Floor 10,024

Year 10 950 ARC (After Rocket Crash) · Floor 10,024

This time Conan dreamt of elevators.

From floor 10,024 he took the stairs up to 10,025. He could have taken the "Little Elevator" as well. There he took an elevator to floor 10,005, in just two stops. This elevator was called "Mid-Little Elevator".

From 10,005 he had several times taken a "Mid-Great Elevator" which stopped at every hundredth floor.

This time, he was taking a "Great Elevator".

It stopped every 1000 floors, and at 1 meter per second, this meant it took 50 minutes between each stop.

Obviously, this was not what one normally thinks of as Elevators, Conan somehow both didn't connect to trains and was very well familiar with train procedure. And yes, taking a "Great Elevator" was a bit like taking a train.

You had a fairly big carriage up and down. It came and left at fixed hours and could take 30 persons at a time. You had to pay tickets to take it. And, while expensive, they were kind of worth it.

You had seats. You had a toilet one floor below that with the passenger seats, and also a cafeteria room one floor above it, with automatic distributors of hot and cold drinks and of snacks. You could even buy a TV meal and you could heat it in a microwave oven, which was switched off five minutes before approaching a stop floor. You put your luggage on luggage shelves. Or, very bulky luggage, on the same floor as the toilet.

Down to 9,005, he dozed.

Waking before 9,005, he was told by a loudspeaker "we are now approaching the next floor, which is nine-thousand and five, if you are leaving here, please finish your meals, don't start a micro-wave heating, if you already have a meal going, you can take it away with you in a brown bag."

He picked up a book (in an elevator on the façade, he could have watched the skyscape, and how the landscape below unfolded, but those were more expensive and some found that an occasion of vertigo or even nausea). This was an elevator inside the building and a break in the electric current could make it go dark, but as it was, he enjoyed the lamps on the book. Some of the other passangers were reading too. Some were talking, but not too loud, he could still read.

He was five chapters through (though when he woke he had no idea what book it was) when the voice announced "we are now approaching the next floor, which is eight-thousand and five, if you are leaving here, please finish your meals, don't start a micro-wave heating, if you already have a meal going, you can take it away with you in a brown bag."

He was not leaving, not yet. One couple of lovers was, though. He watched them smile at each other as they took down their luggage from the luggage shelves. They kept hugging while the elevators was standing still for two minutes, and they went slowly out ... they were probably getting a new apartment somewhere between floors 8000 and 9000.

The elevator started again, this time a bit shaky. But it soon caught up.

All of his life, he had been hearing the noise of winds blowing around the skyscraper, somewhat mitigated by sound dampers. However, this time, he could hear it was blowing to a storm.

The elevator stopped again. "We are in an emergency, please do not panic"

He heard something crack, slowly.

"We are in an emergency, pl..."

Electricity went out, both the lamps and the voice finished abruptly.

He heard the noise of the wind again, more cracking, and felt a slight difference in angle in the dark.

Several others started moving uneasily.

He heard another crack, and the angle was slanting even worse, and now the other passengers were standing up and shouting and quarreling and each wanted to come to the door - but it was locked, as they were somewhere between floor 8,005 and floor 7,005.

As he heard another crack and felt someone stumble across his legs, he woke up.

It was just his cat. "It's you Tabs! You don't know what a relief this is!" The cat was not answering in words, just stared back at Conan.

Conan thought of what Harold Howard had told him about Nimrod trying to build "a tower so tall, that it reached to heaven".

He put on the lamp, and he opened the Bible, Genesis 11.

He read verses 1 to 9.

And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour: Come, let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of Adam were building. And he said: Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue: and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed. Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another's speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.

Unlike the dream, he could remember what he was reading.

Wonder how much they had lost during the Flood ... in technology. How could they have solved the elevator problem?

Was it even a sky-scraper, with an elevator he was trying?

and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven

He suddenly thought of a three step rocket at take off. Only the top reaches outer space.

And he thought - what if Nimrod had no clue at all, nearly, what it would really take, and God delayed this to several thousand years later at Cape Canaveral?

Year 10 950 ARC (After Rocket Crash)

Year 10 950 ARC (After Rocket Crash) · Floor 10,024


Conan found himself awakening during the history lesson.

"Some of you might wonder why, on certain occasions last week, the year ten thousand nine hundred fifty After Rocket Crash was not used. Instead you saw one hundred and one thousand nine hundred sixtynine A. D. - Anyone knows what A.D. means?"

Conan had a vague memory, turned his head where his associations went. Right : Harold Howard was lifting up his hand.

"Yes, Harold?"

"A. D. means Anno Domini. It means Year of the Lord."

"And what does that refer to?"

"Year after Our Lord Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem on Tellus I."

"Correct answer, Harold, but you need not overdo the empathy with those archaic superstitions."

"I don't think they are archaic superstitions, Sir. I think they are tr..."

"SILENCE! ENOUGH! As a punishment you'll go out into the corridor. The hologram TV is switched off, you'll have a boring time. Now, out."

And out went Harold.

The teacher - he was named Bertrand for some reason - went on.

"One hundred thousand years ago, we humans developed rockets on Tellus - you know, the third planet from Sol, also referred to as Tellus I, mentioned in connection with Bethlehem. Or also as Earth, though that is very archaic. The planet where our species evolved. And we developed rockets in the nick of time.

"One thousand years later, Earth blew up and we saved ourselves on rockets - and those who didn't died.

"Our rocket fleet roamed space for some centuries before finding a suitable planet. In fact, if we hadn't learned to make artificial ecosystems, we would have died on the rockets very quickly.

"Then we colonised space. Those on the original planet - the one we found, Tellus II, near Southern Cross - presumably don't know of our success, if they are still there. Ourselves, we know of it, since our own history goes on where we left Tellus II for Tellus III, three thousand years later - we know another crew went off in another direction before that, but we don't know what happened to them. That voyage took our ancestors three thousand years.

"After that ..."

The bell rang.

Conan went out to Harold. They went off to a corner of the schoolyard, while Bertrand was busy quelling a quarrel.

"You are a Christian, right?"

"Yes."

"Don't you guys believe he Universe is going to end, or something?"

"Yes, we do."

"Now we are alrady one hundred one thousand years after your religion was founded," Conan said, generously rounding off to the lower on the remaining nine hundred sixty nine years, "hasn't time disproven your prophecy?"

"Oh, not yet. You see, if it is true that the Universe was thirteen billion years old when He came, the time since then is still too insignificant to disprove it. He still came 'in the last times' and not midway or early in the history of the Universe."

"Wait ... you mean one or two or at least thirteen billion years from now, we won't be around and the Universe won't be around?"

"We'll be around, but the Universe as we know it won't. We'll be around and we will all be either saved or damned and living in eternal bliss or eternal misery. We will all have died and resurrected and we will not die again."

"All? I thought this Judgement stuff you believe in was about your acts, but what about the babies that are made twenty billion years from now? They won't have acted, will they be judged at birth?"

"We won't be making babies any more."

"So you'll have super contraceptives?"

"We won't be having sex any more."

"But you said something about eternal bliss ...?"

"Not that kind of bliss ..."

The bell rang for the next lesson. Conan knew he would be punished for having talked to a Christian who had declared himself so.

And while the bell rang, Conan found he had his eyes closed, was in bed and was waking up. As he did so, he recalled the real conversation with the real Howard.

And the real Howard was a Young Earth Creationist. He believed that Heaven and Earth had been created only seven thousand years ago - some say six, but he goes by a Bible text called Septuagint - and obviously this meant that Doomsday was coming much faster, probably no time to get to "Tellus II" even as per his dream in ... say AD three thousand three hundred and fifty ... and certainly no time to get to "Tellus III" in AD nine thousand three hundred and fifty. If Harold was right, that is.

That was what had bothered him the evening : what would they say of such prophecies one hundred thousand years from now after huge space discoveries had been made. And Harold had answered, with a very cocky, actually a bit nasty self assurance:

"Oh, we aren't there yet!"

Conan tried to get to breakfast after just dressing but was told to get a shower first. While under the waters, he reflected on something else Harold had said.

The stuff about saving mankind to other planets around other stars had, at least at its most basic principle, been tried before - by one Nimrod building a Tower of Babel. And God - some kind of invisible guy these Christians believe in - Harold actually said God had thwarted this, "because it won't work that way."

As he dried his hair with few quick strokes of the towel, took on same clothes and went to breakfast, he thought over and over again "if these Christians are right, there is so much which doesn't make sense."

And at the breakfast table he actually muttered these words a bit audibly, his mother asked:

"What doesn't make sense?"

"Going to school for one."

Here his father lowered the newspaper and asked:

"Why?"

"Well, if these creationists are right, we are taught minute details about a process or more than one which never happened, we are taught elaborate projects about things that won't happen, but nothing about the things that matter most."

"You know what, Conan?"

"No, dad?"

"You ask Harold for some scientific material, we'll go through it and see why it doesn't make sense."

And while the author of this story wishes them an ironic "good luck" with finding that, he also endorses getting the material and looking at it. Even from a Protestant, if it's the scientific stuff on Young Earth.