Chronicles of Tomorrow: Echoes from the Future — Ep.10: Digging up The Past
16th May 2355,
I sent in my report and I notified the office that I’d like to stay in today.
I started on the 11th early morning, I guess around 5 AM. Everything was packed and on schedule but, fear and excitement were gushing in simultaneously. Adrenaline was also pumping high. I inhaled something to calm my nerves and got behind the wheel. Well, not exactly a wheel but a series of HED (holograph emitting diode) panels with a joystick for steering and a display above the dashboard running till the back which gave me an all-round view of the environment around the car. There was an autopilot in case I decided to take a break from driving. The reactor engine had enough fuel to last twice the length of the whole trip.
I watched the city wake up as we drove through the Kalam Road towards the city gates. Two pairs of gates, maintaining the balance between outside toxic nature and life inside the Dome through a simple depressurizing and decontamination process. The environment outside felt somewhat refreshing. I was always able to find some peace among chaos. So, I was enjoying it regardless of the extremely rough terrain. The electromagnetic suspensions worked like a charm. The view was quite different from what could be seen from inside the Dome, less shiny, maybe because of the spherical aberration.
Wherever I turned, I found only debris, torn or leaning high rises, barely supported against another broken building and broken expressways. I was driving on one of those expressways. The environment outside cannot be described with mere adjectives.
All I could see were remains of old cities, in the form of parts of skyscrapers and torn malls covered in sand, roads, all in pieces, getting eaten slowly by the desert, ran through the broken buildings, like a drying river gurgling through uneven rocks. I couldn’t spot any vegetation anywhere, nothing unexpected.
I decided to take a break after three hours of driving. We had reached what used to be the shoreline before every ocean froze up. I put the car on autopilot, Husky was snoring. The surroundings outside were all white, miles across with parts of ships, submarines and airplanes sticking out of the icy surface. It was getting monotonous, and I dozed off somewhere between a frozen submarine turbine and a frozen whale carcass.
I woke up to Husky’s low growl, the onboard AI showed we had reached the other shoreline of the erstwhile San Francisco, about 900 km left. It was also the closest coastal city to the Vault and it took the least time, just a few more hours. I had some food and then took control of the wheel. We were halfway towards Reno, its past glimmer completely eroded. The wide main road was not as broken as I had assumed. I pulled along an almost crumbled highway towards East. The view of Reno’s welcome sign vanished after a while and I was greeted by an open desert, previously known as Nevada. The sand dunes were cubical in shape. I gathered that the debris from buildings had been completely devoured by the desert.
The left of the wheel suddenly started beeping red. The car sensors had picked up something moving through the sand. The screen on my right focused on a sand dune moving towards East. It was not fast but it was definitely long. It was definitely an animal. My eyes followed its movement under the sand, and I thought I saw a dead body, human out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t exactly surprised, just intrigued. If a settlement can exist in Cold Fields, people can be found in a desert too. It was cold outside the car as per the weather panel but Warner than Cold Fields. The body seemed to have absolutely no hair, obviously radiation poisoning. He barely had any clothes on him. I hadn’t realised the moving dune had reached the body. Then the body slowly disappear inside the dune. The dune didn’t stop moving even for a second. I wanted to observe the animal further but we had a goal to reach. It was evident that the world has changed in a manner that was beyond my imagination.
Finally, I arrived at my old refuge during the War, our Vault. If there was another person else in my place, he would have been overwhelmed with emotions. This place gave us a chance to survive but I felt nothing. Time takes away emotions slowly and I have lived long enough.
The main door was titanium reinforced but lack of care had taken its toll over time. It seemed as if nature was mocking me.
I took all the required stuff from my car and walked towards the belly of a giant beast, a dead one. The vault used to be always active during our stay, that day’s dead silence was eerie. The whole area reeked of radiation. Thankfully, our suits were built to protect me from extreme doses of radiation.
I’ll continue the rest in the evening.
