Comment. I love comments. <3 And please point out typos, etc.!
Safety tip: Gloves are great for working with sharp or hot things, but you should never wear gloves when working with spinning power tools. It's better to get cut by a table saw than caught by one.
Kirstie glared intensely at the door of her parts and repair shop, perched on an old wooden stool behind the counter as she disassembled a toaster in her lap without so much as glancing at it. The moment Hector comes in, she thought, he'll be blown away by the sheer force of my displeasure. He typically stumbled out of bed and into the shop at 8:45, hours after Kirstie woke and fifteen minutes late. It was nine o' clock, and still he hadn't come.
Kirstie didn't want an ungrateful apprentice with a suspiciously unreliable alarm clock, or any apprentice at all, but ever since money had become worthless, the world had been run on threats, favors, blackmail, and bribery, backed by simple violence as necessary. When Hector's uncle turned a blind eye to her scavenging in the industrial scrap yards outside the city, on land he had successfully decided belonged to him, she owed it to him to put up a pretense of teaching his layabout nephew a worthwhile trade. It wasn't working particularly well. She could teach him, through pure repetition, how to repair a refrigerator, and still it wouldn't so much as occur to him that he might also be able to fix a freezer.
While the rest of the world disintegrated at about the same rate as her jarful of dead batteries, she was putting things back together, preserving and rediscovering the troves of technological genius embedded in the everyday objects of bygone civilizations. Hector didn't appreciate the implications of the simple existence of microwave ovens, but she did. For something like that to exist, it had to have been invented. Someone had to invent it. Someday, long ago, there had to have been a society where such people—people who dedicated what must have been decades of their lives to invention—could exist. Someone had to invent the microwave, and someone had to design the factories that made the microwaves, and they all got paid with paper slips and metal discs minted by the governments of the day, and since the governments also managed most of the violence, it all sort of worked out. They could use the money not just for goods and services, but also for ideas. The governments eventually forgot, though, that the money wasn't real, and they minted so much of it that the people stopped accepting it and started managing their own violence and facilitating their own trade again, and patents stopped being protected, and inventors had to stop creating new things and content themselves with repairing old things and keeping the factories running.
When Hector arrived at a quarter past nine, Kirstie's gaze was at its fiercest yet, but it was lost on him. He was midway through a yawn when he opened the door. "Sorry, my alarm—"
"Fix," Kirstie ordered, pointing at a row of malfunctioning appliances, "and don't go home until you're done." The appliances would go back to their owners once they worked again, and their owners would pay Kirstie in food or in favors, which she could redeem at any time she chose. If someone didn't make good on their end, she could always call in a favor from someone large, or, in most cases, just show up with a big wrench and ask nicely.
Hector sat down on the floor next to the stack of junk. "What am I supposed to do with this microwave? It looks nothing like the ones you showed me last week."
"Figure it out." It looked exactly like last week's microwaves, just easier. He hadn't been paying any attention. Hector groaned and sighed simultaneously, rolling his eyes behind his drooping lids. Kirstie stood up and left, imagining pulling him apart like a machine and rewiring him to work right.
She walked around the house to the back door of the garage, her workshop, and added a pair of thick leather gloves to her uniform of steel-toed boots and sturdy overalls. Each week, she brought her wheelbarrow a little deeper into the acres of scrap metal just beyond her chain link fence, winding between small mountains of industrial discard and scanning for anything salvageable. Once she'd filled the wheelbarrow, she headed back by a different route, carefully balancing each new item atop the pile and perpetually scanning for more, prepared to rope it all together when it started to overflow.
A bright chunk of aluminum amidst the dull grays and browns of rusty steel caught her eye. It was a solid box with rounded edges, the size of a backpack and almost too heavy to lift. Unwilling to leave anything behind to make it fit, she backtracked until she found the office chair she'd seen a few minutes ago. She tied a makeshift harness and tried to keep her eyes on the ground, away from the temptation of more scraps, as she headed back with her wheelbarrow ahead of her and her new project dragging behind.
The sun was low again by the time she reached home. She ignored her growling stomach—there were beets from the Shaws, whose tractor she had resuscitated, waiting in the cellar, but she was too excited to think about beets—and quickly sorted her haul into barrels along the garage wall before clearing a space on her cluttered workbench for the box and hoisting it up for inspection.
It had to be very, very old or very, very complicated to be so heavy. There were no obvious seams, and it took a good long time to find where it had been friction welded together. There was a bright red button and a tiny watch dial, but they didn't seem to do anything. She tied back her hair, put on her safety goggles, and removed her gloves before slowly drilling a small hole through the case and measuring is thickness: two millimeters. She lowered her table saw blade to just the right height and cut the case cleanly in two. Another case inside it protected the contents. She unscrewed it quickly and pulled off the top plate. She stopped breathing.
It was incredible. Kirstie had spent most of her life in the twenty-seventh century, and up until that moment, she'd believed that if she wanted to see any new technology, she'd have to invent it herself. No one else was going to do it, and she thought she'd already encountered everything history had to offer, from levers to quantum levitation, but this was new. This was different. It resembled a large, densely-packed brick of cotton candy more than any mechanical thing she'd seen. It was spun from gossamer-thin copper feeding in and out of little gold cylinders, some the size of pills and some as small as sprinkles, dispersed throughout like flies caught in a spiderweb.
Three of the walls had grids of spikes that poked into the wire nest, probably to draw away heat. She turned the machine over and over and teased its entangled wires apart gently like knotted hair. Not until she heard Hector leave the shop did she realize how long she had been engrossed. She scrambled to do what she had meant to accomplish that day, but after a few hours she set aside her work again and returned to pore over the puzzling machine through the night.
Over the next several months, she developed the habit of unraveling the machine while watching the news, tracing the paths of individual wires as she listened to a newscaster tell the world that it was the fourth anniversary of Ivan Collamore's assassination. She never even got the chance to vote for him. She wondered what the world would be like if he had lived. As it was, she was stuck fixing appliances, wishing another person would come along with lots of promises.
She turned off the news and looked down at the bundle of copper and gold in her lap. Her tried and true method of taking it apart and putting it back together had failed. She'd tried the red button with every setting on the dial, and that was equally useless. It was probably just an expensive experiment that never worked, but she wished she at least knew what it was supposed to do. Maybe it was time to cut open a capsule.
She picked out one of the larger gold cylinders and cleared the wires to either side so she could score it with a razor. There was a little dot in the center she hasn't seen before. Had a wire broken off? No, it was an opening just the size of a pinhole, perfectly round. She put it under a magnifying glass, then a microscope. The light from underneath shone through, and there was something in the middle she couldn't quite bring into focus. It looked like it was moving. She pulled a laser from an old optical scanner and pointed it at the hole. With a little realignment, she got a clean projection on the table.
02622:08:19:13:35:42:11473888
The last digits moved too fast to read. It was the date and the time, down to the nanosecond. How could it be so precise? Atomic clocks couldn't be built so small, could they? Why was there a zero at the front? Surely it wouldn't survive another 7,378 years. How long had it already been sitting in the scrapyard? Was it even still accurate? It matched the time on her phone. How did the display work? Why was such an incredible device buried so deep it took months to even notice? Did the whole thing run that tiny clock? If so, it worked, so why would it be thrown away? If not, what else was hiding in there? What was it for? Who built it?
"Kirstie, can you help me with this?" called Hector as he walked in.
"Read the manual!" Kirstie shouted back. The instructions he needed were literally on the first line.
"Manual: table of contents," read the machine. "Part one: Safety."
