//|| //^^\\ || || .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED PRESENTS // || \\ || || --X--------------------------------------------- //====TIME=CAPSULES====== '|` ASH UNIVERSE: TIME CAPSULES #0 // || \\ || || "Legacy Discovered" // || \\__// || || Copyright 1998 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ It is the year 2135, and the world is a much different place in many ways. However, a few things have remained relatively constant, like the human tendency to think that today is the only era that really matters, or the fact that it never is. Another thing to stay unchanged is that there are still people who study for the sake of the studying itself, academics who seek understanding because it's there to seek. Also unchanged is that these people have students to do their scutwork.... * * * * "Dr. M'Cormack," wheezed a voice from the hall. "I've got the box, could you open the door?" The professor in question, a gracefully-aging woman of largely Euro descent, smirked and walked to the door, turning the doorknob she'd had fabricated by an engineering student who was looking to earn extra credit points in an entry-level anthropology course. Kaoru Spinoza struggled to shift the box onto a table before killing the power to the gravcart and letting it settle heavily onto the surface. Even weightless, it had had a lot of mass to move around. "Doc, why can't you get a voice command on the door like normal people?" Kaoru sighed, leaning against the crate, his face flushed and darker than normal. She smirked again. "Kaoru, if you can't understand that, you're not going to last long in this department." He frowned. "Doc, Professor Greene doesn't live in an adobe dwelling and sacrifice his enemies to the Sun. Professor Ikawa doesn't bind her feet." "Using a doorknob is hardly a major dislocation, Kaoru. And it helps me feel a little closer to the era I'm studying. Remember, this is a part of history for which we *have* most of the cold facts, so it's important to try to understand the mindset behind those facts. And if living with a little inconvenience like a doorknob helps me grasp the thinking of the Apocalyptic Age more completely, then I'll use a doorknob." Kaoru just shook his head and scanned his reader over the bill of lading imbedded in the packaging. "Another 'time capsule.' More trinkets and duplicates of records we already have. I suppose I'll be spending the rest of the month cataloguing this stuff for you?" Dr. M'Cormack waggled a finger at her student. "Don't speak so poorly of time capsules. I know you'd rather be working at the new Minoan digs, but any of the people there would *kill* for a Minoan time capsule, if one existed. Hopefully, someday you'll thank your ancestors for trying so hard to be kind to future archaeologists." Kaoru shrugged. "Okay, I know that the whole idea of the time capsule started up because people started to become aware that posterity might appreciate better historical information, but why did they keep burying the damned things long after we started keeping permanent records of everything under the Sun? This one," he rapped on the crate, "it's from the late 2020s. We have buildings full of archived information from that era, the permanence problem had been licked by then." "They don't call 1950-2050 the Apocalyptic Age for nothing, Kaoru. From 1946 until 1998, there was a very real chance of a nuclear armaggedon, which would wipe out most records...a time capsule would presumably survive to tell the post-reconstruction civilization what things were like. And then, of course, in 1998 there *was* an apocalypse which staggered the world. It took a few generations before people understood what the Godwar was and that it wasn't coming back. Many people wanted to leave some hidden sign of their existence, something which could be dug up after the next disaster." "I suppose. But since there wasn't a 'next disaster,' we still have all the history intact. So why bother with the time capsules?" "Doorknobs." "Huh? Oh, I get it. I think. Those everyday things they might not talk about in the official records, but which a 'regular person' might put in a time capsule," Kaoru realized. "Ah, he *can* be taught," M'Cormack smiled. "Go ahead, open it up." The graduate student pressed the seal release patch on the crate, and the front side came loose in his hands, followed quickly by the other four panels which could be removed. The packing foam dissolved at the first hint of oxygen, leaving only a faintly plasticky smell behind. Kaoru let out a low whistle. "They wanted this baby to last." Dr. M'Cormack ran her fingertips along the preternaturally smooth metallic surface. "Collapsinum. No wonder it was so hard for you to move. Ah, here's the panel." She flipped out a thick slab of ultrastrong metal which stuck for a moment before moving. It protected a recessed button, which she pressed. The mechanism protested slightly, then the lid rose up on four slim rods. There was a faint click, and M'Cormack knew that the rods had been released, so it was possible to lift the lid off entirely. Not wanting a hernia, she left it in place. "Kaoru, why are you wincing?" "Um, it occurred to me that it might have been a weapon of some sort, a bomb maybe." "Casing a bomb in collapsinum is rather stupid, Kaoru. Besides, it was probed before being sent over, that's standard practice. Sometimes it IS a bomb, after all. Many digs are in supervillain hideouts or bases for secret paramilitary organizations." She pulled out a slightly irregular white sphere, slightly larger than her fist. "Here, catch!" she tossed it to her student, who bobbled it before clutching it to his chest. "What is it?" he eyed it suspiciously. "A baseball." "Pull the other one, it emits subsonics. Where's the stitches?" M'Cormack grinned broadly. "In 2025, they experimented with balls molded from a single piece of polymer, designed by computer to have aerodynamic properties identical to the old leather, string and cork ball, but be fairly indestructible, plus much cheaper to produce. Purists hated the new ball, and it was phased out by 2034. Oddly, the same method applied to Combine footballs caught on and lasted until the sport died out. Apparently, whoever put this capsule together felt that the new ball was an important symbol of his age." "Bet he was disappointed in 2034," Kaoru snickered. "Maybe, maybe not. He might have felt that the new ball was an important symbol of 2025 in the same way the swastika was an important symbol of 1939. People take their sports very seriously, in almost every era," M'Cormack noted. Kaoru peered into the capsule. "Looks like mostly data discs. The old optical storage format, I think." The professor nodded. "CDROMs, yes. We'll probably get a lot of useless duplication here, especially if they're commercially available discs. Hopefully these were compiled by the person or persons who organized the capsule, however, so we can learn something from the choice of items. Fire up the CDROM reader, let's see if the people in tech support fixed it right this time...." ============================================================================= Time Capsules is an anthology series in the ASH Universe, tied together by items placed in a time capsule. Each story will be based on an object found in the container, or a piece of information on the CDROMs. The stories will range from the grand struggles of superheroes and supervillains to slices of everyday life, and will be told in whatever style the writer prefers. It's possible for the entire story to be encoded as a movie on one of the CDROMs, but more likely that the object from the capsule will only provide one piece of the story which is told. Time Capsules #1 will center on the ransom video made by the Conclave of Super-Villains and will tell the story originally intended for CSV #4. Based on a plot by Tony Pi, written by me. Future issues will come out irregularly, as ASH writers get ideas for one-shots they'd like to tell outside the structure of their regular series. If you don't currently write an ASH series but have an idea for a Time Capsules story, talk to me about it. I reserve the right to decide who gets to play around in my sandbox, of course, and to edit any stories.