The ride through the gardens was a joyous riot of color and scents. At first Harold didn't notice that there were people in the garden beds themselves - weeding, pruning, planting, harvesting. It wasn't just flowers - there were fruits and vegetables mixed in with the flowers. Plentiful aromatic herbs that he didn't see so much as smell. Gradually, he noticed people cutting flowers, filling baskets with fruit, and even digging up potatoes!

None of this looked like organized or official work. There were no uniforms that he was able to discern and no standardized equipment. For all the world, it simply looked like people were just taking what they wanted and working where they wanted to. They rode for an hour, Harold's best guess was that they were somewhere in the vicinity of Kalihi, but without the buildings he was used to, nothing looked positively familiar. He thought that he recognized the Punchbowl volcano in the distance, but again, with the landscape totally changed, he wasn't sure at all. Klee led the three of them off the paths and into a grassy field where the tall skinny trunks of papaya trees thrust upwards from the ground. Ripe papaya clustered around the tops of the Dr. Suess looking trees.

"Let's have a snack!" she said. To be honest, Harold didn't want to get off the bike. The machine had almost seemed to propel itself. He could feel his body doing the work, but with no gear shifting, no need to strain - he had been able to catch up without effort. The ride had also been one of the smoothest he had ever taken. He had thought that perhaps it was the material the paths were made of until they had pedaled into the field - at that point he had found that the bicycle retained its smooth ride. He could feel the roughness of the ground underneath, but without the kind of jarring he was expecting.

Klee and Brian leaned their bikes up against a couple of papaya trees - Harold did the same. Strapped to another was a papaya net. Harold, being from Hawaii was familiar with the long pole that had a bail and basket on the end. Brian unstrapped it from the tree and used it to reach up to a beautiful golden papaya. Klee beamed at Harold..."Well, what do you think? Are you missing the eff-ess yet?"

Harold was able to answer her smile with his own and an emphatic "Not even a little bit!" He was curious about the gardens and the bicycles though.
"Are these bikes powered in some way? I mean, besides us pedaling?"

Brian had captured the papaya now and it was he that answered. "Pretty cool, right? Kavika managed to bond silicon solar cells into the high tensile aluminum. It makes the bikes stronger and lighter while at the same time providing energy for the internal dynamo that connects to the crankshaft. And the best part is they are pulse proof - just like the path and stucco. Wait until you see them at night...the entire frame glows."

Harold's head felt like an internal explosion had gone off. He had heard the part about Kavika and materials but he hadn't really grokked it. Kavika wasn't a bike mechanic - well, he was - but his primary work wasn't working on bikes, it was working on materials as a scientist - wait that wasn't right either. Kavika was... and that was where his brain exploded. He was so used to being able to put people in boxes. He realized he was doing the same thing with Klee..and Brian. His 21st century brain was trying to tell him that Klee was a surgeon who also sang and taught yoga and Brian was an engineer who also liked history but those were wrong too. The 'occupation' box was no longer a thing. You could no more say that Kavika was a materials scientist than you could say a bike was a piece of metal. You had to call a bike a bike and you had to include all of the interests a person held in the definition of that person. Bigger explosion. It was more appropriate to say that bikes and materials were Kavika than it was to say that Kavika was a bike mechanic and a materials scientist. That didn't quite sound right either - he was still trying to check off boxes on a multiple choice form. Kavika was Kavika. Klee was Klee. Brian was Brian. Harold was...what was he exactly? He'd never really spent that much time trying to define Harold because he had been trying to put Harold into one of the convenient boxes that his society had laid out for him.

"The material is smart too," Brian said. "It knows not to glow during the day and it optimizes the bounce of the bike to the cushion of the shocks. Did you notice how smooth it is?"

Harold pulled himself out of his head and nodded. He hadn't imagined the smoothness of the ride.

"This is some really high tech stuff," he said."I was starting to think that maybe technology wasn't a huge part of your society."

Brian shook his head. "We love our tech. The hard part has been finding the balance between using the tech to make us happy and letting the tech use us. Not to mention dealing with the pulse. I've read that they are still using hand-held and personal devices in the RSA? Everyone runs in panic when it's time to put them in the basket. Do you miss your connection?"

Very little of that made sense to Harold. He had no way of knowing what they used in the RSA but he thought about his smart phone, his smart watch, his laptop, the navigation apps, the smart speakers and smart TVs. He thought of all the technology that his culture worshipped and clung to.

"No," he said with conviction. "I don't miss it at all. I'm a little different than most of the people I'm usually around though. I suspect that they would go through withdrawals and if you were to ask any of them if they missed their devices - the answer would most certainly be 'Yes'. As for me, I've been actively trying to distance myself from personal tech for quite a while - unsuccessfully, I might add. The world I've come from makes it almost impossible to put things down."

"I've read about that," Klee said. "In fact, I went to a docu-drama a few years ago and they interviewed a couple of the RSA refugees before we helped them go back home. It was all they could talk about - they sounded for all the world like drug addicts."

"Yes," Harold told her "It's like that. I have to admit though that I'm sorry to hear that there are still drug addicts here."

Klee shrugged. "It's a choice. I went through my own addict phase a few years ago - I have to admit that before my time ran out, I was having regrets about having only scheduled three months for it. In hindsight though, I'm really glad that there was no way for me to extend once I was in it. Looking at my experience now, I can't believe how easily I was fooled into thinking I was happy or fulfilled. It was a powerful experience. I'm glad it was an option for me, so I don't mind that we still allow it."

Harold had no idea what to think about what she had just told him. It was too much. There was simply too much that was foreign wrapped up with something that he thought he understood quite well. He decided to move on to his questions about he gardens.

"I noticed people harvesting - and working in the gardens along the way. How does that work?" Now Klee looked confused. "What do you mean?"

Harold tried to explain "Well, it seems like some people work really hard to grow the vegetables and fruits and other people, like us with this beautiful papaya Brian is cutting - we just come along and eat their hard work."

"Yes, that's right." Klee didn't see the issue in what he was asking.

Brian had pulled a sharp knife from his shoulder bag and cut the papaya in half. He dug a small hole and was dumping the black papaya seeds into it.

Harold tried to get Klee to understand his point.
"Don't the people who grow the food get upset that other people come along and eat it?"

Klee laughed. "I've heard you say some funny things, but that's the funniest. Why in the world would they get upset? Isn't that what food is for? To feed people? It's not like you can own a plant...I mean that's the biggest reason to grow food in the first place, right? And besides...if they want a papaya...there's no scarcity of them. No one could eat all of these...in fact, there are people who dedicate their time to figuring out what to do with the ones that don't get eaten."

"So who are the gardeners then?" Harold asked.

Klee looked at him with surprise "Anyone who enjoys gardening. Is this some kind of trick question?"

Brian had sliced the papaya into wedges. He put them down between the three of them. Klee sat on the grass and grabbed one.

"I really can't imagine what the eff-ess is like?" she told them. "Who gardens there? What happens to all the food that grows if people don't eat it."

Harold tried to explain. "Gardeners and farmers grow the food and then they sell it to the stores and restaurants. The stores and restaurants then sell it to the people. If the people just ate it at the source or could just go pick it whenever - there wouldn't really be any need for the shopkeepers or wholesalers." As he explained it, Harold was aware that he was telling about his world of the past, not the RSA and he was aware of the absurdity of the middlemen he had put in.

Klee was trying to understand. "So the farmer spends their time to get fruit and then trades the fruit for time tokens...eh, money...and the store owner takes money of other people and gives them food...hey, does the farmer have to spend his money on food too? And doesn't the food get old by the time it reaches the people who want to eat it?"

Harold had no desire to promote the system he had come from. "Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. The store owner gets more money than the farmer did and the farmer has to pay more for old food than he got paid for fresh food."

Klee laughed. "It's really stupid!"

Brian and Harold laughed with her. The papaya tasted even better than the melon had. Harold watched people tending plants and then leaving them - no fences, no plots, no ownership. The land, the food, the work - they didn't belong to anyone. They belonged to everyone.