Thank You for Listening

Season 4 Excerpt (as published in The Debut Collective's Hostile Takeovers)

The Diary of Ruth Gordon

Day 305: 2187 AD

To my great-grandchildren, so that they do not forget.

It happened slowly, and then, all in one moment. No, I am not writing of falling in love, although that often happens in a similar way. What I am writing of is the removal of the written word from our world. It started with magazines and newspapers moving their articles from the Internet to full audio broadcasts, accessible on our fancy new Otic Network headsets. We didn't even need to carry around an actual cell phone anymore, because our SIM card could be inserted directly into the ear piece, and you only needed to know the person's name to call them. Once the ON found a reliable way for us to search the entire Internet audibly, stating our requests into our headsets, answers spoken back to us, our great nation became hooked on the audible lifestyle.

Requests were made to the ON by security companies, who wanted to remove key locks from doors, and make them accessible by voice recognition and audible passwords. Then came email and other digital companies looking for their clients to be able to send and receive information audibly to one or many, eliminating the need to be a good speller, or to understand grammar and punctuation. And last, but certainly not least, The Hearken Syndicate itself, the leaders of our great nation, came to the ON, and offered them more money than they knew what to do with. Ever since then, it has been operated by the government, its purpose much changed. But then, you already know that.

Of course, reading actual books had already started to fall out of fashion, long before I was born in 2091. People were busy with their jobs, their families, their homes. And there were plenty of other options for entertainment, and even education, besides reading a book. There had already been home computers, e-readers, and audiobooks for about a century, and our world had become more and more conscious of its need to sustain resources. Printing things on paper was an unnecessary use of trees, and therefore our government decided it should be stopped. The last book ever to be produced in physical form was printed 71 years ago. Its title was Words to Live By, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.

It was day 264: 2116, three days before my twenty-fifth birth remembrance. And the only thing I wanted for my remembrance day was a copy of that book. I even told my family members not to buy me any gifts, because that was all I wanted. I had always been a voracious collector and reader of books, something instilled in me by my grandfather, who had taught me to read when I was four years of age. Not only did he teach me how to decipher that the marks on the page were letters, and to put strings of letters into words, then sentences, then paragraphs and entire stories, but he taught me the power of the written word. The knowledge that was kept there, just waiting to be explored, thought about, felt, discussed, used. History was in those words. Our history. The world's history. If there is one thing you need to know from all of my ramblings here, above anything else, it is this:

The words remember.

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Each of you is related to at least four of the eight "great-grandparents" who originally moved underground to the Scrib base, where you live now. Great-grandpa Frank was on the team of neuroscientists that discovered the cure for deafness. However, The Hearken Syndicate had much darker plans for this new technology. Once our families discovered just exactly what they planned on doing with the microchip, and that the government was going to use those of us in Central Intelligence, and our children, as the first people to receive the implants, we formed a plan to get our families to safety.

Great-grandma Madge worked on the team that entered people onto The System. Once we decided to leave, she went to work every day and removed someone from our families from The System. One by one, we moved to our new home, an old underground military base in Colorado, from when our nation was the United States of America.