Prologue - your story

This morning

You were excited to hear the news this morning about a large number of books discovered in the mountains. You manage the town’s library, one of the largest in the known world at over 200 books in size thanks to your hard work. Every month or so you manage to add a new book or two to the collection from a passing traveler or merchant. But a whole collection of books, that’s something else! You might need to get the town carpenter to build a new shelf to hold them all!

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The mountains are just a few days’ journey away. Excited, you saddle your horse and gallop off.

Three days later

You stand before the largest collection of books you have ever seen. No, “collection” isn’t the right word, it’s a…well, you don’t have a word to describe just how many books there are. They are in a series of rooms that are perfectly clean and incredibly bright, and stretch as far as the eye can see. There are switches on the wall that turn the lights on and off like magic. You left your torch outside as you won’t be needing it here.

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The books are just as clean and bright as the room. They are mostly in a different but readable form of English, and their lettering is perfect. It’s as if the people that wrote them never made a single mistake with their pens.

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All your life you have dreamed of making a find like this, but strangely enough, the first emotion you feel is fear.

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Why is that?

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You shake your head and laugh at yourself. No, whatever these books are, they can help you change the world for the better. You set off for the town to bring the rest of the team from the library. You have a lot of work ahead of you.

One week later

After a week of nothing but reading, one thing is clear: these books belong to a civilization from the past that was incredibly advanced. They used machines to write their books, not their bare hands. In fact, they used machines to do everything. They used machines to talk to each other from far distances, and even to fly in the sky. You don’t need to imagine what these machines look like, because many of the books have pictures - they call them photographs - that are more detailed than any painter could ever hope to draw. In fact, they look exactly the same as real life.

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What happened to these people, where did they go?

One month later

You are now quite familiar with these people and their form of English.

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You find yourself torn between two desires: a desire for the knowledge of this great civilization, and a desire to run out into the forest and never come back. Maybe it’s the bright light inside the rooms that makes you want to leave it sometimes. It’s certainly quite different from the light of the sun. Sometimes it’s hard to remember to spend time outside when there’s so much to do here, so much to learn.

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But not everything inside these books is artificial. Some of them contain pictures instead of photographs, and seem to show a period of time similar to yours. They give you a sense of comfort, and you put them on the wall.

The device room

Something else happened today. You found a separate room that contains no books, just some devices with buttons. Most buttons have a single letter, sometimes more or a symbol. Other buttons have whole words like Esc and Tab that you don’t understand the meaning of. Touching them makes a clicking sound and nothing more. Are they toys, or something else?

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They look so unnatural…

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Suddenly afraid, you turn around and leave the room.

Two months later

A most unexpected event happened today. You and your team have been tackling an important question: how can you make this knowledge available to the rest of the world? You were looking into the idea of a so-called “printing press”, a machine that lets you create books within minutes instead of writing them painstakingly by hand.

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But then the unexpected event happened. As usual, you were spending your morning with a new book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other as you walked back and forth. You almost dropped your tea with surprise when you noticed that the book contained pictures of those devices with the buttons in the other room. It turns out that they aren’t toys or fearsome weapons, but machines more powerful than anything you could imagine!

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According to the book, these machines can hold words without needing paper to do so. Pressing the buttons, known as “keys”, is all you need to do to write a word. And it was thanks to their power that the ancients were able to fly in the sky and talk at a distance.

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And the way they started them was by pressing a button that looks like this.

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You remember seeing that symbol before! Excited, you run off to the room.

Inside the room

You enter the room with the machines and stand in front of one of them. You see the button as you remember it - the “power” button, as the book called it. What will happen when you press it?

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Should you press it?

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You laugh at yourself again. Of course you should. You stand as far back as you can, leaning forward slightly with your arm outstretched and your other hand almost covering your eyes. You hold your breath, extend your finger and give it a gentle press.

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Click.

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It begins to glow with a blue light. The machine is almost silent but you can hear a soft clicking sound inside. It’s working!