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A hillbilly's life in San Franisco When Iowa is further away than Cassiopeia A

The train slowly moved at gentle 400 kilometers per hour, no jerking or other sudden moves as the MAGLEV-train crossed the central planes of North America into the direction of the west coast.

Daniel, or as he like it more, Danny, looked at the scenery quickly passing by, 100 feet below him. As the MAGLEV-train got into a light curve, he could see the tall curved beams of blue shimmering ceramic-steel that held the tracks. He did not really feel any remorse, leaving his life in Iowa behind. Not that he had hated living here. It was just that....he wanted to see more of the world, as cliche-like it may sound.

His parents had been overly protecting towards him, shielding him pretty much his entire life from the modern world of the 25th century. Their hypernet access was heavily regulated by this ancient AI which his father had inherited by his father (pretty much one of the few more modern gadgets on their family farm), so pretty much every single piece of information his had access to the world outside of Grandview, Iowa was either blocked or censored. And he just hated that.

His two brothers and sister seemed to be fine with that, but he was not. He had always been the most curious one of the family, and that was the reason why his parents had an eye especially on him.

They home-schooled him until he was ten and the authorities forced his parents to let him go to school, which was pretty much the first time by then when he came into contact with more than just farming business and sunday-school.

Here he learned for the first time about the wonders of the world, and not just this world but the many others humans had visited so far. That Earth was the center of the Galactic Union, a powerful entity that was carefully watching over their 500 member planets scattered all over this galactic quadrant. That there were people out there, both on Earth and on many other planets, that have changed their bodies to resemble fascinating mixes of humans and animals and often even fully fictional creatures, calling themselves simply 'Morphs'.

And then there were of course the dragons, those mystic beasts that were thought to be mere myths for milennia. That was until in the second decade of the 21st century, when the world was recovering from the devastations of the nuclear war in Asia and the 'Greater Global Uprising', a young man in Europe found a young hibernating dragon in a cave, hiding him for several years before he could no longer do so, only to later find out that dragons have merely been hiding from human for the past 1000 years in the most remote places on Earth, which of course scared humans a lot and was the reason why it took them governments of a scared world quite some time to grant them equal right to humans.

And there was so much more, so much more that Danny could barely comprehend it.

In fact he often would come home late from school, because he would stay for hours at the school library, surfing on the hypernet, where his parents could not control what kind of information he would see. Unfortunately they quickly found out about this and they decided that from this day on they would keep a watching eye on him, bringing and picking him up from school everyday themselves in the next larger town to prevent him from reading anything 'sinful' as they called it.

It was nearly three years after he first saw all this wonders, and which were taken from him too quickly, that he got the chance of to see more of the universe. Although it came from a direction he would have never expected.

Out of nowhere his mother's brother visited them, an uncle he never knew he had. And what uncle it was. He was a morph, having his body changed into the form of a creature Danny had only known from history classes about ancient Greece - A Satyr. His feet, legs and hips up to his mid-section where goat-like, together with his ears and two curling horns on top of his head.

He was both scared and yet fascinated to see such a being in person. The first thing Danny noticed was, that Marcus, his uncle, was not wearing any shoes, since instead of feet he had hooves. In contrast to his hidden curiosity, his parents didn't seem too happy of him visiting them, even if it was just for two weeks, especially his father, who tried to avoid meeting him where ever possible. His mother did not seem to be to pleased to find out her brother had changed his 'god-shaped body', yet she was not as repellent as his father, accepting his decision without any further notice after their first chat.

Danny on the other hand saw he had a chance to finally get some new info about the outside world, meeting his uncle in secret whenever he had the chance to, asking him all the things he always wanted to know.

Though it was strange for him, sitting at the side of a person that was only partially human and he could not help but keep a certain distance to him. That was a fact that he noticed on himself pretty fast and he assumed it was because he simply was not used to Morphs, as his parents have kept him away from such 'sinful' creatures.

Yet on the last day of his uncle's stay, Danny was surprised beyond imagination when he was given an really old tablet computer that by his uncle's claim was able to connect so some ancient satellites and give him some limited access to the hypernet, bypassing the safety measurements of his parents' AI.

Though Danny could only ever gain access to the satellite when it passed over them, which was only twice a day. And then the data transfer was really limited so downloading much was not possible either. So he focused instead on downloading pure texts, without many pics to keep saving data.

This way he was able to educate himself more about the world than he could have ever imagined. But his searches where without any order really. He searched for stuff on a certain topic, only two days later to have nearly forgotten about it and already looking for new things. So his knowledge of the outside world was still limited.

This went well for nearly a year, before eventually his father got aware of his actions. Without any words he just confiscated the tablet computer and destroyed it, disconnecting Danny again from the world. It was this very day when he decided, that he did not want to end up like his father. He did not want to spend his entire life in a backwater place in South-Eastern Iowa in a place with barely 100 inhabitants, while the universe had so much more to show. It was then when he decided to leave this place at the very first moment he was able to.

When he finished school at the age of 16 he started working at his father's farm, to his father's joy, who thought he might have brought his son on the 'right' way. Though Danny had way different plans. He only worked now there to save up money and get the hell out of here as soon as possible.

This way he kept doing for the next four years, yet he never managed to save up enough money as he hoped he could. He had decided he wanted to go for the West-Coast, to study engineering and go to outer space by hiring for one of the big multi-planetary corporations. That was his plan. Yet first he needed to get out of here, and he never managed to do so.

That was the way of his life, until three weeks ago, when he received a letter from LTC. Danny nearly choked on his slice of whole-wheat bread when he noticed the sign of the company on the letter addressed to him. LTC or Lunar-Tec-Corporation. One of the biggest corporations in the solar-system, maybe even the entire Orion-arm of the galaxy, and also the one with the best reputation, when it came both to pay and human-right aspect. (If Danny recalled it right, it was in fact this very company that was found by the man that discovered the dragons in the first place.)

Danny at first thought he must be dreaming when he read that LTC was granting him a scholarship by the company for a schooling as a space-engineer for the next five years, including money for food, housing etc and the possibility for a specialization in a further field afterwards. When Danny read how many zeros were behind the first digit he thought it must be a mistake by several decimals.

But it was real. He how had the chance to become a full fledged space-engineer, and after his schooling he would get a 10-year contract at LTC, maybe even at a place of his choosing.

The hardest part was not to decide whether or not he should take this offer. The hardest thing was to face his parents and tell them that he had decided to leave his home and move out.

To his surprise his parents were not outraged, only a really deep feeling of disappointment could be felt when he told them about his plans. It was like 'Didn't we give you a good life?' His father only asked him one more time later that day if he was sure of leaving his family behind to which Danny replied that he would not leave them behind, he would only choose his own way.

Since he barely owned anything worth to be taken to his new home in San Francisco he was only traveling with light luggage, which he was kind of glad. His scholarship was more than enough to pay for pretty much anything.

But even so he was afraid of using too much of all this money, it was probably more money than his father would earn in one year with selling his agricultural goods. This was the reason why he decided against living on the university compound and instead decided for sharing an apartment a bit outside of San Francisco. He simply did not feel good to spend too much of his money, who knew when he would need it.

"Pardon me, young man?" a deep voice said to his right.

Danny was pulled out from his thoughts, as somebody cleared his throat right next to him.

"Eh, what?"

"I said I'd like to see your ticket, young man."

Danny looked to his right....and had to hold back to not wince in surprise and scare, as a two meter tall lion-morph was standing right at his side. Though it seems Danny was not very successful as the lion-man lifted one eye-brow.

"Is there a problem?"

"Errr..no Sir, not at all...the ticket...sure, the ticket..." he stuttered, looking through his pockets for the ticket before he found it in his wallet.

As he handed the piece of paper carefully to the large morph, he held it only with two fingers, somewhat carefully as the conductor took it.

The furred man looked somewhat surprised. He took the ticket, but instead of devaluing by piercing the ticket with a ticket punch, he looked at it closely, as if the letters were too small to read. He even held it up against the light to look at it more clearly.

"Is...is something wrong with my ticket, Sir?" Danny asked, now a bit concerned that he had done something wrong when he bought that ticket at the train-station in Des Moines.

The lion-man looked at it for a few more seconds before he fumbled with a little belt-bag at his front and pulled out a ticket punch, shining brightly as it was fresh out of the factory.

"No, not at all. It's just that...the last time I had to use this thing here..." he clicked with the punch "...was surely a decade ago. I thought I never had to use that thing ever again."

With a smirk the man punched the ticket and gave it back to Danny who took it, slightly blushing.

"First time?" the conductor asked.

It took Danny a few seconds before he realized what he meant.

"Erm, yeah. It's my first time out of Iowa at all. I...I'm on my way to study in San Francisco." Danny said, trying to avoid the gaze of the lion-morph.

The man either didn't seem to notice or to mind that Danny carefully tried to avoid his gaze, when he scratched his round ear poking out of his mane, before brushing a few strands of the lush ring of hair back.

"Ah, Frisco. Nice place to study. I hope you will enjoy your stay there young man." he said before he walked off, checking the ticket of other passengers.

Danny put the ticket back in his wallet and sighed. 'Gods, that was not a good start. And in Frisco will probably be a lot more morphs, not speaking of aliens of all sorts...I really, really need to pull myself together from now on' he thought to himself.

He looked outside again, the scenery quickly passing by. It would still take a few more hours before he would arrive in San Francisco, as the MAGLEV trained stopped at every state-capital before reaching its final destination.

'I just hope I won't have any problems with my roommates' he pondered.

Little did he know how wrong and how right he was at the same time about the people he would spend the next five years with.