A Different Age

When they put us to sleep, I remember they told us we wouldn't dream. I think they lied.

Maybe it was simply a memory, but it was vivid enough.

I saw my parents. They were walking by my side, mom held one of my tiny hands while in the other I held a stuffed bear whose name I can't recall.

As we were crossing the streets it fell to the ground. Mom let my hand go and went to get it for me. Then I saw my dad dash towards her.

When my eyes opened, I was inside my chamber.

"Good morning, Citizen #14," a voice spoke out of nowhere, "this is an automated message that will guide you through the awakening process. Please breathe slowly and follow the instructions."

Blue LEDs lit up in my sleep chamber, but outside of it everything was still dark. I couldn't see the lights that the other chambers should've been making.

Slowly the recorded message started giving me instructions which were all annoyingly generic and simple. A much longer version of a "I'm not a robot" button you could say.

Then, the tasks finally ended and the chamber creaked open.

But instead of hearing the voices of all the other people waking up and their chambers, I could only hear the buzzing of my little capsule. Nobody else was awake.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

Before everyone went to sleep, some officials explained what would happen when we woke up. We were supposed to all get out of our pods and stay here for three days before leaving the bunker. Had I somehow woke up earlier than the others?

There was only a way to know.

"Computer, what date is today?" During the tour of the structure the guards told us the sleep chambers had integrated computers with vocal recognition. I wanted to see if they worked so, before going to sleep, I played with it a bit by asking what I thought to be funny like how to spell amogus backward or who was in Paris.

...It worked pretty well.

Now though the computer seemed to take its time to answer, so I tried again, this time louder.

"Computer, what's the date today?"

Finally, the computer replied. "The date is September 5th of the year 2322."

I froze.

"Computer. What date is today?"

"The date is September 5th of the year 2322."

I chuckled. I couldn't be the first one to wake up in 300 years, the computer was most likely defective. Yet something was bugging me, so I kept going.

"This chamber should've opened in 2122. What happened?"

"A failure in the system postponed the original date of the opening of this chamber by 200 years, 2 months, and 25 days to protect its owner."

Whatever failure the system had, it probably affected the date as well, right? Although... Even so, how was I the first to awake?

I stepped out of my chamber and looked around the room. My eyes could only see so much when the only light in the hall came out of my chamber. I was in the first row, so the lights in my chamber managed to let me see what was in front of me with its dim lights.

As I remembered it to be, the room was barren.

The only things visible beside the door were a terminal right next to it and a small table below with a few objects on top.

I walked up to the table and looked for a flashlight, but what I found instead was a key-chain filled with keys, some crumpled papers, and a mug, everything covered in dust.

'Who the hell would leave a mug here before going to sleep for 100 years?'

I looked at the terminal and decided that maybe that would've answered my questions, so I turned it on.

The screen lit up, and slowly words started appearing on it.

"GEP OS ver 3.06

Copyright © USA Government, 2022. All rights reserved.

System Date: 09/05/2322"

My heart skipped a beat. I wanted to believe so badly that both my chamber and the terminal were wrong, but they were the machines, and I was the human, the one who had been sleeping while they kept running.

But... How? With just the blink of an eye, 300 years had passed.

Suddenly I started to breathe faster, my lungs trying their hardest to fill themselves with air, but it felt like there wasn't enough.

Something bad happened. I didn't know what, but the fact everyone was still in their chamber proved me right.

My head felt light, and my heart was pounding in my chest. I needed to sit down, but there weren't any chairs in that room. I took the keys and went for the exit, but I found out it was already open when my hand touched the door.

'Didn't the officer close it when we all got inside? Did someone else wake up?' I thought.

With a spark of hope, I left the room and entered a long hallway where the light of my chamber didn't reach. I had no choice but to start wandering through the darkness in the direction of the exit to that place, with one hand on the wall so that I could feel any door that it might cross.

Suddenly my feet caught something, and I tripped. I didn't know what it was, so I sat up and started feeling the floor around me, trying to find whatever thing made me fall.

The world that day seemed to both hate and love me because the thing I had tripped on was exactly what I was looking for earlier.

I pressed the switch and, sure enough, the flashlight turned on. The tips of my mouth rose into a smile.

Obviously, it was just a flashlight, but my mind was trying to do its best not to think about the situation I was in. A flashlight was handy in all that darkness, after all.

The situation I was in, huh? I wasn't even sure myself what the situation was.

But I knew that I woke up 300 years into the future and that none of the other chambers opened alongside mine. Just thinking about it made my heart race, but if the door was open, maybe someone else had woken up.

'Did something go wrong? Did the big plan fail? Is everybody else alive, or am I the only survivor? Can I wake up the others?' These and many other questions started forming in my head. But I had to focus.

Thus, I stopped wandering like an idiot with my recently acquired light source and started walking down the hallway.

The place was... Bleak. That was the best way to describe it. The air was stale and the walls cold and plain. Everything my eye could see was gray and lifeless.

Finally, my sight landed on a door.

I grabbed the keys from my pocket and then unlocked the door. When it opened, I found myself in a room that did not look as dull as the rest of that place.

The walls were painted green and light blue, in a sad imitation of some grass and the sky. There were clothes thrown around on the ground and many other things like pencils, bottles, and a few forks.

In the corner of the room, a pile of rags formed what looked like a very uncomfortable bed. It had some pictures next to it. Mostly drawings, but there was also a photo of someone. I would've liked to see who it was, but that picture had already been consumed by time, rendering it just another piece of junk to add to the rest in that room.

In the middle of the room, there was a chair and a table. On the latter was a neatly folded stash of papers. They stood out over anything else because it was the only thing that looked in its right place, so I sat down and looked at the sheet of paper on top.

It was written by hand. It looked like a simple cover for a book or something. The only thing that I could still read was a big sentence in the middle of the page:

"FOR ANYONE WHO WAKES UP EARLY OR IS LOOKING FOR JAMES PARRY"

Hesitantly, I set the first page to the side and looked at the second one. Unlike the cover, the words on this page were easier to read even if the page's borders were very fragile.

"Hello,

My name is James Parry. I was 26 by the time I woke up. The date of my awakening was on the third of May of 2159.

As you can probably guess, if you're reading this, I am dead.

I am writing this on my 30th birthday, with the hope that the 4 years I wasted alone in this hole might be of need to whoever might wake up after I'm gone.

When I woke up, there had been an earthquake. It caused my chamber to open before all the others, yet, 37 years had already passed from the time we were supposed to wake up. I don't know what caused the failure in the system, but sometimes I think they did it on purpose to get rid of us useless common people.

The first thing I tried to do was to open the bunker, but it's impossible. To open it, two people are needed at least, and I am alone.

Of course, I didn't give up, I tried every idea that came to my mind to open the door, but if it's made to protect us from an apocalypse, it was only logical it would survive my attempts.

I then decided to try and wake other people up.

I have never owned a computer, and I have no idea of how terminals work. I know it's possible to open them, but I have no way of finding out how it works. If you have any knowledge of it, please, please wake everyone up and tell my sister that I love her very much and that I did my best until the end. I want her to be proud of her big brother. Her name is Emma, and she's in chamber 27, right next to mine, in the 28th.

I also want to apologize for my mistakes. I was so desperate to talk to somebody again that I ended up breaking the chamber of one of my dearest friends, Luke. I will never forgive myself for what I've done.

I have almost finished the entire food supply in the bunker, so I've decided that this is my last day here. I want to leave food for the next person to wake up if someone ever will.

If you would, please come to the bunker entrance and dispose of my remains before she sees them.

Besides this note, I've left in this stash every drawing I've made during these years that have survived my many periods of emotional instability. They're all for Emma, so please leave them for her."

Below all of that there were some notes related to everything he managed to figure out in his time there... In just a few lines.

I put the note down and looked through the other sheets. I recognized an ice cream shop where my family used to go, the town square, and Buffalo Mountain, the one I and everybody else in this bunker were currently under. The pictures were all well-drawn.

I didn't know James, but he seemed like a good person, someone who tried his best until he couldn't bear it anymore. Good people were rare in this world.

I didn't think I'd have managed to do the same, so all I can do now is hope and do even better.

But I wasn't sure I could.

I put the papers back neatly on the table. I then got up, leaving the room to go to the nearest terminal and turning on the lights to avoid walking around everywhere with the flashlight.

I wasn't ready to see a corpse yet, so I went the opposite way to the kitchen instead of going towards the entrance. I needed to see how much food was left and check how long it would take before I was a corpse.

After a quick check, I realized James was right. There was supposed to be food for three days for all 500 of us here, but he managed to eat almost everything in his 4 years. If everything were still edible, I would have barely got food for a month.

And since the food was supposed to be eaten 200 years ago, I most likely had nothing to eat besides some honey. I liked honey, but I didn't plan on living on honey for the rest of my time.

Thankfully, the water somehow still ran, which meant I had probably 2 weeks before dying of hunger. It wasn't a lot, but I needed to be optimistic.

I felt better. I didn't want to die. I knew I'd have to wake other people up if I wanted to live, but now that I was alone...

'What if I only wake up one person and leave?' The thought immediately crossed my mind.

But who would I have woken up? I didn't have any friends to speak of. Instead, every person I knew either hated me or didn't do anything to help me.

I needed more time to think, so instead of going to the computer room and start looking for a way to wake people up, I left for the entrance where James said he'd be waiting.

I wanted to do just as he asked in his letter.

I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly, then made my way to the entrance.

While walking, I thought I would find something disgusting, like a corpse filled with bugs eating rotten flesh, but I found something else once there.

Next to a green plastic bag, leaning on the steel entrance of the bunker, there was a pile of bones. Instead of white, the dust had made them look the same color as the floor. The skull was smiling, or at least I thought it was. It helped me to think he at least died, hoping his sister was going to be alright.

Death wasn't a foreign concept to me.

All my life, people had blamed me for the death of my parents.

Yet I hadn't been to a funeral in my entire life. I hadn't seen the remains of my parents. The idea of someone being reduced to a pile of lifeless objects was almost terrifying.

I couldn't imagine myself going to his sister saying: "There, that pile of junk was your brother."

In my mind, I only remembered my parents being alive. I remembered their hair, their eyes, their smile, their warmth...

My uncle probably had to see whatever remained of them after the accident.

'I guess this is what I remind my uncle of. His dead sister and friend.'

Now why James wanted himself to be disposed of was clear to me. I granted him his last wish.

Putting his remains into a plastic bag felt wrong, but there was nowhere else to put them, and, after all, he was the one who brought the plastic bag there with that idea in mind. Still, I promised myself I would bury them properly once out of that place.

I left the bag there to remind myself of that decision, and then I headed back to the computer room. And as I walked, I started thinking.

'Our systems might have failed, but what about the other bunkers? Why did nobody come for us in the last 200 years?'

I had to find out what happened, but first, I had to get out of that place.

I didn't know who I'd wake up, but I needed to find someone good, someone not like everyone else. Someone who deserved to come back between us.

I didn't know anyone like that, but it didn't matter.

What the future reserved for me, though, was something I would've never expected.