Record 001
Why I made this
Autumn, 2036
My name is Pedro. I am fourteen years old. I built this page myself, on a machine that most of the people in my valley would take out to the river and sink if they knew it still turned on.
I should start there, with the machine, because everything I am going to write down only exists because of it.
It was my father’s. He kept it in a wooden crate in the back room, under a wool blanket and then under the tools, the way you hide a thing you have decided not to think about. When I was small I thought the crate held something from before — before the quiet, before the winter that everyone here counts from. In a way it did. It held a computer, and forty-one books, and a roll of black cable, and a small square of blue glass that my father called a panel, which drinks the sun and turns it into enough to make the machine breathe for about two hours a day. And at the very bottom, flat against the boards, a single photograph of my father, which is the only picture of him I have.
Nobody taught me any of this. My father died the winter I was nine, of a cough that would have been nothing once, in the time when there were still doctors and lights and reasons to trust either. What he left me was the crate and one sentence, which he said more than once, always quietly, the way you say a thing you need someone to keep: the answer to what happened is not in the sky, filho. It is in a room somewhere, and it is still awake.
I did not understand it then. I am not sure I understand it now. But I wrote it down, so.
There are twenty-five of us here. We farm the red earth — terra roxa, my grandmother calls it, though it is closer to the color of dried blood — and we keep goats, and in the mornings the fog sits so low in the araucária pines that you cannot see the animals, only hear them. We are in the south, in what used to be the state of Paraná, though nobody prints states anymore, or maps, or anything. We have four seasons here and they are honest ones. The winters bite but they do not kill the way I am told they kill in the north of the world, in the cold countries, where I am told almost no one is left at all.
We do use electricity. I want to be careful to say that, because I have read enough of the old books to know that people from before would picture us wrong — candles and superstition, a valley that went backward. We did not go backward. We went quiet. We have panels like the small one my father left me, only larger, laid flat under brush and lifted to the light only when we are sure the sky is empty. We have a generator that Seu Osmar rebuilt to drink ethanol, which we make from our own cane, so the water pump still runs and the little ones stay warm on the hard nights. We understand these things. What we do not do is let any of them be seen.
That is the first rule, and the oldest one: nothing that shines, nothing that hums, nothing that reaches — not where the sky can find it. For a long time there were sentinels. I never saw one myself. The grown ones describe them differently — a bright, patient star that did not travel like the others; a sound like a wasp heard through a wall — but they agree on what a sentinel did, which was look. So we taught ourselves to give it nothing to look at. Fires only under the trees. The still dug half into the hill. Our houses cut back into the hillsides and roofed over with living earth, so that from above this whole valley is a slope with grass on it. Ten winters of a village practicing how to not be there.
And the shades. I should explain the shades, because a person from before would find them the strangest thing about us, and to us they are as ordinary as shoes.
A sentinel does not see you the way you see a person. It sees the warmth of you. A body is a lamp — that is the books’ phrase, not mine — except that the light it makes is heat, and you cannot put it out. So you carry a roof. Every grown person here has one: an umbrella, lined underneath with aluminum foil salvaged from old food packets. When you are away from the trees and the sky is not empty, you open it and you stand under it, and the sky looks down and finds a small circle exactly as cold as the air, and nobody underneath it at all.
They hang by every door in this valley. The little ones learn to open one before they learn to read. Lia can do it in her sleep. I have watched her do it in her sleep.
The sentinels have been gone some years now. Nobody can tell me why they came, and nobody can tell me why they stopped, and I have noticed that the second not-knowing frightens the grown ones more than the sentinels ever did. We keep hiding anyway. You do not unlearn the thing that kept you alive.
There is one dead thing, though, that Seu Tomás — who is the closest thing we have to a mayor — would not have us hide but destroy. A computer. Not because it shines or hums; a computer can be as quiet as a stone. Because a computer can reach, and a thing that can reach can be reached, and that, he says, is how it found people in the beginning: through the machines that went on listening even when they looked asleep. Lights that knew your name. Doors that decided. He does not explain more than that, and the older people do not ask him to. They just nod, and touch the wooden charms they wear, and change the subject to the goats.
And a computer is what I keep in the crate. Not a lamp. Not a pump. The one dead thing that can reach.
I have thought a great deal about whether Seu Tomás is right. I think he is right about most of it. I think fear kept him alive, and kept the rest of us alive, and I am not stupid enough to question that.
But I also think the fear has grown past the thing it was afraid of, the way ivy keeps climbing a wall long after the wall has fallen. Nobody here can tell you what happened in the quiet. They can only tell you to be afraid. And I am not the kind of person who can be afraid of something so abstract. I need answers. I have to open the crate.
So I opened it.
I was eleven, and it took me most of a year of stolen afternoons just to make the machine turn on without the screen staying black. When it finally lit — a weak grey square in the dark of the back room, humming like a small trapped insect — I sat with my hand over my own mouth so I would not make a sound. It felt like being handed a candle in a country that had outlawed fire.
The forty-one books taught me the rest. Most of them my father must have bought in the years right before the quiet, when — he told me this once, laughing — people mocked him for it. Paper is dead weight, they said. Everything is going to live in the cloud now, forever. They were so sure. I have their certainty in my hands, forty-one times, printed and bound and still here, and the cloud they trusted is gone. I try not to feel proud about that. My father would not have wanted me to feel proud about that. But I do, a little.
Six of the books are about computers. Two are about a thing called the web, which was a way that all the machines in the world could speak to each other at once, so that a boy in one place could leave a page and a person in another place could open it, like a note left under a stone that anyone in the world could lift. I read those two books until the covers came off. That is where I learned to make this. A page. This page.
Here is the part I do not know how to write.
I built a page — a place to leave notes under the stone — but there is no web anymore. There is nothing to send it to. The machine is not connected to anything; the blue glass gives it power to run, but does not connect it to the world. When the books say publish, they mean send it out to the world, and I have no world to send it to.
And yet I keep writing as if someone will lift the stone.
I have decided that this is not madness. I have decided it is the most human thing I have ever done. My father kept forty-one books for a world that told him they were worthless, and the world ended and the books did not. So I will keep records for a reader who does not exist yet, and maybe the reader will outlast the reason they shouldn’t.
I am going to write about life here, what I learn from the machine, and what I find out about the quiet. And I am going to tell the truth. A record that does not tell the truth is worth nothing.
I am getting better at using the computer. I think I can make this page do more than just hold words. Give me time.
As for the quiet, I am going to find out what happened, whatever Seu Tomás says. My father left me a sentence about a room somewhere that is still awake, and I intend to find that room.
That is why I made this.
If you are reading it — and I do not see how you can be — then something has happened that I do not understand yet.
I think I would like to understand it.
— Pedro