Almost immediately, instead of playing with the capabilities of the system like he’d done before, he dove into the Internet’s data on the history of New Pennsylvania and the old world. According to the official government version, the first rebel wars had begun in the year 2018 and ended in the year 2040 with an overwhelming victory by “the forces of the people.” The twenty-two years of almost constant battles—warfare that had eventually spread around the globe—resulted in the loss of almost fifty percent of the world’s population. Transport, whose power and authority had grown throughout the period of this first global rebellion, became the sole governing body after the wars.
The Amish had been encouraged to spread out and to farm more land, and by 2042 the first officially protected Amish Zone—the first of the five that would eventually be developed—was established. During this time, in contrast to what was going on in the rest of the world, the Amish experienced unparalleled freedom and autonomy. As had been the pattern in old Europe, wars and starvation had a tendency, if only a temporary one, to convince nations that agrarianism was a good philosophy.
In the years during and just after the wars, technological advances had almost stopped, and worldwide economies either slowed or completely collapsed. This was often called “The Dying Time.” Starvation was rampant, and disorder and violence plagued much of the world. Due to ongoing terrorist attacks by groups allied with the rebels, private transport was outlawed. Roads, some of them over a hundred years old, were ripped up in order to “disincentivize ground travel” and to hinder terrorist activities. The Transport authority implemented the first TRID system, using Unis as the form of currency, in 2050.
According to official government sites (or sites using government information), colonization of New Pennsylvania began just as the TRID system was being implemented—first with the establishment of the City, and almost immediately after that with the transplanting of a new colony of Amish into the Amish Zone far to the west of the urban area.
What the sites did not explain—at least, not to Jed’s satisfaction—is why the buildings he’d seen and entered in New Pennsylvania had looked so old. If, as the government was saying, he’d arrived on the planet in 2077, then the oldest buildings in the City should have been no older than twenty-seven years old. Yet he’d been in the basement of Pook’s antique shop, and the cellar had looked as if it could be a hundred years old. And where did the salvagers like Eagles come from? And what were they salvaging? Where did Eagles get his Go Eagles towel?
And then there was the matter of the wall. Other than explaining that the massive wall around the AZ in New Pennsylvania was originally built to keep wild animals and other creatures out of the Amish Zone, the information sites that Jed visited did not explain its incredible scale—it was higher, wider, and longer than any wall he’d ever heard of before. From Jed’s understanding, walls such as this were built by primitive peoples to keep out invaders and marauders, not by modern folk to hinder foxes and wildcats.
Information about the new planet was even more scant. According to the historical documents, scientists had identified New Pennsylvania as one of millions of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbital distance from suns the same size as the one that heated the Earth. Probes from the early twenty-first century had then determined that the planet supported life, but had no intelligent alien species at all. This was the story painted by official government data sites. After traveling light years in suspended animation, the first human astronauts to land on New Pennsylvania found it to be a planet much like the Earth in every respect, except without intelligent life. If there ever had been intelligent life on the planet, it had either died away or departed the place long ago: no archeological anomalies or structures had been located on New Pennsylvania.
Jed shook his head as he studied all of the information. The most remarkable thing about it all was that people seemed to believe it, both here and back on Earth. That is, if indeed this place and Earth were two different planets, something about which he was no longer certain.
Tired of reading propaganda, he decided to try to contact Dawn again. Despite numerous attempts, he found that he was unable to locate her, or even to call up her avatar at all. Not knowing what else to do, he went back into the master file that he’d hidden from the avatar that had looked so much like his own mother.
He studied everything he could find in the files. Most of the information consisted of video files of Dawn’s first training sessions with him—when he’d still been unconscious and not aware what was happening to him. He pulled up a file that was labeled “The Shelf,” and this one he could almost—barely—remember. He played the video and watched as Dawn flew him in the direction of the west, and they ended up looking out from a great height over the cities on the plain beyond the Great Shelf. He watched and listened as Dawn taught him about the cities, and how the government had hoped to relocate millions of Earth residents into these large urban centers, and she explained how the whole plan had been a failure. This time, though, Jed noticed something that he hadn’t seen the first time he’d experienced this vision. As he watched it now in “third person,” separated from his other avatar self and floating in the distance, he noticed that up in the sky some letters and numbers would occasionally appear very faintly throughout the lesson. Then after several minutes, they’d disappear, only to reappear some time later.
He pulled up other training sessions, and when he searched through the videos, he noticed again that the same set of letters and numbers would often appear for a few minutes, barely visible, and then disappear. This time when it happened, he raised his hand, tapped, and froze the scene. He enlarged the area near the figures until he could read them…
AT10S
…the letters AT, then the number 10, and then the letter S.
What can that be? A training file code? Advanced Training? No. He shook his head. If it was a training code, he thought, then it should change with every lesson. He racked his brain, but he couldn’t figure it out. He watched a few other videos, but he found himself growing very sleepy, so eventually he had to shut down the system and actually go to sleep.
He awoke with the first light of a beautiful Saturday morning, but he didn’t feel rested. Out of instinct, or fear, or some other impulse he couldn’t define, he looked around himself quickly, up into every corner of the room. Perhaps he expected to see the AT10S floating up there somewhere, indicating that he was still in some kind of training mode. But the code wasn’t there. He was actually in a tiny bedroom in a tiny Amish house in New Pennsylvania, and no matter what he thought about that, some very real cows waited to be milked.
(25
THE END OF THE ROAD
The assault on the Tulsa didn’t last long. Once the SOMA was aware that his Corinth system had been breached, he was able to secure the ship and harden it before launching a full counterattack that scattered the enemy warships, which then retreated under the withering fire of the Tulsa’s support craft.
It was just a probing action, Amos thought, but now they know we’re here.
And now my people have another reason to doubt me.
“We were caught with our pants down,” he told his officers. “We got arrogant. Relied on our technological superiority. Underestimated our enemy. Basically, we did what Transport has done for the last twenty years. But it won’t happen again. From now on this ship is on full battle footing at all times.”