Written for a school assignment.
Fiction | Worldbuilding | Assignment
Inside the remains of the Melbourne City Post Office Building sits a human atop a mound of concrete rubble. They are looking out through the shattered windows towards the remains of what was once the intersection of Collins and William street. The tram tracks are rusted and peeling, and the box gums once relegated to the sides of the road now tear the bitumen up in cracks. In the windows of the skyscraper across the intersection, the sun's reflection beams through the grey leaves.
The human looks back down over a collection of four photos, as they have done many times before. The photos are all they have left from before 2008 — they were too young to recall anything from that time, so all they have to remember it by are these childhood photos. None of them are any good. They were taken on an old Canon A95, and the photographer set both contrast and flash far too high, leaving the photos with overly vivid colours and heavy, off-putting shadows. The human doesn't know this, of course — they barely remember what a camera is. For all they know, this was just what the world looked like before 2008.
The human directs their attention to one of the photos — this one is unusual; unlike the others, it was taken outside, and the better lighting makes the poor camerawork less noticeable. The photo depicts a young child with light hair and a pudgy face standing in federation square, looking up towards the camera curiously. They have one hand up to their mouth, and the other held in the hand of a woman next to them — she is smiling at the camera. All throughout the square around them are crowds of other people — families, groups of friends, individuals — each with their own business around Melbourne.
The human furrows their brow as they try to reconstruct the moment the photo was taken in. It is a minute into this endeavour when there is a glimpse of recognition — it all seems so familiar; it's on the edge of their memory. But then the moment passes, and as always, the human remembers nothing. They sigh in frustration, and question the whole point of this — of trying to remember an already forgotten past.
A rustling of leaves ahead. The human looks up with a start and sees — for the first time — another, live human. She has dark hair, tied in a rough bun. She looks to be in her late forties, but her patchy skin is filled with the tiredness of someone much older.
The human swiftly ducks behind the pile of rubble. After a moment — a moment of breathing as silently as they can manage — they raise their head to cautiously look back towards the intersection.
The woman is mumbling to herself as she kicks her way through the brush. She carries a bag on her back — a kid's schoolbag, actually — and she holds a makeshift hiking stick in her right hand. She stops in a small clearing beneath a red gum, and lets her bag fall to the ground as she sits down on a root with a sigh. Her unhappy eyes look blankly into the middle distance.
Cautiously, and not entirely sure of what they are doing, the human steps out — out from behind the rubble, out through the windows of the post office — and into the street. They nervously raise a hand, and wave it towards the woman. She looks up. She doesn't register what she is seeing for a moment, but then her eyes go wide. She scrambles to pick up her walking stick, and though struggling to keep her balance, she stands up and points it at the human. "Who goes there?" she calls.
"I-I'm..." The human realises they can't remember their name. "I- I don't know," they manage to say.
"I-" The woman sighs, and lowers her walking stick. She picks up her bag and approaches the human. As she comes closer, she says, "Damn, kid — you can't be older than, what, 16? — what are you doing here?"
"Wh- Where else am I mean to be?"
She sighs. "Okay." She looks back to the tree. "Here — come sit with me."
"I'm Cole, by the way. Nicole."
"Hi Cole."
There is silence for a moment, before the humans speaks up: "Have you, um, seen anyone else around? After this happened, I mean."
"After the rapture? No, you're the first I've met."
"Same."
"You sure you can't remember your name?"
"No."
There is silence again.
"You said rapture earlier..."
"Oh, sorry, it's just a silly name for 2008 — the 'end of the world', if you prefer. The 'apocalypse'. What Rutherford did. F-Tex too. Fuckin'..." She trails off.
"I don't... Who's Rutherford? What's... What's F-Tex?"
She leans back. "The F-Tex Trade Co was a greedy fuckin' mega-corporation. They were a big part of the Australian clothing market — but they weren't based in Australia, no, they ran all their sweatshops in Indonesia, because it meant they barely had to pay their workers." She wrinkles her nose. "People ate their shit up. 'Didn't care it was made with, essentially, slave labour."
She spits on the ground before continuing. "John. D. Rutherford was the CEO of BDP, the biggest coal company in Australia. They dug up a bunch of stuff that killed the planet. 'Made the air unbreathable." She gives a slight smile. "Rutherford refused to admit to that fact, even up to his last, smoke-filled breath.
"And then there's MetaCom..." She looks up at the collapsed building to her right.
"What did MetaCom do?"
"Well, I suppose they weren't as bad as BDP, but they were such fuckin' assholes. 'Kept talking about they were improving the world with technology — called themselves 'the modern Nikola Tesla'." She snorts. "All their technology did was make the rich white fucks richer and the rest of us poorer." She pauses for a moment. "And they were so adamant that what they were doing was right — 'said it was their own fault the poor were poor." She pauses for a while, and then smiles. "They're all gone now. Every last one of the libertarian fucks..." She frowns. "They left us behind." Her arms gesture around at the remains of Melbourne. "With this."
The human is unsure what to say. Unlike Cole, this has been all that they have ever had.
"You see those?" — she is pointing at the rusted tracks along the road — "Trams used to run along them; big boxes that carried people around — for free, too... It was amazing." She looks down. "They're gone now."
She points over to the post office. "That building used to be filled with these... these big metal boxes. Computers. They could do all sorts of things. They're gone too. They were taken from us."
The human finds themselves able to sympathise with her — with her longing for an unreachable past.
"We didn't deserve any of this," she goes on, "we were a good country — we were consumerist, and racist, and polluting as shit, but we were better than most..." The human notices her eyes begin to water. "They took it all from us." She sniffs, and pauses for a moment in thought. "No. It wasn't taken from us; we took them from ourselves. We..." She trails off. "It was our own damn fault. We did this all to ourselves — us first world fucks. We were consumerist, and racist, and-" She begins to cry.
The human doesn't know what to do. They feel bad for having asked about any of this in the first place. They should have just shut up.
"Some day soon I'll be gone too. And- and there will be no-one left to remember that time... No-one to remember what they took from us — what we took from us. And people will- they'll- people will make the same fuckin' mistakes and-" She sobs into her hands for a long while. The human sits anxiously, unsure what to say.
"Even I'm starting to forget..."
An idea strikes the human. They reach into their pocket, fish out something, and then extend a hand to the woman. In it is the photo of the child in federation square. "If- if you want, you can have this. If you want something to, um... something to remember it by?"
The woman looks up and is silent for a moment, looking between the human and the photo. "Uh, thanks." She takes the photo and looks at it. She looks as if she wants to say something else, but can't articulate it — it slips her mind. She is looking past the boy and the woman in the photo, towards the crowds of people. She imagines each of those people, living their own lives — their own joys, their own sorrows. She imagines them laughing and crying and just existing in the first place. It reminds her of the world she knew.
All she manages to say is: "Thank you... Thank you for... giving me this."
The human smiles and adds, "It's okay. I don't need it anymore."