A few years later...

  Cale sat at his oversized desk going over his reading assignment. His little elbows rested on the hard surface as he held his head up while he read, his chin resting in his hands like a nest in the crook of two branches. The desk at one time had made him feel comically small, but once he realized how many books and notebooks it could hold, he had started to cherish it.

  As he read his mind wandered, he couldn’t believe how fast the time had gone by. It had been a few years since he had started learning to read, and though he felt like he had just ended up on this world, his fifth birthday was right around the corner.

  When his mother first started to teach him – as he had negotiated for – he had thought that since he already knew a language and that he was a toddler again, that it would be easy to learn how to read and speak in less than a year. He wasn’t very wrong on the speaking part, as that was the easiest part and he had mastered that by the time he was three years old.

  The part that was unexpectedly hard was the reading and writing. First, he had a hard time not accidentally writing Earthen letters when practicing his writing, it just came so naturally. He soon discovered that not all the words were spelled as they sounded, which confused his brain even more when it came to writing because some of the letters were shaped like Earthen ones, but they sounded very different. The hardest letter he struggled with was one shaped like the letter A, but when pronounced, it sounded like the letter T, and it made things more difficult than they should have been. When he asked his mother about it, she just said that was how it was, and she had no idea. She was a great help.

  One morning, while Cale waited for his mother to make his breakfast, they started discussing very animatedly about their language and its “quirks.” Cale had a lot of rude things to say about it and finally, after telling her that the language was confusing and nonsensical, she threw her hands up into the air and exclaimed. “Xavier, I. Do. Not. Know. Why. You. Care!”

  Cale, not even listening to what she was saying, watched as the butter on the spatula she was still holding flew across the kitchen and landed on the floor with a loud “Splunk.” It took a moment for his mother to realize what happened, but when she saw the butter on the floor, she went “ugh” and walked out of the kitchen.

  Whoops.

  That evening, when she got home from work, she handed Cale a large book labeled, “The words of the ancestors,” and simply told him. “Xavier, if you are going to be such a smarty pants, maybe you can figure out why our written words are apparently ‘confusingly nonsensical’ and ‘frequently unnecessary.’ You can take up your complaint with the ancestors themselves.”

  He took it from her and quickly shut his mouth. His parents had not been as forthcoming with information as he had hoped when it came to their history and he assumed it was because they still saw him as their little boy. He had asked them in the past about the history of their people, but they always just told him that there had been great tragedies in the past and they were the survivors. That was all they would ever say. God, forbid they elaborate.

  He opened the book and immediately started to struggle as the sentence structure and word usages were different than what he had just learned, and there were many words he did not recognize. He must have really made his mother upset if she had given him a book he couldn’t fully read. But he wasn’t about to back down from this challenge. If his mother was going to try and push him into failure, he would stand up and succeed and then shove it in her face. However, after re-reading the first paragraph four times before it made sense, he realized that this was going to be a lot harder than he had thought.

  Another barrier he ran into were cultural references that were very foreign to him, which made him seek other reading materials in order to even try to understand the author’s context. These references were difficult for Cale since he had spent the last few years of his life underground with a very small population. His understanding of the greater world came mostly from books and not from his own experience.

  He missed the internet a lot during this time. So many words he wished he could have just typed in and searched, instead he found himself going through the dictionary his mother had let him borrow from her work and asking his parents what their thoughts were when it came to something he didn’t understand. His mother helped him a lot during this time and her help greatly sped up the translation of the text, a task he wished he didn’t have to do but was.

  The work took him over a year, and he had an entire notebook of words that he had memorized, his own little personal and badly organized dictionary. He had never missed the sorting feature so much in his life. He probably could have learned it faster, but his mother and father would never let him take the book nor his notebook out of their home to daycare, nor would they let him take it out while someone was over. They had told him that it needed to remain a secret, and he heeded their wisdom. After all, he understood how much he didn’t know about this world.

  The history book he was having to translate was broken up into multiple sections that were based on major historical events. The last section of the book was less of a historical lesson and more of a mismatch of theories, hymns, poems, and translation notes that the people before him thought should be remembered.

  The first historical section was a simple history of the oldest event they had on record for their people, and it was one of the most tragic things he had ever read. The story started almost 600 years in the past and described a time when their people were experiencing much wonder and prosperity. Their people had reached an unbelievable height with their creativity and power and had become so advanced, so blessed, that they spread amongst the cosmos like the divine above. Their people were in a true golden age. This section didn’t go into detail on their species technology or advancements, but it did talk about how they traveled to destinations beyond their planet.

  During this time of peace and prosperity, a corruption started to slowly spread amongst the people until it could no longer be contained. A great war erupted amongst the two main factions. The author stated that some said that it was between them and the gods, another stated that the war had nothing to do with the gods but was because one side had become too greedy. Regardless of the reason, a war had broken out and it had fractured this society in its golden age.

  While the war raged on, there was a great calamity that caused all of those over the age of thirteen to die. The author of the first few chapters was not from that era but instead had asked some of the older survivors about what they had seen when they were children. The survivors described entire cities as tall as mountains, exploding into clouds shaped like giant trees. They talked about ancient creations that protected them as they hovered over their planet.

  These creations, which had been a symbol of safety for centuries, became creations of destruction as they began falling to the ground long after the adults died. The crashes caused their own massive fires and their own tree shaped clouds wherever they crashed, further wounding the already damaged civilization.

  The destruction had been great, and entire regions were swallowed by fire, never to be heard from again. But not everything had been lost. They all thought that when they turned thirteen, they would die, but they in fact did not die; instead, they ended up with interfaces of their own! The author stated that though great knowledge had been lost, the interface was enough to keep the people alive, and it gave them hope.

  Cale read through this part over and over and was amazed at how anyone could survive and pushed forward. Not a single person older than thirteen had survived the day of the calamity and the author made it sound like the calamity happened at the same time everywhere. It was no surprise that so much knowledge was lost. The author ended this section of the book stating that they still had no idea what initially killed everyone but the children. But they stated that everyone they interviewed said that before they turned 13, it was like waking up every day to see a blade of death hanging over you, without ever knowing when it would drop.

  The next section of the text switched authors. This person focused on the history of around a couple hundred years after the first calamity. They went on to tell how the survivors did their best to save as much knowledge as they could in the first few decades. They spoke of the people coming together as one to survive and to find out what had killed so many of them, but all their efforts would end up being in vain. After only a century and a half, another calamity struck, striking at the very thing that gave the people hope. After reading it he understood why everyone thought the gods were punishing them.

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  One night the interface simply… disappeared. The author of this part of the book went on to write about how all their knowledge, all their history, everything they did was attached to the interface, and now it was... Gone. The only thing that remained were a few books that were used to help teach the young before they received their interface. This, to Cale, was the greatest calamity of the two. Yes, the death and destruction of the first calamity was absolutely horrific. But their civilization could be rebuilt and was in fact being rebuilt using the knowledge of those from before. They had been knocked down but not knocked out.

  But here, the very core of the civilization, the work and memories of their ancestors were swiped away, their very history had been taken from them. It would be like if electricity no longer worked on Earth. What would you even do? Entire libraries of information, gone in an instant. Yes, books and libraries would still exist, but how much of it would survive the test of time? The inevitable fires and destruction that always appear after great calamities like these tend to cause more havoc and damage than the initial event.

  When Cale read this part, he cried. The weight of what had happened to these people hit him like a truck, and he felt for them because it was a lot like what he felt. His world had been upended when he had been taken from Earth. His family, his friends, the amenities and freedoms he was used to. Gone in an instant. His own personal calamity.

  He sat there, his eyes following the text without actually reading it, a motion with no thought behind it as tears streamed down his face. Cale crashed back into his chair, his grief getting ahold of him. He thought about his late wife, his children, and the company he left behind. He FELT for these people; they were like him. They had lost more than anyone ever should, and it moved him to tears. Once his eyes dried up, he noticed he wasn’t even halfway through the whole book, and he quickly remembered that the people now did have an interface. Something had changed, giving him hope that something would change for him too.

  He continued to read about the hardships these people went through. His eyes glued to the pages as he imagined the grief and hope the author must have been feeling. With the interface not working they had to relearn how to make their tools, how to heal the sick, and how to travel. During this period, which the author called the “punishment age,” the people began to think that their use of the interface was the reason for their loss and a great, violent movement surfaced among the people.

  The works of the ancients started to be looked at with disdain. Previously treasured artifacts were now being destroyed in the name of redemption, and for a hundred years the people took out their anger, their anguish, and their pain, on whatever remains they could find of what was left of their cursed ancestors. That was until one day the crops started to die as plague swept across the land. The plague did not affect the people but infected their crops instead. The people, unsure as to what was outside of the cities they resided in, sent scouts out farther than they had previously been allowed. These teams were called Rangers.

  One of these Rangers came across an oasis in an otherwise barren land and found themselves investigating this anomaly. While studying this unexpected irregularity, the Ranger came across a farmer using a machine that had been passed down from generation to generation. The Ranger wanted to scold the farmer for not wrecking the ancient tool as it was mandated to do so, but the quality of the farmer’s produce was better than anything the Ranger had seen before, and he could not ignore the benefits of what he was seeing. The ranger asked questions of the farmer until it was late in the night. The farmer, not having seen anyone outside of his family for decades, refused to let the Ranger sleep in the wilderness and insisted he sleep in the barn with the soft hay.

  The next morning the Ranger awoke with a scream! There were words in front of his eyes on what looked to be a floating piece of paper. The farmer had run out of the house, fearing something terrible had come upon his guest, only to start laughing as the ranger ran around the yard swatting away at the space in front of him like he was trying to swat flies.

  Once the Ranger had calmed down and the farmer had stopped laughing at him, he learned from the farmer that the thing in front of him was in fact the interface that his ancestors used to use, and he more than likely got it because he slept close to the farming machine. To the Ranger’s shock, apparently everyone in the farmer’s family had an interface, and it had shown up when one of their ancestors had been doing some renovating and had uncovered the ancient farming machine the farmer was currently using. By the next morning, they all had an interface.

  When the Ranger returned home, word of the farmer’s green lands and the interface spread rapidly among the people in the cities. Soon the Ranger core was tasked with finding other machines like the farmer’s tool to see if what they said was true. A few were found hidden in abandoned farms not long after beginning the search, and just like the farmer had described, those that slept near it overnight also received an interface.

  With a hungry populace, the local church and leadership were desperate to find a solution, and the interface was the perfect solution. With the interface unlocked for the people, and access to ancestral farming equipment the plagued land found restoration as the farmers and the machines healed the land they worked on. The people rejoiced for their bellies were full and repented to their gods for destroying so much of their ancestors' devices.

  Not long after farmers received interfaces, even those that didn’t sleep near the farming machines began to get one, however, the people found that their interfaces didn’t connect to the farming tools and could only do a few of the things that the old stories used to claim. The author noted that some of the ancient stories may have been exaggerated, or it was possible the gods were still punishing them by limiting the interface’s use. The people also quickly realized that some were not compatible with the interface and would simply die, whether they deserved punishment or not. The author concluded that this was the gods’ way of reminding them that they can take away what they give, and they should be thankful for their benevolence every day.

  Cale set the book down in shock. The last events in the book were very recent, considering the age of the civilization in front of him, and it explained the irregularities he saw on a daily basis. For example, every day when going to daycare he would walk past the elevators that were attached to the central tower. From his view, they looked like they required steel and electricity, yet the walls to the base were made of plain wood instead of concrete or a more advanced material.

  He recalled the random signs on the businesses he had seen back in the city as well. Some signs were etched on wood while others had obvious electronic letters. But this place didn’t even have electricity, at least not that he was aware of. Then again maybe he was over thinking it and they ran on solar? Regardless, the whole civilization was a mismatch of iron age technology and current, low-tech modifications. His mother's job now made a lot more sense to him. She helped unlock the secrets of the past to help build their future. He found himself swelling with pride at being a part of her family. If it had really been a god that put him on this planet, they picked a great place to put him.

  He closed the book and reviewed the timeline of the story he had just read. The loss of all the adults, the loss of the interface, the purposeful destruction of anything ancient, and lastly, resurgence of the limited interface access. He didn’t understand the why of it all, but he did realize that there were a lot of angles to this and a lot the book itself was not telling him. But that would have to wait for later because his little sister was crawling under his desk messing with his legs.

  “Can I help you, Marthelia?”

  “No,” said a little voice from under the desk.

  Cale rolled his eyes. She was two and a half years younger than himself, and she constantly wanted to be around him. He didn’t have any siblings growing up when he was on Earth and he found his current one to be quite the troublemaker. She was always in his stuff, and she never wanted to use her own bed. Yes, they had to share a room, which didn’t bother them since they lived in a limited space underground, but he liked having his own bed, his own space, and his own stuff.

  He had complained to his parents, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears and instead they would say things like, “Aww she loves you!” or “She is your only sister so be nice.” So, he found himself just putting up with it. He figured it would only be a few more years and he would be out on his own, and she wouldn’t be able to mess with his stuff anymore. At least she wasn’t tearing out pages in his book or completely wrecking his bed. All matters considered, she could be worse.

  He heard his mother calling for them to come and eat, and Cale had a mischievous idea. He enjoyed the competitiveness of his sister and would frequently use it to his advantage. He quickly finished his last notes on the reading and closed his notebook before sliding it into its designated slot on his desk.

  “I bet you I can beat you there!” he yelled down to her as she sat under the desk doing god knows what with some crayons.

  “Nuh uh! I quick!” she retorted.

  He could hear something drop and she came scrambling out from under his desk as fast as she could crawl. She would have beaten him to the door, but in her excitement, her foot caught the edge of the chair throwing her off balance, causing her to clip the edge of the door frame with her shoulder, which cascaded into her spinning in a circle and falling over onto her butt, with her feet high up in the air. Cale couldn’t help but start laughing; he was just wanting her to get to the table faster, but that had been HILARIOUS! She started to cry so he got up and went over to her, giving her a little hug and then whispering in her ear.

  “I win.” And then sprinted the last 10 feet to the table with a giant grin on his face.

  “No!” She yelled quickly, following after him with a pout on her little face, the pain of hitting the door frame quickly forgotten. Cale laughed to himself. I am such a good brother.