Professor Raziel, Jessica, and Vau walked through the center of town. The streets were paved, but aged.
“This is the main street,” Vau said. He motioned around them. “You have the high school, the city hall.”
As Vau spoke, Jessica took in the quiet street and downtown buildings. “Where are we, exactly?” Jessica pulled out her phone. “I tried to look at my smartphone map, but I don’t have a signal. I don’t believe I’ve seen Archer’s Point on a map before.”
“We work very hard to keep it that way,” Vau said. “It’s by invitation only.”
Jessica kept looking around the downtown area, admiring the variety of shops. This is pretty impressive.
Vau interrupted Jessica’s thinking. “We have a handful of restaurants, all excellent. We have an ice cream shop, a theater, two bars, and a coffee shop. And there’s our bakery.”
“We also have a fantastic dispensary,” the professor said as both he and Vau smiled. “Pretty much everything you need.”
“What do people do around here?” Jessica asked.
“Whatever they want,” Vau said, looking confused by the question.
“Do you mean, what do they do for money?” the professor asked.
Jessica nodded.
“This place built its wealth from the exportation of innovative ideas,” the professor said.
“What kind of ideas?” she asked.
“This place started as a hub for people with ideas about technology, education, and energy sources,” Vau said.
The professor picked up where Vau paused. “That evolved to developing more effective agricultural techniques, and then, of course, the arts.”
“One of our many claims to fame is that we introduced the idea of polyculture farming,” Vau said.
“What’s that?” Jessica asked.
“Let’s head on to the house,” the professor said, “and we can show you.”
At that moment, Jessica thought about how long she’d been on her feet. She’d flown to Vancouver late the night before. She’d spent all day walking through the forest and was now walking through even more of the village, yet her legs weren’t tired. What was in that tea?
“At our peak,” Vau continued, “we produced the largest number of musicians, painters, writers, and inventors the world had ever seen. Engineers were using our technology to create the greatest structures known to man. We were able to discover ways to cultivate soil that allowed people to farm in places like the Amazon rainforest.”
“I thought that the soil in the Amazon rainforest was rich with nutrients. That’s why it has such plant diversity.”
“On the contrary,” the professor said. “The rain washes all the nutrients away. So when very early settlers came to us with this problem, we had to figure out how to use the materials there to create a soil rich and healthy enough for farming.”
“Do people still farm in the Amazon?” Jessica asked.
The professor appeared to daze off. “Not like they used to. Those were the times when you’d find great cities in the middle of the rainforest.”
“Now the rainforest solely relies on the dust from the African deserts to provide its nutrients,” Vau said.
“You guys are losing me,” Jessica said.
“Oh, our bad. We forgot about…” Vau used his finger to point in a circular motion at Jessica’s head. “We get carried away sometimes.”
They left the downtown area and were now on a gravel road, once again surrounded by trees as high as she could see. Jessica wasn’t sure what species they were. I mean, they are red, so maybe redwoods? She knew what pine trees looked like, and these were not them.
“Do you license ideas, like patents?” Jessica asked.
“Yeah, along those lines,” the professor said. “I’m sure that you’re familiar with the network effect. The more people who use what we create, the more we gain.”
“You guys must be killing it if the Singularity Group’s touch screens are an idea that you licensed,” Jessica said.
“That product is doing incredibly well, but it still has room to do more,” Professor Raziel said.
“What other technology are you developing? Or do I need to sign some sort of nondisclosure agreement?”
Vau said, “You can have access to anything that you want to learn.”
“Our ideas are market driven,” the professor said. “We try to create things that are needed. We try to prioritize other ideas over technological innovation, for the moment, that is.”
“Why?” Jessica asked, surprised. “Technology is the future.”
“Yes, technological advances are an important part of the future. However, people consistently break their agreements, and so we really must be cautious.”
Vau chimed in as if he felt Jessica’s confusion. “If you haven’t realized it yet, you’ll come to learn that this place, this town, is older than you can imagine. Long before your history books even began to think about documenting things, people used the technologies and processes that we developed to inhabit the most uninhabitable places. As time moved on and as mercantilism became more popular, businesses were doing anything to maximize their profits. We saw more people breaking their contracts, especially when it came to our technology and education.”
“How so?” Jessica asked.
“How were they breaking their contracts?” Vau asked.
Jessica nodded.
“We licensed our technology to people for specific uses. We later found out that people were reverse engineering our technology and using it in ways that we never wanted it to be used,” the professor said. “There was nothing we could do about it, so we decided to stop licensing our technology.”
“What about education?” Jessica asked.
“We used to teach the teachers,” the professor said. “The founders of the Point had a vision, that if everyone in the world were knowledgeable, then they would all live in a better world. So we brought the most promising leaders here and taught them everything we know. The thought was that they would teach their people, who would, in turn, educate and inform the rest of the population.” The professor sighed deeply. “The reality was that more of our pupils kept the information for themselves. They would share some bits of it, but only with a select few.”
Vau frowned. “Similar to technology, they reverse engineered what we gave them and used it for exploitation.”
“Do you teach anyone now? I mean, anyone who’s not from the Point?” Jessica asked.
“Yes, of course, we do. We just have changed our approach for finding and selecting pupils,” the professor said. “In the past, we would proactively approach the leaders of different communities, those who had been selected by their people. Now, we only teach those who seek the information we have and find their way here. People like you.”
“It’s much more difficult to get here than it used to be,” Vau added.
“We weren’t getting the results that we wanted.” The professor continued with a smile, “Fortunately, many people have become curious and want to question everything. Like, are we even farming the right way?”
The professor slowed to a stop and waved his hand in front of him as if he just pulled the sheet off a big reveal.
Jessica looked up to see a large stone structure that reminded her of a French chateau. The house was at the center of a garden, where each row yielded a different color plant. The berry bushes radiated against the pink and orange backdrop of the twilight sky.