Anyway I cheated and used the futuristic world that a novel of mine is set in to write this, but its all my own creation.
And by the way, the two girls are me and my best friend. I put that in for kicks.
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My name is Mattae. I am sixteen years old and I live in Scotland 4321 ad.
It was one of those mornings when you can barely tear yourself out of your pod, to stumble sleepily to the kitchen in desperate need of a hot drink and a robe. I can never find my robe when I need it. It seems to get in the way all the time and I can never find a good place to keep it but as soon as I wake up in the morning and actually need it to ward off the cold my pyjamas let in, its nowhere to be seen. My mum jokes we have Borrowers like in that Muvee she found when I was little.
So I padded through the house to the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table, feeling sticky from last night’s make-up, which I always forget to wash off. Mum was already there, making tea in my robe. That’s where it was.
“Want some?” she said, holding up the kettle.
“Please.” I said, “Sugar too.”
While she made me a cup of the steaming drink, I quickly logged on to the outlet on the breakfast counter. I pulled out the files of homework I had done the night before, and a window in the bottom right hand corner of the waterproof screen told me my subjects for that day. I plugged in my memory stick next to the screen, copied my homework onto it, then opened a broadband window and quickly checked my Beeboe and MSN accounts (leaning over the screen heavily because my mum doesn’t like me doing that before school). Mum set the mug of tea down next to me, so I logged off and cupped it in my hands, appreciating its warmth.
I was just swilling down the last dregs when the phone went. Mum answered. Who would be calling in the morning? Her face quickly turned from confusion to delight. Something good? Thoughts of promotions, bonuses, and prizes flashed through my mind. My mum is an archaeologist. Good one too.
“Ok. Ok. That’s great. I’ll be in for ten.” She said, and then switched off the speaker. She turned to me, her face full of excitement.
“Mattae. This is great. They’ve found another capsule. But this is it, it’s HUGE. It’s a time capsule from 2007. A huge database of information, bigger than anything we’ve found so far at least a thousand gigabytes, and 2007! That’s got to be one of the earliest ever discovered!”
“Wow. Mum. That’s great. Should be really interesting,” I say, blatantly lying. These capsules are nearly always just news reports and politics of the time. Boring. I would much rather find out how people lived, their habits, what they did, what they ate.
“No. You don’t understand. If I can make a significant contribution to decoding this, I could get a serious promotion! Enough to get a better flat!”
“Really?” This is better news than I’d thought. “Mum. Wow. I mean yay!” I smiled, for the first time in a while, then I looked at the time.
“Knid. Mum I gotta go. I’m late!”. I slung my memory stick around my neck, pulled on my uniform and scrambled out the door.
School went as usual. I didn’t tell anyone about the capsule, mostly just out of laziness, and mum wasn’t home when I came back. I expected it though. Something this big will take up a lot of her time.
She hurried in the door an hour later, puffing and red. She’d clearly hurried home.
“Sorry Mattae! I came back as quick as I could but I couldn’t get away!” she said, pulling off her jacket and handing it to the store machine, which deftly folded it and set it in a drawer labelled Flo’s Black Jacket.
“It’s ok mum,” I said “I know this thing’ll have you working overtime. I’ve been fine here on my own.”
“Really? You were ok? That’s good. I have so much to show you. This capsule is amazing. I’ve been assigned twenty gig to decipher. Twenty gig Mattae! That’s more than all my other jobs put together!” she said, pulling her palmtop out of her bag and setting it down next to the home outlet on the living room wall.
“Here I’ll just upload it to the home wiring and let you explore for yourself. This stuff is wonderful, more detailed than we could have imagined, and this is only what I’ve deciphered so far! And it’s the earliest one recorded. We‘ve never found a capsule from earlier than 2086 before,” she said, then stepped back and let me use the outlet.
I opened up recently uploaded files, and found mum’s database so far labelled 2007. I opened the folder, and gasped as the screen filled with files and files of information, an endless scrolling bar appeared at the side. Wow. This was a big capsule. There were regular text files, many of those, but also a heap of video and sound recording files, which you barely saw in capsules these days. There were copies of ancient web pages, even Microsoft PowerPoints. I turned to mum, who looked as excited as ever to be able to show me the wonder’s she’d discovered.
“Microsoft PowerPoints!” I said, “ Mum this is amazing, do you even have the software to run this program? I didn’t think it even existed any more!”
“Oh we quickly fixed that. With so many, it was relatively easy to figure out a combination of systems we could use to open them. We got that in the first two hours. But it’s these that are the most astounding. Watch.” She said, and then opened a video file named simply “Us”.
I watched in awe as the video filled the screen. It was people, real, ancient people, teenagers even. Two girls my own age, maybe a little younger. I marvelled at the fact this had survived so long, that these girls’s filmed this wondering who would find it. Then it started and I stopped thinking and just watched.
The first girl started speaking. She was pale, and had short black hair with a carrot coloured flash on her fringe side. It was all so…old. I have never met anyone who has animal coloured hair before, even dyed. I mean, brown or red or yellow or black. Nobody has it these days, because artificial hair colour eventually became part of us, part of our DNA, and no one has had naturally brown hair for at least a thousand years. The girl had grey green eyes, and had no markings apart from a little black eyeliner. I fingered my own painted red tiger stripes, this is so long ago. She has no markings.
“Sup!! Me ind Rachel in da hoose 2k7 min bam!” she said cheerily, falling about laughing with the other girl (presumably Rachel) who had a short mop of brown hair and blue eyeliner.
They held up their hands, each pulling down their two middle fingers with a thumb, giving some sort of strange gesture.
“Aye! Said Rachel “ Fit like? Min bam tin can! God that’s hard to keep going!” she said to the black haired girl, “I mean, dis is our 2K7 time capsil, an so we’re spikin in da dialect o the day! Fit like to al yoose future bairns!”
“Yeh we is proper cool mate!” shouted the other “Rachel and Rachael was ere! Da twa maist insane moshers eva! We heart Neds!”
“Yah min bam. Cept my Rachel is spelt better than hers!” whispered the brown haired girl into the camera.
“No s’nay!” cried Rachael. “Mine is! Mine is da originil!” she gave her friend a mock punch, and then bit her hand, which initiated a mock slap fight, which was largely punctuated by bouts of hysterical laughter.
“Yeh we canna be bothered deeyin any mare so, goodbye tay yeh!” said the black haired Rachael finally, saluting once.
“Yep!” said the other Rachel, saluting as well, “Quite honestly, That’s all folks!”
The black haired Rachael gave that weird finger gesture again with both hands and stuck out her tongue as the other one leaned forward and switched off the camera. The video stopped itself and paused on the first frame.
“Wow. This stuff is great but you’ll have to get someone to translate it all,” I said to my mum, thoroughly interested now, “I can’t understand a word!”
in my opinion, just start straight with the story.
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