1 Ziv
Ziv started walking today. His parents cheered him on and helped him up when he fell on the blankets and pillows. They picked him up and kissed him after he was tired. Since it was a joyous occasion, they celebrated with another set of rations. They took a few extra vegetables from the garden in the basement. With Ziv in his mother's lap, he tried grabbing the small cut up pieces of dinner. Happily playing with his food.
---
Some time when Ziv was four years old he woke up from bed. He looked at his hands and around him. He went out of his room to see his parents lounging around talking to each other.
"Mom I can see!"
"What are you talking about honey?"
"I can see."
Ziv tried to explain what he meant to himself and to his parents. Neither of them understood the words Ziv said, but he knew what he felt. He knew what he knew, but he wasn't sure how at that moment. Like he knew how to speak, but he didn't know how to write; knew his favorite foods, but not really what they were; he could see and say colors, but he wasn't sure how he knew it. It was confusing, but at this time he did know what this feeling was.
---
Ziv had been reading different books that were on his tech pad. Just a little device that fit snug on his wrist; easy to use and understand. He constantly read anything that caught his attention and whatever his parents pointed out to him. They wanted him to have a basic foundation in which he could use to learn from.
He read non-fiction and fictional books that have been created over time. Everything was here and the tech pad could still store more information. He also kept notes there to help him in his studies. His parents taught him different subjects as he read through the different subjects.
One thing he did find out was that thing he experienced about three years ago was him being aware: gaining consciousness. Well at least that is how he explains it. He wasn't a different person or anything, he just became aware of everything he knew around him.
---
Learning different things helped him pass the time. He couldn't go outside unless he wore his hazmat suit. His parents had made one for him because otherwise the other ones wouldn't fit. It was rare to leave the house in general unless there was something that needed to be fixed.
He took the time to read different engineering manuals. Water and air filtration were just one of the first things he learned about. Those were the most necessary for survival.
He also needed to study botany just to make sure he can create his own food. If anything were to happen to the current food supply, he needed to know how to alter the genetics of the plant to adapt and then regrow them. They had to do that twice since he was born, but his parents showed him what to do. Waiting a week for the food to regrow was painful. They just had to live on water that entire time.
At least they had water.
---
Fictional stories were just as helpful to Ziv. Reading the stories and imagining the world the author developed was something he really enjoyed. Of course he wished to see grass or trees, but he would rather stay with his parents. Staying with them was the most important thing to him. The other good part about fictional stories he learned really amazing ways the knowledge he had could be applied to any situation.
There was a story where the fireman had to get into this rich guy's home. As the main character, he had to find a way inside the home as it was on fire. Oh and the home was above ground. Anyways the home was smart and had locked him inside and with ingenuity the main character learned from his father he was able to locate the electrical box. Since his dad was an electrician, he was able to rewire the box to create a power surge and allow the firefighters access to the house to get the rich guy out and put out the fire.
If they had waited for the electricians, the man would have died in the fire. Sure they could have destroyed the building or cut into it, but there wouldn't have been time to save the owner. With fast thinking, the main character saved the day thanks to having learned from his father.
Of course that wasn't real, but an event like that could easily happen like that in real life for Ziv. Being able to put the pieces together and understand what needs to be done, is why Ziv reads everything he can. What if there is a situation where his parents are unable to help him? Then he wants to be able to protect and care for them as they do for him.
---
About a month before his eighth birthday, tragedy struck. The wind was blowing strongly enough to have a steel beam crash into the side of the front door. The front door is above ground with the space in-between another door into the home as an air lock. A steel beam crashed into the airlock with the front door still closed, but the airlock was compromised.
Ziv's parents had to go into the airlock with their hazmat suits on and cut the steel beam and then close the hole. At least temporarily, until the wind calmed down and they could close it permanently.
Ziv was told to stay in his room and put on his hazmat suit just in case, while his parents took care of the problem. He wanted to help, but he was scared. Then he heard the call over his tech pad from his parents.
"Ziv we need you to cut off the air filtration system."
Ziv heard this over his tech pad's communication system. He hesitated before moving towards the basement where the garden was. In that room was where the air filtration system was located.
It was a large machine, built into the wall. Once he turned off the system, he would just use the hazmat suit's internal oxygen supply. Not too big of a deal.
As he entered the garden, he went to grab the step ladder. He was too short at this point to reach the panel that would allow him to shut the system off. Climbing up to it, he opened the panel and started flipping all the switches off and typing in a small shutdown code. He finished shutting down the system, but a large quake shook the building and he fell off the step ladder onto his back.
He started screaming in pain as the electrical components tore apart in his suit because they were crushed from the fall. He was being electrocuted.
---
Ziv fell unconscious at that time, but his parents heard his screaming over the tech pad. They dropped everything they were doing and fled inside into the basement and in the garden area.
They found Ziv on the floor next to the air filtration system, on the ground. His suit was torn and part of his back had been burned
"He's not breathing and his heart stopped!"
His mother started doing chest compressions while his father took off his suit. He put Ziv in there and then his mother continued chest compressions. The suits were advanced enough to supply the body with oxygen and restart the heart. The problem was the adult sized hazmat suit was not designed to work on children that way, like the one made for Ziv. His father adjusted the oxygen setting for what Ziv would need. He was getting air now, but the problem was his heart so Ziv's mother kept the blood flowing.
Eventually Ziv's heart started working on its own, but his heart was beating irregularly: arrhythmia. The parents had been switching off and on with chest compressions and were tired, but they didn't hesitate to configure an electrical shock to be sent to their son's heart to steady it.
A couple hours later Ziv woke up. He asked them what happened, but he didn't expect to be hugged right away by his parents. He screamed in pain when they did that he realized that his back and chest hurt.
---
The house was fixed up after that and was safe by their parents working together to close off the hole and repairing it. Eventually using the steel beam as scrap metal for any of their machines within the house.
In the aftermath of that event, his father developed breathing problems. Of course they did a full check up on him and Ziv, but found out the worst had happened to his father. The air outside is toxic to the human body. That's why there isn't anything living out there and why they have hazmat suits.
For the first couple days he would be coughing constantly. Then for about a week, everything would be fine. The lungs try to fake out the host, making them believe it is all over. Then after that breathing becomes more difficult and his muscles start to degenerate at a fast pace. His lungs, then his limbs, brain and heart will be hit hard. Though he won't last that long. His heart will give out before it gets that bad.
There is no cure and there is nothing they can do. Ziv at this time couldn't move too well and for the week where none of his symptoms would show they just enjoyed that time celebrating his life. Of course it was tough, but they made the most of it.
Games, stories, and extra amounts of food were spent to let them enjoy the last remaining time as a family.
Ziv noticed that when they were eating, his father kept telling as many funny stories, but most of his food was left untouched. His father at that time knew it was his last meal, but left it untouched for Ziv and his mother to eat since he wasn't going to make it past tonight.
He was smart enough to know why, but that didn't help how bad the situation was. Their parents seemed to have come to terms with it, but that didn't mean his own heart could rest easily.
---
His mom and dad left the house last night. He wondered why they wouldn't let him come, but a part of him understood. Would you let your son watch his father kill himself?
His mother came back home and she hugged Ziv for the whole night as both of them cried themselves to sleep on the couch.
He hated this day, but he would do his best to learn everything he could and take care of his mother.
They skipped Ziv's birthday that year and just kept working. They kept the house repaired, read and played games, and kept each other sane.
---
Then they learned, about six months before his tenth birthday, that his mother was getting sick. Not like his father; it was worse.
"Honey, do you know when your father will be done working on the fertilizer system?"
Ziv didn't know what to say at the time. So he started to research as much as he could on his mother's symptoms. He figured out that her mind had blocked anything to do with his father's death to help keep her going. He knew she had been depressed and tried what he learned in the books he read to help as much as he could, but it wasn't enough.
"Mom, dad passed away, remember?"
She cried after he said that and the next day she asked him if his father was going to make it to breakfast. He didn't eat for the rest of the day as he went to his room and kept reading, anything and everything.
---
"Honey, did you lose weight? We are going to need to fill that belly of yours today."
"It's fine mom. You can eat. I'm reading up on a few things."
Ziv turned to walk away then his mom asked him a question.
"Alright. Oh and tell your father he needs to come and eat breakfast before he starts working."
Those words drove Ziv to read more. If he learns more, he can be of help. Maybe he can find a way to help his mother.
---
Today is Ziv's tenth birthday. He planned to have as much fun as he could today with his mother. Treating it more like her birthday than his. He had a lot planned, but burying his mother wasn't part of it. He cried in his hazmat suit, never taking it off that day.
---
In hindsight, working on plans and making small items, presents, for his mother wasn't the best plan. By evading her, he could guess that it felt like for her that he wasn't there. With her husband and son gone, she must have thought that there was nothing left for her here.
There wasn't anyone left. He had been told by his parents and everything in the history books, there wasn't anyone left in the world. Even if there were, they weren't anywhere he knew and there wasn't anything around where they lived.
So for the next few years he just read his books.
Reading. Reading. Reading. READING. READING. READING. READING! READING! READING! READING! ReaDinG! ReAdInG! Re… Read….
He wasn't sure how long it had been, so he looked at the clock on the tech pad.
"HAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH… ha haa haa… Its only been three weeks since mother died."
That whole time he was in a daze over his mother's death. He read to pass the time, thinking it had been years and yet just a few weeks. He was losing his mind. There wasn't anything left for him here. His parents were dead, just as the rest of the world. Ziv had only cared about his parents and that was gone. He believed he was the last living thing in the world.
He took his suit that was fitted to his body and stuffed food and water within the suit. He wouldn't be able to eat anything outside of it. He didn't expect to live through tomorrow, but at least he would have his last meal without getting it infected. Something about his food being untouched gave him a sense of comfort.
---
He made the preparations, but he also took the time to set his house to detonate. He didn't want a reason to come back.
Walking outside with his hazmat suit on, supplies inside, and the determination to see the world, Ziv smiled for real. It had been a long time, but he didn't know there was a smile on his face.
The wind started to pick up and the dust was blowing around him. It would become difficult to see in the dust. The world outside looked like all those apocalyptic stories had described. He just walked north.
---
The wind kept picking up as he continued to walk. He had been walking for a few hours. The same brown dust and a yellow-red sun light came down on his suit. He was parched so he found what looked to be an outcropping. He sat down and while keeping his body in the hazmat suit, he took a drink of the water. It was uncomfortable to walk with the food and water canister against his sides, but it was what he wanted. Once he was ready to die, he would use the suit's electrical system to stop his heart. He didn't want to suffer.
He sat there resting. Ziv felt fear. He asked himself a bunch of questions.
'Is this a mistake? Should he really have left the house?'
No he didn't want to die, but what he really wanted was not to be lonely. If he stayed home he would be lonely for the rest of his life. He would just keep searching for people, but if he didn't find anyone, then that would be the end of his journey.
That's right. People. His parents. They are the reason he must do it. There isn't anything left and if he did find people, would they help him? They would take what they could from him. He read stories where humans would kill other humans just for another drink of water. He couldn't trust them.
He shook his head.
But maybe he could find that one person that would be nice, one that would make him happy.
This was far enough anyways. He turned around back towards his house. There was too much dust blowing in the air to see his house, but it was time. Looking at his wrist, his techpad, he pressed a few buttons on the translucent material where he could see it and detonated the house. At first he could see a bright light. It was beautiful. Then for just a second the wind stopped blowing near him. It was surreal. The shockwave hit him and the sound. It blew him back and he tumbled on the ground.
---
Ziv woke up. Looking around he could see light and hear the wind coming from above him. Looking around there was a large sand hill and he seemed to have rolled down it. He checked the suit and found it undamaged. The food and water that he brought with him was not, it was all mush and covered his clothing inside the suit .
He tried to stand up only to feel a sharp pain on his right side of his chest. He took a moment to check the damage and found that his ribs were cracked. He put some pressure with his right hand on it. While it hurt, it made it feel a bit better.
He looked around and it seemed he fell into a building that had been covered in sand for a long time in this desert-like world. He started walking around the building. At this point he was a couple floors under the roof. He just worked his way down.
Surprising enough, there was still electricity. Must be a fusion reaction like their house or at least something better than it. Anyway he found a staircase and started going down. Amazing that it was still intact. He was on [Floor 117] and if he wanted to get to the bottom, it was going to be a long way down.
It took him almost two hours to reach the bottom. Every so often he would leave the stairwell and check what each floor had to offer. The upper floors had a lot of tables and what seemed to be computers from the past. In a few areas he found skeletons. There was a closet with an adult human skeleton and with what he guessed to be a dog curled up next to it.
Another couple of floors seemed to be a lab of some kind. Some with beakers and others with just machines.
He also took breaks to look at these artifacts. He studied what they must have done and what they were for. Looking on his tech pad he found out what they were, but none of them would work anymore as it had been more than seven centuries at minimum. If he took off his hazmat suit he could hook it up to his tech pad, with the supplies and time, to get it working or the information off of it. But he didn't want to take it off, not yet.
---
He reached the foyer of this building. He explored, but there wasn't much. A reception desk, couple seating areas, large structural pillars, screens along the walls for displaying information, and a majestic tiled floor.
He did see there were stairs leading further down. Going further down he finally reached the bottom. He saw the door was busted open. The walls were covered in what looked like blood splatters. Long dried of course, but it was untouched by time. The areas that were stained with the most amount of blood were under skeletons in some black armor and weapons around them. He found it interesting that everything was so well preserved the deeper he went in. He looked in different rooms that again looked like some kind of lab. He found another door that was closed. There were two different skeletal bodies next to each other in different colored armors around their body. In one of the hands looked like a plastic square.
"A keycard?" Ziv muttered as he picked it up.
He looked at the door in front of him seeing that there was a place to swipe the card. He read about it in a story that a 'keycard' could be used to open the doors. Well thanks to the building still being powered, he could swipe the card. The only problem was it was just a little bit out of his reach. He looked around for anything he could stand on.
"There was a chair in that other room."
He went to that room, pushed the chair over towards the door. With the height of the chair he was more than tall enough to swipe the card. The door unlocked and opened on its own. Pushing him and the chair out of the way. He got off the chair and walked inside.
He found himself entering a small area before a room covered in windows. Once he entered there was a robotic sound coming from around him.
"Decontamination started."
The room was filled with a mist and then an electric show spread through the mist. Thirty seconds later it ended with the robotic voice alerting him that it was over. He walked over to the door that automatically opened, on the other side of the chamber and went through it.
He found a hallway that led to an elevator. As he got close to it, it opened up. He went inside and he felt funny. He never felt this sensation before, but he was aware that you would feel something when the elevator went up and down. He just knew that it was going down as the screen in top left of the elevator had an arrow pointing down. About two minutes later the doors opened up. There was a smaller hallway that led to another set of doors that opened up into a room that was bigger than his house and the foyer of this building combined.
There were no bodies around here that he could see, so it was just him in here. Many machines and computers along the walls of the room, but the center had a screen and some kind of machine behind it. On the screen he saw what seemed like a giant circle. Getting closer he found a terminal. Now this was the moment that Ziv hesitated. While he could hear air circulating in the room and knew what a decontamination chamber entailed, but he wasn't sure if he should take off his hazmat suit.
He knew there was no way to get the surface and this was more interesting than the boring surface.
"Right, it doesn't matter anymore. This is the end."
The air was stale, horribly stale, but his suit helped make it bearable to a small degree. The liquid mush of his food and water came flowing out. He noticed that his side was bleeding a little. He ripped his shirt and wrapped it around his side. He let his suit dry, while he took a look around.
For the next couple hours he used wires that he found around to connect his techpad to the terminals. Most of that time was due to looking through the information that was stored on the machines.
He found out that the ring on the screen represented a large hadron collider. This one though was a little stronger than the ones in the past, but it did similar things. This one essentially made and stabilized mini black holes. Once the black hole is stabilized, it connects to the machine in front of Ziv, the one behind the monitors. The machine and the black hole quantumly entangle. At least that is what this whole place is for.
Perhaps they wanted to create a portal to another world? Perhaps walk through one and another, some kind of wormhole? Time travel?
Whatever their reasons were for doing this, he couldn't find them. Though he did understand that they didn't have it finished, at least the timing wasn't. The timing to link the black hole and the 'portal' thing. There was a certain timing to it apparently to link the black hole and the machine. Their computers were unable to run accurate simulations, at least due to hardware problems.
Working with their information and what he had learned from his parents, he was able to run a simulation. It corrected all their variables and would allow the machine to work. Well even if the simulation worked, the machine still needed to be operable and there was no way he was going to be able to find the LHC, let alone escape. So it was all or nothing at this point. He activated the machine and put his still wet hazmat suit on waiting for everything to start up.
He waited. The black hole was successfully created and stable, at least from what the monitors were showing him. He had to disconnect the techpad from the system to put his suit back on. At the same time the portal opened up. All the sound in the room vanished, nor was there any airflow that he could hear or see moving any of the dust around. The closer he walked towards the portal the warmer he felt. Not uncomfortable, but something that felt nostalgic? He wasn't sure what it was, but it made him happy. He looked around the place one last time and decided to take the plunge
This world has nothing left for him. The planet cannot support life. His family is gone and Ziv is probably the last living creature left. It doesn't matter. Whatever happens after he goes in, happens.
He walked into it. He felt his body being ripped apart yet there was no pain. He couldn't see and yet he saw everything; he felt everything; tasted everything; all the sounds he heard were distinct from each other yet it lasted no longer than a second, including the smells. The only thought on his mind was his parents. Just them, hugging him.
