,000 miles away for all she was concerned. The two sat facing away from each other in their at home “classroom”, which was in reality just a bare boned home office. The only furniture in the room were two desks, positioned facing the wall at opposite ends of the room with nothing but a sleek laptop and wireless google charger atop them. Both Rachel and her brother wore what resembled black wraparound sunglasses, and stared straight ahead at the blank walls as they typed away at hyper speed on their laptops. From an outsider’s perspective, they seemed to be in a mystical, odd trance-like state. However, from behind their tinted lenses Rachel and her brother were submerged in a whole new world.
This was all a part of AVEN, or American Virtual Education Network, the government’s online school system.
The AVEN Program was initiated in the 1990s, and was aimed at training American children from an early age to become adept at technology and far more intellectually advanced than competing nations. Amidst the debates over privatization and proper use of emerging Internet system, Al Gore was elected to power and convinced the American government to concentrate networking and computing to academic fields.
With hefty capital contributions and the help of networking pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, Gore proposed a detailed virtual education system to develop his utopian “information superhighway”.
Motivated by the desire to cut costs and accelerate American intelligence the government accepted this proposal and invested millions of dollars and hours into developing a virtual world of public school systems. Each day students would put on virtual reality goggles and log onto their laptops to learn from computerized professors and access infinite research databases.
With a wealth of resources focused on information infrastructure, by 2000 America was the leader of virtual academics and by far the most educated nation in the world. Each child in America took an annual assessment which measured their natural intelligence, learning style and personality. From there children were matched to virtual classrooms which tailored their teaching approach to specific needs and abilities of the students. Each and every day groups of like-minded and like-mannered students from across the country tune in to their assigned education frequency and virtually attend class taught by their “cyscholar”. Cyscholars were actually personified avatars of the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world, often referred to by students as AVE. The students in each class could be tuning in to AVE from anywhere in the nation. This overcame the prior geographical inequities of public school systems but meant students very rarely ever met their peers in person. Because education system is so tailored and personalized to students’ needs, education levels are high, but off-line social skills are scarce. It was a complicated catch-22, as while fifteen-year-olds possess a PhD level of education, interpersonal skills and face-to-face communication had been sacrificed.
From Rachel’s point of view, one eye was transfixed on her computerized teacher, AVE leading on a lecture on the space race, the other linked to the screen of her laptop screen. While she knew she was one of many viewing the class, Rachel’s vision was locked onto to the lecture. Only on designated breaks would she be released by AVA to see the other holographic avatars and virtually interact with her friends. Rachel was eager and antsy for class to end, as everyday she cherished her few hours of freedom spent chatting, flirting and playing games with other students in the social realms.
After the class the students were permitted to travel to the different social realms, designed and generated by the tech tracks. Rachel’s favorite realm was the Mars Bar, a trendy retro lounge designed to replicate the real-time environment and weather on Mars.
Rachel had heard stories from her grandparents having to physically go to school and learn with all local kids, but to her that seemed archaic.
She could not imagine having a human teacher, how could they ever fairly grade and assess the students? What if they made mistakes or taught the material wrong?
AVE was trusted to have the most reliable and up to date information, as she was an extension by the government’s strongest computers and within an instant could search and access millions of online data sources. This system of artificial intelligence was far superior to any human capability. Every “classroom” had a slightly different AVEN cyscholar, however were all a node of the same central government computer. The only difference in AVEs were their teaching styles, which varied to fit to be the most compatible with students’ learning style. Still, Rachel wondered what it would be like to go to an in-person school and see people in “real world” everyday. She thought hard and could not remember the last time she had an offline friendship, probably not since her pre-school play groups. Even those had been arranged and coordinated by an online play-date network. But since then all of Rachel’s friendships were formed through the online interactions with her classmates and existed exclusively online. At birth, she had a chip implanted into her brain, which would later be synced with her virtual reality goggles to allow her to mentally command her avatar’s actions. With very little cognitive effort Rachel could walk, jump, skip even shrug the shoulders of her virtual self. Her and her friends regularly chatted, joked and gossiped in AVEN realms after class through their avatars.
Today after class was the eagerly anticipated annual avatar appearance reboot. Every year Rachel looked forward to the this update, as it was the one day of the year where her “real world” appearance was most evident. Yesterday she had spent hours primping and picking out her outfit before going to the Virtual Identification Bureau to walk through their 3D scanner.
The scanner would then create a hyper-realistic 3D character for their online interactions. This added a dimension of authenticity to their virtual realm, making sure avatars accurately represented their true selves. This was the closest thing that Rachel got to a realistic representation of her peers, revealing to the human behind the screen. While some students hated this feature, Rachel felt reassured it would eliminate the possibility of deception through fake appearances. Her mom had told her about horrible stories of “catfishing” and other fictional identities back when self-designed avatars and pseudonymous chat rooms were legal. The day after the upgrade was always both nerve-racking, as everyone got to see whose appearance had changed the most over the year, for better or worse.
“Well that concludes the history of Pluto’s colonization,” AVE announced, “we will now bre—errr—ak for the annual avatar up-p-p-p-date….” Her robotic voice stuttered and trailed off. AVE looked blankly ahead and her holographic eye flashed for a brief second. Rachel did a double take and was immediately confused, she had never seen AVE glitch or make the slightest mistake. AVEs were programmed to perfect and were controlled by the most powerful computers in the world. Was she imagining things? She must be. Right?
Want to read more speculative fiction? Check out my friend Wall-E's story. . or browse our class page of utopian specualtion here. .
