Lost world - part 1
Haah… Haahh…
A young boy, barely ten years of age, was panting while digging at the foot of a tree.
Haaahh… Herk! Cough cough!
Relentlessly digging his fingers deeper into the coarse dirt, the boy’s vision became hazy. He was digging like his life depended on it.
Suddenly, the boy’s shoulders stopped moving, his face was fixed on a single spot in the dirt, he had stopped digging. In this stillness of the forest, only the sound of a few birds, and the ragged breath of a lone boy, could be heard.
The boy bent forward, entering the hole he had created. With his bloody fingers, he retrieved a mud covered object.
With an unsettling calmness, the boy lifted the object up, straightened his posture, and started walking in a very specific direction, still slightly panting but with focused eyes.
After fifteen minutes, the boy arrived at a river. The boy then knelt on his knees and brought the object into the crystal clear water, creating a blob of mud that floated away in the river.
The boy’s eyes had a sparkle while digging, and it only grew brighter and more brilliant once the object was cleaned.
The boy held the object up to the sun, contemplating his discovery. An unknown metal object, one he’s never seen alike.
He examined the outline in search of an understanding of its workings. Needless to say, such a young kid could not really fathom the nature of such creation. He was nonetheless ecstatic to have found this object.
With the metallic object tight to his chest, the boy sat down on the gravel, he leaned forward, drawing his head nearer to the object, then —
SMACK!!!
“Adrian! For the umpteenth time, stop running off on your little excursions when you have better things to do! It’s almost time for the frozen season, we’ve got to prepare and collect the produce and safely store it. Everyone in the colony is contributing, and harder than ever. We’ve seen what happened to the colony south of us last year, we surely don’t want to meet the same fate.”
“Urgh! Mooom! I am not your punching bag! And this is not an excursion, I am discovering things, I am learning about the people that were before us!”
“You can discover all you want after we are done with the preparations. Besides, don’t you think you’re too old to care about such toys? You’re already 16, you’re coming of age. And what are these toys anyway? They’re too big. All those toys you bring are almost as big as your torso, and you’re taller than most of us.”
“I’m telling you mom, they’re not toys! They’re… well… honestly, I don’t know. But what I do know is that they're proof of people that came before us, with knowledge far more advanced than ours.”
“And what’s finding their stuff going to benefit us?”
“Does knowledge really need to have a clear goal to be desirable?”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The boy, Adrian, 16 of age, seemed surprisingly cool at that moment. Or so he thought, until another smack resounded from the back of his head.
*********************************
With his head still slightly hurting from the overwhelming power of the smack of a mother, Adrian accompanied his mother, traversing across a colossal forest.
Trees that appear to touch the sky, formed this forest. The giant leaves block the sun, casting on the forest’s floor a dark and gloomy mood. Leg sized rodents roamed around, chasing each other and collecting nuts and mushrooms. Fluorescent frogs hopping around, catching unnaturally large insects.
The forest’s floor, muddy and soft and hard to traverse, was littered with overgrown green plants. The massive roots of the trees created roadblocks, and the massive trunks seemed like pillars that could block titans.
Despite the treacherous terrain and the suffocating humidity, Adrian and his mother, Marianne, trekked the route swiftly, as if all these obstacles didn’t even exist but are mere illusions. That’s only obvious as they are the “People of the muddy forest”, they are well adapted to this environment, as were their ancestors for fifteen generations, that is for five hundred years.
The world is mainly separated into six biomes, and Adrian lives in the Frozen Hell biome. A ruthless area where, during the heat season, humidity suffocates the weak, and the heavy rain ruins the produce and floods homes. During the frozen season, as the name implies, the accumulated water from all the rain freezes over. The colossal trees’ trunks start cracking causing their fall and thus the ruination of habitats. Mud solidifies and all life in it ceases. Farmable lands crack and are rendered unusable, and require tilting anew in the heat season. The “frozen hell” isn’t a region that is suitable for human survival, and yet, these people managed to make it their home.
What was omitted in that last passage was that the “frozen hell” is actually the most suitable biome in that world. All the other biomes are either a year long frozen land devoid of life, or a sandy ocean devoid of life, or a massive salty water surface devoid of life. And yet, civilizations have grown and prospered all around the world.
The journey back to the colony from the river took about fourty minutes, which is a record time with all the obstacles and the great distances considered. Once they came into view of the inhabitants, a couple of young boys rushed over to Adrian. Once they reached him, with ragged breaths, they pounced on him and each gave him a good beating.
“Adrian you bastard! You went off on your own leaving us to do your work! Do you realize how tiring all this work was? Too tiring! We have been at it for weeks, and I see no end to this work! You ought to contribute too, you damn lazybones!”
“Thomas is right Adrian. As much as I want to laze around and disregard all these responsibilities, what we’re doing is necessary for our survival. I don’t want to see anyone die this year, let alone having our entire colony getting wiped off like the people in the south.”
“Yeah yeah, I know, guys. This is all very important, I know that well. But I also know that what I am doing might be our salvation too. Just look at this! We’ve never seen anything like it before! This is something created by ancient civilizations, people who have lived before us. Just look at this material. It’s rock hard and yet they managed to form these complicated patterns on it. It’s not like the brittle rocks we use for our tools, it’s much more intricate, much more useful. If I can discover the secret behind it and all the other objects I gathered, I might find some use to them. And then, we might be able to use them to lead an easy life, without worrying about an elderly or a child dying from the cold or heat, or houses getting crushed by trees, or getting poisoned by a frog or an insect. I am searching for these objects for a better life.”
SMACK
“And how will you discover more of these if we’re all dead because a certain someone didn’t store the food with the rest? Cease your mouth and work your arms, come on!”
Thus did Adrian sulkily put away the shiny object he found and proceeded to help out the colony inhabitants.
*********************************
That night, just as every night, Adrian fiddled with the objects he had accumulated and studied them thoroughly, searching for a clue for their workings and roles.
This daily chore went on for years, until thirteen years had passed. He is now 33 years old, a strong married man, with 3 healthy sons and a beautiful daughter. It is at this age that a discovery of his marked a long awaited milestone, a milestone that changed his life and the life of everyone in the world for generations to come.