Echoes of Oblivion

The crowd murmured, absorbing his words like dry earth absorbs water. He was giving them meaning. Simple. Clear. Intoxicating.

– But the filth of the past clings to life! – Jonah continued, his eyes burning with fanatical fire. – It hides in their temples! In their libraries! In their museums! In their data repositories! In every scrap of paper on which their lies are written!

He gave them their first order.

– Find these temples! Find these nests of contagion! And bring them here!

An hour later they brought him the first books they had found in the looted neighborhood library. Jonah picked up one of them. Ironically, it was the very same sociology textbook. He opened it, looked at the flat lines with disgust, and threw it to the ground.

– Fire! – he roared. – Purify the earth with fire! Memory is the disease! And we are the cure!

The first bonfire of books soared into the sky. The pages twisted in the flames, the letters blackened and disappeared. The crowd looked on, their faces expressing ecstatic release. They weren’t just burning paper. They were burning their insignificant past, their pain, their guilt.

Jonah saw this. He understood with the instinct of a great demagogue that what they needed was not only destruction, but also creation. The building up of a new faith.

– Every burned page is a sin forgiven! – He shouted, raising his hands to the sky, black with smoke. – Every letter turned to ashes is a broken chain! We do not destroy! We are cleansing! We are performing the great ritual of burning away the filth!

He grabbed a burning charcoal and drew a simple symbol on the ground in front of the fire – a crossed-out ear.

– This is our sign! The sign of the Great Silence! A sign that we will no longer listen to the false voices of the past! From now on, you are no longer a faceless mob! You are the Purifiers! And this is our first sacred act!

The people caught up to his cry in ecstasy. They repeated the new word, “Purifiers,” like a prayer. They tore off their old identification bracelets and threw them into the fire. Chaos had gained more than an ideology. It had acquired a ritual, a symbol and a name. A new, terrifying church was born.

Chaos had an ideology. Hunger and violence had a higher purpose. A holy war against memory had begun. And its first, most fierce fire was already devouring words.

The first winter after the Shutdown was a great filter. It killed not so much with cold as with despair. Cities deprived of central heating and power supply turned into icy tombs. Millions died silently, in their apartments, without realizing what had happened. It wasn’t the strongest or the smartest who survived. It was the most stubborn who survived.

Elias Vance spent this winter on the move. He had descended from his tower like Dante into hell, floor by floor. He saw traces of lives suddenly cut short, scenes of struggle and silent extinction. He had learned to be a shadow. Learned not to break codes, but locks. Learned to distinguish the sound of a marauder’s footsteps from those of a hungry refugee. His target was the British Library. A beacon in the icy desert. He reached it in the spring, exhausted, frostbitten, but with a backpack packed not with canned goods but with the most valuable books he could carry. He wasn’t the first. Inside, in the huge reading room, dimly lit by a fire built in a metal trash can, sat several of the same ghosts. They weren’t talking. They were reading. They were the first Archivists.

Matvey Kamen spent the winter under siege. But the enemy was not man, but nature. His home became an ark for his entire sprawling family and a few neighbors lucky enough to be nearby. The first weeks were hell. David, his programmer son, was helpless. He didn’t know how to chop wood, didn’t know how to fix a leaky roof. A wall of misunderstanding grew between father and son. The turning point was the night when little Leo began to have a high fever. Lena, a doctor, could not do anything without medicine and equipment. And then Matvey, remembering how his grandmother treated him, went into the snowy forest and returned with willow bark and some herbs. He himself boiled a decoction, and he himself drank it to his grandson. And Leo survived. That night David took an axe in his hands for the first time and chopped wood until dawn. Silently. Stubbornly. He began to learn from his father. Stone Fort was born not of the Code, but of shared fear and shared work.

Jonah spent the winter wandering through frozen cities. He didn’t hide. He went to the most dangerous places – to the spontaneous markets where people were killed for a can of canned food, to refugee camps where disease was rampant. And he preached. His teachings of the Great Purification were a balm for souls who had lost everything. He gave them meaning in their suffering. He didn’t offer food. He offered something more – justification for their losses. He gathered around him the most desperate, the most embittered. He taught them not only his faith, but also discipline. He turned the crowd into an army. His first Purifiers were not fanatics. They were survivors who found a warmth in his words that no campfire had ever given them.

Chapter 3.5. The Road of Glass

Fragment of lost information: a message from a survivalist forum, 2043. “The main rule in the first 72 hours is to get to the ‘assembly point’. No heroics, no saving the world. Just get to your own. Because after 72 hours, the world you knew will be gone. And you may not have any of your own left.”

David Stone, a brilliant programmer, never thought that the most difficult task in his life would be to drive thirty kilometers. When the Network died, his smart apartment on the outskirts of London was reduced to a concrete box. His wife, Sarah, cried and their young son, five-year-old Leo, stared fearfully at the dark screens. David knew only one thing: he needed to go to his father. His father always knew what to do.

They stepped out into the street. The chaos had not yet taken shape; it was like Brownian motion. People wandered aimlessly, staring at their dead communicators, trying to speak, but often shutting up half-heartedly, forgetting what they wanted to say. This wasn’t panic. It was a systemic hang-up of humanity. Their electric car, like thousands of others, stood dead. But there was another car in the garage, an old, pre-flood Jeep with an internal combustion engine that his father-in-law, a retrograde like David’s father, kept “in case of a zombie apocalypse.” Everyone laughed at him. Now no one was laughing at him.

And then she came up to them. Lena. His sister. Elias Vance’s daughter. David barely recognized her. She was a doctor at a clinic nearby, always organized, elegant. Now her white coat was stained with blood, her hair disheveled, and cold, focused terror in the eyes he remembered laughing.

“David?” – Her voice trembled but was firm. “Father… he’s in “Charade. I can’t get in touch with him. And you… your father lives outside of town, right? He has a well. And land.”

They understood each other without words. In this new world, their fathers, the Historian and the Builder, were the two poles of hope. They pooled their families – two cars, leftover food – and decided to make their way out of the city together. Lena to her father, David to his.

The road was hell. Not because of the gangs – they’d show up later. It was the confusion. Cars without autopilots collided. People who had forgotten the rules of the road took to the highways. But the most frightening thing was different. They saw a man in an expensive suit trying to pay for gas at a still working gas station with his dead communicator. When he saw that it didn’t work, he didn’t get angry. He sat on the ground and cried like a baby. He didn’t remember what money was. Elsewhere, a woman was desperately trying to soothe her child by humming a tune to him. But it wasn’t a lullaby. It was a synthetic drink commercial jingle stuck in her head like a shard of glass.

It was Lena who saved them when they were stopped at one of the roadblocks spontaneously organized by frightened policemen. “Where are you going?” – The cop asked with blank eyes. David started to babble something about his father, about home. But Lena stepped forward. Her medical authority, even in this situation, was palpable.

“I have medical supplies in my car,” she said firmly and simply. – Antibiotics, bandages. I’m a doctor. And he,” she nodded at David, “has blueprints for a water pump in his head. Give us a ride, and maybe tomorrow you’ll have clean water and help for the wounded. Stop us and we’ll all die of dysentery here.”

She wasn’t lying. She had simply culled from their shared knowledge what had become the new currency. Practical utility. And they were let through.

They never made it to the Charade. The city center was already impassable, turned into one giant traffic jam where despair turned to violence.

“I won’t make it to him,” Lena said, looking up at the smoke rising above the skyscrapers. There was unbearable pain in her voice. “Go to your father, David. Save your family. Save Leo. Someday…someday we’ll find mine.”

“No, Lena, we can’t leave you!” – David protested.

“You can. And you should,” she looked him straight in the eye, and there was steel in her gaze. – Here in this old school,” she nodded at a building nearby, “there are dozens of wounded already. They’re my patients. My father is a historian; he saved the past. My job is to save the present. This is my post. Go away.”

So the children’s paths parted. David, heartbroken and bearing the weight of this choice, took his family to Stone Fort. Lena stayed in the suburbs, taking some of her medical supplies and organizing a field hospital in the old school building. She was the daughter of the Archivist. Her mission was not to save books, but people. This act, this self-sacrifice, would become one of the first legends of the new world. And David, for the rest of his days, would carry the guilt of leaving, leaving his sister behind in this hell. This guilt will be the fuel for his future obsession – to build a world where this will never happen again.

Chapter 4. The Librarian’s Sanctuary

Fragment of information lost: tweet from @UrbanExplorer_Alex, January 12, 2045.

“Went into an abandoned library downtown today. Dusty! But what a thrill! The smell of old books is like a time machine. Funny how this was once the main source of information for people. #retro #analogworld #history”

Seven years after the Blackout. Seven years of silence, hunger, and fear that had slowly been replaced by a fragile, ugly semblance of order. The world no longer screamed in terror. It groaned with exhaustion.

Elias Vance survived.

His refuge was the British Library. Not a gleaming modern building, but one of its old, forgotten vaults, deep underground, which he had reached through a network of ventilation shafts and service tunnels. It was a labyrinth of steel and concrete, smelling of centuries of dust and decaying paper. To most survivors, a useless tomb. For Elias, the Ark.

The first few months were hell. Not because of hunger or cold. It was the loneliness and silence, broken only by the rustle of his own footsteps and the creaking of shelves. He fed on what was left in the staff vending machines, drank water from the fire suppression system. But his main occupation was wrestling with his own memory. He would walk along the shelves, pick up a book, read the title – A History of the Decline and Destruction of the Roman Empire – and try to remember anything but the author’s name. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not. Every grain of knowledge recovered was a victory. Every gaping hole was torture. He was king in the realm of dead words.

He had changed over the years. His professorial gentleness was gone, giving way to a wiry, wary thinness. His hands, which had once fluttered over the touch panels, were rough and calloused from working with metal and stone. But his eyes… in their depths, they still burned with the unquenchable fire of a guardian.

He wasn’t alone.

Little by little, one by one, he found others. Those who were not looking for food, but for meaning. The first was Aaron, a former violinist who had gone mad with silence and had come to the library in search of sheet music to make music sound again, at least in his head. Then came Maya, a medical student who remembered scraps of anatomical atlases and was desperate to recover the knowledge so she could treat people with something more than herbs. Behind her, an engineer, a carpenter, a teacher. They were shards of the old world, drawn by the gravity of this incredible repository of knowledge.

They’ve made a life for themselves. Outings during the day. In the evening, work. At night, duty at the barricaded entrances. They learned to make candles from wax found in the church cellars. They planted a small vegetable garden on the roof, where sunlight penetrated through a ventilation shaft, and grew meager herbs and mushrooms there. It was a fragile but stubborn civilization in the heart of a dead city.

They called themselves “Archivists.” There were no more than twenty of them. During the day, they made forays up into the “Wasteland,” as they called the ruins of London, in search of food, tools, and, most importantly, other books. Every book they found, from a poetry book to a technical reference book, was celebrated as a great victory.

In the evenings, by the light of homemade grease lamps, they did their main work. They read.

They read aloud, one at a time, so that the knowledge penetrated them not only through their eyes, but also through their ears, becoming fixed in their memories. They copied the most important, most fragile books on whatever material was available – on the back of old advertising posters, on pieces of bark, on dressed rat skin.

– Water, water, water, water everywhere, but there is no drop to drink,” Aaron read in a trembling voice from the miraculously surviving volume of The Tale of the Old Mariner. The listeners seated in the circle of light absorbed every word. They weren’t just listening to poetry. They were learning. They were learning metaphors, rhythm, how to describe despair and hope with words. They were rediscovering language.

But their community was not idyllic. The knowledge they were saving was not only light but also poison. One day, while reading an old psychiatry textbook, one of them, a former teacher, went mad. He began to see symptoms of the diseases described in himself and others, sowing paranoia and distrust until he had to be isolated in one of the distant vaults.

Disputes arose. The Pragmatists faction, led by Ezra, an engineer, argued that only useful knowledge should be saved and rewritten: technical manuals, medical atlases, survival guides. “Poetry will not feed us, and philosophy will not protect us from raiders,” he said at evening councils.

Elias, on the other hand, was leading the Humanists. “If we save only the blueprints and formulas, we will only build a more efficient anthill,” he replied. – And what I want to save is not the anthill, but humanity. Poetry, philosophy, even the darkest pages of history – this is what distinguishes us from machines and beasts. It’s our soul. And if we lose it, what does it matter if we survive or not?”

This dispute was their main internal war. Every book they found became the subject of a debate: to save or to ignore? And every outing was not only a search for food, but also a struggle for the ideological future of their small, fragile world.

Elias was their leader. Not because he was the strongest, but because he remembered more than anyone else. His personal notes, begun in that apartment on the 73rd floor, had grown to dozens of homemade notebooks. It was The Book of Elias, a desperate attempt to reconstruct the skeleton of history, science, and culture.

– They’ll come for this,” he said one evening, pointing to the racks going into the darkness. – Those who fear it. The prophets of Oblivion. They call themselves the Purifiers. They burn books. They believe memory is poison.

– But why? – asked young Kira, who had been born a year before the Disconnection and had no memory of the old world. Her world was here, in the dungeon.

– Because knowledge gives power,” Elias answered, looking at her clear, curious face. – And whoever controls the past controls the future. They don’t want people to remember that it’s possible to live differently. That it is possible to be free, to question, to doubt. They want obedient sheep, and books turn sheep into shepherds.

He did not add, but thought: “Maybe they are right about something? Maybe the weight of all our bloody, complex, contradictory history was too heavy? Maybe oblivion really is a gift.” He chased those thoughts away like heresy. But sometimes, in the darkest nights, they came back and gnawed at him from the inside.

He knew that their refuge would not last forever. Rumors of “librarians” keeping “forbidden words” were already spreading across the Wasteland. Sooner or later, the Purifiers would find them. And then they would have to fight for the right to remember.

A few dozen miles to the south, in the settlement that had grown up around Matthew Stone’s home, life flowed differently. Their community, which the surrounding survivors called “Stone Fort,” had grown. It was now a fenced-in settlement of two hundred souls.

Matvey, now called simply “Father” by everyone, established a strict but fair order. “The Code of Stone became their constitution. Loyalty to the clan, hard work, mutual aid. They had their own forge, their own mill, their own fields. They didn’t read poetry by candlelight. They mended plows and smoked meat.

His grandson, Leo, the boy with the holographic dragon, had grown up. He was twelve. He didn’t remember the Internet or virtual reality. His reality was the calluses on his hands from working in the fields, the weight of the axe and the smell of freshly baked bread. He was strong, agile, and silent.

One day, while patrolling the perimeter with Father David, they came across a stranger. He was lying unconscious by a stream, exhausted and wounded. He wore strange rags and clutched a dirty, tattered bundle with a dead grip in his hand.

They brought him to the Fort. Lena, Matvey’s daughter, their only doctor, examined him. Multiple bruises, exhaustion, fever. But the wounds had been treated, albeit crudely – someone had cauterized them with red-hot metal. This man was fighting for life.

When the stranger came to his senses, he saw the stern face of Matvei Stone above him.

– Who are you?” Father’s voice was like the creaking of a millstone. – Where do you come from?

The stranger, thin, with a mad glint in his feverish eyes, tried to sit up. He was one of Elias’s Archivists. His name was Ezra. He was an engineer.

– From London… from the City of the Empty…” he wheezed. – They found us. The Purifiers…

Ezra told them his story. He told them about a dungeon full of books. About people who were trying to save not their lives, but the memory of humanity. He told of the attack. Dozens of fanatics, led by the Prophet of Oblivion, stormed the library. They carried torches and hammers. The archivists tried to defend themselves, but they were too few.

Ezra spoke, and his voice trembled not only with weakness but also with guilt. He was the leader of the Pragmatists. On the day the Purifiers attacked, he was just arguing with Elias, arguing that they should barricade the entrances with racks of poetry and fiction to save the tech sector. “These fairy tales are useless, Elias! We need schematics!” – he shouted moments before the first battering ram hit the door.

Elias then looked at him with his tired eyes and said: “You are wrong, Ezra. Schemes teach us how to live. And fairy tales teach us why to live.”

When the fire started, it was the technical archives that Ezra had tried so hard to protect that were the first to go up in flames. And the way out was through the philosophy section, which he despised. Elias, retreating last, shoved a roll-up into his hands. “Run, Pragmatist,” he said without reproach, but with infinite bitterness. – Run with what you find useful. And find those who can build it. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s the place to start.”

– They were burning everything,” Ezra whispered, tears streaming down his cheeks. – They were smashing shelves, tearing pages… screaming that it was poison, that it was the filth of the old world… Elias… he told us to run. Split up. To take something with us.

He clutched the roll-up he hadn’t let go of all this time.

– He gave me this. He said it was more important than my life. He said to find those who build, not destroy.

Matvey looked at the package. David, his son, carefully unwrapped it. Inside, wrapped in several layers of oiled cloth, were two things. The first was the tattered Boy Scout handbook. The second was some scribbled sheets from The Book of Elias. They didn’t have poems or history on them. They were blueprints. A simple windmill to generate electricity. A water pump. A diagram of a primitive printing press.

David, a former programmer, looked at the hand-drawn blueprints and his eyes widened. This was technology. Not digital, not cloud-dependent. Real, made of wood and metal. Technology you could touch.

– Electricity…” he whispered, looking at his father. – We could… light the houses. Run the pump.

Matvey Kamen was silent. He looked at the exhausted Ezra, at the blueprints in his son’s hands, and two feelings struggled in his soul. The first was distrust. Everything about the old world had brought only chaos. His way was simple: land, hands, power. The second was pragmatism. He was a builder. He saw the benefits. A wind turbine could make life easier for his people. It could give them an advantage.

– Give him food and water,” he said at last, turning to his wife. – And let him rest. We’ll decide what to do.

That evening, the first serious dispute broke out at Stone Fort.

– It’s dangerous! – spoke one of the elders of the community. – This man has brought death after him. If the Purifiers found them there, they will look for the others. They will come here!

– But this knowledge…” David objected. – Father, it can change everything! We can not only survive, we can evolve! That’s what you said-not to let chaos eat us up!

For the first time since the Shutdown, Leo, Matthew’s grandson, raised his voice at the adult council.

– He brought the book,” the boy said quietly. – I saw it. It has pictures of how to make a fire without matches. How to make a shelter in the woods. It’s useful.

The boy’s words, his unclouded, practical way of looking at things, impressed Matvey more than all the adult arguments. He looked at his grandson. Leo was the future of the clan. And if he saw those leaves as a benefit, not a threat…

– He’s staying,” Matvey announced his decision. – We’ll build that wind turbine. But we’ll reinforce the sentries. We’ll be ready.

It was a turning point. Stone Fort, a bastion of survival, unknowingly took a step toward the knowledge it despised. For the first time in seven years, Book and Stone began to find common ground.

Meanwhile, in the burned and desecrated British Library, Jonah, the Prophet of Oblivion, stood in the midst of the ashes. His followers, the Purifiers, were dragging the charred remains of books and throwing them into the general pile. The victory was complete. But Jonah did not feel joy. He felt anger.

As he stared at the pages writhing in flames, another scene came into view. The glittering, light-filled lobby of Chrono-Synaptic’s headquarters. He, then not Jonah, but a humble technician named Silas, standing with a tablet in hand, waiting his turn for a presentation. He had developed an elegant algorithm to optimize city power grids that could save millions. He believed in his project. He believed that knowledge and technology were the light.

And then Kevin Tsang himself walks past him, surrounded by an entourage of investors. The God of this world. Tsang casts a fleeting, bored glance at Silas’s tablet screen. He doesn’t even stop. “Another dreamer trying to build a bridge out of fog,” he tosses to his assistant loud enough for Silas to hear. “Make sure his social rating won’t allow him to take out a loan for even a coffee maker. We don’t need dreamers, we need doers.”