The Waking World

Abstract

00. PROLOGUE--Eiji Sino-Korean Colony of Nippon We're restarting civilization. What do we keep? Eiji blinks and the Blue unfurls before her. It falls as a semi-transparent screen over her vision, lighting up with rows of text and hundreds of scrolling images in answer to the message board question: Renaissance paintings, coffee pots and cookbooks, Mesozoic dig sites, botanical encyclopedias. The net feed follows her thoughts--closing pages she ignores after a glance and moving others that catch her interest but need to be looked over later--all thanks to the optic implant everyone in the factory-state of Nippon had been retrofitted with during the war. Lying awake in bed, weak daylight breaching the window just beyond the aquamarine interface, Eiji considers contributing to the first board for the hell of it. She thinks of the wagashi sweets she distantly remembers from childhood, smuggled through the door by neighbors, eaten like animals in a burrow, quick and hidden. Practical things pass through her mind: Servers and coolant tanks. Toilet paper. Penicillin. She thinks of her true answer and has to look away. Nobody wants to be reminded of the inevitable. Not everything on planet Earth is going to make it to the new world