History

Hello there all, Have a look at this, a short story I wrote recently. It now has a title, too. So here I present: History.

The stag tensed, sensing a disturbance, and the moment was lost. He cursed as the deer bounded out of sight. Picking up his bow he ran noisily after it, crashing through the dense undergrowth. The signs of the animal’s passing were clear and he had wounded it already. Surely it must be running out of steam now, he though.

Daid’s legs burned and a pool of sweat was collecting between his shoulder blades. If he didn’t catch the beast soon he’d run out of strength himself.

Without realizing, Daid burst into a clearing, devoid of even the meanest of plants, the tree line shorn abruptly as if by design. The soil was sandy and loose, great clouds of it were blown up by his and the deer’s racing strides. Squatting in the centre of this incongruous desert was a wide structure of some unknown rock, so unlike the wood and metal constructions of Daid’s village.

The roof of the building was almost entirely absent, but it looked as if it had been blown open from the inside rather than succumbing to the elements, as the weathered facing showed it had endured.

Was it some kind of temple? He wondered. There were odd markings above its rusted door, a circle with three distended rectangles pointing inwards. The language under it was strange but he recognised one word: Danger.

He approached the entrance with some anxiety. What if it were a temple? He thought. Would the Gods be angry with his trespass? Curiosity won, as it so often does, and he stepped up to the crumbling portal.

He slowly inserted the point of his spear into the crack in the door. The metal inside was degraded to an extreme degree and the only thing holding the structure together was a smooth yellowed frame of some type. Applying a little pressure caused the door to bend and then crack. The remains of the entrance collapsed in a heap of dust and fragments.

Upon entering the structure he immediately noticed yawning, roughly circular chasm that spanned almost the whole of the floor. There were no interior walls on this level, either they had decomposed into nothing with time, he decided, or this space had been an entrance hall.

When Daid had been nine years old, his father had taken him to see the great temple in New Karrans, but he had only been able to see the topmost entrance, a small, heavily fortified concrete slab. While the temple exuded protection and safety, the last savior of his ancestors, this now place gave off a feeling of vague unease, as if it was designed to keep something in rather than out.

As he unslung his pack and removed the braided rope, laboriously fashioned from horsehair into a strong but light cord, he considered what he was doing. The buck was almost certainly long gone by now and he faced the prospect of returning to his village empty handed. Still he had never seen the like of this place and it was worth the loss if he found something of use among this aged, broken ruin.

He tied the rope to a solid looking stone pillar, though he was hard pressed to find one that did not crumble at his touch.

The second floor down was unremarkable. The damage to the centre was just a severe and all that remained were a few pieces of interior wall, bleached almost smooth by the elements. Once again Daid wondered what had calamity had caused this destruction. He even briefly considered that it might be the enemy, but he quickly dismissed this thought. There had been no trace of the enemy for hundreds of years now, and the great temple had only survived because of its location in the side of a mountain.

The fourth floor was illuminated only because it was noon, and the sun was directly overhead. The floor was intact but a thick film of watery mud coated it. Daid supposed that the sun never shone long enough here to dry it out. Some sort of foreign metal boxes lined one wall and puddles of this same metal and rare glass were burned into the stone on the ground walls. More signs lined this room all bearing the same moniker: Danger.

Most interesting to him however, was a tiny room contained in a hard stone cuboid. The ground inside appeared somewhat unstable but he stepped in anyway.

He wondered what the purpose of this odd room was. Along one wall was a dirty panel. As he brushed the muck and grime off he could see a series of small buttons and a number above each one. Almost without realising he pushed one of these experimentally.

The entrance to the room closed with a screech. At once a rumbling sound could be heard and the room began to noticeably drop. Daid crouched, awaiting the impact. Instead of a crash the room simply slid to a halt, dozens of metres below its original position. The doors slid open, a little more easily this time. A little shaken by the violence of the descent, Daid tiptoed carefully across the new room. The only illumination came from the tiny light inside the square and a small blinking dot on a glass sheet on the other side of the room.

“Welcome” said a hidden voice. There was a long pause, long enough for Daid to examine the glass panel now in front of his face. The symbols were unfamiliar, and the only recognizable section was a small face in the upper left corner of the screen.

“Welcome” the voice repeated. The face on the screen moved in line with the word, and Daid jumped back in shock.

“I’m really glad you’ve come”. The voice sounded genuinely eager. Daid realised he was holding his breath and let it out all at once. His body shook hard, more due to his terror than the cold. He had never seen anything like this.

“Please sit, I have no chair for you, and I apologize.” Daid steadied himself and said “Who are you?” His voice was thick and his words came out in a rush. He wanted to turn and run, but he had no idea where the exit was.

“Who am I?” He wasn’t being facetious; he actually seemed to be considering the question. “My name is Gordon”.

He appeared to be puzzled as how to continue the introduction. “I am a computer”

There was no word in Daid’s vocabulary that corresponded to this term. The word sounded like the phrase in the old language meaning ‘thought maker’ or ‘idea maker’

“Wh-why am I here? Where is the exit-how can I get out?” Again he rushed his statement, the fear etched into the sentence.

“You want to leave? But there’s so much to discuss.” The computer’s voice sounded sad and a little desperate. There was no malice in Daid, and despite his terror he felt a little compassion for the creature. Whoever he was, he must have been stuck here for a long time. A long time without anyone to talk to, or to listen.

“Uh…uh…no” he quickly amended. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

His voice became animated, as if he had been practicing this for a long, long time. “Many things, Mr, uh?”

“Daid. Just call me Daid”

“Daid, then, many things, the history of this world. I know so much about this world. Your history and the history of your forbearers. Their rise and their downfall.”

Daid wasn’t really in a hurry, he supposed. He sat on the ground, which was warm and strangely soft. The light from the screen bathed the area around it in a soft glow and Daid felt a lessening of his fear. The computer paused a second, and then began.

“It began a long time ago, far from here.”