Rebirth17 min read
I Got a Weird Live-Teaching System — and a Kingdom Watched My Streams
ButterPicks14 views
I remember the backstage lights as a hum, the smell of hairspray and foundation, and my manager tapping a rhythm on the door because the show was starting.
"Julia, five minutes!" Dolores called from the corridor.
I forced my smile into place, letting the costume zip over my head. The dress my mother picked that morning felt like a memory I didn't ask for — loving, practical, cautious. I sat while the makeup artist powdered my cheeks one last time, then swung my feet to the floor.
A flat, glassy rectangle, roughly the size of my palm, floated between me and the dressing-room door.
"Hello, ancient-streaming teaching system at your service!" a polite, mechanical voice chimed.
I froze. My hand went instinctively to my throat. "What—?"
"Host, after interstellar streaming bureau qualification verification, you are selected and bound to the Ancient Live-Teaching System. Please review the contract."
A projection bloomed like humid air: lines of printed text and boxes, a contract with tiny seals that wouldn't be there in real life yet made my heart race the same way. I stared until the dots and clauses blurred.
"Read it," the voice said.
I touched the words, flipped the simulated pages, and a cold little laugh bubbled out of me. A lifetime ago a wandering monk had told my family I would be a teacher. My parents planned for that as if it could be an arranged marriage. I ran away from certainty, auditioned for a singing show, and won everything I'd dreamed of: fame, stage lights, adoration, contracts. On my twentieth birthday, in the bustling press of the arena, while the confetti still smelled like aluminum, a system decided I would be a teacher after all.
"Why me?" I whispered. The projection didn't answer; only the contract did: tasks, lessons, rewards, a promise of enrichment and—if I succeeded—invitations, status, even a spot in the interstellar bureau. The reward sounded like cosmic candy. The task sounded like a sentence.
"I don't teach," I told the screen. "I sing."
"Host," the voice said. "Teach the people of the Great Yan. Save them from drought, famine, plague. One host cannot fail."
I laughed then, a small brittle sound. "You want me to save a kingdom? This has to be a joke."
The next day, the sky over a palace changed. Enormous translucent screens drifted like moons, and a woman — me on one of them, dressed in a stage costume that did not belong to that century — began to speak.
"Help the Great Yan through its crisis," I read aloud when the system suggested the opening. "Teach. Save. Even a little helps."
A murmur rippled through the palace courtyard where the crown prince, Wyatt Teixeira, sat poring over dispatches. He didn't rise at first; he kept smoothing the corner of a petition the way people smooth torn paper.
"I don't understand morning, noon, and night of these missives," his chief eunuch, Hans Perez, coaxed. "Your Highness, you should rest."
Wyatt only shook his head. He had the sleep-deprived look of someone who had learned to rule by doing the impossible three times a day. "Leave me," he murmured, then sighed and went back to scribbling.
The palace garden had been noisy earlier — the emperor and the consorts flying kites to twit the prince — but when the great screens appeared, voices fell silent. On those floating panes my face blinked in and out like weather, and people heard the same sentence: "Help the Great Yan."
From my side, teaching only felt like a series of problems. I had a system and a contract and three hundred thousand fans in my app who wanted tweets and selfies, not national policy. But when I saw their faces in those clips the system projected — hollow cheeks, children too thin for their age, fields like cracked mouths — the "teacher" part of the monk's prophecy settled on me like dust.
"Okay," I said finally, to the rectangle that had begun my new life. "I'll try. But I won't pretend I can fix everything at once."
"Host," it answered. "Your first duty is to educate. Adaptation advised: choose leaders."
"Leaders?" I blinked.
"Yes. Teach a few capable people who can lead local change. Broadcast to all. Build knowledge."
The idea stayed with me after the show. I flew onstage, gave the concert, laughed with my band, and in the dressing room the contract blinked on my phone again: "Please contact your three selected helpers." The system had already picked someone: a ring had appeared at Wyatt Teixeira's table that evening when he sat down to eat. He had pressed it, and the same streaming menu flashed across a hidden screen in his palace.
"Who's the host?" he asked when the image of my face appeared on his ring.
"You are in communication with the Earth host Julia Blankenship," the voice said. "She can instruct."
"Julia?" Wyatt read my name like a question. "Hello."
"Hi," I said, trying to keep my voice light despite the way my palms went damp. "Can you hear me? This must be very weird."
He bowed with a small, slightly nervous formal gesture that made the room around him feel suddenly formal and ancient. "Your words hold weight here. Our people are hungry for any clue."
We talked late into the night. He asked me to describe my world: public sanitation, shared education, reservoirs, and the idea that ordinary people might learn things that changed how they lived. He listened until the candles had burned low.
"Teach me what you can," Wyatt said. "I will send.'
His first message had a patience and a hunger I hadn't expected. When we logged off I felt both afraid and oddly responsible.
"You're smiling like someone married," Dolores teased the next morning.
"Not married—just stuck with a kingdom," I said.
Everett, my brother, arched one eyebrow. Everett had been a steady presence in my life since we were kids. He drank coffee black and used it to fix everything. He was a surgeon now; hobnobbing with hospital administrators felt like a second skin to him. "You sure you can handle a country?" he asked, sliding the practice brief across the table like a rescue.
"Do you want the job?" I asked.
"Nope," he answered. "Lucky you."
I strategized absurdly like a gambler making a plan. If I taught a few credible people—local leaders with authority—then ideas could spread. Not a broadcast of doctrines but tutorials: fog catchers that condensed morning mist into water, crop alternates that needed less irrigations, basic sanitation and quarantine principles. I could do this. I would just be a broadcaster. It felt faintly ridiculous and exhilarating.
"Don't tell anyone about this," the system warned when I asked if I could loop in my family.
I ignored it. My family deserved the truth.
I set up a video call with Wyatt and, for the first time, with the curious official Arden Ziegler, the new magistrate in the Qinling region, who had been selected by the system. Arden was younger than I expected, clean-faced but weathered by responsibility. He knelt when we connected, because that was what the etiquette of his world required. "Blessings, Host," he said.
"Call me Julia," I said. "We don't do kneeling on our side."
He smiled at that, a small, private thing.
We planned little by little. I showed them a recorded video of a "fog-catcher" built from nylon mesh and conduit, and when I sprayed water from a garden mister onto the mesh, the droplets coalesced and ran down into a pipe into a bucket. The system fed my stream to hundreds of thousands below the palace and to those in the palace itself. I showed them a step-by-step guide. They tried. Not everyone listened, not every local official acted, but in places that tried, a thin thread of breathing returned.
"Can your people really invent explosives?" Arden asked one day, after reading the notes I had practice-compiled for blasting tunnels through mountains for canals.
"It seems shocking," I said, eyebrows up. "But the evolution from gunpowder to shaped charges is an engineering problem. I can give you the chemistry and the cautions."
Wyatt convened a group. They argued fiercely—something about pride and method—but his tone changed when I volunteered to provide experiments and manuals. Within a month a prototype for safe mining charges came together; the palace engineers were terrified and proud at the same time. When they thanked me, I went hot and cold.
Meanwhile, small miracles happened in the droughted countryside: fog nets collected water. Wells filled a little. People who had been dying of thirst and despair stood with buckets and looked like they might live.
And men with power adjusted their faces. Some approached Wyatt with smiles like knives.
"There is a ring on my wrist that links me to a host," Wyatt told his council. "She shows us tools. She shows us new seed crops like sweet potato and corn. We have to adapt or we die."
"Or we profit," someone said.
I had thought the story would be mostly technical: chemistry, botany, architecture. Instead it looked a lot like court intrigue. A powerful chancellor, Calixto Tarasov, had his own ideas about authority and resource control. He had been rumor-rich for months. He had a smooth voice and slowed the presses with paper and petitions.
One morning, Wyatt told me a small story through the screen: a local petty noble, West Cole, had stomped a street vendor's simple stall and taken the woman by force. Guards were slow. "If you can hold," Wyatt typed, "we will intervene."
I remembered the vendor. She called herself Lian in the posts we saw — a small, brave woman who knelt and begged and had her lanterns smashed. When the men shoved her into a carriage, Wyatt's retinue arrested the bully. He sent West Cole straight to the magistrate.
"Bring him to public hearing," Wyatt said.
At the magistrate's hall, a crowd swelled. The vendor's neighbors came, the palace pages came, and even people from other districts in town rolled in when word of a public trial spread. I watched the whole thing live through the ring, every face as sharp as paper. West Cole had swagger at the start. He liked swagger; it had been his uniform.
"You will not touch a common woman," Wyatt said quietly when the captive was brought. His voice over the ring was like a blade and a balm both.
West Cole's cheeks puffed. He was used to the taste of importance. "You do not know my family," he flapped. "My uncle is—"
"Not here," Wyatt said. "This is a market. If you do wrong, we act."
Watchers in the crowd murmured, phones—or their crude equivalents—recorded, and the vendor's hands trembled as she recounted the nightmare. When the magistrate's guards pushed West Cole forward to the court floor, his arrogance was still tangible. He laughed once, too loud.
"Take his carriage," Wyatt ordered later. "Let him walk." West Cole's face went from amused to flush, and the crowd began to record. He tried to bluster, "You cannot humiliate me."
"Humiliation does not apply when the law exists," the magistrate said. "You abused your rank."
Then, in an instant, West Cole's swagger curdled. A watchman pushed a certain sealed letter into his hand and the crowd saw his expression shift like a storm. There are things the world will not forgive and will not forget; men who thought themselves safe can topple. He bowed the wrong way, then was made to bow correctly before Lian. Cameras captured everything. West Cole pleaded, voice raw, "I was only—"
"They all said that," someone muttered, and the market snickered.
But the worst, the real showdown, had to come later. Powers that system-selected and aristocracy-molded clashed. Calixto Tarasov, the chancellor, had for too long turned a quiet hand into a wide net: extortions, privilege peddling, petitions manipulated. He had even been implicated in the neglect of drought relief and allotment of grain to private warehouses. I had seen one of his men—an old house steward in the palace—passing a ledger with entries that traced the food diverted away from marshals and into private stores. My chest tightened when Wyatt sent me the ledger and asked me plainly, "Do you want to reveal this?"
"Yes," I said, then swallowed. "If you can make a public forum."
Wyatt convened an audience in the palace courtyard. The emperor, for reasons of his own, sat with a cup of wine while a row of consorts looked on like halting tides. The courtiers, a dozen provincial officials, and an enormous assembly of commoners thronged the outer ring. Word had leaked: the "host" would witness a public reading of certain discoveries.
"Bring the screens," Wyatt told the usher.
A dozen light-panes woke in the air. I stood behind my own small console in my apartment, the system feeding my live face to the same screens. The courtyard’s air smelled of dust and flowers. People held their breath.
"Calixto Tarasov," Wyatt called, and the chancellor stepped forward with the slow dignity of someone who believed in his own immortal reputation. He smiled like a man who'd been taught to smile for portraits.
"I have---" he began.
A handler pushed the ledger into the wind. The projection flickered, and the ledger's figures spilled across the panes for all thousands to see. It was arithmetic and cruelty merged: shipments mislabeled, food consigned "for troops" routed to "personal stores," bribes disguised as "donations." It was handwriting, dates, signatures. For a moment the screens were all ledger lines, and the palace felt like it slanted.
"You have taken grain meant for my people," Wyatt said. His voice did not break. It was an accusation. It was also a verdict.
Calixto's face twitched. He straightened and laughed first, a practiced, confident sound. "Preposterous. Who asks me to condemn myself? The prince presumes—"
"Is this the truth?" Wyatt asked, holding up a last parchment like a sword.
"False," Calixto spat. He swept his hand, as if banishing the idea. "These signatures are forgeries. My enemies—"
The crowd's murmur turned into a tangle of whispers and a few curses. "Show the evidence," someone called. "Proof, proof!"
I pressed a few keys. The system had built a composite: timestamps of shipments and the recorded orders matching names of merchants who had received the goods. I pinched my own breath and dipped my voice into a quiet place. "We have intercepted merchant logs. We have witnesses from warehouses. We have a house steward's confession."
The chancellor's smile thinned. His eyes cleared, then sharpened. His face changed from amused to faintly unsettled.
"No!" He stamped a foot. "You brash child! You cannot—"
He floundered. His voice quavered in the hush. I watched his color drop as more screens drew up voices and receipts: testimonies from a dozen men who had been his clerks, grain sacks counted wrongly in warehouse inventories, bribe slips folded in his private ledger. The magistrate, Galileo Coppola, who had for months been stuck between duty and favor, took a step forward.
"Calixto," Galileo said quietly, putting weight on the name like a scale. "Do you deny the handwriting? Or do you deny your men?"
"They are—" Calixto began, then snapped his mouth shut. He looked at the faces in the crowd and something hard in him fractured. "This is a—this is a spectacle. Political theater."
"It is a record," Wyatt said.
The crowd swelled then, like a tide that had been waiting for a reason to move. People began to clap—not polite clapping but the clean thunder of indignation. Someone started to chant, a small, brave sound: "Justice! Justice!" The chant multiplied until it was a wave. Servants in the crowd took out crude devices and recorded. A woman with a child's hand clutched a small lantern and filmed with both hands, a smile like a sudden break of sun on her face.
Calixto's reaction went through unbearably human stages. First the poker face, then the thin smile. Then his eyes jumped. He searched faces for allies. He tried to laugh. "You cannot—" he panted. "You set a trap. This prince—"
"Enough!" Galileo's voice sliced the manor stillness. "If there is dispute, we assess." He signaled the steward. "Read the confession."
The steward, who had never been to court for anything but to deliver tea, told the room the truth with a stooping voice: nights he had shifted counts to the chancellor's notes, orders traced to Calixto's seal. He had been paid to be silent and, ashamed, had been ready to die on his honesty.
By then Calixto's face had drained to something almost colorless. He spun for the emperor, then for the courtyard, then for Wyatt, as if testing whether authority would hold him. The emperor only sipped wine. The consorts looked away. Whispers filled the air like insects.
Calixto's voice climbed into denial. "These men are liars," he insisted. "They are bought by factions. They would destroy me for their petty gain."
"But you signed the orders," the steward said. "I saw you sign."
"That is impossible. I—" Calixto's sentences broke in the middle like a snapped rod.
Then the public shaming began.
First, an older woman in the crowd, a neighbor in a market, spat. "You took my grain," she hissed. "My boy almost starved because sacks were diverted."
Someone else started photographing his face. "Look at him!" a young clerk cried. "He ate our grain. He sold us emptiness for coin."
Calixto's breaths shortened. He tried to speak and the words stumbled into nothing. He looked at the crowd and saw not faces but witnesses. His composure was gone.
He dropped to one knee in a sudden, ugly falter. The courtyard lamps flickered. "I did what I needed to do to keep families," he gasped. "I was saving—"
"Save them," a voice cut, "or steal from them?" The tone was merciless.
His denial turned into memoryless recitation. "It was for state inefficiency! I used it to pay for—" He reached for excuses like a drowning man reaching for planks.
"No more." Wyatt's voice was quiet and clear. "Calixto Tarasov, you will be removed from the chancellorship. Confiscation will begin. An inquiry will open. You will answer for every sack diverted."
The chancellor's reaction was a slow, visible unmooring. He had once believed himself above consequence; now he was a man stripped on a public stage. He tried to rise but his knees gave. For a minute he could be seen trying the stages of emotion: arrogance, then shock as his world narrowed; then denial, clumsy and loud; then a thin, choked attempt at bargaining, an exchange of small words; then crack. The face that had been wax for the portraits crumpled.
"Please," he begged suddenly. "I can—" His hands shook. "I will return... I will repay—"
"Save your words," someone said. "We need action."
The magistrate read the next sentence aloud: immediate disbarment, arrest if necessary, public restitution. The crowd's roar grew. Someone started to film the chancellor; another started to clap slowly, in time, as if marking the moment a corrupt edifice collapsed.
Calixto fell to both knees. His voice lost its pitch and went tiny. "Please," he said, stuttering. "Spare me. My family. My—"
No one spared him. Some people shouted for chains; a handful began to hum a hymn that soldiers used when harvests were good. The steward, who had told the truth, was embraced by a woman who'd lost her son to famine. Her arms were mud-stained from the fields and her tears cut the dust. A dozen merchants began to sign receipts: they would release stock to distribution centers. A man in the crowd started tallying sacks to be moved.
A bystander recorded the whole thing on the crude device we used — the image of a dignified man becoming a crumpled, pleading figure played and replayed in the market. The steward's confession and the magistrate's orders arranged themselves into an irreversible narrative. People who had been mute now shouted; children who had seen nothing were suddenly learning civic shapes.
Calixto moved from denial into supplication. "I was forced," he cried. "If you spare me, I can fix it! I can lead reform!"
"Then start by telling us where the grain is," Wyatt said. "Speak truthfully."
He did. He gave names and warehouses and receipted dates. Men ran to fetch ledgers. Servants scurried. The crowd watched the chancellor's implosion like a public lesson in what greed had become. He begged and pleaded and finally clutched at Wyatt's boots, the old arrogance gone.
"Please," he said, hoarse. "I was protecting something."
"Protecting yourself," someone answered. "Not the people."
The scene ended with the chancellor torn between the last threads of power and the rising demand for accountability. The palace bells rang, not in merriment, but as a summons: reclamation had begun. People who had quietly suffered for years found their voice that day. Cameras — cheap lens-devices in pockets and hired scribes’ panes — captured the fall. They recorded the expression changes: ease to shock, denial to pleading, and the final, raw collapse.
Afterward, the footage circulated. Men who had been content to live on the crumbs of power stood naked in public light. The steward's testimony helped redistribute stores. The emperor said little; he had been a man of wine and spectacle, and the spectacle had turned on someone else.
Back in my apartment, I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.
"Did you see?" I asked the ring. "Did you see what they did?"
Wyatt's face looked tired on my screen. "Yes," he said softly. "You helped."
I blinked. I had taught with a mesh and a pipe and given people a way to catch mist. I had pressed buttons on a screen and given them designs. I had done something no one could have planned. But watching a corruption unspool and a crowd regain the right to roar—that was not a plan; it was an accident of truth.
The next days continued in the same strange weave of teaching and palace drama. We taught fog nets and sourdough irrigation, sanitation and the basics of infection control. Everett sent medical outlines for pulmonary tuberculosis in simple steps that people could follow. When Wyatt convened a group to inspect the irrigation route proposed by Arden—whom I watched with sentimental pride as he drafted canal lines—he did it with textbooks I had been streaming to them.
And in the small windows of my daily life, the world changed too. I still had stage obligations. I still answered fan mail. But my concerts started to feel different. Fans cheered still, but a new kind of message slid under my posts: peasants asking where to get seed, a schoolteacher asking for my lecture schedule, a boy in the south asking if he could learn how to build a fog net.
One night, while the fog net hung in our yard like a cheap art installation, I slept with the ring on my hand. It hummed softly, a mechanical heartbeat. I touched it in my sleep and dreamed of fields breathing water from air.
In the morning a message blinked: Emmeline Cooper had added me.
"Who?" I asked Everett.
"She called herself Emmeline in the system," he said. "I think she is the girl from the minister's house."
Emmeline had been the minister's daughter. She had been plucked from a cruel life and, by a sliver of luck and the ring's miracle, had a hand to hold. I had written out a course for her on civic literacy and political ideas in measures she could grasp. She had hunger: for books, for dignity, for revenge, perhaps. The ring allowed her to reach out to Wyatt.
"Ask him," Arden urged. "He can take you in."
She did. Wyatt listened. He offered counsel. He offered a place in the academy he planned to found.
At home, my mother insisted I keep up appearances. "Don't vanish, Julia," she said. "You have obligations here. There are fans. There are contracts."
"I know," I told her. "There are contracts and a country who just learned what fog catching is."
Everett winked. "You have more admirers now than ever."
"You say that like it's a problem," I muttered.
It wasn't all noble. The palace remained a place of rotten fruit and shiny skins. There were men who would still try to double-sell grain and keep muttered promises for personal favor. But the public had learned the shape of truth: screens that projected a woman teaching about water could also project receipts and punishments. The system's soft hum had become a lever.
The kindnesses we traded were small and precise. I taught fog nets and the people built them. I taught dry-land crops and they planted. I showed pictures of bicycles and libraries and school bells. People learned to measure rainfall and to count sacks; they learned to question; they learned to record.
One evening, after a long day teaching students how to test water contamination with cheap litmus and charcoal filters, I walked into the backyard where our little fog net hung. It collected a thread of night mist thick as soup. A tiny, perfect stream dribbled into a jar.
I cupped that jar in my hands. The water sloshed, cool as life.
The ring on my wrist buzzed, and Wyatt's face appeared. He looked smaller in the late-night glow.
"Julia," he said. "When we first saw you, I thought you were a story to pray to. Now I think you are the kind of lesson that leaves more lessons behind."
"Do you ever stop worrying?" I asked.
"Not when a country needs to learn," he said. "But I sleep better. I have fewer nightmares about an empty granary."
I set the jar on the table and listened to the tiny thunk of the lid. "Then we'll keep teaching," I said.
"And we'll keep holding people accountable," Wyatt said.
"Promise?" I teased.
"Never," he said, and we both laughed because neither of us believed in promises; we believed in action.
Some nights I still miss the stage lights that made the crowd into a single quick heartbeat. I still miss the hush before a chorus. But when a child in the Great Yan dips a cup into water that wasn't there before, and grins at a stranger who helped teach how to make it, I feel something like the hush, and like applause that never stops.
I ran my finger along the ring's cool edge.
"Keep the net," I whispered to the night. "And the hand ring. And the small, stubborn hope we shared."
Outside, the fog net trembled in a secret breeze and dropped one bright bead into the jar. In my room the ring pulsed like a tiny planet.
We had started a strange school: I taught, they learned, and the world leaned forward like a class holding its breath for the next problem. And when the next problem came — a test of the farm, the court, the people's patience — we would answer with something real and small: a fog net, a lecture, a ledger, a face. The system hummed on, an accomplice I had never asked for and could not refuse.
That night I slept with my handband warm and the jar of world-water by my bed. When I woke, the words I promised myself I would keep were already waiting like a new line of text on the contract.
"No more illusions," I thought. "Just lessons."
And then, because I could not resist, I taught one more thing that day: how to fix a leaking roof. It was not glamorous. It was very, very useful.
The End
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