She turned away, aiming her light down into the black. The rubble angled downward, so she slid and stumbled her way to the base of the pile, reaching a sloping floor. Dust motes hung in the air, and a thick blanket of gray covered strange rectangular shapes around the room. Stopping to listen for any sounds above, she stared up through the hole. Then she turned, playing her light over the shapes. A large desk stood against one wall with a chair in front of it. Two items sat on top of the desk. She brushed the thick layer of dust off them. The larger one was a plastic box with black glass on one side. In front of it lay a flat plastic rectangle with buttons. Each button had a letter on it, along with some other symbols she didn’t recognize. As she moved around the room, her light dancing over more strange shapes, the headlamp’s beam fell on a door. Another room? She rushed to the door. It had no theta wave receiver. She pushed against it, and it swung open, revealing another room beyond. This one held a number of large tables, each with its own sink. Posters hung on the walls. She studied each one, but she couldn’t make sense of them. One showed a series of color-coded squares with letters and numbers in them: Ag 47. He 2. C 6. Most of the poster was ripped, decaying, pieces of it lying on the floor. Another showed a diagram of a circular object with smaller circles surrounding it.
She couldn’t believe it when her light fell on yet another door. The hole in the floor hadn’t simply led to another room. This was vast. She was sure she was under one of the adjoining pods. The whole living unit building had been built on the ruins of some other structure. The place was ancient. Of that much she was sure. It smelled old, musty. She walked up to one of the large tables and wiped away dust. Glancing back at the mysterious posters, she walked across the room. A glass case on the far wall held small silver rocks. They weren’t like the landscaping rocks outside of the living pod units. These were shiny, metallic-looking. She reached inside and picked one up, finding it unusually heavy. Uneasy, she slipped it inside her pocket.
Even stranger shapes lay enshrouded in dust on a table along another wall. She brushed them off, finding equipment of some kind, but she had no idea what it was. She’d never seen anything like it, bizarre tubes of glass and metal with knobs and dials. She wondered if they powered on, so she sent theta wave signals to them. They didn’t respond. She touched the pieces, finding them clunky.
She passed into the next room. Shivering in the damp, she noticed signs and drawings covering the walls. Another desk sat against the far wall with the same ancient equipment sitting under a layer of dust, a tall black rectangle standing on its end, and a bigger rectangle on a stand of some sort. Shelves stood on either side of the old desk, filled with peculiar objects. She walked to one of the walls, her feet kicking up dust. She coughed. The signs on the wall were very thin, tacked there with rusted metal pins. She recognized letters on the page, but didn’t understand most of the words. One sign focused on an image of a huge rock pocked with holes. She walked along the wall, taking in the images when she couldn’t make out the words. The next showed a destroyed building with a massive pit next to it. An inset image showed another giant rock with a burned crust. The next few signs held images of fires consuming city blocks. She tried to read the writing beneath the images, but other than building, fire, and fell, she didn’t understand them. She’d never seen so many different words in her life. Some of them were so long, an archaic form of English. Her written instructions always came to her in abbreviated format, like today: Crps clnp bldg A pod 25. These words were long, clustered together in dense sections.
Suddenly the beeping noise returned, louder than ever. She was in the room with it. She snapped her head toward the ancient desk. A tiny red light glowed. Quickly she moved to it, afraid someone above would hear her. The beeping came from one of two little boxes next to the bigger rectangles. She sent it a theta wave command to lower its volume, but nothing happened. Then she sent an off signal, to no avail. Finally she sought out the red light, finding a dial on one of the little boxes, which she tried to push, but ultimately twisted. The beeping grew much quieter, then with a click, it went away entirely. She turned it back on, leaving the volume very low. She felt along the bigger rectangle with the glass, finding a small button. She pushed it, and it began to glow beneath the dust. Wiping it off with her sleeve, she found a blank blue square staring back at her. It was a screen, she realized—an ancient one. It didn’t hover in the air, but glowed outward from the sheet of glass, held within a plastic casing.
She moved her hands over the upright rectangle next to it, feeling for another button. She found one and pushed it. Something hummed, then the sound of a small fan filled the silence. In a few moments, the screen showed symbols, circles.
She couldn’t believe the equipment could still be turned on. But she knew the whole building had been nuclear powered for a long time. She didn’t know for how long, only that the maintenance crew
