How do you feel after reading this?

There simply wasn't enough moisture in the air. Every day he tried to breathe through his nose and it burned. It always burned and it never smelled of anything but heat. Like an oven door opened before your face was turned away. No nature, no wood, no salt, no nothing. But, for some reason, this made him think of something else: opportunity.

The place was an opportunity; a chance to construct something where there had never been anything like it before. To both paint the picture AND put the puzzle together was what he had here. He was good at puzzles, but he always longed for pictures.

From this realization came a clear image in his mind; a culture of people without traditions and pasts, a group of near settlers unknowingly on the forefront of the next great revolution of man. The Industrial Age had passed. The Age of Enlightenment was upon them, but known by few.

So these settlers set out into this new era, fresh with the ideas that would ultimately bring about a kind of feeling that no one was yet even capable of dreaming about. A quantum leap in the way that people lived their every day lives.

We are all connected, whether we want to be or not. The only way we can improve is that everyone must realize this and let down their guard. They must give in to the safety of the group, confident that as many, no one could defeat them. Not government, not those who did not understand, nor those who would reign terror down upon them. They believed because they realized they must, and this gave them power.

Not that they knew they even had this power. In fact, none of them did. Some of them had glimpses into the world where interaction was so transparent that honesty wasn't a choice, it was just accepted as standard. Within the transparent circle of connectedness, every thought and word were treasure and treated as fact. They were all together. They helped each other.

So it began that year. 2008 was the year the world changed.