Oh, it was to be so jolly good! What a game! Such excitement they hadn’t known in years. The children ran this way and that across the green laws, shouting at each other, holding hands, flying in circles, climbing trees, laughing. Overhead the rockets flew, and beetle cars whispered by on the streets but the children played on such fun, such tremulous joy, such tumbling and heavy screaming. And if you are asking yourself why all the excitement, well, we have to go back a few days. You see, a few days back, let’s say about five days, kids weren’t allowed to play outside. That law had been implemented since 2155. The reason why Cornelius, the governor of the Empire a rich old guy with a head shaped like an egg, made that law was because more and more children were addicted to their computers and they would never leave home to play outside. All in all, Cornelius, who was a very old-fashioned man, kept kids out of the streets with that law thinking they would beg for, as he said, their freedom. Oh, how he was wrong! So wrong! And he knew it. He knew that he was even more wrong than the people who thought the world was going to end in 2012. So he kept the law hoping kids would, some day, regret having stayed so much time at the computer. And as you know 5 years later kids were not allowed to play outside still. And that is when our story began.
Some day a kid, let’s call him Michael, woke up and went to his small window, as he did every day, and saw snow. It was snowing! What a strange feeling that he was seeing snow! He went quickly as possible post a new entry in his blog until every kid on the Empire knew. You see, it had not snowed since 2154. It was a big event around there. For some, it was the first time they saw snow, for others it brought memories of good old times. Rita was one of that last ones.
She had vague memories of when she went to play with snow on the streets she was 4 years old. Now, she didn’t know anything that weren’t inside of those walls of plasma that her parents called home. The only things she knew was because of telebooks but she knew it was not the same.
Some days she would feel very sad, and not even her flying shoes would make her smile and that was one of those days. At some point she couldn’t take it anymore. She stood up, opened the door and put one barefoot on the snow. Oh, white, cold, soft snow. How I missed you, she thought. So she put the other foot outside and suddenly all the kids, which were watching the snow at their windows, left home and started to play which each other. Above their heads, the same spaceships that will be above their heads 5 days after, were flying. Spaceships that they had never seen. But who cares about spaceships when you can play with snow^? And that is why Cornelius, watching that with tremulous joy, took the “kids-can’t-play-on-the-streets” law out of the law book.
It was a really nice trip that revealed a lot about a city that, now, seems more that just a town. I think that only after being a tourist in your city, you can actually call it, your city.
