welcome to the world

I cannot claim to be an old-timer. I was born into this world already accustomed to space, technology and the loss of old ways. My parents were born the year the first colony gained independence, their childhoods were marked by the conflicts between Earth governments and those newly-made in space. By the time they reached adulthood, a new generation claimed citizenship on new planets. By my birth, there were more cities off-world than on our humble homeworld. There are children born now who have no homeworld, no port of call, born and raised aboard ships. Mankind has a gift for exponential growth.
My grandparents were true old-timers, born before two millennia of the Common Era concluded and this glorious Space Age began. They remember a time before space ports, the Comweb, planetary traders; a time when books were published and forests existed on uncontrolled pieces of land. I never knew this world, and mourn only that there are so few records of it. In the days of the Space Age, all eyes look forward. Information is computerized, the rest falls by the wayside.
My own education has been largely self-created. This archaic vocabulary that I cling to is, I admit it, a point of perverse pride. Words have been lost, whole languages melded into slang and the drawls of interstellar cargo-carriers. School is the institutionalized version of a survival guide. We were taught to operate communication systems, add columns of numbers, sign our names, tap blinking buttons…perfectly molded into the factory drones, soldiers, and terraformers needed by the galactic economy. There was no mention of anything else. I did too well in school, I took it too seriously and learned too much. Which is why, at a young age, I realized that I could learn much more beyond the confines of the classroom.