an engineer wakes up in a wholly different time. he is found by people who don't know any of the terms he frantically spouts out, who stare at him uncomprehendingly when he talks about machines and their wonderful mechanisms, about beasts of steel and the harnessing of thunderstorms. the village they bring him to is simple wood, stone and hemp; sturdy trees with branches arching everywhere, but nary a trace of concrete.
in time, he gets used to his surroundings, and the people get used to him. he doesn't fully remember the life he left behind, but brings bits and pieces of it to the village nonetheless; his life had revolved around machinery before, and he tries his best to emulate it, to return to the routine, to daily life.
some, curious, stop by to ask him what he's doing, what he's thinking, and he readily shares. they don't quite understand at first, so he decides to start from the very beginning and build from there, and eventually they understand.
he devotes the rest of his life, staying, working in the place he was found, to teaching; to bring back the youth he remembers, to bring forth a new age for these people. he leaves behind countless writings on his deathbed, about giant stores of energy and metal canisters storing them, about boards with such minuscule detail, each of them crucial to create tablets which responded to simple touch; about metal snakes under the earth which could bring people anywhere they wished.
he is the first spark of a new era. villages, towns which then turn into cities build and grow upon the visions he saw in his mind. dirt is replaced with pavement and asphalt, and it is no longer the trees which tower over humans, no longer the stars which light up the night sky. a life he saw once, lived once, in a dream, as he died.
no one knows what technology exactly brought about the end of things. some say it was a superweapon, developed by people who had conquered everything on earth, to conquer even the invisible stars. some say it was a monster, argued to be of the mind, with a giant maw; slurping and demanding more and yet more energy, until the earth could give no more. some say it was a blight of death-mist synthesised by titans, merciless as the common people pled, for they weren't the ones dying.
(everyone, of course, knows that, at its very core, humanity really just turned on itself, as it is wont to do. again and again, civilisations have fallen and wars have raged on.
humanity just had the power to destroy the world along with their own human constructs this time. materially, mentally.
and, would you say, the engineer was the one who lit the fuse first, with the words he wrote, teaching people the first steps to construct these monstrosities?)
at any rate, the apocalypse happened, that which would be passed down in tales, as scores of people died. first the poor, but the rich soon realised they would not be spared either. they ordered their engineers to develop safety pods at record pace, seeking escape, but for many it was too late. ragnarok had come, and razed the earth, only a scant few survivors falling through the cracks; and all that remained after were the shells of what had once been called cities.
no longer would people work with that which had perhaps led to the destruction of the decadent life their ancestors had once lived; or perhaps it was because the survivors did not know how to. the ruins were abandoned; plants regrew, claiming, burying the old steel and concrete.
the world eventually forgot, after many generations, as tales diluted as they were passed down, as new generations no longer saw the marks - forgot about the monsters which scarred the land, as they were by now deep in the earth and long gone. and so the world healed, and life went on.
in a small village, a few people are digging out the nearby mountain, for coal to pass the long, cold nights. they find, instead, a giant cylinder, made from an ore they cannot name, cold to the touch.
upon further inspection, they find there is a man sleeping in the cylinder. of course, they immediately set about freeing him from his prison, which they do successfully, though not without some trouble.
when they - perhaps unceremoniously, but very practically - dump the man out of the cylinder onto the well-trod ground, a few strange, flat rectangular objects, the size of a palm, fall out of the stiff leather pocket on his person. the language of the words written upon them is dead; not one person, except perhaps their slumbering owner, knows how to speak, much less read, the inscriptions. some debate using the objects as extra kindling, for they have no other discernible use.
if they could read, though, here's what they would learn: that this man was an engineer, employed by a long-obsolete company, forced to develop and test a new prototype of safety pods the day the apocalypse hit his city. he was born on the 10th of june - as if the name of the month had any significance now - and was previously diagnosed with asthma, as many in his generation were.
at any rate, the engineer soon wakes.
he is the final embers of a dead empire. he is the first spark of a budding era.
time is a circle. the snake shall forever inject venom into its tail.
