His hands quivered with some sort of strange, unquenchable excitement. Everything about this was wrong, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even care that he had no idea how he’d get out of this building.
The message held a sort of lighthearted tone to it. It felt like 4D4M was conversing with a long-lost friend. This note must’ve been with him forever, since the paper itself may have possibly shown more age than he had. Whatever it was, it held an essence to it; like the light of someone’s soul had been poured into the script.
Hello, Ford.
Before I write anything else, I want you to know who I am. My name is Douglas Miring Anderson, but most people call me Doctor Doug. I’m currently 67 years old, but by one of the many times you will read this message, I will be much older than that and probably long gone. My wife describes me as a spunky kind of guy, but I prefer to… settle. Angelica is also 67, our daughters are Antonette (42) and Pasquale (19). Angelica is more beautiful than she will allow me to write, but even in greys, she is still my morning star and shining beacon. She’s a writer if you can believe it! While I’m here in my workshop, she’s building entire worlds in her dreams. She writes a lot about a world where there is no fear, no dread, no emptiness… but all of that is gone now.
Antonette is crisp and bold, and if I dare call her beautiful I’ll probably never hear the end of it! And Pasquale… dearest Pasquale is unfortunately no longer with us, but she is with us in our hearts. She was a pale and shy girl, and she hated it when people laughed at her name. She was… astounding. If anyone could’ve made you feel lucky in this world, it was her.
Your name is Ford. You were practically a part of the family. We loved you. You had the likeness of my brother, Adam, who had passed away when he was just seven-years-old. His favorite phrase was… more of a hilarious way of getting out of doing his morning chores. “Oh yeah! I forgot, sorry!” he’d say, giggling and laughing. I loved that poor kid, even though he was a smart-alec.
I called you 4D4M at first, but the memory of my brother had stopped me from being able to work. Thus your name changed to Ford, derived more from the first number and letter in your name. You were made in his honor, but your purpose was originally to help Angelica through her cancer after I lost my left leg to an explosion. Thanks to you, that’s probably why she’s still holding on today.
Ford, something has gone wrong with the world. The planet itself has turned into a cancer. The fields used to be green rather than the brown it is now, if you can believe it. Australia has been completely turned to rubble and dust. The oceans are drying up. Humanity is on the brink of exterminating themselves. Southeast-Germany built the first completely-free AI, thinking it could help them win The War, which instead ended up destroying itself, and now the majority of the country is suffering from the quarantined fallout. The Once United States was next to build an AI, and it worked for the most part; until a rebellion was brought up from citizens resulting in the machine’s destruction. It was Greenland who built the first AI that was smart enough to begin building other AI underlings. It was a prophetic AI, essentially. The world called this particular AI “Apollo.”
Apollo built some sort of failsafe. A way to keep the origins of the past alive should the rest of the world die-out. It then destroyed itself, along with the nine minds behind its own creation. Whatever it did is now somewhere in Eastern-America.
I have one last, final favor to ask of you, Ford. I don’t particularly care how you do it, so long as it is done. The world may be gone, but prove to me that you can do it.
I need you to teach them how to forget.
The world is a cold, cruel place. It became this way because of how we saw one another. We couldn’t keep our eyes off the past, off of our grudges, off of our poor, unloving values. Humanity became far too angry, too immoral, too afraid to do anything about it! Mankind needs to learn to let go. We need to learn how to be like Adam. We can forget. We need to forget. Please, Ford. Do this for me. Do this for Pasquale. Do this for Adam. Do this for Angelica.
Ford, I know this is going to hinder you, but I need to know you can do this. Your memory is programmed to automatically erase your entire memory bank, all besides your basic knowledge and understanding of the world around you, after one week, on routine. You won’t remember me, you won’t remember Angelica, you won’t remember Antonette or Pasquale, you won’t remember the Atrium, none of it. You’ll be lost, you’ll forget people you’ve met, you’ll forget people you love, but that’s the point. You are made with human senses, but you don’t bleed like a human, you don’t get hurt as easily as one. I need you to know that you, yourself, are not human. When people make androids, they have a primary skill so as to distinguish them from us humans. I have reprogrammed your primary skill to be forgetting, and you can teach this to the world. I need it from you, Ford. You’re a piece of me that I’ve always needed, but now the rest of the world needs you. Be their beacon of hope. There will be a better world waiting for you here if you ever find your way back home.
Sincerely,
Douglas Miring Anderson
Ford gingerly placed the metal pick into the scroll, coiling it and securely placing it back in his pocket. He wanted to cry, but he soon found he was incapable of it.
Douglas had talked of brown and partially dusty lands, but at this point, the whole world may be turned to dust. Had mankind destroyed themselves? Their creations are still here. Surely if this place has survived, then surely other, stronger structures must be around to protect them? After all, he was still alive. Or rather… functional.
I need you to teach them how to forget.
It could be interpreted in many different ways, but Ford was smart enough to know the difference. According to the message, the world brought itself into chaos because of the past. Is that what he needed to teach them to forget? The past?
There are many things he could focus on, but for now, he needs to move quickly. Dusk was likely approaching outside, which meant larger, more terrifying storms. If he only had seven days to complete all of this, he couldn’t afford to wait inside this boxed ruin.
He glanced to his left and right, realizing that by coming down here he had only turned himself into a ruin. There were little to no reliable handholds and no feasible way of getting up without some sort of rope and hook method.
He sat in the dark for a moment, thinking, calculating, until his attention turned towards the rectangular puncture that the broken desk had made. The only way left was down, but that could result in him becoming further trapped. Logically, it was his last card to play.
Ford knelt down and peered into the abyss, letting the bright-blue strips on his face that marked his lack of humanity shine down to make light. Unsurprisingly, whatever was left of the furniture was lost somehow. To Ford’s surprise, there was far more than half-a-wall to this floor; there was an entire divider between one room and the next, with a nearly intact door, and the vegetation was roughly three-quarters as present as it was on the third floor. There was one more primary, overarching detail here… Some of the vegetation wasn’t dead. And he recognized them, too. Potato plants, living under a tiny glimmer of sunlight.
Living Potato plants. Which meant something must’ve been taking care of them.
“Hello!” Ford called into the abyss. “Hello?” he repeated. No answer.
The prospect of no longer being alone, with his objective being one step ahead so quickly, Ford leaped from the floor above onto where the half-table was. Curiously, Ford stepped to the side and lifted the table; some burnt bundles of vegetation. Burnt. There had been a fire here.
“Hello?” he called again. “My name is Ford; I need some help!”
His eyes trailed the room again. Nothing more than he saw before, but the door to the divider remained closed…
Slowly, Ford crept closer to the door, pressing his ear to the crack. He listened for a few seconds and heard nothing. He listened a little longer.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
A single breath. Slow, steady, shallow, but alive.
Ford gingerly held his hand on the knob of the door. He stood behind it as he opened it in case he got a hostile response, but nothing came about as the door slowly and stealthily crept open.
The divider opened into a section of the building that Ford hadn’t even known was there; a wider and longer room than the structure offered previously. There may have been many smaller walls stationed here at one point, making up many rooms, but now there was but one, holding up the center of the structure.
There, about forty, maybe fifty feet away, Ford noticed an anomaly. Someone who was roughly his own height stood there, looking down at the ground, facing the right wall. He was well over fifty-years-old and had a ragged, full beard, with decrepit gray hair, and a musty look to him. He looked possibly strong, yet Ford couldn’t tell if it was because of hunger that he lost his strength. He wore ragged clothing, and beside him was a cloak made of multiple sets of clothes. It was obvious that he must’ve heard Ford come in, but he didn’t turn to face him.
Curiously, Ford stepped forward into the room. As his face became more evident, the man had a… sad, desperate, depressed look upon him. His eyes looked down, not necessarily looking at anything in particular, and his face was stricken with tears. Where Ford rejoiced, this man made up for it in being completely devoid of joy.
He got to the point where he was within ten feet of the man. By now, Ford could see what he was looking down at. Deep in the floor were what could only be described as shallow graves. Piles of compact plaster piled on one another. Two of them, but on the second one there was another folded, ragged cloak. There was a third slot, but it hadn’t been filled with rubble, and the man stood over it.
Ford attempted to take a step closer, but suddenly, the man’s eyes widened. It was as if he were in another world, reliving some memory, and stepping forward had suddenly awoken him as if a bright fire had erupted underneath where he was sleeping. His eyes immediately darted to his left, staring Ford straight in the eyes for three solid seconds.
“Hello?” Ford said nervously.
The moment the word passed his lips, the man sprung back six steps away from Ford in a mass panic attack! Ford tried to move forward, putting his hands up, pleading, but the man’s right hand swung ahead of him with some sort of metal contraption in his hand. Judging from the size, shape, and form, it was some sort of projectile weapon that likely shot fast, small rounds.
“Woah! I don’t want to hurt you,” Ford pleaded. “Y-you can understand me, right? I don’t know any other languages.”
The man stood there, his face beading with sweat, with what Ford now identified as a revolver shaking in his right hand.
“Please!” he began again, “I was just looking for someone. Anyone, really.”
“You… you’re not here to kill me?” the man said in a deep, curious tone.
“Of course not! I just found you is all--”
“Stay where you are!” he reinforced his position. “Now… who are you? What’s your business with me?”
“I’m not entirely sure who I am, but my name is Ford,” he answered, “I have no business, I was just looking for any--”
“Nobody goes out just looking for anybody!” he cried, his echo climbing the walls of the room. “Why me, huh? Is it because of what I did?”
“N-no…” Ford looked nervously towards the shallow-graves, and back towards the man. “W-what did you do?”
The man squinted his eyes as if to attempt to read Ford’s mind, even though if he was successful he’d find nothing.
“You aren’t wearing anything for traveling in the dust… and you don’t look like any Elder I’ve seen,” the man finally replied. He put the gun behind his back now.
Ford exhaled a sigh of relief before suddenly his list of questions became even larger than it had before. The man sat down on the ground, acting as if this has happened a hundred times before, while the frightened Ford remained standing.
“W…” he didn’t know where to begin. “Who are you?”
An awkward silence passed for a moment. The man’s hands twitched as if he were about to pull out the revolver from behind his back and blast away at Ford’s face.
“I’m John,” the man finally said, “John Carter. And you are?”
“I think my name is Ford,” he replied. “Nice to meet you, John Carter.”
“Just Carter would be fine,” he commented. “Why are you here? I mean, you look like an Elder. Why am I not dead?”
“What’s an Elder?”
Again, John Carter seemed to be put in a position of utter disbelief.
“Wait… so you don’t know who Elder Glory is? Or why everybody wants to kill me?”
“I’m afraid,” Ford began, “my creator programmed me to forget everything after one week. If I knew who you were before, I don’t know anymore.”
Carter tilted his head to the side as if pondering this new information and sighing out loud. “That’s… interesting.”
“I’m afraid that means I’m very confused,” Ford continued, “and why I am in a bit of a hurry.”
“Oh, a hurry, are you?” Carter spit back, “oh, I’m sorry, I suppose I’ll just have to move it along then.”
Ford glanced back again at the shallow graves marked in the rubble.
“Don’t worry about them,” Carter said. “I didn’t kill them. This gun has only ever had one bullet, and there’s a high chance it won’t be used to shoot you either. They starved, or got sick, or something.”
Ford finally felt safe enough that he could simulate rest, albeit on the opposite side of the man.
“So,” he began, “what’s an Elder?”
Carter gave another loud, audible sigh, and reached behind him. Ford flinched for a moment, believing him to grab the gun, but instead, a small, still-green potato came of it, as Carter began biting into the thick, crispy vegetable.
“An Elder,” Carter began between bites, “is a person that looks like you. With the blue lights on the side of your head. They’re in charge of The City.”
“The City?” With each increasing word, Ford’s hope multiplied. “So there’s still a human civilization out there?”
“Ha!” said Carter, “it’s probably the last one. You’re standing in the ruins of one of the tallest skyscrapers of New York if I’m not mistaken. The City is a little ways away from here, but it is one of the few places not entirely covered in dust. Granted it's... kinda-covered. But not all-the-way covered.”
“That’s good enough!” Ford stood up again, thrilled. “You have to take me there.”
“What? Hell no,” he said simply, taking another bite out of his potato. “You picked the worst week to try to fulfill your request. The storms are hell nowadays. I wouldn’t survive, let alone be able to guide you. Nor would I want to.”
The man stopped eating for a moment and seemed to concentrate. His eyes focused on the shallow graves, and Ford met his gaze. Carter’s expression changed from that of a stern, old-man, to that of a hopeless, sad soul.
“Okay, fine,” Ford, continued, “then you can at least teach me everything you know about it before I go.”
Another moment of silence.
“What about the Elders?”
Carter sighed. “There… are nine Elders in The City. Elder Knowledge and Elder Philosophy run the whole operation since together they know all things. Pretty scary dudes if you meet them, so, don’t. Elder History is the keeper of the past; supposedly he has this theory that mankind is something worth saving. Elder Love is the embodiment of compassion…”
His voice trailed off as he stared off into the distance. He seemed to return to his dazed look, however, it was one of determination now.
“Who were they?” said Ford, referring to the graves.
He seemed to be brought back to reality, but not… fully. The pair seemed to have a knack for striking fear into one-another.
Carter seemed to weigh the question heavily before eventually coming to a conclusion: “Ah, what the hell, you’ll forget in a week anyway.” He walked over towards the second grave and picked up both the cloak that lied there as well as his own.
“You’ll be needing this,” he said, tossing the second cloak to Ford. He caught it, looking at it as if he’d be robbing the grave itself.
“I’ll…” Carter’s gaze once again fell on the graves. “I’ll take you there. To The City. For her sake.”
“For her…?”
“Before she died,” he began, “she told me to… to find something good to do in my life. That there might be one shred, a glimmer of goodness in me…”
There was something very strange and unnerving about Carter. He seemed complete in his life, an expectancy of fulfilled purpose that flowed through him. He was… retired, yet pensive and sad.
In the corner of the room, Carter revealed two staffs, meant for desert travel. He put on his own pair of tattered shoes, seeing as Ford already had sandals.
“Come on then,” Carter beckoned, holding out the other staff. “We’ve got a long way to go, and the dust storms are pretty volatile. Don’t know what to expect out there.”