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1 Turkey – 2 Germany –3 Portugal – 4 Estonia- 5 Ireland –6 Italy

 

Part 1: Have you ever heard the saying: It's the same world over?

Written by Turkey, from Italy (This first part of our story was written by one of groups of the Italian team on behalf of the Turkish team.)

Well, nowadays, in 2050 it’s a reality.

What does it mean?

It means that the world has become one single nation, with one government with Amabo as president, one mother tongue and the cultures amalgamated in one single culture.

Also, everything goes well, economy is thriving, the expectations of life have increased, people are freer and as a consequence, discrimination doesn’t exist anymore.

I could stay here for many hours speaking about the good things about this wonderful world, but, it’s a perfect world.

But, how could it happen? , you may be wondering…

Well, in part it’s also thanks to us.

Having said that,  we can move on in our story.

We are in Luzern, Switzerland. Where the by now 89 years old Frank Banchieri on his death bed,  prey of his many faults , decides to call the participants of Eutopia+ project, sending them an e-mail.

Pushed by the curiosity of receiving a notice about a project happened decades before, they all go to the place indicated by Franck, his house.

The guys are confused to see the old man on the bed, staying in a mysterious silence, they are just petrified.

But then a John Lennon-looking guy (he may have been from the Italian team if my memory does not falter), screams:

“Who the heck are you? And why the hell do you call us here?”

“I want to be frank and honest with you… I just need you to go back in time, and make our present better”, intoned the old man.

“But our world is already perfect, why should we want to change it?”, asked with a baby voice one of them.

“And so you call perfect a world where French people don’t go around with a baguette under their armpit, Italians don’t cook good pasta and English people don’t drink tea at 5pm?”, answered peacefully the old man.  

 

 

Part two

written by students from Germany

“But why is all that so bad? We live in a perfect world. Life has never been better. We defeated cancer and lots of other illnesses. Everyone is equal and nobody suffers from hunger or poverty. The kids get the best education they can get. This system works perfectly. We have no wars. Everything is peaceful. Why would you change that?” said Francisco from Portugal. He had a very good job in the government and so it was no wonder that he was a big supporter of the worldwide nation and president Amabo.

Everyone else in the room was thinking about what Frank and Francisco had said. They wanted to choose their words wisely before they said something aloud. In this group of people everybody is respected and no one wants to offend anyone.

After some moments of silence some people started talking.

A big discussion started. Usually the conversation is calm and polite. But today everything was a little different. Some of the people started yelling and gesticulating. Everyone got excited and you could not understand what the person next to you was saying.

“Now you all calm down. I cannot stand it when so many people are talking. You all know that. You think of what you want to say and then one after the other says what he or she would like to say,” Frank said and everyone stopped their conversation and looked guiltily to Frank’s bed. Nobody liked an angry Frank, because some things that had happened in the past made everyone very respectful of Frank.

After some moments of silence Joe from Ireland rose to speak: “I think we should go back in time and change some things, so we won’t have this completely uniform world. There are so many points against this way of society…”

Which points is Joe thinking of? What do the others think? Do they agree with Joe or with Francisco? And what did Frank do so he is so respected?

 

 

Part 3 Written by students from Portugal

“Since I have found out the cure for cancer, life has never been better, so I can’t understand why you are saying there are so many points against this way of society and why you think we should go back in time. Explain yourself!”, said Frank angrily.

Joe felt uncomfortable, but, even so, he held his opinion: “On the one hand I totally agree with you, we really live in a perfect world, but not in a perfect society. All days the same things, people live shaped, they have no goals. I’m tired!”. After saying those words, Joe left the room suddenly, hastily and angrily.

Everybody got shocked at Joe’s attitude. At the same time,Tiago, a very successful engineer, enters the room and greets everyone not knowing what’s happening.

Francisco tried to calm everyone down and gently smiled showing his beautiful teeth; he calmly said: “My friends, everyone has their own opinion, Joe might be right, people live in a perfect world, we have no cancer, we have almost no social problems, but people do not try to make their dreams come true anymore, they don’t fight to survive, and that’s the point of living, everyone has their lives already planned. The human race has always been at war with itself to keep the balance. War and poverty helped to keep that balance. In some years, the world will be overpopulated and eventually nations will fight for resources, such as food, water and oil but the human race will always find a way to destroy itself. It’s nature’s rule!”

Tiago was eager to give his opinion. He lifted his muscled arm and started speaking: “I must admit that we are driving humanity to self-destruction. We changed nature. People must die naturally. It’s the cycle of life, people live and die, some sooner, others later...but everyone dies, we must do something about this, it’s painful to admit it but instead of doing something good, we unbalanced life!”

Everyone thought about what Francisco and Tiago said, everyone knew they had a point, but no one wanted to admit it. The future of humanity is absolutely unknown…

Suddendly a man came in and told Francisco that something huge had been found. His eyes were wide open and he looked very worried: “Something was found and you won’t believe me if I tell you what it is...”

 

Part 4 By students from Estonia

‘’Come, everybody! I’ll show you.’’ he said. Everyone followed him outside and into a cave near the house.  

    “Okay, so I found this thing. Last night, when I was walking home I saw a weird light coming from this cave. I was too scared to go check it out because it was dark, so I came back this morning to see what it was.  I came to you as fast as I could. Does anyone know what it is?!?”

    Everyone gathered around the weird machine and looked at it. After a long time someone said:” Maybe Frank knows what this is, we should ask him about it.”

    They all went back to the house. Frank was lying on his bed. He didn’t feel good because it looked that he had a fever. When they asked him about the mysterious machine Frank just looked at them flakily: “You found it? How?”

Then he relaxed and chuckeled to himself: “Ahh, I must’ve hidden it not well enough then. Might as well tell you about it. You see, the problem I called you all here for has been troubling me for quite some time. I can’t even remember since when, probably decades already. At first I didn’t see anything bad happening so I thought I was being paranoid. But the odd feeling didn’t leave me, so I knew I had to do something, to give my mind some peace at least.  Anyway, since then I’ve been trying to construct a time machine, just in case anything goes really wrong. Took me quite some time to get it working, but sadly by the time i was too old and weak to go back myself. The situation in our world wasn’t nearly as bad as our future looks like right now so I just hid the machine to keep it from people who might use it for evil.”

    Then someone interrupted Frank: “If you had the time machine all this time, why didn’t you let us use it?!” It seemed like the yell came from the side of the room where Francisco was standing. He looked a bit embarrassed for being so loud.

    Now Frank looked like he was embarrassed too. “Well… I would have told you about it earlier, but I may have somehow forgotten how to use the machine.”

    “Oh now, what do we do now? We can’t use the machine without knowing how it works, can we?” said Joe.

    “Sure we can! Why not? It’s our only option anyway,” said Francisco, suddenly very confident, “Come, let’s go back to that cave and figure out how that machine works.” He finished his sentence and marched outside, expecting everyone to follow him. After a brief moment of confusion they did. as the last people were exiting, Frank gave them an encouraging thumbs up.

    They all walked to the cave, feeling  a bit cheery for finally having a plan. Once they were in the cave Francisco didn’t look so sure about his plan anymore. “Does anyone have any ideas?” he asked quietly.

    One of the Estonians piped up: “ I do! I think we should press that button over there!” she exclaimed while walking over to the machine and pointing at the button. She stopped , her finger on the button waiting for someone to disagree with her, when no one did she pressed it.

 

Part 5 by IRELAND

 

As she pressed the button the composition of their surroundings was altered as the cave was transformed by light, it emitted from the device like a hologram and all of the people felt like they were floating in the centre of the galaxy, as Joe began to move his arms it caused the planets, the moon and the sun to rotate about each other at a different speed, as they looked they could see that this seemed to change the appearance of the planets. Joe stopped, That was pretty cool said Francisco, a nice light show, but lots get out of here and find out how this time machine works, as they left the cave the group were met by a shock of what lay in front of them, “where are we?” asked some one, “I think the question we should be asking is when are we” replied someone else. It was true, they had travelled back in time, by moving his arms and changing the orbit of the planets Joe had moved the group to another time period. After much deliberation, and trial and error the group identified a set of patterns that allowed them to travel to any specific time in the earths past.  They devised a plan, while it was true that a world without war, disease and hunger was a place that humanity had always strived for, it had achieved it at a huge price, originality and uniqueness had all but disappeared and the conformity that now existed had sapped all desire and originality from the humanity. The human race had lost its passion. The group identified a key time in history when great advancements had been made but had also sapped energy from mankind. This key events was the Language initiative, whereby the governments had decided that the individual languages of different countries was a great obstacle to the advancement of mankind and had uniformly adopted a common language as the primary means of communication for the entire world, within half a generation, individual languages had all but died out. The group identified that this had led to people losing respect for their origins and history. By going back to this time period they were able to become ambassadors for the different languages and cultures, so that while this new language was a very convenient form of communication when conversing with someone from a different country, people became bi-lingual and as a result maintained their cultures and customs.  Eventually when they felt they had accomplished as much as they felt was possible, they travelled back to their present day and were astonished with what met them, a world that was free from war hunger and disease, but also a world that was culturally rich and one that celebrated the uniqueness on individuality of people from different origins and passions. A true EuTopian society.

 

Part Six (Italy)

As the group came back to their new EuTopia, they lived a more vivid life. The complexity of the “new” cultures of mankind, which they never experienced before, was a way to fill the world with discoveries; their life and memory never were so full of diversity.

The years went on and therefore the guys grew; everybody kept on with their life, some of them got married and had children.

Twenty years later, economy started to worsen: inflation increased to the highest values ever, essential goods became too expensive, even having a proper house was hard. All these problems were caused by the overpopulation of the world. Even with different cultures all over the world peace was once again threatened. As the crisis got worse, various regions of EuTopia decided to expand their territory to supply their needs. This caused the union amongst countries to break and war arose.

A lot of the males in the group were fit and thus, they joined the war, even fighting against each other, sometimes. Even some of their children got in the fighting.

The vivid world they had made slowly turned to dust, while war destroyed the same cultures the group tried to preserve.

But while everything went so bad, there was still hope for peace and it lay in two brothers.

Alessandro, the eldest one, was a thin, medium height, guy, with long, brown, curly hair. Miriana was younger, with long, red wavy hair; she was smaller than Alessandro.

One day, Alessandro and Miriana, were snooping around the attic of their old house. There they found an old wooden chest, there was a lock on it but it was broken, inside it there was a diary. "Look at this; There is our father's name on it. What might it be?" said Miriana to her brother "It looks like a diary or some sort of journal." - "Wow, I don't know. I'm not sure we should read it, it's like invading someone's privacy, but I think that in times like this it doesn't really matter". And so they did, they browsed through the little journal; the majority of the pages were full of normal descriptions of their father's days. But something strange shocked them: one page contained a sketch representing a strange machine, the next pages were missing. "What the heck is this machine? Is it just a random sketch?” - “Let's go on, I want to read what dad wrote about when he met mum or stuff like this" asked Miriana "No, it looks too detailed to be just a random sketch, it looks more like a blueprint, and what about those missing pages? Something just doesn't fit right" answered the brother "I think we should ask dad about it".

 

And so they went to their father; he was ill and very weak because of the war that surrounded them. The brothers asked him about the diary, and in particular the machine drawn in it: “It will sound very unreal, and probably you won't believe me at first. But the world we live in was influenced by us, some lads in a group, EuTopia. We didn't want war but it was a by-product of our actions. In reality, our society was different originally; it was plain, gray, there were no differences, nor war or illness, everybody was the same, it may seem like the perfect world to live in but there were some problems. The first is pretty obvious; imagine living in a giant city, where everyone is the same, every community has the same history, the same traditions, I don't need to explain any further. We fixed it, avoiding the world to have just a single language. To do so we used the machine you see in that drawing, it was created by the founder of our group, and yes, even if it sounds impossible it allows people to travel through time” explained the ill man, he then went on explaining how the time machine worked and what the group changed. Alessandro and Miriana couldn't believe that such a machine existed, but there was something in the way in which their father was telling that story that convinced them it was not a lie “The second problem arose after some time, but it would have happened even without our intervention. Overpopulation brought lack of resources and therefore war” finished the man “But couldn't a device like that change the situation once again?” continued Miriana “It can, but I'm your father and I can't give you this burden. If you feel like you can do it though, I won't stop you, you have the right to live in a world far better than this, and you can actually achieve it. Just be careful, it is something way bigger than both of you”. It was a hard scary choice but they didn't want war and if there was even the slightest possibility to improve the situation, it was worth it. They made their farewell and left. Soon they found the machine and following the instructions they managed to make it work.

They went back to around 70 years before, it was year 2017. The world was peaceful, and way more simple that what they ever witnessed, but in a couple of years it would transform with the start of the changes that Et-Topia would bring.  But they were two simple kids, they couldn't enter the government and simply tell them to stop, and nobody would believe they were time travellers. There was still a way for them to influence what would happen, though. They spent their days writing a book, it contained all their story, the war, what their parents did, how the world was for them. Using the time machine they were able to analyze specific moments in history to write them down as accurately as possible. When the book was complete, they published it. The book was unexpectedly a success amongst young people and in a short time it spread around the world. People were hit by the realism of the events written in it and how alive they seemed, like it was a diary or a biography. In a short time even elder people and researchers started to analyze the book, looking at how possible it was for mankind to go through the same path. Some people were really shocked by the harm that a seemingly perfect society like that could bring. After some years, when the government started to propose the “EuTopia project” people were worried by it, frightened that what was in the book could turn to reality. Thus, EuTopia was never born.

Humanity kept growing and even if it was not the perfect world EuTopia wanted to bring, it was balanced: there was war, illness and poverty, but people in this world were also determined to keep the balance, to fight everything that was bad. In the end, mankind itself could prove to be

good.

This story you read is the same that was written by the brothers in an attempt to make the world not a perfect place, but to avoid consequences way more terrible. Not everyone will believe something like that and it's understandable. Either you believe it or not, that perfect society mankind aims to just keep in mind that the world is on a scale, life's too, what's bad brings improvement, what's good will be the ideal to fight for, but we can't have only one.

One creates the other, together they make balance and thus peace.

 

The end