Excerpt: Nevecin

Newlyweds, Lucy and Edmund start from their hometown in Austria. They’ve recently been married in front of all their family and friends. But little to anyone’s knowledge, their honeymoon will be a lifelong adventure because they are moving their lives to Nevecin.
This comes as a shock to their family and friends, because in Nevecin, technology is banned. The people who live there have willing rejected the use of any and all technology in order to live the “simple life.” By their definition, that means no computers, no micro chips, no modern medicine, no factories, no building materials. Everything is done by hand. You build your own house, raise your own food, heal your own sicknesses, with the help of a caring community of course.
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It takes a village to raise a child. And everyone is a child in the recently founded city of Nevecin.
Nevecin was founded in the year two thousand two hundred where the city of Venice, Italy once stood. It sank beneath the ocean centuries ago. But the sunken city proved to work well enough as a foundation for a new city to be built in it’s place. It had been abandoned for the last few decades, but the Italian government agreed to sign over the useless, soggy land over to the founders of the city and gave them full autonomous rights, independent of their government under the condition that this experimental city could actually thrive and support people.
So far Nevecin has been a successful city. Word of mouth and outside news reports have been the only method of advertisement for the city, since they have sworn to not use technology themselves. It has done well enough since the city’s population stands at thirty seven thousand people when Lucy and Edmund arrive at the Italian border.
It is now the fortunate year of twenty-two, twenty-two and Lucy and Edmund have been married and have taken their last car ride to the coast of Italy. They are greeted by the one person in the Nevecin population allowed on the Italian shore after having entered the city. His name is Eduardo.
“Beautiful morning for a sail across the sound!” Eduardo steps off the dock and onto the small, handmade wooden sail boat. It was a beautifully crafted boat. Quite different from any ships in the marina a half kilometer down the shore. Intricate carvings of swirls and waves decorated the edge of the boat, and rich brown and green tinged stains painted non-traffic areas of the boat.
Eduardo motioned for the couple to follow him on the boat. He waited for them with a grin as they stepped on the boat warily. Edmund hopped on first, and Lucy followed with a hesitant step, holding Edmund’s hand for stabilization.
“You guys ready?” he asked the quiet couple. He untied the boats ropes from the dock and kicked it to shove them off. “Guess you ought to be.” He had a gruff sound, but a smile in his voice all the time, you could tell. “Don’t worry,” he said, noticing their silence. “It’s a bit frightening to say goodbye to the old life so suddenly,” he narrated as if telling a story to children. He has rehearsed this with a lot of people.
“As soon as you step on the golden banks of Nevecin, you’ll be happy,” he said.
“Is it really so easy?” Lucy asked.
“Yep,” he said, sure of himself.
“How long does it take to cross?” Edmund asked.
“You can see the banks there,” he pointed out the bow of the ship though the patchwork sails.
Lucy and Edmund ducked a little to see under the boom for the sails, and sure enough, far in front of them was a glittering shoreline ahead.
“It’s beautiful!” Lucy breathed to Edmund.
“Darling!” Edmund tapped Lucy’s shoulder excitedly, whispering to her. He pointed up at the sails. “Look at the designs!” Lucy saw what he was pointing at and gasped.
The sails of the ship were not patchwork in your normal, cheap fixer-upper sense. They were expertly sewn together with intricate designs attaching the multicolored fabrics together. Swirls of green thread, beautifully embroidered a seven centimeter width of thread between the cloths.
They heard Eduardo chuckling behind them. They both turned.
“That’s done by our ship yard sewers. You should see the ladies formal dresses in the shops,” he said, noticing their whispering.
Lucy sighed and smiled. Edmund knew they would be okay here.