This is 2114. More exactly, May 25th 2114. Tomorrow is The Day of the Opening of the Future Library. My throath feels dry and soar. I am sitting on the floor at my hotellroom. Outside the rain is pouring down. I hope the weather will be better tomorrow, but it is unlikely. It almost always rain in Oslo nowadays. Not as much as in Gothenburg, but a lot. My parents justed to live there, in Gothenburg, when they were young but now it is deserted due to the heavy raining and storms.
This is 2114. My namn is Maia and I am fourtheen years old. I am one of one hundred young people from one hundred nations that will read at the opening tomorrow. Each and one of us have gotten an author whose secret work we shall read a piece from. Nobody, except from the authors know what is in their stories so we are all nervous. I am nervous. I am the first to go. I am supposed to read first. All eyes will be on me. All ears will hear the words that come out of my mouth. Like a million things can go wrong. No one who sees the opening will ever forget my performance, because I will read Margaret Atwood's Scribbler Moon. Or at least a piece of it. The first few pages.
I am looking at the picture that I am slowly building up in front of me. I have always loved mandalas. They are good for my nerves. I made the first at school when I was six years old. It was just made up of colourful circles, triangels and squares. I am much more advanced now then I was then. My body feels relaxed, but my mind is walking along its own paths.
This is 2114 and I am one of the lucky ones who tomorrow will get the chance to make a fool out of themselves in front if the entire world. I won the Scribbler Moon Contest and that is my prize. Or maybe punishment. Depends on from what angle you are looking. I never liked talking in front of a lot of people. I did not enter the contest by my own free will of course. Nobody did. All children all over the world were forced by their teachers to write a story to the contest.
For some, to me at least, strange reason the jury found my story to be the best.
"Simple, but straight to the point", one of them wrote as a commentary. Another one wrote: "Head on. And I believe that the girl is right!"
My friends at home pity me. Or maybe they envy me. I really do not know. The last couple of months I have hardly seen any of them. I have had to improve my reading and writing skills before the event so I have not had that much time to socialize lately. So while my friends emerge into their favorite stories, I have to read mine instead. I do not understand how people could stand reading stuff for so long. It is soo slow and soo boring! But of course, reading facts must have been worse than fiction. Thank God for inventing downloading! Otherwise we would stay in school from the day we are born till the day we die.
It was worst in the beginning, the reading I mean. Now I am getting the hang of it! :)
I remember the day of the contest well. The sheets of paper in front of me. Their white surfaces looking like newly fallen snow. Pure. Untouched. No scribble on them. Nothing. The smell of the sharpened pencil. The eraser near my right hand. The smell of sweat, deodorants and damp wool.The bright room and the darkness I knew was lurking outside of it even if I could not see it. All I could see was my classmates and my own reflections in the glass. We looked pale, diffuse in a sense, almost transparent. Like ghosts. We were there to write in the old fashioned way, a fact that properbly scared the crap out of some of us. The winter was howling outside and we were supposed to write about the past, in a sense at least.
I looked down at the instructions. "Pandora's Room" it read on top of the page.
Pandora? I have heard that name before. Was she not a greek girl who, by mistake, opened up a box and a lot of bad things escaped into the world? The only thing remaining in the box was Hope? The must vane thing of them all. Hope. A little hope can make us endure hardshipes and it is the last thing that dies. At least that is what my grandmother justed to say. That Hope is the last thing to die. The last thing to leave a man. Or woman. I think it was Buddha who said that hope, like everything else, makes us suffer. Of all the pains and sufferings in the world, hope is supposed to be the worst.
Before I entered the contest I never paid much attention to The Future Library. I guess not many did. I mean, a time capsule in Norway. It sounds a little bit like a joke. A time capsule hidden deep down in a norwegian wood, among huldras and trolls.
Hardly no one in the year 2014, hardly anyone in the year of 2114 either. Of course it was in the papers and all over the net once a year when it was annonced which writer who had been chosen to be leave a contribute to that collection of stories. But compared with the attention the Nobel Prize Winners still got this was nothing.
Until now. Now media is very interested in The Future Library.
"Which stories do you think will be read first when the Future Library is being opened? And what will be in them?
You all got 60 minutes to write down what you think.
Good Luck! :)"
I began to shew on top of the pencil. My mother justed to tell me that it is poisoness to do so. It is something in the orange paint I think that can be dangerous in high dosis. Or maybe it is truly lead in them. Pencils began to scratch the surfaces of sheets of papers. The sound was like voices whispering to each other from places in time. A monolog that never truly could be a dialog. We were all still pale in ghosts in the window, but almost everyone was working now. With the exception of me. My mind was locked in a way.
Very carefully I lay the blue grain of sand down in my mandela. It is a small part of a sea where a full moon is mirroring itself. There is a beach. Trees, bushes and further away there are some rocks. They are just shadows in the blue night. Like accusing fingers they are pointing at the Moon. And tonight I can see it. The Moon do not have a face. There is no man in the moon. Not any Goddess either. There are letters. Scribble. Maybe from a now distant God that passed by. Or maybe passed away, living us to ourselves.
"This is 2114", I wrote. "In the year 2014 there was a lot of turmoil going on in the world. Apocalyptic visions filled peoples minds. It seemed inevitable that Doomsday was near.
Day in and day out heroes solved the worlds problems by using weapons in the theaters and in many books. Capitalists and politicians refused to listen to reason when came to climate change, pesticides and pollution. Nuclear power was still in use. Companies went on with business as usual, feeding healthy animals antibiotics and cutting down the rain forests of the world. They drilled for oil in the Artic, overlooking the warnings of distaster. Mankind was waiting for someone else to solv their problems. A returning God, a friendly alien or a big technological innovation. Hardly no one saw the beautiful world that surrounded them."
I get up at my feet and look out through the window. It has stopped raining. And the Moon is now raising in the east. Maybe the weather tomorrow will be okay after all, maybe even beautiful (even if that might be to much to ask for).
When I was young, well, younger than I am now, my great grandmother told me of the lemmings, a small animal that looks a bit like a hamster or a genua pig. They live high up in the North of Sweden. A lot of animals, like owl and artic foxes, depend on them for their survival. Some years there are not many lemmings at all, and a lot of animals starve. Other years there are so many lemmings that they would starv and get into fights with each other, until, one day, they begin to migrate. The lemmings pours down from the mountains; come out of their holes and like a living flood they go to the Baltic Sea where they threw themselves from the cliffs to a certain death. Some lemmings that for whatever reason did not hear the calling survive and therefore the species do not die out. My great grandmother Edda, is supposed to have said that of course it was not true; that the assumption was based of a misunderstanding of the animals behavior. And then she ended with: "But there is truly one animal that is trying to commit suicide by throwing itself of a cliff and that is homo sapiens sapiens. We bribe about our intelligence, opposite thumbs, creativity and a lot of other things but we are the true lemmings. We want to be Gods, or at least angels, but we are just animals."
"The stories that will be read first are the oldest ones because we want to know how well the authors predicted the future. Some of them will proberbly be dystopic. Humanity has done what the lemmings never did. All that is left are the weathering ruins. They will not become time capsules like the pyramids because they are not built to stand forever. I bet that in some stories there will be fantastic technological innovations, bad companies playing God in one way or another, and a lot of other things like dictatorships and the lost freedom. The biggest biggest attention will without a doubt Margaret Atwood's Scribbler Moon get. How accurate will her prediction of the future be? But who knows? Only Margaret Atwood knows. We do not know what she wrote about at all. Maybe we will all get a big surprise."
There is like a shining yard surrounding the Moon. It seems to be much closer to Earth than normally. I look at the spots that people have thought were the lines of a face. Now it definitely look like scribble. I wonder what the text would be if there was a text? It is like if the Moon have heard my thoughts. The text is growing larger and then I can se what it says:
Do not miss the Opening of the Future Library tomorrow at noon!
Do not miss the Reading of Margaret Atwoods Scribbler Moon!
The Moon I can se from my hotelroom is just a stupid hologram. When it is switched off I can see how dark the sky is. New drops of rain hit the window. It almost sounds like if someone throw small peebles on it. Or was drumming with long fingernails unto the glass, wanting to get in. I close the drapes and go to bed.
I get up early the next morning. Take a shower, get dressed and have breakfast. They drive us there in small buses. The road is narrow. The trees are surroundig us. I am not sure if they want to embrace us och strangel us. Some of the kids in my bus are stunned that there are so many trees in Norway! There are few spots with wilderness left on the globe. And to be earnest I doubt this is really untoached either.
Then there is a clearing. The sun is pouring down, feeling warm at my cheek . Birds are singing. A bumble bee passes by my ear. Some drones are filming and taking pictures of us, others are broadcasting the event to the entire world.
In the middle of the clearing one hundred authors are standing. And one artist, Katie Paterson. The artist who designed it. Some of them are alive, but most of them are holograms like the Moon last night. It think I heard that one of the male authors are supposed to be a clone. We sit down in front of them. The wind is twisting it's fingers in my hairs. They are a bit cold.
The head of the Future Library, a blonde woman with big glasses, welcomes us all, talks about the one-hundred-year-long project that now came to an end.
My thouhgts are wandering even if I try to stop them. I remember the ending of what I wrote and won the contest with.
My great grandmother was born in the late 1960's. She was a couple of years old when Armstrong uttered the famous words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" when he sat his foot down on the Moon. The following decade almost everyone believed that soon there would be spacestations and spaceships. But time went on. The, so-called, Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union was going on. Most space programs were cancelled, or got less money. There was no travelling through space, not for the common man or woman anyway. Edda just to say to my grandmother that she always felt like someone had stolen something from her. Maybe it was Hope that was taken from her. The hope of a better world. The hope new chances. Instead of becoming an astronaut, Edda remained her entire life on Earth. She of course went by airplane on vacations (it was cheap in those days), but she never truly left Earth. And that is the legacy she passed on to me, a longing for new horizons somewhere 'out there'. But I think there is a big chance that neither I am going to leave this planet.
The first stories will be about the hopes and fears of the past. The last stories, I do not know. But of one thing I am sure: this will truly be a time capsule. Every year a new story. If all stories have been put there at the same time they would proberbly be much more alike. Now they might differ a lot as time pass by due to the fact that no one except to author know what is in the story he och she wrote. So the authors can not influence each other, not in a direct manor anyway.
So what I hope, that what will be found in that time capsule is Hope. Whatever kind of hope, we always need the hope for a better tomorrow.
"Give a hand to miss Maia Olsen now!" I get up from my chair. My heart is pounding. I walk up to the podium. Margaret Atwood's hologram gives me a smile. The blonde woman gives me a smile to and hands me a book. I have a look at the cover. Scribbler Moon it says.
"Thank you all", I say. "I shall read from the first pages of Margaret Atwoods Scribbler Moon, the first book that was put in the time capsule.
I take a deep breath and begin to read.
When I return to my hotelroom the window is open and the cleaning robot has vacuumed my mandala moon. Making picture of coloured sands are vane. That is why make them. To remind ourselves of that even if most things in life is in vane life is still worth living.
This is 2114. My namn is Maia Olsen and I am fourtheen years old. Today I have read Scribbler Moon and it was worth all the hard work so now I am glad that I won that contest! :)