In The Year 2617.....

The year was 2617 but no one was counting. The earth had been through hell and high water for 200 years, or more, with most of its population gone. Gone literally. Turned into slime under the submerged ground or dissolved in the salt waters. There were millions upon millions of dead bodies still floating, washing up on the shores.

The interiors of continents fared the best or better. Higher lands survived. Denver was high. Moscow. And Mexico City. But not New York, L.A., Frisco, Miami, Tokyo, Rio, London, Bangladesh. All gone. 

The rest, high plains, upland pastures, steppes escaped the flood, still alive with some crops. Intact infrastructure. The bigger cities have survived but relied on the countryside to supplement city parks for food. The countryside relied on the cities for protection against marauding bands of killers. Populations overwhelmed the cities, suffocating the safer ones of any size. The resulting panics and breakdown of societies made the smaller cities fall to the armies of wanton killers. The smallest villages and towns were long ago wiped out. There seemed to be a line, a radius, from the large cities that could be protected and anyone beyond that line was doomed. By 2617 most of what could have been killed or slaughtered or subjugated had been consumed and the bands fought each other but sometimes they consolidated and attacked previously too-powerful strongholds.

Institutions all changed. Government,learning, healthcare, military, all morphed from one form to another. Learning came and went as was needed for survival. The cities, singly, with a population to choose from held sway over the armament technologies forging alliances between collections of brains and production. The marauders formed significant units that could fight well. This did not produce a standoff but rather some uneven back and forth of gains and losses destroying and re-destroying land and people.

Continents shrank and consolidated. Some survived. Some became fortresses of stone walls and moats. Some were doomed.

In this craziness each side was uncovering new sights and things in the fought-over territories. One such discovery happened when an armed patrol from one of the big inland cities, high and dry, well fed, and watered sufficiently, found an underground cavern system complete with its own power and disposal plants. The thing went on for miles and they found in it a water source, greenhouses, and working robots tending the greenhouses and the water supply as if they were assisting something living.

Exploring further the scouting crew found something living: primates. Maybe 1,000 or more. All healthy, all active, all being fed continuously, and playing games on keyboards. The primates looked young. The scouts watched, avoided the robots, and began to notice that some robots labored in another part of the cavern system and followed these to find an incinerator, in full working condition, into which the robots fed dead primates. The scouts were stunned. It was as if this automated system, apparently giving life, feeding, and then tending to the dead, along with power and light and water and waste removal, all planned and executed centuries ago, was still in full operation.

And no one knew about it.

Further inspection led the scouts to determine than some kind of old-fashioned computer was monitoring the output of the primates through their keyboard strokes and every time it recognized a word it stored that output. The machine’s ability to read the words was correctly functioning but the words in context made no sense.

The scouts, and subsequently the intelligence services, had no notion of what to think of it.
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