Post by troydenite on Oct 28, 2012 7:24:44 GMT -5
[-3rd February, 2012-]
[-0600 hours, Pacific Time-]
[-
?-]
In the dark emptiness of the Communications Room, the air was silent.
Silent, save for the faint whir of millions of electronic circuits and the clacks of the printing stacks of data, reams upon reams upon reams of figures immortalised on paper and piling up in moving belts between each row of screens, to be delivered to any one of the the innumerable paper-pushers whose job it was to make sense of the figures therein and publish their findings, summarised into a single bullet-point, in any one of the fifteen daily reports given to the Trustees of the Organisation.
Dark, save for the soft glow of hundreds of displays, each one flicking between subjects as diverse as the Albanian evening news for June 23rd, 1999 to the contents of the 2010 Melbourne Yellow Pages. Every frame analysed, triplicated and kept on record, every sound byte saved for posterity and filed away in some vast, labyrinthine system of infinite storage.
Empty, save for the plethora of cabinets that lined every inch of the wall, tagged with such ominous and faintly ridiculous labels as ‘Meteorite Sample 250E’ and ‘Bones of Elvis.’ Ready to be delivered at the press of a button to any one of three hundred labs, if their researchers so desired to view the contents within. Or, as it were, mess around with them in the name of Science.
In short, not dark at all, not empty, and not silent in the least. Only the largest archive of audiovisual content in the history of humankind, working around the clock for years on end with mechanical precision to create a complete picture of the last hundred years of human progress, and a slightly less complete one of the preceding two hundred. Security footage from the White House during the Watergate Scandal. The entirety of YouTube, revised and backed up with astounding speed the second anyone else uploaded another grainy video of their neighbour’s cat harassing the baby of the couple two blocks away. Specks of Moon dust recovered from Neil Armstrong’s boot. Relics, artifacts, legends, tomes. Everything that anyone could ever hope to discover in a lifetime, and then some.
It was miles beneath the rest of the facility, and roughly the size of a large shopping mall - but it was not the only one of its kind. There were others, scattered around the globe in places ranging from the North Pole to Belfast, in halls equally well-hidden as this one. This room was merely a single volume in the archive.
On one of the screens, tucked away in a little corner, six names flashed.
[-3rd February, 2012-]
[-0630 hours, Pacific Time-]
[-Somewhere above the Pacific Ocean-]
Kyle awoke to the sound of a steady whir. Stirring blearily, the young man raised an arm to his face to block out the sudden glare of orange light that had infused his vision - then he blinked, and sat up in a hurry, almost hitting his head back on the floor where he had been lying on in his haste.
“What... what on earth?” He had been lounging in his room. Why was he...
Oh.
The black-haired sixteen-year-old, still dressed in a casual grey shirt and loose jeans, looked back to find himself propped up against cold metal, the orange rays of the rising sun flowing in from two rows of windows on either side of the spacious compartment he was in. There were no seats, and the chopping sound through the metal above his head instantly told him that he was on a helicopter of some sort...
And he wasn't alone, either. Sprawled about him in various positions were other teenagers around his age, each in a state of dress that indicated that they, too, had been snatched rather abruptly from the middle of their normal lives.
This was weird. Really, really weird... but he had to keep his head. There was no time for panic.
Standing up cautiously, the gentle-looking English boy looked around, before taking a few tentative, echoing steps forwards and kneeling down at the first person in front of him.
“Hey,” he called softly. “Hey. Are you okay?”
[-0600 hours, Pacific Time-]
[-
?-]In the dark emptiness of the Communications Room, the air was silent.
Silent, save for the faint whir of millions of electronic circuits and the clacks of the printing stacks of data, reams upon reams upon reams of figures immortalised on paper and piling up in moving belts between each row of screens, to be delivered to any one of the the innumerable paper-pushers whose job it was to make sense of the figures therein and publish their findings, summarised into a single bullet-point, in any one of the fifteen daily reports given to the Trustees of the Organisation.
Dark, save for the soft glow of hundreds of displays, each one flicking between subjects as diverse as the Albanian evening news for June 23rd, 1999 to the contents of the 2010 Melbourne Yellow Pages. Every frame analysed, triplicated and kept on record, every sound byte saved for posterity and filed away in some vast, labyrinthine system of infinite storage.
Empty, save for the plethora of cabinets that lined every inch of the wall, tagged with such ominous and faintly ridiculous labels as ‘Meteorite Sample 250E’ and ‘Bones of Elvis.’ Ready to be delivered at the press of a button to any one of three hundred labs, if their researchers so desired to view the contents within. Or, as it were, mess around with them in the name of Science.
In short, not dark at all, not empty, and not silent in the least. Only the largest archive of audiovisual content in the history of humankind, working around the clock for years on end with mechanical precision to create a complete picture of the last hundred years of human progress, and a slightly less complete one of the preceding two hundred. Security footage from the White House during the Watergate Scandal. The entirety of YouTube, revised and backed up with astounding speed the second anyone else uploaded another grainy video of their neighbour’s cat harassing the baby of the couple two blocks away. Specks of Moon dust recovered from Neil Armstrong’s boot. Relics, artifacts, legends, tomes. Everything that anyone could ever hope to discover in a lifetime, and then some.
It was miles beneath the rest of the facility, and roughly the size of a large shopping mall - but it was not the only one of its kind. There were others, scattered around the globe in places ranging from the North Pole to Belfast, in halls equally well-hidden as this one. This room was merely a single volume in the archive.
On one of the screens, tucked away in a little corner, six names flashed.
[-3rd February, 2012-]
[-0630 hours, Pacific Time-]
[-Somewhere above the Pacific Ocean-]
Kyle awoke to the sound of a steady whir. Stirring blearily, the young man raised an arm to his face to block out the sudden glare of orange light that had infused his vision - then he blinked, and sat up in a hurry, almost hitting his head back on the floor where he had been lying on in his haste.
“What... what on earth?” He had been lounging in his room. Why was he...
Oh.
The black-haired sixteen-year-old, still dressed in a casual grey shirt and loose jeans, looked back to find himself propped up against cold metal, the orange rays of the rising sun flowing in from two rows of windows on either side of the spacious compartment he was in. There were no seats, and the chopping sound through the metal above his head instantly told him that he was on a helicopter of some sort...
And he wasn't alone, either. Sprawled about him in various positions were other teenagers around his age, each in a state of dress that indicated that they, too, had been snatched rather abruptly from the middle of their normal lives.
This was weird. Really, really weird... but he had to keep his head. There was no time for panic.
Standing up cautiously, the gentle-looking English boy looked around, before taking a few tentative, echoing steps forwards and kneeling down at the first person in front of him.
“Hey,” he called softly. “Hey. Are you okay?”
T.A.I.S.E.N. Academy: Towards the Future
Prologue: Introductions, and a Bunch of Other Stuff
