Kylian did not know exactly where he was. It was all a big blur. He found himself in the company of a short, cute girl with glasses and a few other undergraduate students inside a basement room of one of the buildings somewhere. Those who were unlucky nursed their wounds of various severity. The side of Kylian’s body where he had been hit with a police baton still hurt and throbbed with pain. Aware of his breathing, he reclined on an oversized chair while he held his side and stared up at the ceiling thinking about his life up to this point. It was quick. There was not much to think about.

The short girl who had hid behind Kylian to avoid getting whacked, came up to him to talk.

“Are you OK?” She leaned over Kylian to examine his black eye. She swept a few stray hairs away from his eye.

“I don’t know,” said Kylian still looking upward at the ceiling, “I don’t think I have any broken ribs.”

“It’s my fault I hid behind you,” she sounded a bit guilty. “I’m sorry you got hit.” Her voice, being so high-pitched, sounded cute when she was feeling apologetic. In fact, she looked very cute when she was not marching in protests.

One of the other protestors with them asked a question.

“Hey, Solene, where’d you get the new guy from?”

“What?” Solene, the short girl with glasses and the high-pitched voice was confused. “No one knows him? I thought he was one of us.”

The other protestors shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders. They did not know who Kylian was either. Who was this stranger among them? Solene decided she had better find out.

“If you’re not one of us, who are you then?”

Kylian, still kind of dazed, answered with obedience. “I’m Kylian Bouche. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the National Laboratory. I work to further advance the technology of teleportation. I don’t know what’s going on with your protest. I didn’t even know such things happened in Capital City. How did you ever think that I was one of you?”

Solene answered since she was the one who got Kylian swept up in the protest march.

“When I saw you with the black eye, I just assumed that you had gotten that injury at our last demonstration when the police beat us up then, too.”

Not wanting to reveal that his black eye was due to an embarrassing vacuum cleaner accident, Kylian decided to move the conversation along.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Solene,” said the high-pitched girl. “I’m a student leader of our group of activists.”

“What? You?” Kylian tried to laugh, but it hurt his side to do so. He could not believe that this short, cute, girl with the high-pitched voice could be a leader of anything, much less a political activist for a group of young people.

“Yes, I am!” Solene was indignant. “What’s there not to believe?” She did not like to be laughed at, even by Kylian who was unable to laugh very much.

“Well, it’s just that you’re so…you’re so…” Kylian could not find the right words.

“Yes?” Kylian could hear the disdain in Solene’s tone.

“You’re so, how should I say this? So…” Kylian was never one for words.

“So what?”

“Several words come to mind.” Kylian stalled for time.

“Let me guess,” Solene sounded annoyed. “Short? Cute? Squeaky voice?”

“Well, yeah.” Kylian admitted as much. He figured since he was already injured, Solene would not slap him. She unleashed a tirade of words instead.

“Rrrrrrr! How come I’m never taken seriously? What’s wrong with being petite and cute and having a high voice in this world?”

Kylian started bargaining. “Well, it makes you appear younger than you actually are. Don’t women want to look younger than they really are?”

“When I’m 80, I’ll be fine with it, but for right now I can’t get anyone to take me seriously. It’s terribly unfair!”

Kylian realized that he should not have judged a book by its cover, but too often, that was what everyone did at one time or another. It was easy. What was hard was to take the time to get to know a person first before passing some kind of judgement. Kylian corrected himself.

“I’m sorry about that, Solene. I shouldn’t have made it an issue. So tell me why what you do is worth getting beaten up for? I’d like to know since I got beat up for it.”

Solene half-accepted Kylian’s apology and half smirked at him. She felt she owed him an explanation.

“We don’t think it’s right for our government, the Ruling Party, to withhold all advanced technologies from the rest of humanity when the people living outside our borders could be helped by our life-saving medical technologies, our clean, non-polluting energy technologies and our labor-saving manufacturing technologies. They could lift themselves out of poverty faster if they had access to some of these advanced and powerful technologies. The countries of the CoC resent us because they believe the UEN is purposely holding them back and keeping them poor and weak, preventing them from attaining the better future they deserve.”

“I never thought of it like that before,” responded Kylian.

“This resentment became much more pronounced after the UEN installed Transportals in several of the countries of the CoC,” continued Solene.

“Why did we do that?” Kylian sounded like he was younger and naiver than the protestors.

Solene rolled her eyes. This was why they were protesting for a free press. The average, ignorant citizen, which Kylian best represented, knew nothing about the complex issues surrounding the technology embargo. They accepted the official explanations fed to them by the Ruling Party. If the UEN had a free press instead of the state-controlled media, the truth about the world might be widely known and opinions changed. Solene would have to educate Kylian it would seem.

“We installed Transportals strategically in places all over the globe so that we could teleport goods and materials into and out of the UEN much faster and more efficiently than by trucking over land or by shipping overseas. In each country where we have a Transportal, we also have a military presence to operate the Transportal and to guard the supply chain supporting it. Because of our military occupation of other nations’ land, it is causing us to be viewed as a hostile force since we have taken over the land immediately surrounding each Transportal. The host countries of these Transportals don’t like us having what looks to be a small military base on the edge of their borders.”

Kylian thought about that, but something did not sound right. He remembered Luc saying that the symbiotic relationship between the UEN and the CoC was win-win, albeit a bigger win for the UEN and a smaller win for the CoC.

“But didn’t the members of the CoC benefit from the presence of the Transportals? Didn’t they want them, too?” He challenged Solene’s logic with Luc’s.

“Yes, some countries tolerate the Transportals better than others. For some, the presence of a Transportal has been an economic boon creating more jobs and economic growth, but everywhere we have a Transportal, it’s a stark reminder to the people of the CoC just how wide the divide is between us, the technology haves, and them, the technology have-nots.

“When they see that we have the ability to teleport objects over the hundreds or thousands of miles nearly instantly by using the Transportals, it is a daily reminder of just how powerful and technologically advanced we are compared to them. And that breeds resentment among the people of the CoC when they see such awesome technology that we have, but that they are not benefiting from because we’re withholding all of our advanced technology, including the ones that could help them improve their lives.”

“When you put it like that, I can see how this technology divide could be a problem,” admitted Kylian.

“When you know the truth, it can not only be eye-opening, but it can be life-changing.” The other protestors surrounding Solene all nodded their heads. They had all been changed by the truth. “That’s why we students have organized these protests to speak out against the Ruling Party’s policies of information suppression which prevents citizens like us from knowing the full facts of what’s happening in the world.”

Up until this moment, Kylian had only thought of himself as a simple scientist working on advancing the technology of teleportation. Solene’s explanation of the world opened his eyes to the consequences of this technology and how his work on it might be fueling inequity and division in the world and possibly raising military tensions between the superpower UEN against the rest of the world. Was this the right thing to be doing?

It was a lot for him to think about.