“That’s just it, Phillip. You’re not just driving all of us crazy with this negative volunteers talk, but you’re really starting to draw some serious attention to yourself. Do you think what happened at Giorgio’s has stayed a secret? Because I can assure you, it hasn’t. Half the town knows about your little stunt, and they’re talking. Why don’t you do yourself a favor, Phillip, and when you’re at the records archives look up what society used to do with people who talked nonsense all day. They used to have these places called, asylums, and what they were, were hospitals for those who had lost their minds.
The authorities would lock these people away and be done with them. They would never be let out again. And, ultimately, their friends and family would forget all about them having ever been put in there in the first place, and then these people—the ones committed—would just become lost to time as if they had vanished. ” “Yeah, well, it’s a good thing, then that these hospitals don’t exist anymore, huh? ” Phillip sarcastically quipped. “And, don’t worry, like I said, I don’t plan on talking about the volunteers anymore either. There’s no point in talking when there’s no one to listen.
“Then you don’t need to go down to the records archives then,” Russell responded. “I told you,” Phillip fired back harshly. “I’m just going down there to finish watching the holograms I started, that’s all. It’s nobody’s business, and it’s nobody’s concern. ” “It’s all of our concern, Phillip,” Russell derided. “And, you might have mom and dad fooled, but not me, not after what you pulled at Giorgio’s place. I know you’re going down to the records department to go fishing for something, something involving the volunteers so you can feed this demented little fantasy of yours.
But I’m not going to let you take this family down with you. One way or another this crap about the volunteers being fake and controlling us is going to end. ” After his confrontation with Russell, Phillip did his best to lie low until Saturday arrived and he could get down to the records department after class. Once at the archives, he didn’t know where to begin, and he didn’t even know of what he should be searching for, but he knew there had to be a clue somewhere, a mistake in the volunteers’ operation like Inez had put forth, one that would set him in the right direction to finding answers. But what?
Something had to be in that gap of missing time, the several months just before the arrival of the volunteers era, the more Phillip thought about it the more he was almost certain of that. They must have been watching us at that point in our history. The world was at its all time worst then, at a critical juncture, a precipice, and they changed all that. They altered the course of human history almost instantly and caused all of civilization to do a complete turnaround. Welcome to New America’s New York branch of history records, the familiar female voice that was Stacy said as Phillip accessed the records.
And appearing before his vision once again was the 3D hologram of her that greeted users. Look here and blink to start the program. “Stacy, show me records of the early twenty first century,” Phillip asked. “Accessing the first quarter of the twenty first century,” she responded. Appearing before Phillip’s eyesight was the years 2000–2005, and he paused reluctant to go into the files because he wasn’t sure if he would be able to find anything of use there. “Stacy, take me to the year 2029,” he then requested changing course. “Accessing the year 2029,” Stacy responded.
Holograms of the great wars soon filled Phillip’s vision along with the immense suffering, cruelty, disease, and famine that accompanied that time period in human existence. Apparitions of a poisoned environment that teetered on the brink of collapse and mass extinction were preeminent. And vast amounts of rubble and ash was all that was shown to be left of the world’s cities as they crumbled to the earth in a death spiral of corrosion and decay.
“They’re bound to screw up at some point with an operation so large. ” Inez’s words were stuck in Phillip’s mind as he continued to pour through the archived holograms. Stacy, take me to June 17, 2030,” he stated. “By June 17, 2030 the last of the great wars had ceased,” Stacy began to explain as the mainframe brought up entirely new images. “All of the world’s governments had fallen, and their military were left depleted of not only crucial supplies, but of able bodied fighters. In the end, there were no victors of any of the great wars as a result of population depletion.
Only a slow, drawn out series of cease fires which took place as the world’s population continued to dwindle down even further due to the rapid spread of disease, pollution, and lack of food. An unwillingness of the plant’s surviving population to continue to wage war became prevalent. That was coupled with the increasing logistics of carrying out military campaigns under the dire conditions.
“With the great wars having come to an end, the survivors who were left had inherited the Earth under calamitous circumstances. But with the help of the Volunteers, under their guidance and accrued wisdom, which they so graciously bestowed upon mankind, a renewed sense of hope and optimism was born. The dominance of what was the great wars was replaced by what became known as, the great healing, which began on June 17, 2030. ”
Holograms of the great healing then showed up before Phillip. They consisted of images of people who were beginning to sow the land once again, growing crops where battlefields once stood. Zero emission filtration facilities were created to cleanse the world’s oceans and waterways of carcinogens, and green energy fuels were developed. After spending a fair amount of time in the , the great healing era, files, Phillip moved on. He then once more requested that Stacy take him to the time between November 3, 2029 and June 17, 2030, but once more she refused stating that all records between those time frames had been lost during the great wars.
Feeling frustrated and disappointed in his search for answers, Phillip then requested Stacy to show him twentieth and twenty first century forms of entertainment as he wanted to give his mind a break for a while. A main menu appeared before him asking where it was he would like to begin narrowing down his field of choices since the archive was so extensive. Phillip had settled on a block of 1950-1960’s American television. In the file, original episodes of a television show called, Leave it to Beaver, were sectioned off in blocks by season.
That show was at the top of the list along with one called, Gun Smoke, and a prehistoric cartoon called, The Flintstones. But, Phillip’s favorite record in the entire file was one of a man called, Bruce Lee. He discovered that Bruce Lee had been an actor who had starred in American cinema for more than twenty years. Lee typically could be seen performing in movies that focused around something called, martial arts, a term in which Phillip had to ask the computer to look up for him since he had never heard of it.
As he viewed the holograms of Lee, it was amazing to see him move about the way he did. Phillip was enthralled watching the scrawny man handle his opponents. To him Bruce Lee was super human, like what he would have imagined a volunteer to be like. Would have. Before long, Phillip hadn’t noticed it, but he’d spent the better half of the rest of his evening watching Bruce Lee’s movies. And when it became time to close down the records department, he had the archive system download and save several more of Lee’s films to his portable notepad computer so he could watch them at home.
The very next day, Phillip spent his entire Sunday, with the exception of the time he’d spent in church, watching his stored martial arts films. He had even researched the many different forms of the arts there were as he tried to soak in as much about the craft as he could. It had soon become an obsession within him, with how people of the past could move with such fluidity and contort their bodies in such ways that would almost defy the laws of physics. That their minds could have such control over themselves physically that they could do almost anything. They were limitless.