If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too:

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;

If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same:.

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings,

And never breathe a word about your loss:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

-Rudyard Kipling

Greenton, Auctus, February 14, 458 UE. Spelman Axiom School: 2305 hrs A.M.S.T. Auctus Mean Solar Time

“Okay class today, as you know, will be your last final of your high school career. As always, your last final, is history. Does anyone know why?” Looking around the teacher called on hand. “Matthew.” The teacher said, for that was whom the hand belonged to.

Matthew, a bright student, but not the brightest in the class, stood as you should when giving an answer. “For we must understand, and remember, our past. Both triumphs and disasters. So we can properly act in the present, to create a better future.” Matthew then sat down.

“Correct!” The teacher said. “Now who can tell me who said that, when, where and why? Timothy.”

Timothy stood, “Richard Foster, April 11, 2116, UN Wharenui, New Zealand, Earth. His goal was to unite the world. His plan was to solve disputes virtually, leaving no real fallout. It is in his success at said moot, that he is referred to as the ‘Father of the One World”

“Thank you, Timothy. Okay, here is a hard one, whoever gets this right will receive 10 points on their final.” At this, the class gasped in unison. Of a maximum of 60 ten points was a lot. “Who can tell me where Richard got his inspiration for that statement?”

The teacher looked around and saw no hands.

“His father?” A shy girl named Susan said.

At this, a bully "coughed" the word "stupid" sparking a lot of people to chuckle, thinking her stupid to suggest such a thing. The teacher was about to admonish the class when a boy, James, stood. James was usually very quiet, well to most people. He was much more vocal with people he liked. But at school he was quiet. James hated bullying, it was not much of a problem as it was in the past. Even though, nanites gaurantee that no one will be born with genetic deficits, and muscle mass and body fat would stay at a reasonable and consistant level, unless one was truly interested in changing on of those factors. Genes were genes, and some people just may be born ugly, or not as smart, or not as coordinated. No one cared about skin colour anymore either. The point is, no matter how perfect your society, there will always be a little guy and a big guy. James, out of a school of geniuses, was the genius. He had the highest critical thinking ability. Though no one knew it, except the teachers. Not even James. Grades were announced at the end of Axiom in order to prevent disfunction.

Most of the time James left people alone and they him, but nothing got under his skin more than bullying.

“Actually Susan right, she just didn't explain herself very well.” James saw the entire class’ confused look, and the teacher’s smirk. He continued though, acting oblivious to their expressions. “His inspiration was the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. The poem is told from the perspective of a father talking to his son. And knowing that Richard idolized his own father, for good reason, seeing how his father, though rich, worked tirelessly to improve living conditions of the poor, and knowing his father’s favorite author was Kipling, we can infer that Richard’s father told him ‘If’ at some point. Maybe even when Richard sought his father for counsel before going to the UN moot.”

At this, the only people in the classroom with smiles were Susan and the teacher.

“Thank you James, I could not have said it better myself. For your correct answer Susan, and for proving her validity James, you both will receive the ten points. Also I would like you to stay after class if you could. I would like to speak to you.”

35° 33’ 9”N: -107° 6’ 44”W. (~80mi NW of Rio Ranchero). Earth. December 24, 2590 AD. Classified: 1706 hrs G.M.T.

“Time, 1706 hours. Gravitic Manipulation experiment D17-47q.” An old Dr. Martin Trent, spoke into his omni-comp. Too old if you were to ask him. At 453 he was already 43 when modern medicine found nanotechnology to be the panacea for humans back in 2180, making them live much longer, people born at that time will live to be 400. It was not until 100 years ago that scientists found a way to biosynthesize the nanites, that now we're part of the human genome. People born after that have a life expectancy of 800 years! Phenomenal, but sadly Dr. Trent is too old, he was born too long ago for that boon, not that he wanted it. 550 years, was how long his life estimate was and that already seemed too long for him.

“Begin sequence.” Dr. Trent said with tired eyes. He had been working on artificial gravity for travel in space for over 200 years. To say he was tired of failure was an understatement.

With matter to energy converters, resources were unlimited. Need to charge your phone put a rock into a matter converter, affectionately known as a D-mat, and you can power your house for the rest of your life let alone charge your phone. Need a hamburger, just use an energy to matter converter, affectionately known as a printer, and it uses energy to create a hamburger at the atomic level, though, for whatever reason, it would taste like dirt. With the invention of the D-mat and the Printer, poverty and homelessness were wiped out.

Now that we had an unprecedented peace man looked again to the stars. In 2345, yes, yes everyone knows, sequential numbers and blah-dee-bla-bla. Light speed was achieved. That, actually, was not as complicated as previously imagined. The D-mat made enough energy for an ion drive. There were two problems, the first was the energy at that speed would destroy the gravitational need to pull together, a defining trait of matter causing the object to break up. The other problem was inertia. If you accelerate from zero to c in a fraction of a second, you will be paste on a hull. Kind of like a bug on a windshield. The only way to fix these problems, is to create an inertia dampening field. For this you need to be able to manipulate gravity, thus Dr. Trent’s work.

Dr. Trent became the leader in this field when he published a paper on a decidedly simple concept. Gravity is the natural reaction matter has on itself and energy. Like magnets, positively polarized iron attracts negatively polarized iron. So if regular matter attracts regular matter, then the only way to repel regular matter would be with antimatter. It turned out after lots of experimentation, he was wrong, antimatter more absorbed regular matter, like a vacuum, or absolutely erratic. Through this discovery however, Dr. Trent found it may be possible to reverse the aspects gravity controls. Two centuries of failure brought him here.

A disk sat on the other side of 4 feet of lexan glass and an energy barrier. Well actually it's a barrier made up of tightly packed y-rays locked in their photon state named HiDAPLoB, or High-Density Aural Phase-Locked Barrier, but no one is gonna call it that, not even the military. Dr. Trent stared at a circular disc 6 feet in diameter and four inches thick. The disc was in a sphere made of an electromagnetic field. The disc was shot with a dense beam of energy consisting of electrons that were Valance Recognized, basically they were previously valence electrons that were ripped from atoms.

This was Dr. Trent’s last try for success. After two hundred years he would quit.

As the disk spun clockwise with the VR electrons coursing through. It… Started to float, pens and paper and other light objects pulled towards it, and Dr. Trent, was crying. After two hundred years, he had succeeded.