I love history. I love learning all the oodles of insane shit that went on among people that led to the world where I am now. I love seeing how all of those events intertwined with each other and how people at the time thought about them. All of the drama, the action, the brutality, the suffering, the ignorance, the stupidity, the successes, failures, all of it. It’s not just because I hyper-fixate on what life used to be like as a distraction from my current life, but because I feel a certain kind of emotional catharsis in thinking about just how shitty life was back on Earth and how better off I am right now. All of the wars, all of the genocides, all of the natural disasters, and they still never learned a thing up until thousands of them were suddenly thrust into the new world.

“The Rapture,” they called it, the same thing they called the predestined event in Christianity where Jesus would return and lob everybody into Heaven. This rapture was something like that, only instead of Heaven, it was just… an Earth lookalike. Something closer to what Earth probably looked like before humans arrived. Details from that far back are sketchy, thanks to the town’s former historians not remembering shit about prehistory. Regardless, I am still incredibly grateful to the Rapturites for putting all of their historical knowledge into text in the face of such a chaotic and unexplained event upending their entire existence. But even that’s not enough to keep a bunch of dipshit fucking boomers from complaining that I “don’t appreciate all of the backbreaking labor our founders put into making this town possible.” Fuck them.

But… there’s still so much I wish I knew. Earth’s history has its share of gaps, yes, but there’s a lot about this planet I want to know about. I wish we had some idea of what this planet actually looked like, but our leaders are dead set on remaking the technology from Earth that we lost instead of exploring the continent. I wish we could know more about our place in the universe, but our best astronomers are long dead with their work long unfinished, and very few of the town’s 450,000 people have taken interest in that field of study. I wish I knew if anybody else was out there past North Manmau, but again, nobody wants to go exploring. I wish I could know our first mayor Henry Griffith the same way that Earth’s historians knew George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, but all of his communication at the time was verbal (given the lack of paper and ink), and only one guy bothered recording most of the shit that was going on in those early days.

But god, I am glad that he recorded what he did. The early days after showing up on this planet must have been hell, but the work those people did to organize and form a functioning township in just a few weeks, despite pervasive language barriers and age differences, and while maintaining decent food and water rations, was truly incredible. The 2,000 people there scrounged up tons of wood and stone from the forest using makeshift tools, scraped up every little bit of nickel, aluminum, and gold that washed up in the river or appeared in deposits just below the ground, and foraged for every scrap of naturally occurring food that looked edible, including the abundant wildlife.

Within just barely a decade under Henry Griffith’s leadership, they constructed hundreds of massive log cabins to get everybody out of their tents, remade a bunch of machinery with steam power to create a mining and drilling apparatus around the small mountain range, set up several acres of farmland with the variety of crops found throughout the forest, and established a political hierarchy with an ever-expanding city council and Cabinet that has kept the town chugging along for the past three centuries. They understood that there was no chance of returning to Earth, so they documented everything that they had remembered from it and left dozens of schematics/instructions to rebuild it and stockpiled all of their leftover technology (mostly cell phones) in the Town Hall for later research. They filled textbooks with medical information, world history, and life in their respective towns and countries, yet few chose to write about themselves.

To know about the stories of the people involved, along with the documented progression of the town’s development, would be an intellectual feast unlike any other. But no, they had to wait until Year 14 before stockpiling enough lampblack ink to establish a newspaper, and even then, it only published three days a week until 22, and even then, it mostly covered Council politics, interviews with people about life on Earth, and the goings-on of the city Catholic church that the paper’s owner attended. And make no mistake, regular life on Earth is nothing if not fascinating; I could waste a whole day reading about people’s various activities on social media or home life in the 1960s while wondering what shag carpets looked like. But the gap in knowledge of the first few decades of this city’s development is wide, and unless we can somehow parse centuries-old sound waves from the DNA picked off the chips of dirt they stepped on, there’s no filling it.

But that doesn’t make what we do know worthless. The eighth edition of the newspaper proclaimed Henry Griffith’s sudden death, and all of his successors have left unique marks of their own. His Lieutenant Mayor and immediate successor was the former Greek citizen Apollo S. Meaney, who oversaw the establishment of city schools for the dozens of children born post-Rapture and some of the younger people who were Raptured out of school, a project that Griffith had been planning for months. He, like Griffith, was in his 40s when the Rapture happened and was aging poorly, so he stepped down in Year 16 and Spaniard Rafael D. Riley was elected in his place. He sought to boost the people’s standard of living by essentially overhauling everything. Agriculture was overhauled, piping and sewage systems were overhauled, wastewater treatment was overhauled, animal farming was overhauled, the industrial system of mines and factories was overhauled, a power grid was established to put electric lights in everybody’s homes, and those homes themselves were overhauled with the reintroduction of drywall and mass-produced paints and higher-quality furniture.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I only know all the specifics that I do because I’ve read a ton from the newspaper archive, and I’ve only read up to Issue 168, I.E. mid-Year 22, which is where my deeper knowledge trails off.

But I do know that Riley served until his third term ended in 28, and he was succeeded by Bolesław Stanek, a Polish woman who fought to break down the onerous language barriers by pushing all the former non-Americans to adopt English, which was taken with a heft of controversy at the time but has since been accepted as necessary. The controversy was such that she didn’t seek reelection in 32, and thus along came a Ramona Chandler, a closeted American nationalist, who was pressured to step down after it was found she had some very upsetting opinions on the Holocaust (I guess familial word-of-mouth travels more effectively than textbooks). Next up was Aleksandër Ilir Prifti, who as far as I know was just an Albanian religious zealot that the Council forced out six weeks into his term.

The next 160-some years was relatively unremarkable as most of the makeshift technological advancements had been made and the Rapturites died off, leaving the scientists and engineers back at square one in regaining the lost technological knowledge. We got no computers, no phones, no television, no internet, and no modern medicine. So when the Red Cancer arrived from fungus off the bottom of a child’s shoe, hundreds were swiftly wiped out with little recourse to keep their organs from being torn apart. Neighborhood after neighborhood fell victim and became deserted, some remaining contagious for decades after. It wasn’t until Cintia Mafalda Cantú, better known as just “Cinthia,” was elected mayor a year later in 196 that things came under control.

After decades of stagnation and a general feeling of inaction, things finally picked up in the early 200s. First, the population growth finally recovered after the Red Cancer’s blow, and the city reached 100,000 people. With that came a massive reshuffling of the government; the mayor’s title was changed to Governor, the city was split into five districts which would elect their own provincial mayors and district representatives, and the Council underwent its largest expansion, with one of its first decisions being ordering the settlement of a second city far out east. Second, the computer was successfully recreated using technology from phone screens. It was a box computer like the early Earth models in the 1990s and was just powerful enough to scan the data inside of a lower-gen iPhone. We got its music library, contacts, text messages, photos, notes, call logs, and voice memos.

As news poured out about the wave of Earth shit and computers began to reach the populations, the STEM people hit the ground running. In 212, they mastered long-distance radio communication and began producing various radios for the public. In 221, the first biofueled car was developed in the style of the Classic Bug, although a public referendum opted they be solely produced for public transportation. In 235, after years of failing to replicate iPhones, landline telephones were built in their place and distributed to every house. In 240, the first medication to combat the rising Red Cancer was released to the public seeing as immunization was unreachable. In 251, the first video game system, the VortX, by Nintendo spinoff Xtendo, was released with a slew of platformers and sports games. In 266, the first workable prosthetic arm was invented and approved, closely followed by prosthetic legs. In 277 came the introduction of genetically modified food, primarily for use in farmland. And the most recent development that I even have memories of, the release of the TV, came in 288.

The governor at the time I was born was Lina Hilton, who oversaw some of the most serious disruptions in the city supply chain, including with the distribution of TVs, which apparently lasted over a year due to slow production and a shortage of delivery drivers. After four terms, she stepped down in 292 to make way for our current governor, Giorgos Antonis, who has overseen even greater economic problems and severe public discontent. Crucial workforces to the functioning of society stayed demoralized, long-awaited promises to cut back on gas and oil production in place of higher-tech green energy to fix rampant air pollution have remained stalled, the plan to boost water production in the face of a shortage was unresolved, and above all else, the rollout of redesigned cell phones was nearing. And after narrowly surviving reelection in 296, he’s now in even greater danger as he faces a wave of challengers in two months, all hedging their bets on being the one figure who will refashion the entire system to perfectly serve the city’s rapidly growing populace.

And that’s about where we’re at now. After all my years of reading about humanity’s history, I now get the chance to live history in one of its most critical moments. A governor, dozens of provincial and local mayors, 125 Councilmembers, 204 district representatives, and six highly consequential referendums are at stake in what some are calling the “End-of-all-things election.”

Anyways, welcome to the city of Lyman. We have a lot of fun here.