Harmony

Waiting for Information

Neca wasn't spending as much time painting as she had thought she would. She had told Suria the day before that she wanted to paint a number of landscapes, and apart from the village painting, none of her other planned paintings had happened yet. What she did find, she said, was a cartooning instruction book in the library, and she was studying that and practicing her cartooning. It was taking time away from her painting, but she was greatly enjoying it.

Le, much to Suria's delight and to everyone else's as far as she could tell, was continuing to play the piano for an hour or two daily. The sounds of it could be heard from anywhere in the community centre whenever Le started playing. Often when she started up, conversations tended to peter out, and everyone who was nearby simply engaged in quiet activities while they listened to her play. Suria loved that it was at random times of the day too, because then it always surprised her when she started hearing the first soft notes of the piano.

When he wasn't jogging with Rocsi or organising the volleyball games, Suria often saw Arias out walking, exploring the surrounds of the village and keeping a log of what he found. He had also recently been engaging with Pixie and herself in philosophical discussions about the nature of happiness, and whether it was the ultimate goal of humans. His thoughts were that happiness was vitally important to individuals, contentment even more so, but that the ultimate aim of any human should be to further the best interests of the whole race, as much as they possibly could, within their means. In little ways or big, whatever one felt capable of doing, service to others should be the focus. The opposite of greed and corruption. That had been their post-dinner discussion the night before, for instance, and there had been other such discussions which quite a few of them had joined in. When Suria first met Arias, she wasn't aware he was interested in philosophy. She always enjoyed it when he started up a conversation along those lines.

Pixie for her part had been writing everything that had happened to her and the group down in a series of journals. She wanted to chronicle their experiences. It might be important someday, she said. It had become her favourite pastime. She was getting quite good at writing, and particularly at capturing the essence of what had happened, ignoring trivial details, but not the fun things or the jokes and laughter. They were vitally important, she said. Her writings made fascinating reading for quite a few of the group, such that she occasionally had to deal with questions about when she was going to release anything new for comment.

Suria and Gimi had set themselves the task of doing personality profiles for the group. With her background in psychology and his in anthropology, they were both keen to do this and motivated to find out why they all got along so well. It had taken less time than they thought it would. They tried to make their discussions with each of their friends light and casual, not aiming to put pressure on them at all. Their main aim was to see if anyone needed help, or if the group was having any issues, based on their earlier discussions about negative memories and flashbacks when they were up on the plateau overlooking the valley.

The two of them had reached some interesting conclusions. The collective thinking amongst the group was that they were all amazed by the technology in the village. The array of intelligently designed machines, aimed at making their day-to-day lives easy and enjoyable, was of constant delight to them all. Neither did anyone have any knowledge of how the buildings were powered, or where the water was stored or pumped. There were no electricity lines and no circuit boards anywhere. Nor were there any power points or cables. No telephones were to be found, which everyone thought was quite strange. All portable electronic devices such as Le's keyboard and things like lamps and fans had power but no battery compartments or external cords. Yet they worked. The technology provoked wonder in them all.

The village was also optimised in a way that kept them engaged with enough tasks so that they felt useful and busy, but still with a good amount of free time to indulge in the things they loved to do. Village life was proving to be calming and relaxing for all of them. They all loved being there and working together as a team in helping sustain it.