Everyone was glad that finally there might be a chance that we could reverse desertification,
and nobody minded working to save our town. Even the kids helped because we needed all the
manpower we could get. It was burning and dry, like always. This was the reason why we always
studied in the afternoon and worked in the cool morning air. We hurried on to my house.
I ran upstairs to get my books. Study time was the best time of the day. Once I asked my Ba if
he thought SmartSchool was hard, and he said that he had gone to a school building when he was
a kid. He said they didn’t have SmartSchool tablets yet. I wonder how they learned by sitting in a
building. I took out my SmartSchool and reviewed with Po-Ming what we had learned yesterday.
Air pollution, global warming, algebra, and an essay on the history of the ancient Beijing. The
topic that interested me most was global warming. When my Ba was a child he had lived in a
big city called Hong Kong or something. The city was now underwater because of the rising sea
levels, so he had moved to this little town of HaiDian, which was very near Beijing. Here there
were lots of things that he could invent to help reverse desertification, and he also was here to
show how his jelly soil worked.
We studied hard and read interesting facts. We submitted our homework electronically to the
grading centre, answered questions on our electronic SmartSchool textbook. I read an interesting
article on my SmartSchool social studies textbook:
June 20, 2040
DESERT GETS CLOSER TO HAIDIAN
AND MORE ON POLLUTION
The Gobi desert spreads more and more by the day, leaving wrecked cities and homeless
people behind. But fortunately, HaiDian is already getting prepared. The desert was originally
believed to be coming from the northwest, hitting HaiDian before the Beijing capital, but the route
swerved and took Beijing first. The inventor WuSu Ngai says, ‘I am glad that my jelly soil is in
good use, but one day there will be something better.’ Ngai is quite right. Back in 2014 somebody
from Belgium invented walls that could turn pollution into CO2 and H2O. By 2017, the most
polluted cities had these walls. In 2029, scientists found a way to clear the radiation from the
water and soil in Japan. In 2032, there was a way to make acid water clean. Soon there will be a
way to completely reverse desertification.
Since my Ba was an inventor, his name popped up in the HaiDian papers a lot. We finished
our essay, learned more arithmetic and history, and wrapped up our pollution unit. I finished
my research about desertification and solutions and was ready to show my Ba. When I finished
studying and Po-Ming had left, Ba was working on expanding his jelly soil invention. He had
worked out a plan and wanted to share it with other places that were being taken over by desert.
I proudly presented my research about jelly soil to him. He thanked me and continued to work. I
opened my SmartSchool again and read another article. This one was about how bacteria could
help reverse desertification, but it wasn’t tested yet.
I waited with Mei-Hua for a few days until finally Ba came out of his workshop. He proudly
told us that in a town near the silk road people were willing to pay high prices for lots of jelly
soil, and there they could help him trade his jelly soil for very valuable things. Ma was proud too,
because finally, after about a couple years of work on this project, Ba had successfully created
something that proved himself as a great inventor.
