The Museum of Lost Souls

The Digital Museum is housed on a hillside. It nestles into the landscape as if it has always been there. The locals call it The Museum of Lost Souls. Cavernous rooms have been quarried out, almost like an ancient giant burial chamber, each housing relics of data sorted by date or themes. It is the only place left where you can look into the past and see what life was once like. 

Michael has worked here for three years. He knows it's a lucky position to have. If it wasn't for this, he would have been employed on the recycling plant, digging plastic out of old landfill sites, pulling shards from baked earth, while wearing an oxygen tank on his back. Or perhaps, he would be working on the tree regeneration project, planting saplings and willing them to survive. Green was a rare colour these days, each new green leaf brought hope and joy as it uncurled from its bud. More often than not, the buds would turn brown and drop from dry twigs. True, working with trees was worthy and important work, but he was pleased he had escaped it. The thought of days filled with shovelling human waste, attempting to put nutrients back into the ground turned his stomach. At least here in the museum, it didn't smell and he is thankful to be working underground, away from thin air and harsh sun. 

There are only four of them here, working in the museum, all highly trained in the history and application of old data systems. The hardest job, however, is to keep the old generator going to run the exhibits. On Saturdays, people wander in gawping at how life once was. Michael watches them, their curiosity and their shaking of heads as they look at what was lost.  So many trees, the lush grass and clear rivers full of fish, things they were all now trying to restore.

The biggest cavern holds the main department. Public and Political. Michael finds it demoralising and depressing working in this department. A virtual reality world is constructed from old news footage. Here, you can walk amongst famine, where women hold babies with bloated bellies, walk between sandy husks of houses where the ground shakes with each missile strike. You can also watch seabirds as they struggle against oil slicks in the oceans, feathers and beaks coated in black tar. In the walk-through of the twentieth century, war and disasters hang suspended in the air, tension mounting, priming the viewer for the events of the twenty-first century and the day that everything changed.  

In the course of daily work, employees relive these events over and over again. The repetition has created a numbness amongst them. As Michael goes about his routine work he hears speeches streamed out of the walls of rock, politicians full of their own importance and how they would create a better world. Promises of more money, better jobs, higher standards of living, a neatly packaged utopia. The evidence never backed up all the political talk, from what Michael can see. 

To work here, you are examined on emotional stability and resilience at six-monthly intervals. This is partly to monitor the employee's aptitude for working in this department, but also as a safeguard for other unknown events of horror that may surface. 

In an offshoot from the main area, Michael sits at a desk piecing together previous lives from remnants of the old computers and hard drives. He tries to match still images known as photographs to e-mails and messages, or faded traces of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Michael prefers working here, looking at the personal stories and details of day to day lives. Sometimes he sees personalities emerge, people he's drawn to as he watches the interaction between friends, beers at a picnic or families celebrating birthdays. No one has birthdays now. Michael has his favourites, lives that he returns to again and again, in particular, a family called the Neilsons. He likes the notion that he has somehow adopted them. He takes comfort viewing this now extinct lifestyle, of Brian and Lynne. They were about his age, maybe a year or two older and had two small children. Their house looked warm and clean, and they shared it with a cat and a dog. Bank accounts showed they had barely enough money to live on, there was always an unpaid bill at the end of each month, but they seemed happy, apart from the time that Brian ran over the cat with his truck. Michael saw the vets bill, and the statements they posted on Facebook. 

He supposed his great grandparents lived like this, with cars, television, lights that you could easily switch on and off and central heating. The idea of needing to heat living space seems strange now. Michael hasn't come across any digital evidence of his ancestors yet. He yearns to see them, to find them in the digital labyrinth. It would be like finding a part of himself. It has become his very own personal secret mission. He wonders if his colleagues were also searching for their own past. He can't ever ask them. Personal searches are not only deemed self-indulgent but a sackable offence. It was ironic that they were holding the past of so many other people, but not allowed to delve into their own family history. 

Michael's work is a welcome escape from the barren world outside, it also takes his mind off his usually empty stomach, unless he is looking at pictures of food. He takes pride in his work, the understanding of ancient technology and the magic of making it work, also the detective work, the craft of weaving recovered information together. It is a privilege to be able to delve into this world long gone, full of extremes, love and hate, sentiment and warnings. In the real world outside, there is nothing left but to survive and try and heal the earth.

Sometimes there are moving images, video or film they had called it then. These files are full of happy faces, people laughing and having fun. He knows that life was not always like that for these people, he has analysed enough data to know that many dark truths sometimes lurk behind the public facades. The work isn't always what his friends call 'nice', sometimes the work is sickening. War and devastation is one thing, but last week he found a hard drive full of naked children cowering in fear from a middle-aged man. He threw up, there and then on the stone floor. He had heard about this sort of thing from old news, but this was the first time he had actually seen anything like this. A long debate ensued with his co-workers about what to do with this particular computer. Michael wanted to smash it to the floor. One of them said that perhaps it should be kept, as otherwise they were censoring the past. They all argued about what should be done. Michael took matters into his own hands and destroyed all of it. He was immediately sent for emotional rehabilitation and was told to take the rest of the week off. It didn't stop the nightmares though. 

Michael came back to work earlier this week. Something had changed inside him. The pride in his work was gone. He questioned what they were doing in The Museum of Lost Souls. He loaded images up of the Neilson family onto the big screens in front of him, hoping to be soothed by their smiling faces, but this did not feel right either. He slumped across his desk, tears oozed from his eyes and he cried until his diaphragm shook with guttural grief for them. This family, who were almost perfect, little did they realise what was ahead of them. 

Michael called a meeting with his co-workers. He announced that he had spent enough time in the past and was going to leave. They tried to persuade him to stay, that his work was valuable, and the museum was precious, worth all the hard work, no matter how painful the truths it uncovered. They even suggested another emotional rehabilitation session. He told them it was no use. Tomorrow he starts on the tree regeneration project.