Chapter 29 #4
I went on. There was a Dark Ages exhibit, complete with a detailed knight in armor and, behind him, a dirty peasant bent under a backbreaking load.
The knight’s sword looked suspiciously robust, the metallic edge shining in the enhanced night vision.
I stepped into the exhibit—feeling an odd bit of guilty thrill, a little boy ducking past the crowd-control stanchions, afraid a guard would yell at him—and wrestled the sword from the knight’s armored hands.
It was heavy and solid. The edge was not finely honed, but it would chop wood or flesh if I had to swing it.
I almost thanked the empty suit of armor.
It was only a guess, but if the knight was from the Middle Ages, roughly fifteenth century CE, he was from a time that was technically closer to my own era than this museum was.
Eight hundred years closer. The empty suit of metal was a kindred spirit.
I hefted the sword, laying it flat on my shoulder, and continued, feeling a bit better to have something solid, metallic, and reasonably sharp in my hands.
The next display featured a miniature desert, and, in the middle, a book planted into the sand.
I peered at it for a moment, trying to figure out what it might mean.
The Koran, maybe? An image of Muhammad was out of the question, if the current version of Islam was anything like I remembered, so maybe this was the museum’s best effort.
I next found an American flag, tattered and dirty, beside detailed models of World War I–era British tanks and World War II–era American, British, Soviet, German, and Japanese aircraft carriers and fighter planes.
The museum had lumped the two great twentieth-century wars together and blurred the combatants.
Next was a full-sized model of Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
The model, in the deep shadows of the silent museum, looked eerie and prophetic.
There was more. It made me wonder at what the museum designers—and therefore, to some degree at least, the people of this time—thought important.
What events in history had stood out to them as they made this timeline of human history?
What I had seen so far skewed toward Western history.
Because the museum was in North America? I could only guess.
After the World Wars there was a submarine replica, complete with open hatches along the top to show the bullet noses of the nukes stacked inside.
Above the model was a Soviet flag, bloodred, with the hammer and sickle in the corner.
Next to that was a full-sized model Chevy Impala, circa the mid-1960s or so, complete with long hood, leather bench seats, and muscular fenders.
Even in night vision, the black car gleamed.
Then came a series of grainy photos of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And September 11, 2001, complete with a small model of the World Trade Center.
On the wall behind the model were the infamous photos of the airliner slamming into the second tower.
Next to it, a model of an American attack helicopter, in front of a photo of what looked like a group of Middle Eastern men staring at the camera, holding AK-47s.
I went on, the exhibits blurring together even as I wondered what Anjari would have made of all this, with her historian’s mind. Maybe she, or her students, had even contributed to this place. I had no idea how old it was.
As I went along I started having trouble recognizing things: a model of an oil barrel, leaking black liquid onto the sand around it; a wall-sized photo of the Chinese flag on fire, blurry screaming faces below it; a model of a hurricane the size of a continent; an aerial photo of a mushroom cloud, immense and terrible as it parted the clouds, and, next to it, two crossed flags, one of which I thought was India’s.
The next exhibit was another large photo display. I stopped before it, not understanding. Then recognition hit me like a slap, and I took a surprised step back, almost falling over another display. “Oh my God.”
“What is it?” Lyle asked.
“It’s Berkeley. It’s me, at Berkeley, right before you came for me.”
“I see it now,” Lyle said. His voice was subdued.
I took in the details. The crowd was seated, looking at me with wide eyes and rapt faces.
The resolution was incredible, fine enough to pick out the surprised expression on my face.
There was some writing on a stand before the photo, but I didn’t understand it.
Squinting, I held up the touchpad on my arm.
There was a language icon somewhere in the touchpad’s software.
I tapped around until I found it. I waited to input the characters I was seeing.
But the touchpad sat there, glowing, until a message popped up.
Please turn interface to the writing in question or speak to begin translation.
I contemplated that for a few seconds, then held the pad toward the stand. The pad beeped, and when I looked at it again there was new writing on the screen.
The Traveler, it read. This is one of the earliest pieces of that still of this famous—or infamous—historical figure.
A of physics, the Traveler is a normal human who is traveling forward through time, at greater and greater .
Born sometime in the late Post-Industrial / early Resource Restricted Age in the of the United States of America, the Traveler has been several times throughout history to date.
A religion was constructed around him, and became significant during the decades-long Wars.
The last of the Traveler was right here in a little over five hundred years ago.
If the is true, and if you happen to be in about two centuries, you might get to meet him in person!
I let my arm fall and stood there, staring at the picture of myself.
I wondered, numbly, if this was what US presidents felt when they walked into a wax museum and saw themselves, life-sized, standing there for all to see.
It was bizarre. Surreal. I kept looking at the faces in the crowd.
They looked like people having their dreams fulfilled. Their beliefs justified.
It had turned ugly so quickly.
“You remember that?” I asked.
“I do.”
“A pseudo-slash-false religion, huh?”
“Indeed.” For a heartbeat I could almost see the wry expression on Lyle’s face. Fifty-one-year-old Lyle, the Lyle who’d rescued me from the quad at Berkeley. “I never claimed it was anything except what it was.”
I thought of the broken tablet I had tossed into the water.
Again, I considered, briefly, asking Lyle, this voice of my dead son, if he had a digital copy of the Word he could access.
Or if he just remembered all of it, had it there in the tangles of his quantum memory store, and could recite it to me verbatim.
Lyle, reading it to me in his own voice, right there in the darkened museum at the end of the world.
I didn’t ask. The moment didn’t feel right. If I was being honest, though, I didn’t feel right. I was at, or nearing, capacity.
I forced myself to leave “my” exhibit. There were more displays, including a detailed model of Mars hanging, seemingly without support, above the floor, but I stopped paying attention.
I walked, sword flat on my shoulder, barely watching where I was going.
My brain shut off for a little while and my feet carried me forward.
I woke from the reverie in a public cafeteria.
Blank, empty rows of salad bars and open refrigeration units stood against the walls in the darkness.
Beyond the food area was an open space filled with tables and chairs.
Enough to seat a few hundred people. The walls were glass, or at least transparent, without framing.
The builders had managed to create a single, sweeping, curved piece of transparent wall, like a flattened dome.
And they’d put cafeteria tables under it.
Much like the glass ceiling in the central area of the museum, debris and wreckage covered the dome.
But there was some space uncovered, allowing the gray daylight to stream in, and allowing me, from the shadows, to look out.
The museum was on a peninsula jutting into the ocean.
The cafeteria was on the water’s edge, so waves coming in crashed against the dome.
I could see under the water. The ocean had the same gray tone as the sky.
Flakes of ash floated briefly on the surface before sinking beneath the waves.
In the far distance lay the curve of the horizon, hazy and dark.
Closer in sat dozens of wrecked ships or the remains of floating buildings.
Off to my left, visible through the pile of debris, was the skeletal outline of a colossal pyramid.
It was tilted to one side, with jagged sections missing from its angled flanks.
It was hard to grasp its size without any reference.
But it was large enough to dwarf a massive ship beached on a reef a thousand or so yards from the coast. That ship, all curved, sweeping lines and surfaces, had a broken back: the bow and the aft sections both angled up into the air, while the central portion was a splintered depression.
It was also on fire, even though it looked like it had been beached for decades.
A lazy plume of black smoke rose from the aft section.
The sight held me there until the surreal lost its luster and I got hungry. I roused myself and went foraging.