Transology by Dan Bieger

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SUMMARY: February Flash Fiction Contest

Carl Young, graduating class of 2059, knocked on his counselor's door, a formality since now was his appointment time, opened and peered around the door, heard the counselor's voice welcome him and invite entry. Seeing no else in the room, Carl accepted the invitation. He crossed to the couch, unbuttoned his shirt and removed it, took position lying on his back on the couch. When he settled in, the feeds dropped f-rom the ceiling and affixed themselves around his head and torso. Status lights on a console on a table to his right shifted red to green and his counselor's voice re-iterated the welcome already extended. "What can I do for you this day?" the Counselor inquired.
"It's getting to be that time," Carl said. "I need to decide the PSAT I want to pass."
"Do I take it you have not decided for yourself?"
"Not yet. Been putting it off as long as I can but I'm running out of time."
"You are not required to take any test, Mr. Young. You are aware of this fact, are you not?
"You know, Counselor, you have an annoying edge to your voice. It may be that trace of accent you've adopted. What is it?"
"Central European Alpine, I believe."
"Let's go back to generic N.A. I'm much more comfortable with that"
"How far north?"
"Kennebec ought to do it."
The counselor's voice lost none of its characteristic timbre but the edges morphed into a slightly more nasal delivery with just a hint of favoritism towards the long vowels.
"Is this better?"
"Yes, thanks. Okay, here's my problem. I want to pursue some field where you can acquire expertise not available to the crowd. To make this a little more clear, I once read a really old book by a classic writer in the speculative fiction field though this book dealt more with the state of the physical sciences at the time. He complained that modern education was becoming too specialized, that folk were learning more and more about less and less and he wanted to write about things using a viewpoint well above the minutiae.
"As far as I can see, we've spent half a century achieving his goal. Every field of education now takes place at the heights: the whole transology mess.
"Systems analysis, Carl. You know that. Everything in the known universe is part of a system, the system, a system of systems. Everything is connected."
"I've been paying attention, Counselor. I know that all of history can be distilled to tunnel vision thought processes. The crash of Ought-Eight: tunnel vision by the economist/politician alliance. The Fall of the Middle Euro-Asian Continent: religious tunnel vision. The Birth of the World Unification Organization, a reaction to nationalist tunnel vision. I've studied all that as well as the interconnection between physics, large and small, chemistry, biology, and ecology, sociology, history, literature, painting, sculpture, and last but not least, mathematics. You can't fully understand one without some understanding of all the others."
"And your present difficulty in selecting which PSAT to take stems f-rom this interconnectivity?
"That's about it.