How to rebuild the future

The Earth remembers what we forget. The husks of humanity’s past glory, laid out all around for us to admire… And yet, we lack the ability to restore them, to even understand their inner workings. These were the thoughts the boy ruminated as he picked up another scrap of metal from among the branches of a bush. He run a hand over it and looked at the light shine on it as he wondered what it had been a part of. He lazily put it onto the pile of similar pieces he had gathered in his wheelbarrow and set off again. The sun was already setting as he arrived at a clearing with a few scattered apple trees. The boy carefully plucked apple after apple and put it inside his crossbody bag. When he was done, the bag was far from full. Summer was coming to an end.

Night had fallen by the time he arrived back at the village, and steadily drove the wheelbarrow down a dirt road. He stopped in front of a cabin that stood on thick walls of wood and clay, topped by a thatch roof. A woman in a dirty baggy dress and a wool cardigan stood on the porch, waving at him. Home. The boy stowed the wheelbarrow next to the house and handed his mother the bag. “Seems like you’ve run that orchard dry already, Kai”, she commented, eyeing the scarce bounty. Kai planted a kiss in her cheek and went inside the house, slightly bending to fit through the doorway. A little girl ran to him with extended arms, giggling. “Hullo, Maja! Ready for dinner?” She looked at him wide-eyed and nodded. The inside of the house was without any walls. A hearth burned in the middle and behind it, several wood-and-pelt beds had been laid out. The front was occupied by a table with four chairs and a long counter with various kitchen utensils. The woman lifted the little girl and brought her to a chair while a tall, lanky man, Kai’s father, served bowls of sloppy porridge. When they had eaten their porridge and apples, the man asked “Found anything interesting today?”. The boy nodded and said “I’ll bring them to grandma Giorgina tomorrow, it’s too dark now”. Giorgina wasn’t really Kai’s grandmother, but all the young people in the village treated her as such. None of them was as close to her as Kai, though. He was her student, or her colleague, as she liked to call him, and she had set for herself the ambitious goal of teaching Kai everything she knew – from mathematics, to Newtonian mechanics, to quantum physics and the principles of electricity.

Grandma Giorgina was now over a hundred years old, and the only person left in their settlement who had been alive before the cataclysm that wiped out a whole civilisation. She had also been an engineer, someone who devised machines. That fact laid a sizeable burden on her – the burden of making sure as little as possible of humanity’s knowledge was lost. Of course, most of her duties nowadays involved teaching Kai and the younger village children, and working with Kai in building new devices and salvaging materials and parts from the bits of technology he scavenged from the wilderness.

“Do you think you could stay until noon to help around the farm? The barn needs a few repairs and I could use a hand or two”, said Kai’s father with a wink. Kai nodded absently, and with a big yawn he got up and picked up his bowl, rinsed it and announced he was turning in for the day. He fell asleep to the sound of leaves rustling outside the window and Maja’s annoyed moans as she negotiated her bedtime with her mother.

…

When Kai arrived at the shed that served as their laboratory, he found Giorgina hunched over a mess of scattered papers filled with notes and drawings, a light bulb shining dimly behind a glass screen. Behind her, a shelf with several primitively bound books, written by Giorgina herself, hung from the wall. She hadn’t noticed him coming in. He knocked softly on the door frame and Georgina finally looked up from her notes, as if waking up from a long slumber. She beamed at him. “Have you brought anything interesting?” “Just bits and pieces”, Kai said, pointing at the pile of scraps in the wheelbarrow. Giorgina moved some of the larger pieces around to peak into the pile. “More wire” she mumbled, “We need so much more wire”. “Sorry” Kai flushed, “it’s getting harder and harder to find anything useful these days”. The wire was for a project they had been working on for a while now, as were the schemes and notes that Giorgina had been devouring with her eyes moments before: providing the village with electricity. For everyone else, it seemed a far-fetched goal. Of course everyone had a vague idea what electricity was. They had learned about it from their elders. It was what had enabled humans from the past to heat their houses, to store their food in cold cupboards they called refrigerators. But nobody except Giorgina knew what they where missing out on. Let alone, knew how electricity worked or how to make it happen. Nobody except Giorgina and, now, Kai. All they still needed was enough wire to make a turbine, and they could attach it to the water wheel in the river.

Behind them, someone cleared their throat. A small man with a beard and a bushy moustache stood there, shifting his weight nervously. Kai greeted him heartily, but the man returned the greeting by shaking his head. “Bad news, I’m afraid. The radio has stopped working. The chief would like you to have a look”. He said at Giorgina in a gloomy tone. She dismissed him with a whiff of her hand. “I’ll be along”, she assured him. “What is wrong, you reckon?”, Kai asked once the man left. “It’s probably just the battery, as usual. Must have run out of juice”. Making batteries was one of their most frequent occupations – they were easy to make and served to power a variety of small devices, such as the electric lamps that were so priced in their village.

But hours later, at the radio shack, where a small crowd including the village chief and Giorgina had assembled, Giorgina’s look echoed the gloom in the messenger’s eyes. Because she had exchanged the battery, and the transmitter still failed to send any signal.

“So?”, the chief asked, impatiently, “what’s wrong with it?” The chief was a bulky man, well into his forties, who had a tendency to get too close and speak too loud. Not that he was a bad leader. After all, he had been chosen because he was someone who could get people to do what had to be done. But when it came to technical endeavours, he was illiterate as one could be. “That”, Giorgina replied pensively, “is a good question. And one I will need some time to answer.” “But can you solve it, woman?” As way of an answer, Giorgina dissipated the crowd and told them to leave her and Kai alone with the device.

…

The sunset found Giorgina and Kai still in the radio shack. They had taken apart the transmitter piece by piece to figure out where the problem was. They sat in silence, looking at the gallery of electronic components laid out before them, the only sound being the pitter-patter of light rain on the window. Giorgina didn’t express any concern, but Kai knew to interpret her silence as a sign that the situation was more complicated than it seemed at first. “But we’ll figure out how to fix it, won’t we?” he asked anxiously. “Oh, I know how to fix it. What I do not know is where we are going to find what we need. See – this” she explained, picking up a small chip from the table, “is a transistor. A very valuable piece of tech that allows us to amplify the electric signal. We were lucky to find one of these intact back then. But where we can find another, I do not know. I do not know”, she concluded.

Kai was still a boy when Giorgina and the others had built the radio, but he knew it had marked a before and after in the short history of their settlement. That was how they had discovered that there were other settlements out there, seldom as they may be, populated by other survivors of the cataclysm. It was how they kept in touch with their fellow humans, how they got access to a doctor, and actual farmers who knew what they were doing. It was how they were finally able to trade and get access to more resources. And it was all thanks to Giorgina’s skill. And all who had helped her along the process, of course. But building a radio that could send signals far enough to reach those settlements had only been possible because they had salvaged valuable pieces from the junk they had found out there. And the transistor was one of those pieces. Invaluable. Irreplaceable.

“Can’t we build one from scratch?” asked Kai. “No. Or rather, we could, but not one that is good enough to send our signals as far as we need. For that we would need very precise tools that we certainly don’t have. It’s very advanced technology”. “Fine” said Kai, resolute. “I’ll find us another transistor”. But Giorgina seemed lost in thought again, as if suddenly transported to another time, another place…

…

“We’ll survive” Kai’s father said sarcastically, as his mother kissed him goodbye, “You’re not that good at farming, you know?”. Kai loved them for making it so easy. He knew most parents would have found it hard to understand why his 17-year-old son suddenly had to take off and leave them to care for a farm and a small child on their own.

Three days had passed since the radio transmitter had stopped working. Three days in which grandma Giorgina and Kai had sat hour after hour, day after day, trying to come up with a solution that didn’t involve such a large luck factor. But they hadn’t. And just the day before, they had received another visit from the chief. It hadn’t been a pleasant visit. Grandma Giorgina and him never really saw eye to eye, but usually they let each other be. Elections, however, were due in a few weeks, and the chief seemed convinced this was all some kind of plot to remove him from power. “So you want me to believe” he rebuked her “that in order to fix this radio, which was fine until just now, you need some odd piece of ancient tech that we suddenly don’t have”. By that time, his face was only a few centimeters away from Giorgina’s and his voice had grown louder and louder, as it often did when he wanted to make a point. “Well, isn’t that convenient”. Giorgina didn’t answer, but just stared at him in the eyes, without blinking. Kai had the impression that she talked less and less these days, as if she knew she didn’t have that much energy left and was trying to spread it out as much as she could.

Those thoughts fuelled Kai’s anxiety as he strode through the woods, trying to keep walking in the direction Giorgina had pointed him too, and keeping her hand-drawn map carefully folded inside his pocket. In addition, he carried a large backpack with a waterskin and enough provisions to last a few days. Oh, and the weight of the world on his shoulders. Of his world, at any rate.

He was looking for a place he had never seen and couldn’t even picture in his head, with only a vague idea of where it might be, and he was not even sure if it was accessible any more, and if it would still contain the device they were looking for. That place was an underground research facility where Giorgina had worked in her youth. It was supposed to be a few days walk from their settlement, and to have housed what Giorgina called a particle accelerator, an instrument that helped the humans of old peak into the weave of reality. Unfortunately, Giorgina was not at all sure that it hadn’t caved in, and in all the years since they founded the village, they had been too few and struggled too much to risk organising an expedition. So it was now up to Kai to find that place, and restore the radio transmitter that would save their village from being left behind by their fellow humans.

But days passed and Kai started to feel less and less sure of where he was. He had seen none of the landmarks Giorgina had told him about. He’d used up most of his provisions, until he only had a hard lump of bread left, that he now tried to stretch over a whole day. Anxiety gave way to dismay, and when the rain started to pour, Kai was, for the first time in his life, starting to doubt whether he would survive. He started to crave the warm hearth in his home, and his mother’s smile, and studying with Giorgina late into the night, while moths danced merrily around the light bulbs. He then came upon a metal husk that provided some shelter, curled up under it, and fell asleep with tears running down his cheeks. If Giorgina had been there, she would have been able to tell him that husk of metal was actually what remained of a car. But Kai didn’t know what a car was, and he wouldn’t have cared in his current situation.

…

Back at the settlement, the tension was reaching unbearable levels. The chief’s face had never been so close to Giorgina’s, and he was saying things along the lines of “fix it, or else” as drops of saliva rained from his mouth. One of his trusted thugs waited in the doorway. Giorgina looked at the chief pleadingly and tried once again to persuade him that it was time to go looking for Kai, that the radio business could wait. The chief, however, was not keen on sending more of their (already few) young people out into the wilderness with no clear destination, and stated that he was “having none of it, and that is that”. When he turned to leave, however, he stumbled upon something unexpected. That something was a great, rock-hard hand slapping across his face. It belonged to the thug who had been waiting at the door. “That radio saved my wife’s life when she was giving birth to my son. I know if there’s a chance for us all to survive, it lies with you and the kid”, he said to a flabbergasted Giorgina, as the chief laid sprawled across the floor.

…

Two days later, Kai woke up with the first rays of sun. He could still hear the soft sound of the voices he had been dreaming about. Except that he didn’t stop hearing them. Because the voices weren’t in his dream at all, they were coming from somewhere among the trees. And no sooner had he realised this than he saw his father and several of the village’s young men and women emerge from the thicket. He crawled out from under the car’s shell and launched himself into his father’s arms, crying and babbling “I failed dad. I’m sorry. I failed”. His dad pulled him away and gave him a big smile. “You didn’t fail, son. You’re not the only thing we found today”.

After Kai had been properly fed, they started on their path again. The group led Kai to an area with low bushes and filled with rubble, and the ruins of the foundations of various buildings. Before them stood a mossy statue of a dancing woman standing on one foot. Kai laughed bitterly at the thought that something like that could have survived while the surrounding buildings were shattered to the ground. But then he realised – the statue was one of the landmarks Giorgina had drawn in her map. ”You found the place”, he whispered in astonishment.

They didn’t attempt anything that same day except a bit of reconnaissance. But Giorgina had told them how far down the structure reached, and they were sure at least something must have survived the cataclysm. Several weeks later, when they had assembled a proper expedition and had cleared a great part of the rubble, they went down a shaft that took them several dozen meters underground. And what they found was not what Kai was looking for.

It was so, so much more. Rooms filled with computers, (those gadgets that were still a fuzzy dream for Kai’s newborn society), and books, and scientific instruments Kai had no idea how to name. This was not enough to repair a radio transmitter. It was enough to rebuild a whole lost civilisation. The first thing Kai did was take out a piece of paper with the words “Giorgina Bartalini research laboratory” and pin it to the wall. Giorgina had died a few days after Kai had been found. But thanks to Kai, her legacy would live on.