Echoes of Oblivion

The laughter of the entourage. The click. It was the sound with which his life broke. That phrase, forever recorded in his digital dossier, closed all doors in front of him. The net, that eternal archive, made it impossible to forget anything. It was an eternal accuser, an eternal reminder of his humiliation. The knowledge he believed in became his prison. The technology he worshipped became his executioner.

And now, looking at the fire devouring the books, he felt not triumph. He felt vengeance. He wasn’t just burning paper. He was burning Tsang’s world. The world that had humiliated him. He wasn’t just giving people oblivion. He was giving it to himself. And that made him the most dangerous man on Earth, because his holy war was deeply personal.

One of his lieutenants brought him a surviving scrap of page.

– Prophet, we found this in their leader’s office.

Jonah took the scrap. It was a leaf from the Book of Elias. It didn’t have a diagram or a poem on it. It had an entry on it, written in Elias Vance’s hand.

“June 16, 2045. 17:34. I remember this moment. It wasn’t like a glitch. It was a wave. A purposeful one. Like someone had turned a key. What were they hiding? What was so dangerous that it had to be erased from the memory of all humanity? Project Origins. I vaguely remember the name. ‘Chrono-Synaptic.’ Kevin Tsang. I have to remember…”

Jonah crumpled the sheet. He knew those names. He knew this project. In his past, forgotten life, he hadn’t just been a street preacher. He had been a minor technician at the Chrono-Synaptic Corporation. And he remembered things that others didn’t. He remembered the fear in his superiors’ eyes before the launch of the Istokov. He remembered the whispers of “uncontrollable consequences.”

His doctrine of “purification” was a lie he created to survive and lead people. But at the heart of that lie was a grain of truth: The shutdown was not an accident. Nor was it an act of God.

It was done by human beings.

And Jonah knew that if men like Elias got to the truth, their fragile new world would crumble. And his own power would disappear.

– He survived,” Jonah hissed. – The Librarian survived. And he took the questions with him.

He turned to his followers.

– Brothers! Sisters! The purification is not complete! The foulness has spread! The archivists have fled, taking with them the seeds of poisonous memory! We must find them! Find them and burn every one of them! Every leaf, every word! Until there’s not even an echo of the old world left!

The hunt is on. The hunt is not for food or territory. The hunt for the very idea of the past. And all the tracks led south, toward the community that had dared to shelter the fugitive with the book.

Chapter 5: The Spark of Memory

A fragment of lost information: from correspondence between two historians in a closed academic forum, 2041.

“The question is not WHAT we remember, but HOW we do it. The pre-written era valued oral transmission, training memory to incredible limits. Printing created the ‘external hard drive,’ freeing the brain but making knowledge vulnerable to fire. The digital age has created the illusion of immortality of information, but what if the network itself, the very ‘brain’ of humanity, one day falls ill with amnesia? We will not return to the Middle Ages. We will return to prehistoric darkness.”

Change has begun at Stone Fort. Slow, almost imperceptible, but irreversible. Ezra, the Archivist Engineer, had recovered. Under Matthew’s supervision and the guidance of his son David, they began building a windmill based on Elias’s blueprints.

It wasn’t easy. The blueprints were just a concept. There weren’t enough tools, not enough materials. But it awakened something that had been dormant for seven years – ingenuity. They learned to smelt metal from old machine scraps. They were turning gears out of hard wood. David, whose brain was accustomed to operating with abstract codes, was surprised to find that the laws of physics and mechanics were just as satisfying to him. He saw his calculations turn into real motion, into the creaking of a working mechanism.

In the evenings, the construction site by the hill became the new center of the community, replacing the hearth in Matthew’s house. People brought food, sat around, and watched David and Ezra argue over blueprints, drawing them out with a stick on the compacted earth. It was like a ritual. Like the collective creation of a miracle. The women began to recall scraps of knowledge from a past life: one remembered her electrician grandfather talking about wire cross sections, another something about bearing grease from an old educational movie. Humanity’s memory, shattered into fragments, was beginning to slowly reassemble around a common, understandable goal.

It was like a strange, collective fever. One woman, who had been a clothing designer in a previous life, suddenly realized that she remembered how to calculate the tension of sailcloth for the blades because her grandfather had been a yachtsman and had once shown her an instructional film. She didn’t remember her grandfather’s face, but she remembered the angle of attack of the sail. The former office clerk who had never held anything heavier than a stylus had discovered that his hands themselves knew how to mix clay and straw to insulate wires, a foreign, peasant memory that had come to him in a dream. They were like a broken receiver that catches the scraps of dozens of radio stations. Their own memories had been erased, but the echo of the memory of all humanity lived on in their muscles and intuition. They weren’t just building a wind turbine; they were assembling it from the ghosts of other people’s experiences.

The Fort’s youth, including Leo, huddled around Ezra when he took a break from work. He didn’t preach. He just told stories. Told about stars that were actually giant suns, not just lights on a black blanket. He talked about how people flew to the moon. He talked about the music of Bach and the paintings of Van Gogh.

For the children who had grown up in a world confined to fences and fields, these were revelations. Their world was suddenly vast, deep, and full of wonder.

One evening, Leo approached Ezra.

– Tell me more… about the dragons,” he asked.

Ezra smiled. He didn’t go on to say that dragons were a myth. He started talking about dinosaurs. About the giant lizards that once ruled the Earth. His story was scrappy, full of gaps, but it lit the fire of imagination in the boy’s eyes.

– Why did they die? – Leo asked when Ezra had finished. His eyes burned with curiosity.

– A big rock fell from the sky. Very, very big,” Ezra struggled to find simple words. – It changed the world. It got cold. There was nothing to eat. They were too big to hide. Too strong to change.

– Like us,” Leo suddenly said quietly.

Ezra looked at the boy. He didn’t understand.

– Well, in the old world,” Leo explained. – Grandpa says we were too strong. Too smart. And we couldn’t hide when things changed, either. We’re like dinosaurs?

That childish but frighteningly accurate analogy made Ezra’s breath catch. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

– No, Leo. We’re not dinosaurs. Because we can learn. We can remember. That’s our difference.

But the main miracle was David’s transformation. At first, he was just a journeyman, barely able to tell the difference between a nut and a bolt. But one day, looking at Ezra’s chaotic blueprints, he suddenly saw more than schematics. He saw an algorithm. A logical structure.

“Ezra, you’re doing it all wrong,” he said, picking up a coal, “You’re trying to build one big system. You’re trying to build it in modules. Like in the code. This node is responsible for energy conversion; it should be independent. This one is for distribution; it should have its own fault-tolerance protocol.

He began to redraw the circuit, but not as an engineer, but as a software architect. He was creating not a mechanism, but an operating system out of wood and metal. Ezra looked at him in amazement. He, the keeper of old knowledge, saw a new science being born – not a simple copying of the past, but a synthesis of it with the logic of the digital age. David did not abandon his past. He applied it to a new reality. And in that moment, he ceased to be just his father’s son. He found his own path, the path of the software engineer of the new world. For him, the wind turbine was more than just a machine. It was his first working code, written not on a screen, but on the body of the earth.

But not everyone in the Fort was happy about the change. The old men grumbled.

– He poisons our children’s minds with fairy tales,” one of them said to Matvei. – They should be thinking about how to survive the winter, not about bones in the ground and flights to the moon. Your Code talked about work, not talk.

Matvey Kamen felt uneasy himself. The order he had constructed was simple and clear. Ezra’s knowledge brought complexity, questions, doubts.

At night he lay awake, listening to Anna’s breathing. He stared up at the dark ceiling and thought. He was a builder. He built houses, walls, a community. He built with whatever was at hand – stone, wood, clay. And this Ezra… he built with things you couldn’t touch. Words. Ideas. And Matvey didn’t know which was stronger. His wall that could protect him from the marauder? Or the idea in his grandson’s head that could force him beyond that wall? He felt that the world had become bigger than his Fort, and it frightened and yet vaguely attracted him at the same time.

But he saw his grandson’s eyes light up. He saw his son David regain the purpose in life that had been taken from him. He saw the simple hope of an electric light bulb inspire the entire community.

And he couldn’t stop it. The spark of memory had been lit.

Elias Vance was shaving through the ruined suburbs, heading south. He was alone. After the fall of the Library, he had lost contact with the other surviving Archivists. He had become a ghost, a shadow in the ruins. His shoulder bag held his most precious possessions – the few surviving books and his own, ever-expanding notes.

He learned to sleep in rubble-strewn basements, to eat canned beans that had expired decades ago, and to filter rainwater through the fabric of his shirt. He grew thin as a chip, but his mind was as sharp as a razor, honed by constant danger and a single-minded purpose. Every night, before he went to sleep, he pulled out a picture of Lena and Leo-the real one, the paper one he always carried with him. He would look at their faces and whisper: “I’ll find the answer. I promise.” It was his personal code.

He survived with knowledge he himself had saved. He knew where to find canned food in the rubble-strewn cellars, how to navigate by the sun, how to avoid the most dangerous gangs. But his main goal wasn’t finding food. He was looking for footprints. Traces of what had caused the Blackout.

“Project Origins. Chrono-Synaptic.”

Those words became his mantra. He knew that the corporation’s headquarters were in the closed science city of Prometheus Park, west of London. Getting there alone would be suicide. But he had to try. Because he realized that just saving the past wasn’t enough. You have to understand who tried to destroy it and why. Otherwise, history will repeat itself. Even if no one remembers it.

One day, hiding in the ruins of an old church, he saw them. A squad of Purifiers. They moved fast and organized, like a pack of wolves. They weren’t looting. They were looking for something. One of them had a smoking torch. Another had a backpack with a scrap of a familiar binder sticking out of it.

Elias froze, blending in with the shadows. He saw them interrogating a lone vagrant, showing him something Elias couldn’t see. The vagrant shook his head fearfully. Then one of the Purifiers slapped him, and they moved on.

Elias waited until they were out of sight and crept toward the spot. The tramp was gone, but there was a dropped object on the dusty ground.

It was a crudely drawn portrait. A portrait of Ezra.

Elias’s heart sank. They’re not just looking for books. They’re hunting his men. One by one. And they know them by sight. So they had a traitor. Or they captured someone alive.

He leaned against the cold wall, and a wave of not fear but icy clarity came over him. His mission had changed. He’d gone to Prometheus Park as a historian to find answers. Now he realized he had to go there as a soldier.

But what could he do against the torch-wielding fanatics? He was old. He was weak. He had no weapons. His only weapon had always been knowledge. And in that moment, he knew how to use it.

He stopped just looking for books. He started looking for vulnerabilities. He no longer looked at ruins as artifact repositories. He looked at them as a tactical map. He recalled scraps of knowledge not of poetry but of chemistry – what burns, what explodes, what poisons. His mind, accustomed to systematizing history, began to systematize chaos, looking for weapons in it. He, a humanist who mourned every burnt book, began to think how to transform knowledge into fire himself. This transformation terrified him, but he understood: to save a library, sometimes you have to burn down part of a city.

Now his mission had changed. He had to do more than just get to Prometheus Park. He had to find his people before the Purifiers did. And he knew where Ezra had gone. South. Where there was rumored to be a community of strong and independent people. Where they built, not destroyed.

At Stone Fort, after two months of grueling work, a miracle happened.

It was a windy fall day. The blades of the wind turbine, assembled from trash and genius, slowly, creaking, began to turn. David and Ezra stood by the makeshift generator. The wires stretched to a pole in the center of the settlement, on which hung a single car headlight.

The wind picked up. The blades spun faster. Something in the generator howled, sparked. Suddenly the headlight flashed.

Dimly at first, then brighter and brighter, flooding the square with an even, pure, white light.

The people gathered around aghast. Many children born after the Disconnection had never seen artificial light other than fire. They looked at the lamp as if the sun had descended from the heavens. Adults who remembered the old world wept, unashamed of their tears. It wasn’t just a light. It was an echo. An echo of a lost civilization. Proof that they were not just feral animals, but humans. People who could tame the wind and turn it into light.

Matvey Kamen stood back, looking at the jubilant faces of his men. He looked at his son, who was hugging the alien engineer, at his grandson, who was gazing at the lamp with rapt attention. And he realized that the elders were wrong.

Ezra didn’t bring them danger. He brought them hope.

The people gathered around aghast. Many children born after the Disconnection had never seen artificial light other than fire. They looked at the lamp as if the sun had descended from the heavens. Adults who remembered the old world wept, unashamed of their tears. It wasn’t just a light. It was an echo. An echo of a lost civilization. Proof that they were not just feral animals, but humans. People who could tame the wind and turn it into light.

Matvey Kamen stood back, looking at the jubilant faces of his men. He looked at his son, who was hugging the alien engineer, at his grandson, who was gazing at the lamp with rapt attention. And he realized that the elders were wrong. Ezra hadn’t brought them danger. He had brought them hope.

But at that very moment, on a hill a few miles away, a sentinel from the Purifier squad, peering into the darkness through old binoculars, froze. He saw it. Not a campfire. Not a torch. A steady, unnaturally bright light in the middle of the night wasteland.

He lowered the binoculars and turned to his commander, a man with the symbol of a crossed-out ear scorched on his cheek.

– “Found them,” he said. – “They’re here. The scourge is here.

The commander nodded, his face expressionless. He pulled not a torch from his belt, but a strange device, an old-world artifact they had adapted rather than destroyed. It was a field repeater. He pressed a button.

– To the Prophet,” he spoke into the microphone. – Source found. Sector Gamma 7. They’ve turned on their lying light. They are trying to resurrect the Web. They are trying to bring back the disease. Awaiting orders.

From the repeater, after a brief hiss, came Jonah’s calm, confident voice.

– Do not attack. Do not scare them off. These aren’t just heretics. This is a symptom. The core of the disease is somewhere near. Surround it. Observe. I’m coming.

The hunt was over. The war was about to begin. And the light of hope that was lit in Stone Fort became a beacon for friends as well as enemies, drawing to itself all the forces that fought for the soul of this new world.

Chapter 6. Children of Oblivion

Fragment of lost information: from a lecture on military strategy, West Point, 2038.

“Modern warfare is a war for information. Deprive the enemy of communications, blind his satellites, erase his databases, and his army becomes an uncontrollable mob. But what if the war of the future will be fought not for control over information, but against the very idea of information? It won’t be a war of armies. It will be a war of fanatics against librarians. And it will be far more brutal.

Jonah, the Prophet of Oblivion, arrived at the foot of the hill overlooking the Stone Fort on the third day after the light had been seen. He brought with him the core of his army – a hundred of the most loyal, most ruthless Purifiers. These were not just marauders. These were soldiers of a new faith.

They were the Children of Oblivion, a generation that the Disconnect caught at a young, malleable age. They didn’t remember the past with nostalgia. They remembered it as a time of confusion, of pressure, of digital noise. Jonah’s teaching gave them simplicity, purpose, and a sense of belonging. They didn’t just forget the old world, they hated it.

Among them was a girl named Riya. She was seventeen. She vaguely remembered the old world: perpetually tired parents chained to their work terminals; school, where she was constantly compared to others on digital metrics; the feeling of being alone in a crowded virtual space. Disconnecting for her was liberating. Jonah didn’t just give her food and security. He told her that her pain, her loneliness, her hatred of the old world was not a weakness, but a sign of being chosen. He told her that she was a healthy cell in a sick body. And she had believed him with all the strength of a desperate soul. Now she was ready to die so that this nightmare would never return.

Sitting next to her was a guy named Caleb, the same guy who would later infiltrate the Fort. He didn’t remember the old world, but he bore its scars. An old medical database had been found in their community. With the help of one of the “repentant” techs, they learned how to use it. And Caleb learned that in the old world, he had been diagnosed with “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Type 2. Predicted social adjustment: low.” He was signed up in advance, before he was born, to be a loser. For him, the Disconnect wasn’t a catastrophe, it was an amnesty. It erased his sentence.

Others bore different scars. A girl whose parents had divorced in the old world, and whose Family Network profile was labeled “single-parent child,” barring her from elite schools. A young man whose genetic scan showed a predisposition to depression, causing insurance companies to jack up the price of his “life support package.” They hated the old world, not for its technology, but for its soulless, mathematical cruelty. For turning their lives into a data set and rendering a verdict before they’d even had a chance to live it. Jonah had not seduced them. He only gave a name to what they already felt. He told them that their hatred was righteous.

– Look,” Jonah said, pointing to the distant light of the Fort. His voice was quiet, but everyone caught his word. – They’ve lit their false light. They think it’s progress. But it is a cancer. It is an echo of a world that should be dead. Every word they read, every diagram they draw is a nail in the coffin of our clean, new future.

He turned to his followers. Their faces, lit by the flames of the torches, were young and stern. There was no doubt in their eyes.

– We will not attack head-on,” Jonah continued. – Their walls are strong. Their leader is stone. But stone can be cracked from within. We will slow in them the seeds of their own poison. Seeds of doubt.

His plan was insidious. He knew that in every community there are those who are disaffected. There are those who fear change. He sent forward his spies – not warriors, but “whisperers.” Their job was to infiltrate the Fort under the guise of lone refugees and start spreading rumors. “The stranger has brought a curse…", “Because of this light we will be found and killed…", “The old world was evil, why are we bringing it back?”.

And he prepared to strike at the sorest spot of all. The children.

At Stone Fort, the euphoria of a lighted lamp was replaced by mundane chores. The wind turbine provided electricity for only a few hours a day, and it became the most valuable resource. Lena was able to sterilize the instruments. David and Ezra began working on a primitive radio transmitter – a crazy dream to contact other islands of civilization.

But the seeds of doubt had already sprouted. The old men, frightened by the stories of the cruelty of the Purifiers brought by the new refugees (Jonah’s spies), began to murmur openly.

Light created inequality. Families whose houses were closer to the central square could pull a wire and get light for an hour in the evening. Those who lived near the walls were left in the dark. Quarrels began. “Why them and not us?”. David tried to explain about the losses in the long wires, about the power of the generator, but his words, full of unfamiliar terms, only increased suspicion. The technology that was supposed to unite was beginning to divide.

Leo saw it with his own eyes. He saw his best friend, the blacksmith’s son, looking enviously at the miller’s house, where the light now burned in the evenings and they could work longer. “Before, we were all equal in the dark,” he said to Leo. – “Now there are ‘light’ and ‘dark’. He saw women whose husbands were working on the construction of the wind turbine start demanding extra food because their husbands were “doing more important work.” The unity forged in hunger and fear began to rust at the first glimmer of comfort. Matvey’s grandfather taught him that strength was in the stones. Ezra had taught that strength was in knowledge. But Leo saw that both could be the cause of discord.

– Matvey, you’ll ruin us all! – shouted the old blacksmith at the council. – You harbored a snake, and now its relatives are crawling towards us! We’ve got to kick that engineer out! Destroy the windmill! Turn off the lights!

Matvey stood his ground.

– We don’t hide in the dark like rats,” he replied. – We are building. If they come, we will meet them.

But he felt the unity of his community was cracking at the seams.

Leo, his grandson, became Ezra’s chief disciple. The boy absorbed knowledge like dry earth absorbs water. He had already learned to read syllables, using the Boy Scout Handbook as a primer. Ezra, seeing his hunger for knowledge, took a risky step. He told Leo what he had only told Elias-about his vague, fragmentary memories of Project Origins.

– I don’t know what it was, Leo,” he said quietly in the evening, looking up at the stars. – But I remember it was something huge. Something that was going to change humanity. And something went wrong. Catastrophically wrong. Elias believed that the Disconnection was no accident. He believed it was done on purpose.

It was too complicated for Leo. But one thing he realized: somewhere out there in the world, there was a secret. A great mystery. And it had to do with why the world was the way it was.

It was at this point that Jonah’s plan came to fruition.

Two children from the Fort, playing by the creek outside the perimeter, did not return for dinner. The community rose to its feet. Search parties combed the woods all night. Matvey, David, all the men of the Fort searched for the children.