Abandoned World: The Awakening

— Quiet, you… Yes, a flash drive… There are more movies. I haven't seen them yet. But it

looks interesting… I was going to suggest that we go together. Will you go?

It seems that the concern has blown his mind, and he wants her to keep him company in Tosca, too. It was an interesting plan, though — he'd have no competition there, and she might forget what those she liked looked like. It looked like he'd thought about how he was going to spend the next thirty years.

— Taylor, I have no desire to spend the rest of my life watching you in a jail cell And it looks

like that's where it might end up. Give that flash drive to the elders, and then you can tell me what you get back. — Natalie got up from the table and took the tray with the leftovers and moved towards the exit.

***

It was not the first time she had heard of similar finds. People had found flash drives, memory cards, and even whole laptops in completely different places. Of course, most of them had been found in the first year, when everyone woke up, but they still found bits and pieces. And, as it usually turned out, they were tidbits that only fueled the intrigue for such things, despite the threat of prison. And there was something about it We had an official history of our planet and

everything around it, and there was no good reason to suggest that it wasn't. Except for the very beginning of our present life.

We are officially on the third planet from the Sun, called Earth. It is the smallest in the solar system and therefore has no satellites, unlike most other planets. And a few thousand years ago, it was of a completely different kind than it is now: with beautiful seas and oceans, evergreen forests and lots of wildlife in it. Back then it was still possible to walk freely on the surface and live without a spacesuit. But for a long time everything was polluted to such an extent that the cataclysms that occurred led to what we have now — a gray lifeless desert with no air. At one point we agreed to immerse ourselves in a centuries-old cryosleep to wait for better times. But waking up after the dream, we realized that we had lost our memory in the process, and now we are recovering it bit by

bit. And to keep the truth from weighing us down, all information must first go to the elders, who understand the importance of dosing information. That was the story we were taught from birth in school. But it was not readily believed by everyone.

After all, there were a number of contradictions. Some said that it was safe to walk on the station, because special engines were working there, forming a stronger attraction. While outside it — you can easily jump without much difficulty for a dozen meters.

Others have found a contradiction in the fact that textbook maps have many mountains and other kinds of high altitude landscapes that are not even close to being on our planet. Okay, that everything died out, vaporized, and became impossible to breathe, but why did the topography change so much. Of course, only a few people were allowed to walk everywhere, and even more so to ride far away on overcars, and they kept silent in front of everyone else, but from any window one could see the complete absence of any mountainous systems on all sides of Appollo-24.

Others went even further and began to study the movies that we got on various kinds of media and that we were allowed to watch. And the biggest question that came to mind was why the technologies we see in the movies are not very different from ours, but the surrounding reality is completely different. They can breathe fresh air, they have seas and forests, and the same technology. If it came out that we've screwed up our own planet, it couldn't have happened overnight. Which means the movies we've seen are far from catastrophic. But it can't be, because technology certainly doesn't stand still — how much we've managed to invent in our twenty-four….

There were no answers to all these questions — only doubts. Some people had tried to dig into them, but it had been 14 years since they had been forbidden to discuss them publicly. The new found materials began to be turned in after the incident when Oscar Midnight, an engineer of the energy block, was put in Tosca's cell for concealing a hard disk he had found. No one even knows what he saw there, or if he saw it at all, but when he was taken away he shouted that everyone was being lied to, that the place we were on was called the moon, not Earth, and on that word he was hit in the back of the head. Fourteen years have passed since then, and no one has ever seen him again, and everyone began to share their thoughts only in whispers.