A Line on a Map

Just taking matters into our own hands. Aurora thought of her brother’s words, but the reassurance did little to soften her guilt. She frowned at the shards of window pane scattered on the wooden planks of the town archives’ porch. The ring of shattering glass echoed, and the hole in the smashed window stared back at her. Why had the archivist lied?

They waited in silence for the townsfolk to adjust their quilts and covers, roll over, and go back to sleep. Aurora sensed her brother, Kars, who stood nearby holding his breath and waiting. She finally exhaled. It seemed that their break-in had gone unnoticed.

Kars snaked his arm between the edges of the glass, and the deadbolt clicked a moment later. Aurora grasped the handle, pressing the door against its hinges to stifle its creak. She had opened it hundreds of times. She knew the old door’s tricks.

The familiar mustiness of the archive washed over her. Kars clicked on a flashlight as they entered the foyer, shielding the beam to a sliver between his fingers. They passed the reception desk and stepped over the turnstile to enter the archives. Shelves of books and newspapers and old computers stretched out through the long building.

They weaved their way into the depths of the town archives until they reached their goal—a fence gate closed with a loop of heavy chain. A muscular lock dangled from the links. Restricted materials.

Kars handed the flashlight to Aurora and removed a small iron catspaw from his pack. He wrestled the lock until the shackle bent and popped free of the body. Kars extracted the chain from the fence, and the gate swung open. Aurora glanced behind her. The shadows of the shelves made her shiver, but nothing moved. The archives had always been a place of refuge for her, halls of knowledge that felt endless when the town felt suffocating and small. Seeing the library in this light, she felt she was betraying a patient friend.

They entered the restricted section. File cabinets and map tables lined the cramped space, vessels stuffed with the musty surveys and records of a prior era. Kars nodded toward one of the map cabinets. Aurora made out a faded emblem slotted into the window of the drawer. A thick ring snaked around on itself—Perpetual Corporation. A mix of excitement and wariness welled up inside her. 

The cabinet drawer rolled on its runners as Kars leafed through the documents. He extracted one from the jumble, gave it a cursory glance, and stuffed it in his bag. He nodded to Aurora and they retreated from the restricted section, pulling the gate closed behind them. Kars hung another lock on the chain, leaving the key in place for the archivist to think he had just left the key in the lock and to trust in his own ailing memories. Aurora rolled her eyes; it was a feeble plan.

She frowned as they left the halls, frustrated she agreed to the heist. Even if they succeeded, she would still be the intruder of her own sanctum. Things would have been easier if the archivist had just told them the truth.

There is nothing there, the archivist had said. Don’t worry. Leave it alone. 

One lie begot another. She steeled herself as she closed the door behind her. Glass ground beneath the heel of her boot. They would see for themselves.

Aurora and Kars navigated in darkness to the side of the building where a third figure waited as their lookout. Lena straightened at their arrival, reaching for one of the packs near her feet.

“Did you get it?” Lena whispered.

“Yes,” Aurora responded.

“Let’s get moving,” Kars said. “If we hurry, we might get there and back before anyone notices.”

They each hoisted a pack and marched into the night.

 *          *          *          *          *

“You think this was worth it?” Aurora asked, impatient that her guilt had still not dissipated despite the hour-long hike up the old mountain road.

Kars shined his flashlight on the faded paper he had spread on a flat rock. Lena stood next to him, rubbing her hands together to ward off the bite of the alpine night. 

Aurora squinted as she traced the line in the bright pool of the flashlight. The ghost of penciled lines meandered across the worn paper. Faded crosshatches wove through the contours of the map. The line was almost erased from memory.

“Someone penciled it in and tried to erase it. I think it’s a cable connection.” Kars stabbed his finger against a bend in the topographic lines. He traced the erased line with his fingertip and looked to them as though victory was self-evident.

“You promised something major. Seeing this map with my own eyes . . .” Aurora trailed off in disappointment.

“This is just a musty old map!” Lena interjected.

“A musty old map with a purpose,” Kars retorted. “Aurora checked the town survey herself—no one listed anything in this area. The archivist probably had me sort those files because he thought I wouldn’t pay enough attention to notice. It has to be a cable. He told you there was nothing. He wouldn’t even share the map with you!”

Aurora chewed her lip. He had hammered the point to bait her into their midnight heist. Seeing the faded line on the map stoked doubt in the honesty of the town survey, but another thing chewed at her mind: the round Perpetual logo coiled in the corner of the map.

“You’re sure you want to find it?” Aurora asked.

“Maybe not,” Kars said. “Ask me when we’re there.”

“Don’t dodge my question,” Aurora retorted. She took a sip of coffee from her thermos to punctuate her willingness to wait for an answer. She spat a loose ground from the tip of her tongue.

Kars measured his response.

“Aurora, you know the history better than any of us. It wasn’t always war,” Kars said. “Perpetual had a presence up here before the Rebellion. And if it is there, the cable has to lead somewhere. That kind of find could go a long way—salvage, supplies, maybe even some working equipment. Maybe there are signs of the people we lost.”

Aurora felt a tinge of pity for him. They had all lost things in their own way. Just beyond the pool of light, the rusted husk of one of the old machines loomed in the bushes at the edge of the road. On a passing glance, it looked like little more than a boulder dressed in years of forest understory, a relic of a lost civilization. The armored form stood as a harsh reminder of a brutal past. It looked like artillery had cracked the beetle husk of the war machine and ended its march.

“Whoever erased the line, maybe they erased it for a reason,” Aurora said.

“They didn’t destroy the maps,” Kars argued.

“But they locked them up,” Lena countered. She danced between her feet to combat the cold. Her braid fell from beneath her knit cap onto her shoulder.

“Why lie?” Kars leaned on his argument.

“We can’t just leave this well enough alone?” Aurora asked, thinking about the archivist’s denial of the map as she weighed their choice. They could have just accepted the lie.

Kars spread his hands over the worn paper.

The marks of the forgotten cartographer lanced across the blobs of topography. She took another ponderous sip of coffee from her thermos and cautiously eyed the faded logo in the corner of the map. The archivist had lied in the name of safety, but that did little to calm her curiosity. She needed to see what was there.

She shrugged her commitment.

“We already bit off most of the hike, Lena. If Kars is right, it’s not too much further. It’ll warm up soon enough when the sun comes up,” Aurora said. “If we’re going to do this, let’s move.”

“Whatever,” Lena responded. “I doubt he’ll even find it anyway. No way you even know how to use that old thing.”

Kars grinned in satisfaction and carefully folded the map. The paper flopped along its folds like fabric as he tucked it in his coat. He swung his flashlight through the woods before turning back to the trail.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Kars patted his pocket, slung his pack over his shoulder, and started walking.

Left alone in the darkness, Aurora adjusted the stiff canvas of her collar, drawing closed the gaps in her jacket. The mist of her breath floated away from her into the night-soaked forest. Just before dawn, spring in the mountains still felt like winter. She took a final sip of coffee from her thermos and looked up at the ocean of stars above her, free of the anchor of the moon. The pale cloud of the Milky Way meandered through the dark, and the star flecks of satellites cruised between the shadows of the trees over the road.

The burn in her legs had cooled to an ache during the break. Shrugging off the soreness, she adjusted her pack and followed her friends down the trail.

Dawn started to warm the sky. Startled animals darted away from them as they approached, and bird songs welcomed the spring morning. Even if they did not find the cable, she was enjoying herself.

The rising sun painted the sky from orange in the east to purple in the west. The peaks of the mountains across the valley stood domed with snow and wreathed in cloud. They followed one of the old roads, now little more than a few patches of pavement scattered between the roots and brush. Automation and robotics had allowed the cities' development to reach deep into the wilderness like a taproot reaching into the water table. Their tendrils bypassed most pockets of rural towns and villages. Backwater such as their valley returned to wilderness.

Aurora turned and looked back on their home before they rounded the corner of the mountain. Rooftops poked out among the evergreen contours, and tiny cones of smoke rose from their chimneys. She smiled seeing it from this distance.

Prospector was just a tiny hamlet of cabins and buildings nuzzled around the bosom of a towering rock known as the Maiden’s Cusp. Ancient glaciers and eons of the river’s passage had exposed the granite tooth jutting from the hillside, giving the bald peak a vantage of the surrounding hills and the scattered farms in the valley beyond. Buildings and narrow roads nestled around the Cusp, poking through the green blanket of the hillside. From this height, Prospector seemed even smaller than it felt.

Aurora tried to picture what the quiet forest had been like before the Perpetual Corporation left. During her apprenticeship with the town archivist, she studied the varieties of machines for logging and mining that scoured the land like an army of ants. Arteries of rail traffic had pumped the resources from the frontiers to manufacturing plants in the cities where vast factories digested and reassembled them into miracles of science and convenience.

“Imagine what this place was like before the Rebellion,” Aurora said as they tromped along the trail.

“I’ve tried to imagine it my whole life,” Kars responded. “That’s part of why I wanted to follow this map.”

“No splitting wood for winter, farming, or fixing the water makers. Machines to do all their work for them. No studying. No apprenticeships. Endless entertainment, a machine bending time around them.” Lena’s thoughts wandered as she trekked along the road.

“There was a reason our parents fought them,” Aurora cautioned. “And don’t buy those rumors. You sound dense. The Perpetual Corporation didn’t have a time machine—just clever people.”

“Prove me wrong,” Lena challenged. She knew Aurora couldn't disprove it. The loop of cause and effect would always slip past her explanation.

“People give too much credence to rumors in the face of genius.” Aurora didn't take the bait.

“So the time machine theory stands?” Lena taunted.

“No, I don't believe time bends to the Perpetual Corporation,” Aurora said. “And there’s no way to disprove it—so it’s not a theory.”

Lena muttered under her breath, perhaps parroting her friend. Kars smirked as he studied the map.

“I think augmentations probably changed more,” Aurora responded.

Alone in the archives, Aurora had watched the old footage of stylish, successful looking people giving inspired speeches lauding the potential of a connected world—lofty goals to free the transcendent potential trapped within the lonely island of the individual.

Aurora shuddered at the thought that from a simple injection, a computer would sprout and grow in the brain like ivy on brick. From there it was only a matter of thought to reach the vast expanse of the digital world. The network was the next civilization, the individual connected by hidden roots like an aspen grove.

“You think brain computers changed more than a time machine?” Kars asked.

“Time machine aside”—Aurora sighed and surrendered to their barbs— “augmentations let people directly share thoughts, maybe even control thoughts. It was only a matter of months until the augmentations changed the way people communicated, learned, and governed. It changed how they interacted with technology and with one another. People stopped staring at their phones and looked out into a shared reality.”

“Not everyone,” Kars cautioned.

“I think augmentations probably changed more,” Aurora responded.

“Got it!” Kars exclaimed. “And she didn’t trust my musty old map.”

He patted the pocket where he had stored the map before he tromped into the underbrush, tracing the cable up the hillside.

Aurora and Lena watched from the road as he waded into the brush. He did little to contain his enthusiasm as he pushed under bushes and clawed his way through vines and leaf litter. Aurora took a last swig of lukewarm coffee, slid her thermos into her pack, and hopped off the culvert to join him.

After a short climb, the cable ran into thicker brush. Aurora fought through the wisps of a golden spider web and then held back the bushes for Lena. They reached the saddle between two slopes and paused to look through a break in the forest onto the valley below.

From their vantage, Aurora saw vacant industrial structures in the hollow below. Gravel lots peppered with the new growth of young trees filled the gaps between the buildings. Larger arched roofs nestled against the far edge of the valley.

Kars stared down with fascination at the industrial ruins below, and a smile spread across his face. The faded line pressed into the old map led them true. They scrambled down the saddle into the hollow, emerging from the brush onto a gravel road leading into the camp.

“What do you make of that?” Kars asked. The road curved up the mountainside until it met a jagged wall of boulders. Twisted metal jutted from between the stones, and char shadows lined the contours. They couldn't see beyond the mess of shattered rock.

“Maybe they closed it off when Perpetual left?” Lena said as they scampered down the road toward the gravel lot, her words a hurried mix of fear and excitement. “Or maybe it’s a way into town? Or a way out?”

“Maybe they tried to forget,” Aurora said, looking at the charred rock. “It wasn’t all glory.”

Kars blew out a breath in frustration with his sister.

“We know that as well as anyone. But it doesn’t always have to be about what we lost. Look at this place!”

Aurora admitted it to herself—it certainly topped a regular day in town. Better than monotonous hours of apprentice work they would do before they settled into a role to keep the town’s tiny economy afloat. She had placed her guilt to cool in a compartment. They had grown up picking through the rusting heaps left over from the Rebellion, but this camp was an archeological site.

“Fine,” Aurora admitted. “Not bad for a morning’s crawl through the bush.”

She tromped along next to Kars, climbing over a log that had fallen across the road. A few young trees had started to encroach on the edges, but the gravel path remained respectably clear despite its disuse.

The three friends reached the edge of the abandoned camp and paused. Cool air cascaded off the mountains into the cleft of the valley below, bringing moisture from the snowpack and the smell of mountain juniper. The silence of the still morning weighed upon them. The wraiths of their families’ old enemy lingered among the buildings.

Vines tugged half-collapsed metal scaffolds to the ground. Black scars of long-dead fires marked spots where technology had given over to nature in one last effort of resistance. A jeep sat on flat tires in front of a trailer building. Pipes, metal beams, and other materials lay piled on the edges of the main gravel lot. Two buildings remained standing at the perimeter.

Kars broke the grandiose mountain silence.

“Where do we start?”

He jabbed his finger at the trailer. “Looks like the office is there? Or some kind of warehouse?” Kars pointed to the gaping doors at the other side of the camp. Two birds darted across the lot into the opening of the warehouse; a few dragonflies hovered at the edge of the trees.

“Let’s try the office first and see if we can get some more information about this place,” Aurora said, starting toward the trailer. “Hopefully we don’t wake any ghosts.”

The office trailer was a mess, smashed computer equipment and binders of papers scattered on the floor.

“I wonder how this place went unnoticed since the battles around the Rebellion?” Lena asked.

“It was pretty well stashed,” Kars said.

“Not to steal your glory,” Aurora responded, “but it was only a few hours hike from town. I wonder if there’s something else at work?”

“Check this out,” Lena lifted a binder and pointed toward a symbol on the front, a circle curled around on a fanged wedge.

“An old Perpetual logo,” Aurora said. “From before the militarization.”

“I hope you’re wrong about there being something else at work, even if you’re usually right.” He pushed aside another pile of loose debris with his foot.

Lena tossed the binder aside.

“The thought of traveling through time . . .” Lena lingered on her prior thought. “What if that’s why we’re here? Maybe we used it? Did something so we could find it ourselves.”

“Paradox,” Aurora dismissed.

“Brilliant!” Kars responded. “Maybe we drew the line for ourselves!”

“That would cause a whole series of problems,” Aurora said. “Not least of which is that there’s no way I’d leave a time machine rusting in the woods for you to find.”

“Who said you were involved?” Kars responded. “Apparently you lack the nonlinear creativity required for this plan.”

Aurora shot him a disbelieving glare. He looked amused with her surprise.

“Can we just focus on whatever we are looking for? Maybe you should come up with that plan first,” Aurora said.

“I know, you’re probably right. Just saying—they came up with all sorts of inventions pretty quickly. And we still don’t have an answer about why this place was hidden back here.”

“I think this is just a mining outpost—no time machines or other magic,” Aurora said.

She poked a blade server that hung off its rack. It clattered to the office floor.

They all froze in place, startled by the noise in the otherwise still space. Aurora held her breath, waiting for silence to return. Kars looked at her, fear drawn across both their faces. The seconds drew past as their anxiety swelled.

Then Kars burst out laughing.

“What are we afraid of? It’s just junk!” He kicked the old computer hardware.

The tension melted from Aurora’s shoulders.

And then she heard it.

The fine whir of an electric motor came to life at the other end of the office, clearing a puff of dust. The drone righted itself, rising off the ground. The oblong orb flexed two silver dorsal fins and cycled its six-stunted mechanical legs as it hovered over the clutter. It adjusted the iris of its main peering lens. Several smaller eyes twitched in their sockets around the main lens, scanning the surroundings. It slowly wobbled a few feet from the floor.

Lena squeaked in surprise, turning to Aurora, wide-eyed to ask what they should do, but Kars waved his hands, trying to keep them quiet and still. They all froze in amazement as the machine rose into the air.

The searching lenses scanned the room. Kars and Lena remained still as the robot processed its surroundings. It was quiet save for the low hum of the robot’s motors. Even from a distance, her distorted reflection filled the lens. Seeing the machine come to life brought on a sense of elation, followed by fear. The ruined camp was not dead but sleeping, and it had just awakened.

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