JS: I’m not. I’m being a realist. The first computers ever built by man were massive things that took up entire floors of buildings and required massive amounts of cooling. None of them could read these disks. By the time you printed and learned enough to build a computer, which could read these things, and leaving size out of the equation for now, the disks would probably have lost their data.
SK: At least some of the knowledge would be saved.
JS: But the wrong knowledge.
SK: What? You just said that the computers you have couldn’t last long enough to print out all of these books, did you not?
JS: True.
SK: If that is the case, our first order of business should be to learn enough to build new computers so we can salvage as much knowledge as possible.
JS: You would be saving the wrong knowledge.
SK: How can you say that?
JS: That encyclopedia disk won’t teach you enough to build a computer starting with nothing but sand, crude oil and copper ore. A creative mind could get most of the way there using it but there are many, many other texts you would need and standards you would have to learn, if I even have them all.
SK: Are you trying to tell me you know how to use a computer and most everything else about it but did not save the information on how to build one?
JS: You are asking a point-in-time question.
SK: Well how about right now for a point in time?
JS: If you have all of the cards, drives and components still in factory boxes, I can build a computer in about an hour. If I’m required to start with nothing but sand, copper ore, and crude oil, forget about it!
SK: And you chose not to save this information?
JS: Remember that disaster recovery plan we talked about?
SK: Yes.
JS: Well, hindsight is 20/20.
SK: 20/20?
JS: My God, you don’t even have eye doctors in this new cycle!
SK: We have…glasses.
JS: But you don’t know how to make them or test a person’s vision.
SK: Correct.
JS: Which is why focusing on the knowledge required to build a computer would be salvaging the wrong information. There are many other disks on that shelf. Complete sets of medical and drug books. There are chemistry books, which will teach you how to make many chemicals that do not exist naturally in nature. You will learn about antibiotics and antiseptics. You will learn how to diagnose many different types of ailments, both common and rare, along with many different types of surgery to both remove and repair various organs. Some will cover proper nutrition and others will tell you how to properly prepare portions of plants and animals you now believe are toxic to humans.
SK: You would have us focus on saving this small portion rather than trying to save all of it?
JS: This is what you need to save the human race. With a sufficient population and a desire to learn, the children you educate from the books we do save will eventually be able to re-create many of the wonders the previous cycle had. Please note the key phrase, “sufficient population.”
You will need tens of thousands of people devoting their entire lives to the sciences. They will need hundreds of thousands of people devoting their lives to the building and acquiring of things the scientists need to advance the species. Those people will require thousands of people devoted to checking their health and patching them up when they are either hurt or sick.
Lastly, you will need a large and well-maintained infrastructure. This means electricity, along with clean running water, both hot and cold, for all. It means a network of roads and bridges, which make travel both speedy and safe. It also means you will need various forms of communication. To start with, you will need an efficient and well-organized system to deliver books, packages and the written word. Once that is in place, you can think about inventing the telephone.
SK: Telephone? Book delivery system?
JS: The first set of books you need to print are those encyclopedias. They will tell you of many wonderful things that existed. They won’t tell you exactly how to make them, at least not all of them, but they will get your minds working.
Be warned!Very bad things will be discussed in those books as well. The point of those books was to educate, not pass judgment. Yes, you will find information about both nuclear power and nuclear weapons in there. Ignore it! It wasn’t a good idea! Tell anyone who doesn’t believe that to spend a week deep inside a forbidden zone and that will eliminate them as a future problem.
SK: That’s rather harsh. First you say we need to breed like rabbits, then you say we need to kill people off for their thoughts.
JS: Trust me, lady. That thought needs to be killed off! Take a very good look at any forbidden zone you choose and tell me “it couldn’t really be that bad.” We had a hundred years and computers that could think way faster than any given scientist and we never figured out how to clean up after it. What kind of chance do you think you have?
SK: Alright, I see your point. It just seems cruel to tease us with a library large enough to provide over one hundred different books to every known living person and still have titles left on the shelf, then say we can’t have it all.
JS: I’m a realist. Like I told you, it is the cost of time.
SK: You could have sought us out?
JS: And had I died on the journey, either from bandits or wild animals or walking into a forbidden zone before I realized it, where would you be?
SK: You just seem cruel. Like it was your plan to taunt us all along.
JS: No! It was my parent’s plan to have more children and have a subset of my family begin learning what we needed, while another portion went looking for a trustworthy civilization to share this knowledge with. That plan took a shit when I buried both of them before time forced grandfather and I to seal this bunker! By that time, there was such a panic, we could tell no one we had a bunker. There were mobs in all of the streets ransacking every basement and sewer system looking for bunkers. Less than a thousand yards from here was a bunker built by another family we knew. The mobs found them. Their outer door did not hold. All that remains is a piece of a concrete wall and a small part of a floor.
My family prepared. Our bunker was built out of a bank vault. The mobs didn’t get through our door. They didn’t find any of our air, water or sewage, so they couldn’t force us out. After a few days, they were gone. Then I had the long, boring wait. Eventually I received transmissions from a few weather satellites we knew about. They told me when it was finally safe to open the door.
In the meantime, I sat down there for two years. I had to seal up my decomposing grandfather as best I could when he died. I didn’t blame him for dying. All was lost when the other family’s bunker was ravaged by the mobs. We had planned on hooking up with them, then trying to locate some of the other bunkers they knew about in other places so we could begin rebuilding the world. When they died, the last part of our plan died, so there really was no reason for grandfather to continue on.
For two years, I lived in solitary confinement with no hope of parole. I had to limit my use of electricity because I had no realistic idea how long I would be down there or if my power source would last the entire time. I watched one movie per week. I spent twenty minutes on one of the computers trying to obtain readings from the weather satellites. I spent a half hour with a short-wave radio and scanner, listening for other survivors. The rest of the time, I either read one of these books with the light provided by one high-efficiency light bulb or I slept. I bathed once per week and did laundry once every three months.
Don’t you dare call me cruel. I went through puberty completely alone. I had to kill my first man at age fourteen, when a band of psychotic scavengers decided this place would be ripe for the picking. I had to dig their graves myself because if I left them out in the open, they would attract the animals.
I sacrificed for you!The first civilization large enough to reach me, which didn’t seem like a band of roving thieves or cannibals, or people who were left staked out in the sun too long. I spent two years in solitary without the comfort or distraction of another individual.
That other family, they had a daughter about my age. I didn’t know it at the time but I assume now both sets of parents thought the worst case was that we would have to populate the planet. I’m seventy-nine-years old and because of the secrets I had to save for the next cycle, I have never known the comfort of a woman and, at my age now, I never will.
SK: Perhaps it was a poor choice of words.
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You are reading a special promotional version of “John Smith – Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars.” This is the third book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:
