L. Navid Osbert (東京)
24 August, 2009
There’s just no way.
This week I met with the company liaison. We went to a small cafe next to Shimokitazawa station and discussed a few issues. We’ll call her K.
Actually, since she might come up again here, I’m going to call her Kay. I’ve always thought one-letter psuedonyms are a little awkward.
We got our coffees — mine a plain black ice coffee and hers and ice cafe au lait, because the weather lately doesn’t permit drinking anything hot — and sat down. After a long awkward silence, I just decided to launch into it.
“There’s just no way.”
“There’s just no way to what?”
“This is not a historical document.”
That’s about how far we got before another long awkward silence. She sipped her coffee and just sat there. Looked out the window at the stream of pedestrians, didn’t say anything. So I tried again.
“Trains. Electricity. Artillery.” I’d looked up the Japanese for artillery in anticipation of this conversation. “There’s no way entities called the Meihonese Empire and the Kolsivite Federation could have been so large and powerful as implied in this text in the timeframe necessitated by the existence of this technology and there be no other record of it, much less this record contain no reference to any geo-political entity that exists now. America. Japan. China. Europe. The Middle East. Something.”
“You’re finished reading through all of it, then?”
“Well, I’m not finished… but this thing can’t be real.”
“Your predecessor left a large volume of notes.”
“But only notes. Where are the originals? I admit I haven’t read everything there, but it’s all paper. Printed off a computer or ripped from a notebook, no longer than ten years ago. If that. There’s not a scrap of paper in there that looks like a historical source, much less photographs or clay tablets or bronze figurines.”
She waited a bit to see if I was going to go on. I waited to see what she would say to this. “Like you said, the technological level seen here is far beyond clay tablets and bronze figurines.”
I lit a cigarette and stared at the table for probably close to fifteen minutes. She was surprisingly patient.
“Tell me something,” I said finally.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything. If you want me to complete someone else’s unfinished fantasy novel, you could just say so.”
“As you read through the notes you will see this in more detail, but I’ll tell you what I know. Your predecessor was convinced these documents were not from any recent known time period.”
“What does that mean?”
“That person believed they were from a long, long time ago. Ancient isn’t the word. Prehistorical. That was after ruling out the possibility that these documents were from an alien civilization located far outside the solar system.”
“Did this person have any historical background whatsoever?”
“There’s been a lot of speculation,” she ignored me, “about the current civilizations which exist on earth being someday destroyed by a great catastrophe, related to climate change or nuclear war or meteors or volcanoes or a religious apocalypse. Some even go further than this and speculate that such a thing has already happened, that humanity has reached technological peaks comparable to or higher than the present day in the past and then been reduced to starting all over again as the result of some global disaster.”
“That speculation isn’t grounded in any actual research,” I bluffed. I’m pretty sure I’m right, but pretty sure is the best you can do with amnesia. “We have dinosaur skeletons. There’d be some actual established archaelogical record of such civilizations if it were so.”
“If we knew everything,” she said, “then of course. But if we knew everything there wouldn’t be research companies or contracts for people like you.”
I drank my iced coffee and smoked for a few minutes.
“You sound like a Believer,” I said. “What did it for you?”
“I don’t know whether it’s real or not,” she said. “But that isn’t particular to this project. Authenticity is always an issue with newly discovered historical documents.”
“If this is still at the verification phase, why have they had asked me to make a publicly-available record of my work?”
“If we’re talking about the motives of our employers, the best I can do is conjecture, so I apologize that I’m going to refrain from doing so.”
“Fine. But there has to be more reason to take it seriously than what you’ve said so far.”
“Maybe,” she sipped her au lait. “I’d be speculating about that too. I do know your predecessor was also deeply troubled over the time and place of these documents.”
“And?”
She cleared her throat.
“You know the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel?”
“Yes, I do. But… even if you say this is a religious holy book, I can’t suspend my disbelief far enough to consider that proto-ancient writers were able to casually talk about trains and assault rifles and cybernetics in their prophecies. The sheer unambiguous accuracy of these visions of the future would instantly validate whatever religion they were promoting beyond any other that exists now.”
“Some people,” she waited for me to finish, but went on as if I hadn’t said anything, “have regarded the tower in that story as a metaphor. That it wasn’t literally a ziggurat reaching high into the sky like Tokyo Tower or Burj Dubai. It might have been something more akin to the internet, something that linked peoples of scatted locations and languages and backgrounds together in some way that after its destruction was impossible. Something that would have been impossible to describe to generations that had never known it or its requisite technology, such that it became a story of humans trying to stack stones up to the realm of the gods and being struck down for their arrogance. We like to look to history for parables, after all, don’t we?”
“But history is not parables. History is real things that happened to real people, that real people did, that impacted their lives. We can draw lessons from it if we want, write fiction about it, turn it into film or literature, but that isn’t what it is. And the Tower of Bable is from a religious text.”
“What religion?” she said.
“It’s in the Judeo-Christian Bible. Before that it was in the Jewish Torah.”
“And before that it was a Mesopotamian myth.”
“But still a myth. Giving it a cultural label instead of a religious one doesn’t change that. Especially back then. Religion and general culture were practically indistinguishable from one another.”
“And World War Two,” she said, “will be a myth to future generations far enough removed from it. Look at the vast body of fictionalized film and literature it has generated. That will far outweigh any actual historical record of it by volume and spread alone. Things we take for granted as social norms, like nationalism, and scientific fact, like the splitting of the atom, will be seen as religious beliefs to future generations with their entirely different mindsets. And if technology were to be rolled back to a Bronze Age level, the idea of men dropping bombs on each other from the air would seem absurd and imaginative, metaphorical perhaps. Machine guns would be puzzling, understood at best as some kind of slingshot or bow-and-arrow technology.”
“But it would be understood eventually, as the society studying it progressed technologically. There would be ancient machines to dig up and reverse engineer.”
“If they survived.”
“Certainly they wouldn’t be intact,” I sucked down the rest of my coffee. I was pretty irritated by that point. “But they’d be recognizably human constructions. Nothing to give substance to technology suggested by this text has ever been discovered earlier than the times we know it to have been invented.”
She shrugged. “I’m not the lead historian on the project. That is your title. I can only tell you what I’ve heard and what I’ve inferred. But certain things have come to mind to make me hesitate from writing it off.”
“Like what?”
“Damascus steel,” she said, “and the Incan ruins.”
“Pretty archaic technologies, stone and steel, compared to trains and electricity.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But trains and electricity we have today. Even cybernetic prostheses are in their experimental phase. Mortarless stone buildings that can withstand centuries of weather and earthquakes, and Damascus steel are still to this day beyond us, though. Which of the technologies is more primitive then, harder to imagine an unknown prehistorical society to have possessed?”
I was chewing ice.
“Damascus steel,” she went on, “has been discovered to have derived its legendary toughness and sharpness from cementite nanowires and carbon nanotubes. Do you know what that means?”
“I’m not a metallurgist, or a chemist.”
“Those are high-tech products. We don’t know of any way to mass produce carbon nanotubes or cemenite nanowires, or cut stone to fit together in stable structures without mortar except through ultramodern technology. And even that is shaky. But ancient peoples with supposedly far more primitive technology were somehow able to reliably produce technological items that had such advanced techniques as a prerequisite. Nobody’s positive exactly about how something as simple-seeming as even Stonehenge was built.”
“They must have had some other method that allowed them to do the same things without high technology.”
“If that’s the case, then whatever technology by which they did it that we don’t know about now would still have to be said to be more advanced than our methods. We tend to correlate this idea of technological advancement to certain particulars like the internal combustion engine or electricity or lasers or genetics, but if comparable results could be achieved by less complicated means, wouldn’t that make those less complicated means in fact the most technologically advanced of all the available options, just by nature of their being simpler while still as productive?”
“Fine,” I shrugged. I felt a little bit lost by this point. “But this is all speculation. I’m talking about the actual documents I have in my apartment, that you’re asking me to treat as a real historical record.”
“Get further through them, and get in touch with me again. You’re getting paid regardless of what you believe, aren’t you?”
I lit another cigarette. She checked her watch, which for whatever reason I noticed she was wearing reversed, the face on the underside of her wrist.
“I’ve got to get back to the office before rush hour starts,” she said. “One last thing for now — don’t feel like you need to censor these questions or doubts on the website. They’d like for you to be upfront and straightforward about the whole process and whatever comes to mind along the way. Think of it as stream of consciousness historical research.”
“I’m not sure that makes much sense to me.”
“Give it some thought, I suppose. It’s an unusual concept perhaps, but where the traditional methods fail experimentation is necessary, and it sounds like you’ve already noticed that what we’re dealing with here is a bit outside the mainstream of historical research.”
“But you still haven’t told me why you believe it’s worth even putting the time or effort into.”
“For me and for you,” she said, “it’s because it’s our job. As for the people paying us… well. That is out of my depth. Good luck.”
She left me holding the bill and a lit cigarette. I watched her through the window, strolling off in the direction of the train station, her behind pushed up by high heels, wiggling back and forth under a light grey pinstriped skirtsuit with each step. A few minutes after she was out of sight, it started to rain. Hard. I sat in the cafe for another hour waiting for it to clear.
By the way, if you haven’t noticed yet, Parts One, Two, Three, and Four of Chapter Two of The Epic of Eiji Daitokai are now posted.
I have serious reservations about staying on this project any further, though. I’m sorry if this is the end of this site.
