The Megaspiracy

1850 - The Others

The dawn broke. A ship loomed in the sky. Silent, immobile, impossible. Voices echoed inside the metal hull. 

“Why are we here?” a young voice asked.

“We can’t know. You know that. We never know,” another voice answered in a deep baritone.

“Only at the very end?” the young voice asked.

“Yes,” The old voice confirmed.

“Alright then. When will it be time?”

“Soon. Soon,” the old voice said.

“I can’t believe this is happening again. Will I forget everything?”

“Yes. Everything.”

“It seems so frightening. Surely there must be something that I am allowed to remember.”

“No.”

“One small thing,” the voice pleaded.

“Reminiscence of your knowledge may appear when needed, at a given time. You don’t need to know anything from the start.”

“What if I really do?”

“You just want it for comfort, isn’t that right?”

There was a pause and a sigh.

“Yes,” the young voice said.

“Everything will be well. You will find comfort in other things. You will learn how to find it. You will be a new person. So that fear will be completely gone.”

“Yes.”

The ship hummed and began its descent. In a different part of the ship, two other voices could be heard.

“Terrible moisture. I’ll get mold in my lungs again,” a young, male voice said and coughed.

“Yes, well maybe this time there will be something we’ll be able to do about it,” another voice said.

“You mean?”

“This time, we’ll have tools and medicine,”

“Are you sure? I thought it was against the rules?”

“The rules had been changed.”

“Why?”

“Terrible prognoses this time. We’d perish in two decades.”

“Oh, that would have been unfortunate.”

“Yes.”

“Will we have any eternal masters appointed?”

“Several.”

“Will we know who they are?”

“No.”

“That’s one level up.”

***

A small crowd stood awkwardly outside a small building. They had all been given generic clothing: black wool trousers, black jackets and top hats. Their memory had been erased. There were a lot of children, transported here from the other place.They looked serious in their dark clothes. Serious, resolved, mature for their age. They were adults in small bodies. An older woman stood a little distance away from the main group. She was instructing a group of girls.

“You must wear a corset every day. The gravity here is stronger, you need to support your back or your discs will compress. It’s very important. There are rules to follow. Social protocols. Religion. You need to go outside a lot. The oxygen levels here are significantly lower. This, you need to remember. Soon, we will forget everything we know, about where we came from,” she said hastily. They had little time to get settled. After three days, they will become the new people. From then on, everyone will be on their own. And no one will remember.

***

“I must remember, I must remember…” Ishmael murmured. He felt old. Much older than his old body.

“What?!” Gotta, his adopted child, yelled from the kitchen.

“I must remember.”

“Remember what?”

“I… I don’t remember anymore,”

“You don’t remember what?”

“What it was that I was supposed to remember… I feel like I’m about to go insane.”

“Let’s go for a walk,” Gotta said. 

Minutes later, Ishmael and Gotta stood on a ridge overlooking the cold sea. It was autumn. It was the autumn of the last age. When the cold wind rose, Ishmael felt the years in his bones. He was Gotta’s guardian, she was only thirteen. What will happen to her when he dies? Gotta twirled around on the yellow grass. She wore a linen dress and a short wool cape, but she didn’t seem to mind the cold.

“It’s a beautiful world. Look at those trees and birds and the vastness of it!” she said.

“It’s the only world we know.” Ishmael said, slightly surprised, as if it just dawned on him.

“Is it? Didn’t we just get here?” Gotta said and stopped.

“No. We’ve always lived here,” Ishmael answered a little puzzled.

“Right. Not in the old world.”

“This is the new world. But it’s called that, because many years ago people came here from a place called Europe.”

“Hundreds of years,” Gotta wondered, “Shouldn’t really be called new anymore then, eh?”

“What are you aggravated about? You don’t seem to make any sense,” Ishmael said, irritated and sighed heavily. He knew she was right and it made him angry. Her mind and memory were young. The things she said knocked on the door to his memories, but those doors had been now bolted shut, rusted and fused with the haze of his aging mind.

“Nothing here really makes sense,” Gotta shrugged. He said nothing. Gotta climbed a large boulder, grasping at the edges with her weak, thin hands. She reached the top and looked over the cold sea. Stretching her arms out, streaks of thin, brown hair dancing in the wind, she gazed at the tumultuous clouds and sighed dramatically.

“We are but pilgrims. Strangers to this strange world. It is strange to us and we are strange to it,” she said in a theatrical tone.

“You’ve gone mad.” Ishmael said weakly.

2055 - The Descendants

The cave was filled with snow. It must have come through the opening in the ceiling. They had set up camp a mile away the day before. The gigantic ice cave was the first site on their list. The metal detector went wild, as Charlie climbed up the snow heap. 

“What is in there?” said Charlie as he pushed away a block of ice. 

“Charlie, look out!” Annie yelled from the bottom of the cave.

Too late. Charlie’s headlamp swept the high ceiling as the heap of snow tumbled down taking him to the bottom. The snow came down in a tiny avalanche, revealing a dark, metal shape. 

“Are you OK?” Annie asked. He took her hand and pulled himself up. 

“Yeah,” he said, brushing the snow off his clothes.

“What is that?” Annie shone her flashlight on the metal object. The oblong shape was huge.

“Let’s get the shovels,” said Charlie.

“Looks like some kind of transporter,” said Annie.

“You can go ahead and date it,”

“OK,” she said.

There was a moment of struggling with the backpack in the dark and a brief silence as Annie set up the proton analyzer. Charlie came back with the shovels.

“It’s three hundred sixty five years old,” Annie said in a weak voice. 

“That’s impossible. No one had that kind of technology back then,” Charlie scoffed. He took the shovel and started digging.

“That’s just the age of the alloy. This… object could have been crafted at a later time,” she said.

“Still. It doesn’t add up,” Charlie said, digging deeper and deeper into the snow.

“Maybe it’s alien,” Annie wondered.

“Then why does it say door five on this bit?” he asked, pointing at the surface he just uncovered.

“What?” Annie said. She climbed up to see it. The pictographs and signs looked oddly modern.

“Right here. Look, there are pictures,” Charlie said.

“What is that?”

“Looks like an exit sign,”

The sun outside the cave rose higher, shining a cold arctic light on the entire area, illuminating the cave a little. It was still dark, but now a dark gray. Charlie and Annie didn’t notice it. They were too preoccupied with what they just discovered. The yellow paint had peeled in places, but the signs were still visible. They managed to uncover more surface.

“Look! It’s the same configuration as the one etched on the stone,” said Charlie.

“Right. What does it mean?” asked Annie.

“I don’t know.”

They did some more digging but two hours later they still couldn’t agree on what the object could be. Most of it was still under the snow. Charlie sat down and took out two protein bars. They ate in silence, thinking.

“It’s a submarine,” Charlie concluded.

“It can’t be,” Annie said, shaking her head.

“Look at the hatch here,” he said, pointing at something that was clearly a human sized door.

“There were no submarines three hundred years ago,” she sighed.

“Maybe we simply never find any,” Charlie said and shrugged.

“There would have been accounts,” Annie said.

“Unless someone destroyed them,”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“Maybe there was a reason? Something we don’t know anything about.”

“But that must mean that all of history is fabricated?”

“Not all of it. Just the important parts.”

“But that would be so much work!” Annie gasped.

“To write and publish ten or fifteen false books? Not really. What is the oldest book you have held in your hands anyway?”

“That would be…Well, I can’t recall,”

“Look at how perplexed you are, Annie. You worldview would be shattered if it were true.”

“Yes, but…”

“How far would you go to protect it?”

“It’s just impossible,” Annie said with a dose of scientific confidence.

“Right, it’s impossible, so let’s just bury it under the snow, cover up the hole and pretend like nothing ever happened. How about that?”

She opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again.

“I…” she gasped, “...need some fresh air,” she said weakly.

She climbed clumsily up to the opening, panting, grunting and shaking with emotions.. While she was outside, Charlie took out the laser and made some measurements. The object was about sixty feet tall. He carefully scraped off a small bit of metal and put it in a tube. There was no rust or corrosion. It must have been an unknown alloy.

Twenty minutes passed and Annie wasn’t coming back, so Charlie climbed out of the cave to check on her. He could hear her voice. He got out into the daylight. The snow glittered in the sun. His eyes hurt from the light. He saw her, lit up by the sun, a little distance away. She was smiling, nodding and wiping her nose. She must have been crying earlier. Why didn’t I follow her immediately, he thought. He ran up to her.

“Yes, it must be,” she said. He realized she was talking to someone on the phone. He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him.

“Annie, what are you doing?” he whispered. He ripped her phone out of her hand. 

“What? I was just talking to the dean. He said these readings aren’t always accurate. It’s basically a machine taking a wild guess,”

“Oh my God. What did you do?!” he yelled.

“Hey, give me my phone back!” Annie said.

“Did you give them the location?” he asked. The site was a twenty minute hike from base camp, so they would have a chance, he thought to himself.

“Why?”

“Did you?”

“Yes. They knew where we were anyway,” she said and held her arms up.

“Oh jeez Annie,” he sighed and shook his head, “I thought you were-”

“What?”

“Nothing,”

“What?!”

“Nothing,” he said. I thought you were brave, he thought.

***

The soldiers were exceptionally polite. 

“I’m sorry,” Annie mouthed as the helicopter lifted them off. Charlie shook his head. They sat in silence the entire trip, huddled together on a narrow bench. There must be a way out of this, he thought. He knew no one would ever learn about their discovery. The captain made them sign some papers as soon as they landed. Charlie sighed heavily. He knew she wasn’t really sorry. Why did she cry earlier though? Why was it so hard to accept a new truth?

***

The Diary of Gotta Liebeskind, March 3rd, 1851

“We were smaller than the old people. The elderfolk. The elderfolk came in various sizes. But most of them were much taller than us. When we entered their homes, we’d look odd. Out of place. We didn’t match the tall doors and windows. We looked like dwarves. The splendor of the ornate moldings contrasted with our weary faces. They brought us here to start a new era. An age of technology. The elderfolk had to go. They were dreamers, lunatics. They knew magic. They wouldn’t make good slaves. But our children would.”