The following is released under the Creative Commons license. It’s a story I’ll flesh out later, once I do I’ll change the licensing, I just want to get a good base of the story. There’s 4 more parts to come.
Books filled the room from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. There was even a bookshelf on the back of the door. All the of the covers filled with real paper books. Amber couldn’t believe her eyes, this was the kind of thing you only heard about in school. There had been pictures on her tablet about the old, well, she couldn’t even think of the name as it had only been a foot note about the beginning of the original global government. But this, this was overwhelming, it had to be an allusion. The walls were so high that looking up made her a bit dizzy.
“Ok, where the projector? This can’t be real, these don’t exist anymore!” The words came out weakly and exasperating from Amber’s mouth,
“It’s not, but it does. Once upon a time they called them libraries. This is only a fraction of some of those long gone temples to words and prose. Before they were deemed an awful waste of space. Which predated the banning of most of them. Up near the top are the encyclopedia as they are a bit useless now. As one of these great poets said, learn from history or you are doomed to repeat it.”
The two of them just stood there for a bit, taking it all in.
“Wait,” started Amber, “you’ve read some of these?”
“Over half I think. The ones in English and Mandarin are ok, but I get lost in the ones in German, Gaelic, Finnish, and some other language that starts with an F. I spent the great majority of my childhood in here when it used to actually snow.” Mary got lost in thought for a great while. Amber just stared, gawking, and then starting to regain a bit of herself.
“But these things are illegal, how are you able to keep these if they are to be destroyed after being acclimated?” Amber surprised even herself with that question.
Mary didn’t skip a beat, “my Dad owns them, and it’s perfectly legal for him.”
“But that would mean that your dad would have to predate the war. There’s only supposed to be three people alive that old, and there’s no way your dad could be that old. The war made them all sterile at any rate. It’s very well documented that they had to wait until all the men that weren’t yet at puberty matured before they could begin to procreate and have any chance at our race surviving.” Amber was proud of herself.
But again, Mary didn’t skip a beat. “In theory, that’s true. And it’s a great theory, with a horrible implementation. My dad, like his three colleges, were different, special you might say. They were all given two side effects, one causing the other. My dad was given what amount to eternal youth, his body will not and can not age over the 31 years of age that he looks to be now. Mr. Saks, the museum curator at the capitol, has an infinite memory causing his brain to never be worse than it was at the end of the war. I’m really not sure how that helps, but dad says it means his body can’t figure out how to get old, so he doesn’t. Mr. Mud, the man we always see in the war films reminding us how bad war is, is similar to my dad apparently, but it has something to due with muscle density which is why he looks like he’s over a hundred years old. Mrs. Cobalt, the crow as my dad says, has saltwater in her blood, the saline acts as a preservative keeping her organs and mind working into her advanced years. They’re all similar, but slightly different. And as such, they’re all basically immortal is how I understand it.” Mary finally took a breath.
“That still doesn’t explain the amount of paper in this place, “ Amber quipped. Haughtily.
Mary sighed and started a new, “anyone who was of age before the law passed was allowed to keep their books and using paper. In theory that mean that it would die out at the end of the generation. Grandfathering is what they called it I think. Remember, that law happened before the war. My dad and his comrades were all just barely of age when the war broke out. And they are the last survivors.”
Amber’s wheels finally started to click in place, “but that means your dad is over 600 years old, at least!”
“This is true. And it’s why he and his friends only come out every couple generations, and mention how they are the descendants of the people they look like, when in fact they are those people. My dad got the idea from a book he read.” Mary stopped, looked at Amber, and really wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.
She soon found out. Amber passed out.
Door of Youth, part 1 by pyroturtle.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.