For the first time in months, I stretched my fingers to write a story start. It took a few tries and combining a few ideas too weak or derivative to stand on their own, but it felt good to just write without worrying about it being or becoming something more significant. Sometimes, it’s nice to not overanalyze every decision and just put down words. I should probably do that more for other stories, but it’s not viable for the stories that I really want to tell and the way that I aim to tell them.
The first idea is simply a take on a science fiction dystopia. These are overdone, in my opinion, and often not done well, but I was perhaps inspired by my recent reading of We to give it a try. They are, after all, a useful medium for exploring powerful notions and stories at multiple levels of narrative, but I did not want to do a strict dystopia. So often, these science fiction dystopias are depicted as being the entire world – there is no respite from its remit, save perhaps for a small rebellion or other movement existing within its borders or fringes. Instead of writing a story set within a dystopia, I wanted to write about a “normal” society interacting with the dystopia.
That’s a bit heady, and I wasn’t looking to write something extremely serious and weighty in character. In fact, I also wanted to explore doing a science fiction riff on the classic fairytale setup of the enchanted, sleeping princess awoken by a kiss. It might be a bit anachronistic, and the idea of awakening someone from a stasis pod is hardly original. Nor is the prototypical story of the time traveler or other figure finding themselves unexpectedly in an environment bereft of modern technology and being obliged to reinvent all of it (like in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). Perhaps because all these ideas are somewhat derivative, appearing in various forms in dozens of stories, I was more willing to just write what occurred to me.
My goal, if that is not too pretentious a term for this effort, was to write a quick, complete short story incorporating these ideas, no more than six thousand words, ideally something which I could write from start to finish in a few sittings. I had no intention of revising it, running it through test readers, or anything so robust – it was just going to be something for myself, and maybe I would share the rough product with my audience here. That didn’t quite happen, and the reason is obvious in retrospect: I tried to do too many things to contain in the length I intended.
It’s less a problem for novel-length works, which is why I prefer working in the novella and novel length ranges, but with short stories, it’s necessary to be conscious about each new element which is introduced to the story. Every character, every location, every major story concept requires words. There’s a formula some of the authors on Writing Excuses like to use which attempts to capture how many words are required to introduce a new character or a new place, but it’s less about specific numbers than it is about the knowledge that having more elements will necessarily result in a longer story. There are limits to how many elements can be incorporated into even the strongest flash fiction. My story started with two main characters and a single setting, but within a few paragraphs I introduced the notion of a significantly larger and more complex setting with multiple locales and societies coexisting. Of course, it also took me several thousand words just to get my main characters from where they begin in the wilderness to where anything substantial can really begin to happen. It’s possible my emphasis on being realistic in terms of linguistic drift, travel times, etc. extends my stories more than is strictly necessary.
With that in mind, I’m going ahead and sharing the first section of the story. I don’t know if or when I might sit down to finish it, but it’s been some time since I shared a story here on the site, for which I feel a bit guilty. Even though it’s not finished, I think this is the kind of piece which will get your imagination going. At least, it will if your imagination is anything like mine. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. And yes, if significant interest in this is expressed, I will be more likely to come back and finish it one day.
Lush, burgundy leaves rustled in a summer breeze flitting along the game trail Nober followed. He didn’t know this part of the forest well, almost a week’s hiking from the village, but the tracks were fresh, and he refused to return emptyhanded a fourth time. Only the oldest hunters recited their greatparents’ tales of summers scarcer in game than this one. Even Injo thought he exaggerated the problem.
Nober froze to the sound of gray branches crackling, filtered through the brush to him. Stringing his bow by touch, he lowered his stance and began slinking towards the sound, moving slower now, placing each bare footstep with care. There was no perfectly silent movement, but a careful hunter could come close. Just as carefully, Nober eased an arrow from the quiver secured to his hip. He rounded a small hillock and looked down a muddy embankment to a creek stained only the faintest turquoise, where his quarry was guzzling water and grazing from a thorny berry bush.
Keeping his motions slow and smooth, Nober knelt in the warm grass, feeling the cool, sticky mud on his bare knees. He put the arrow to the string and sighted down his outstretched arm and along his pointing thumb to the junction of the sow’s shoulder. In the pause between exhale and inhale, he drew back and took his shot. The string thrummed against his calloused fingertips, and then Nober was on his feet and running down the embankment, slipping in the mud.
The pig turned before the arrow hit, so it struck her hindquarter instead of the lungs. With a squeal, she churned through the creek and up the opposite bank, the arrow waving crazily. Cursing, Nober pursued, stowing his bow and yanking out his memorial dagger. If the pig hadn’t turned…but that was down to probability, as the memoirs would say.
With its lower stature, the sow could run through gaps in the brush too small for Nober, but she was hampered by the arrow still protruding from her hindquarter, and the franticness of her flight left an obvious trail. Nober followed the obscenely waggling arrow, ducking and holding an arm over his face as gray branches whipped an ashy residue onto his skin. He leapt over the ruddy boule of a mossy log, crawled on his hands and knees through a dense, thorny thicket that left him with a dozen minor scratches, and found the sow collapsed in a picturesque vermillion clearing.
She still struggled, but the sow’s leg had given out, and she was no fearsome cornered boar to menace Nober with yellowed tusks. In a practiced motion, Nober got behind her, severed the spine at the base of the thick neck, and then cut her throat. Only then did he notice that the most remarkable thing in the clearing was not his quarry, but the alien object against which the sow was slumped.
A single glance told Nober it was a relic, for the materials reminded him of those preserved in the memorials. In form it was a coffin sculpted of smooth curves, the surface unstained despite its time exposed to the elements – thousands of years if it was truly a relic – even the sow’s blood running over the object’s foot beaded up and rolled off to leave the slick, black material pristine. On one side, near where the shoulder would be, seven lights glowed: five green, two yellow.
Nober bowed to the relic and laid his hand upon the slick, warm surface. With his other hand, he caressed his chin. “I remember,” he said in the memoirs’ tongue. Respects paid, he stood and returned his attention to his quarry. He would tell the memoirs of this place when he returned to the village. Behind him, one of the yellow lights turned green.
Working quickly, Nober butchered the sow. He buried the viscera and as much of the bloodied earth as he could, then prepared the animal for transport. He would take it back to his camp of the night before and smoke most of the meat to preserve and lighten it before he made the weeklong return trek to the village.
This was the task over which he was bent, his back to the relic, when a voice startled him such that he dove away from the sound and came up with his bloody knife in his fist. “Hello?”
Well, that wasn’t quite what Nober heard. The voice spoke in the language of the memoirs, but it was accented so differently from how the memoirs pronounced the words it was almost unrecognizable even if Nober was fluent. Then, even had he been fluent, and the accent been more intelligible, he would have been too stunned and terrified to process the word as he stared at a bleary-eyed woman clothed in unfamiliar fabrics sitting up in one half of the split-open relic.
She frowned, inciting a maze of fine lines across her pale skin around her mouth and eyes. “Hello?” When Nober still did not respond, the woman sighed. “I can’t tell if I was out so long the language changed beyond recognition, or if you’re just an idiot.”
His heart was still beating too fast, and Nober did not understand most of what the woman said, though he caught a word here or there. Quickly, he wiped the memorial dagger clean and returned it to his belt so that he could bow his head to the woman and caress his chin, though that action left a bloody mark. “I remember.”
“I almost understood that. Did you say… ‘I mummer?’ No, that doesn’t make sense. Member? No…I wish I could ask you to repeat yourself.” The woman’s head ached, and her arms trembled from the effort of holding herself upright. Even that exertion left her faintly dizzy, and when she reached up to massage her graying temples, she slumped over the relic’s side. Panting and struggling, she pushed herself back upright until she was only half recumbent. “Gah. ‘No musculoskeletal deterioration,’ they said. Well, they did account for it. How long…” She looked around herself, properly this time, and noted the trees, in shades of red and gray instead of green and brown. She observed the remains of a vaguely porcine creature, and she eyed the man with whom she was trying to speak: his thick, folded, almost scaley, grayish skin, his rough, primitive garb, the clumps of hair which looked more like spines. Her voice grew faint. “Oh.”
Nober stared at the woman talking to herself. She was definitely speaking a version of the memorial language. He saw her physical weakness, and the sudden dismay which washed over her face. If a memoir was here, perhaps they could communicate, but they rarely left the memorials. Somehow, she had come out of the relic. He didn’t know for sure, but that meant she was probably a memory. A memory, in the flesh. He tried another phrase in the memorial language. “What was, what is, what will be again.”
“I caught some of that.” The woman cocked her head. “But if I did, it doesn’t make any sense. Are you just saying random phrases?”
Knowing she was asking a question from her intonation did not help Nober understand what she asked, or to answer. He tried his own language. “Will you come back to my village with me?”
His words barely sounded like words to the woman, this time, and she cursed. “A dead language. I’m speaking a dead language, and all you know are fragments.” She rubbed her head again and slumped down in the preservation pod. It felt like there was less air than there should have been, and she was so weak. Her breathing was coming faster, and terror pressed on her chest. No, that was the lack of air. She felt like she was choking, though her lungs filled with each breath. It was like being atop a high mountain and trying to run higher.
When the woman collapsed, Nober didn’t know what to do. Hesitantly, he approached the relic, in which she still half-lay. She didn’t respond to his approach, but he could see she was still breathing. He looked from her, to the relic, to the mostly finished butchery, and back towards his camp. He tried to rouse the woman with words, and with gentle prodding, but she didn’t respond to either effort.
It took Nober the rest of the day to trek back and forth between the clearing and his campsite three times. The first was to carry his prey, the second to carry the woman, and the third to transport the coffin-like relic. He intended to carry it, too, but it proved deceptively heavy, and he was forced to drag it. It looked none the worse for wear after this rough treatment, and he returned the woman to it before he set about starting a fire and continuing his task. While he worked, he kept an eye on the woman in case she woke or needed anything he could provide. If she didn’t wake before he was ready to return to the village, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Perhaps leave her in the relic until he could convince a memoir to investigate, but the relic refused to reseal itself.
In the evening of the second day, the woman awoke. She felt a moment’s disoriented panic at another new location, at a different time, but she took a few deep breaths, and her heartrate gradually slowed. Breathing still felt harder than it should be, but she was no longer choking. She frowned at Nober, who froze at his fire when he saw her sitting upright. “Well, you’re no knight in shining armor, but you’re not some primitive barbarian stereotype, either. Who are you?”
Nober bowed and caressed his chin at her again. “I remember.”
“That’s what you said before! ‘I…remember.’ You remember? What? What do you remember? Why do you keep saying that?”
Hearing the woman say ‘remember’ several times, Nober repeated the phrase, too.
The woman rubbed her forehead. “Oh. It’s some kind of ritual phrase. Do you actually know what you’re saying, I wonder? Or is it like people at church saying ‘amen’ all the time without really knowing what it originally meant?” She sighed. “Either way, it doesn’t help me.” She studied Nober a long moment. His appearance disturbed her. Not because it was alien – not just because it was alien, at least – but because of what it implied for how long she was in the pod.
“Alright, let’s try this.” She waved to ensure she had Nober’s attention, then pointed at herself. “Quaide.”
Nober frowned, unsure what the woman was trying to indicate. He pointed at her, too. “Memory?”
“No. What did you even say?” Whatever it was, he’d said it in his own language, not the dead one. Linguistically, Quaide assumed it was a related language, changed by the passage of years – she shied away from thinking how many years – but even if it was a closer relationship than, say, English and proto-Indo-European, that didn’t mean much for her understanding it beyond a few obvious cognates. She pointed at herself emphatically. “Quaide.”
“Quaide,” Nober repeated, though he remained confused. When Quaide pointed at him, he floundered for what she wanted until she repeated the exercise twice and made a questioning noise to accompany her pointing. “Nober. I’m Nober.”
Neither took the conversation further. Quaide was already tired again, and Nober couldn’t think of how to proceed. He busied himself tending the smoking pork, while she gazed into the fire, silent. At least the flames were like the flames she remembered. Eventually, she lay back down in the pod and closed her eyes to dream of the world’s end.
In the morning, Quaide stood. Her legs trembled and her lungs strained to do it, but she stood upright for the first time since she laid down in the preservation pod. More than the changes in language or the absence of familiar landmarks or remnants of the civilization she knew, the evolutionary divergence of the local flora and fauna suggested how long that might have been, but it was better not to think about that too closely. Placing each step cautiously, she managed to reach Nober’s fire, where sitting down again without collapsing was its own exertion. He was breakfasting, and with some gestures, she contrived to communicate her own hunger.
A handful of nuts, some freshly roasted pork, and fresh berries from the bushes near the stream made a hearty meal. It tasted off to Quaide – the berries and nuts were no species she recognized, and the pork was far gamier and tougher than she recalled – but she hoped that was a product of the foods’ natural sources compared to the industrialized food system to which she was accustomed, and not a sign it was undigestible by her anachronistic biology. It filled her complaining stomach well enough and restored some strength to her limbs.
Lacking the ability to converse, or the strength to take much action, Quaide sought to content herself with inferring what she could from her surroundings. The sky was blue, if less bright and pure a blue than in her recollections, and from the temperature and humidity she thought it might be early spring; it was cool enough that she wished for a jacket in the weak sunshine. Nober was more interesting. Clearly, he was a new species in the homo genus – new since Quaide’s time, that was – but he was both more and less civilized than Quaide might have expected.
His clothes, for example, were plain, undyed, and limited to a kind of tunic coming down to his thighs. He seemed less affected by the cold than Quaide was, but his clothes were interesting to Quaide because, while they were primitive, they were not completely primitive. They were not, for instance, mere hides, but properly tanned leather and wool. That bespoke a certain level of craft which Quaide associated with a somewhat settled lifestyle. His bow and arrows likewise, although she’d not yet caught a glimpse of what material he used for arrowheads. Most significantly, his dagger wasn’t stone, or bronze, or iron, but steel. That it existed, and that Nober treated it as important but not as some borderline holy relic as she’d observed him treating the preservation pod, strongly suggested to Quayle that someone still knew how to produce steel at some scale, or had rediscovered the process. It was at odds with his clothes and other implements, though. His solitary status reinforced the notion he came from some kind of settlement; she assumed a hunter-gatherer tribe would hunt in groups.
“Stupid to make assumptions like that, though. He could be some kind of hermit or recluse.” She sighed and brushed at her eyes. When she’d agreed to go into the pod, she’d thought she’d understood what it meant. She’d been wrong.
As for the pod itself, it had limited information for her. Quaide spent most of the afternoon examining it when it became clear Nober wasn’t moving camp yet, but the device’s single function was to endure. It did that admirably, her unexpected weakness aside, but that meant it had no user interface, no extra features, nothing to help her start in this new world from scratch. The indicator lights told her only that it still had power and that the environment was within the programmed tolerances based on its limited sensor set. Nober touching it had triggered the sixth of the seven thresholds to transition to green, which told her his biosignature was close enough to homo sapiens to meet the sensors’ requirements, and six out of seven, with the seventh in the marginal range, was enough to open the pod. There was no way to reenter it.
When Nober finished preserving the pork, he packed it up for transport. Struggling to communicate through pantomime, he pointed at himself, then in the direction of his village, and the held up five fingers. He pointed at Quaide, at the relic, at the village again, and then adopted what he intended as a questioning expression. He spoke aloud, too, though he knew it wouldn’t aid Quaide’s comprehension.
Quaide exhaled. “Well, I can tell you’re intending to go somewhere. I’m guessing you want to know if you can take me and the pod with you. Which would be a lot easier to answer if I knew where you’re planning to go.”
Her worldly experience and social upbringing all informed her that following a random man she met in the woods to a random place was not a wise decision. The problem, and the reason she did not dismiss the notion entirely, was that she lacked for alternatives. She was alone, without meaningful resources, and she had seen no signs of civilization in the two days at Nober’s campsite. Were she in the peak of health, she might consider surviving alone in an unfamiliar wilderness a feasible, if challenging and risky, option. Weakened as she was, it would almost certainly kill her. Nober did not seem to have ill intentions towards her – he clearly held her in some regard relating to her emergence from the relic – but seeming was not reality, and Quaide knew she was not the greatest judge of people, even those familiar to her.
When Nober began hiking, Quaide followed.
A week’s hiking out became almost twice that to return to the village. The first couple of days, Quaide could barely manage a mile at a time before she had to rest. Her endurance improved, but by the end she still would have slowed Nober’s natural pace if not for the other factor weighing on his travel: he insisted on dragging the relic. With difficulty, he lashed the awkward form onto a travois he could drag behind him with a kind of belt, but it made some of the paths he followed out unnavigable on the return. It surprised him that Quaide indicated on several occasions he should simply abandon the relic, but Nober persevered.
Two days from the village, the trails were more established, and other signs of settlement proliferated, like fenced pastures. Nober thought they might encounter others out foraging or hunting, or grazing the animals, but they saw no one until they were a half day from the village, when the fields came into view.
Half a day’s hiking was far to get to the fields, but that was because the village hadn’t always been in the same place. It used to be right amidst the fields, until the Domeheads started coming out from their hill. Now, the village was hidden in a nearby forest, and the folk were resigned to a long walk in the early morning and the late evening to tend what remained or could be salvaged of the crops.
“Nober! Success?” Oberrok leant on his hoe and waved at Nober. His eyes widened when he spotted the relic and the strange woman, and he planted the hoe in the ground so he could hurry to greet Nober.
“Caught a big sow. Smoked almost all of it; it’s right in here.” Nober patted the pack on his back, then glanced back at Quaide and shifted the belt connecting him to the relic. “Is everyone alright?”
Oberrok glared north. “A few patrols, but they didn’t come through here.”
“Good. That’s good.” Nober glanced back at Quaide. “Actually, do you think you could take the meat back to the village? I need to visit the memorial.”
“Is she a memory?”
Nober nodded, and Oberrok bowed to Quaide and caressed his chin. “I remember.”
“I’m so glad you remember,” Quaide muttered. “Now, if only you remembered this language.” She wished she knew what Nober and the farmer were discussing, but despite recognizing a few words as ones Nober used, she couldn’t make sense of it.
“Ah, that sounds like the memoirs’ language.” Oberrok took the pack of preserved pork and nodded seriously to Nober. “Go. We’ll be waiting for you in the village when you return.”
Nober knew the word ‘memorial’ in the memoirs’ language, but it meant something different to him than it did to Quaide. She thought they were visiting a kind of cenotaph, perhaps to her own civilization, when he pantomimed going somewhere and repeated the word. While she thought it might be educational, she didn’t consider it a priority, but Nober insisted, and their limited communication left little capacity for debate. But the memorial was not a marble edifice, a bronze statue, or a crumbling corpse of a previous era’s accomplishments or hubris.
Even by wan daylight, Quaide’s first impression of the memorial was of light. It struck her with a force that had nothing to do with physicality, for it was artificial light, utterly at odds with the technological sophistication she observed on Nober or in the village’s fields. The building from which the light glared was a cross between a bunker and an ancient Mesoamerican pyramid made from crumbling concrete at war with encroaching foliage. It could not be from Quaide’s time, but the design was descendant of what she remembered.
Birds fluttering off diminished the resemblance as Nober led her into the foyer, still dragging the relic. There, he bowed and touched his chin. “I remember.”
There they waited, Nober remaining bowed whilst Quaide stood. A grinding, mechanical noise emanated from slightly oxidized metal doors until it stopped a moment before those doors grated open and disgorged a memoir.
She might have been ten or fifteen years older than Quaide’s biological age, though judging age between species was difficult. Somehow, she wore a sweater vest and imitation lab coat like religious regalia, and she stared at Quaide and the preservation pod with divine recognition. It discomfited Quaide, so she strode forward while Nober remained bowed and stuck out her hand.
“My name’s Quaide. I don’t suppose you speak my dead language? Or are you just going to tell me you remember?”
The memoir dropped to her knees. “Is it real? Are you a living memory?” Her accent was horrible, and the words didn’t make sense to Quaide, but she at least recognized the words.
Quaide crossed her arms. “I don’t know what you mean by that. What’s you’re name? How fluent are you in this language?”
“Memory, I am named Witroa. All memoirs can speak this language, though it is not quite the same. Your words are strange, and the order is odd.”
“Linguistic drift. Surprisingly minimal for how long I have to assume it’s been.” Quaide grunted, then glanced at Nober, who was still bowing. “Tell him he can get up. Then, if we can hold a real conversation, we can see what we can figure out about both of us.”
Witroa hesitated, but then she gestured for Nober to rise and follow. She led both Nober and Quaide into the elevator, used a lever to shut the doors, and then began turning a crank to lower the elevator. Quaide wondered why the elevator was manually operated when they had functioning electric lights outside. It made for a bumpy, uncomfortable ride to the bottom, where Witroa spun a lock and used a huge wheel to unseal a wedge-shaped door into a large, brightly illuminated chamber.
If a church sanctuary, an advanced manufacturing floor, and a cafeteria merged, the result might be the room Quaide saw beyond the elevator doors. A polished concrete floor gleamed gray beneath electric lights, and relics on plinths like museum exhibits lined the walls, carefully preserved. The preservation pod squeaked and clattered as Nober dragged it, trailing behind Quaide and the memoir while he wondered if the new relic would join the ones in this room. Other occasions when Nober glimpsed inside the memorial were reverent moments, reserved for auspicious and significant events in the community and in individuals’ lives. He still felt that same sense of reverence burgeoning upon him, but Quaide made her slow pace seem a determined march across a utilitarian space.
Witroa led them to a closet-like chamber off the larger chamber’s terminus, in which hung more lab coats unstained by any real lab work. Illumination emanated from an oil lantern resting on a wooden trestle table rather than the empty light socket in the ceiling, and a few stools sat around the otherwise bare room which would be tight with only four people in it. They stopped here, and Quaide concealed a relieved expression as she hooked a leg around a stool and sat down on its wooden contours.
She frowned when Witroa addressed Nober in his language. “Go and wait outside. Another memoir will come by and show you where to put the relic. Then, you may return home.” A pause. “You may all expect a recollection shortly.”
Despite Witroa’s ability to converse with Quaide, it was obvious watching her speak with Nober that she was far more comfortable with his language. Nober bowed and began to retreat from the closet; Quaide thought about demanding he remain, but there seemed little point. It was still jarring to watch the one face to become somewhat familiar in these new circumstances disappear when Witroa closed the door. She bowed to Quaide again.
“Memory, we are archived by your presence here.”
“You can call me Quaide. Or Memory Quaide, I suppose, if that’s more suitable to your sensibilities. Please sit down so we can have a proper conversation. I have questions, and I’m hoping you have at least a few of the answers.”
Obediently, Witroa sat herself upon another stool, facing Quaide. Her eyes darted across features which were as foreign to her as hers appeared to Quaide. “It is the role of memoirs to remember the answers.”
“Alright.” When she wasn’t purely exhausted by her recovery, the hiking, and the enormity of her situation, Quaide spent the journey from Nober’s campsite thinking about what she most needed to learn about her circumstances. As tempting as it might be to ask Witroa for her understanding of the last several thousand years of history, Quaide most needed practical information. “When you call me a Memory, what do you mean by that? There have been…other Memories?”
Witroa searched for words. “A Memory is…someone who looks like you.” She gestured at Quaide’s comparatively delicate skin, fine hair, and soft features. “One was born in the time of my ten-great grandfather; he was the last remembered by this memorial.”
Not someone actually out of the past, like her, then. She supposed most of the pods, and the other efforts people made in her time to preserve themselves for the future, either opened or failed too long ago to be remembered, no matter how important remembering was to this culture. “What happened to him?”
“We brought him here. He was made the Archivist by his twelfth summer. An illness struck him a few years later from which he never fully recovered. The records say he requisitioned two relics and set out on a pilgrimage to other memorials. He never returned.”
Quaide swallowed and told herself one unverifiable anecdote was nothing on which to base a conclusion. The pod’s systems claimed the environment was habitable to her, and her situation was not that of a genetic throwback born into a subsistence society. “Is your assumption, then, that I will become your Archivist?” She assumed it was a title, not someone literally maintaining an archive.
“You should discuss this with the Librarian.” Witroa shifted. “You’re a Memory. Memoirs will do all we can for your wellbeing.”
That was somewhat reassuring to Quaide, although she did not appreciate being revered as a kind of religious prophet. Well, the reverse of a prophet, as she was a supposed link to the past, not the future. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious I’m not in a great position right now.” She leaned forward and caught Witroa’s eyes. “That relic Nober found me in? It’s a preservation pod. It kept me alive, in stasis, for what I’m assuming to be thousands of years. I’m not a Memory like that poor boy born in your great grandfather’s village.” Witroa’s eyes were widening, and Quaide felt vaguely guilty for how she was doing this, but she proceeded. “I’m the genuine article. I lived through times that probably predate your oldest relics. I can tell you how they work, what they’re supposed to do. In those ancient days, I had a title. Not Archivist. Not Librarian or Memoir or Memory, and I won’t be content now to simply preserve what I know for you to pass down in mutated form to your descendants. I was, and am, an engineer.”
In fact, she was an engineer with precisely the skillset and knowledge base which would be most valuable to someone stranded in an uncertain, post-apocalyptic future, which is less a matter of convenience and more a matter of deliberate selection. Preservation pods like the one in which Quaide passed the millennia were not cheap or simple pieces of machinery, and not many of them were made. They were one of several projects undertaken in her time to find a way of passing knowledge through a world-wide disaster, and Quaide’s participation in the program was based on several factors, including passing batteries of tests. Not just biological tests to ensure she was compatible with the preservation method: she had to study for and pass practical and theoretical examinations on topics throughout the realms of physics, materials science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, linguistics, thermodynamics, civil engineering, meteorology, geology, and more.
Thus, Quaide was not some errant, random individual popping up in the far-flung future. She was chosen through a deliberate process, which yes, also selected based on her willingness to participate. If she seemed particularly intent on ensuring her status in this highly convenient memorial, there was good reason for that, for she felt an urgency beyond the most immediate imperatives of survival. One of the conditions to which she agreed after qualifying for the pod program was that she undergo insemination. Every person in the pod program was pregnant when they were put into stasis. Better to preserve not just one life, but the potential for many more lives, if the goal was to see the human species through an apocalypse. Oh yes, the people behind programs like the preservation pods were intelligent, dedicated, and thorough. They only failed to account for their pods keeping anyone in stasis not just into the next civilization era, but into a future so distant Quaide found herself amongst a new species of hominid.
To be continued…maybe.
IGC Publishing 