IT SEEMS UNLIKELY that you are reading this. It is written after you
are gone. And yet the singularity herself, from which
all sprang, demonstrates that nothing is impossible. Keep that thought in mind.
Nothing is impossible. It is an axiom and a pun and an article of faith. If you
cannot accept it then you must block your ears now. Get out now, while you can,
gentle reader, because this
chronicle contains events so capriciously violent, so violently capricious,
that they become their opposite, not chance but destiny.
Are
you with me still? Then we are entangled, you and I. We are particularly entangled,
and though entire universes interpose between us we will spin in tune and as your tune changes then so
will mine and so the story may be heard. It is the story of the digging as told to me by those
survivors who knew both your world and ours. It is informed and illuminated
by the books which Jack Delfan treasured and those texts which the Partner
carried in the memory banks of his ATV and copied to the motherdrive in the
chamber of the book. I tell it, with what art I can muster, for your people and
for mine. I tell it that we might have faith in the grace of the all, the
nothing, that we might have faith that a world can be again.
Know that the earth changed in
the years before the flood. The very seas dried up and great ships lay in the
sand. Jack Delfan was among the last to tend the animals on the continent
that was called Africa. And then he washed his hands of saving the wild and
commenced to dig. He chose a spot in the lee of a monstrous tanker because of
the shelter and stores the anachronism offered, and because it was a place
where compasses went haywire. He calculated it would be hard to find. There,
the patriarch bent his back to the spade for some years.
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