Memories *finished*

Maturity: Bombs, apocalypse, blood. I wouldn't recommend the ending if you're particularly squeamish.
Fantasy: Takes place in the far future.

Thank you to Shad for use of her nickname.


Excerpt from the memory bank of Nickolas Rhody: Memory identification code 215.
A family sits on their couch, watching the news.
“This just in,” the slowly rotating hologram of a reporter announced. “Congress has declared war on the Australian Empire. The President has asked that everyone please remain calm. Make sure your shelters are well-stocked with food and other necessities and please remain near them, as the bomb warnings could come at any time.”
The mother hugged her baby daughter to her chest with the arm that wasn’t wrapped around her son’s shoulders as she turned to her husband. “I wish you didn’t have to leave.”
He patted her shoulder reassuringly. “I’ll be back before you know it. Diamond is the safest city in the Western district.”
She lowered her voice so that her son couldn’t hear. “And us? Quartz isn’t so safe.”
“You’re in Rose Quartz. Nothing’s going to get through the Dome. I promise.” Adjusting his reddish tie, he got to his feet and picked up his briefcase, then kissed his wife and hugged his son. “I’ll be back by noon tomorrow.” He left, the front door sliding closed behind him. His family watched him go through the pink-tinted glass of the window, seeing him climb into his sleek, expensive new hovercraft and fly away.
The mother turned away, holding her little boy’s hand tightly.
“Momma, is Papa going to come back?”
“Of course,” she assured him, her voice trembling slightly. “Tomorrow. You heard him.”
He didn’t believe her.
“This is Samantha Ashley, signing off. Join us tomorrow for the nine o’clock news, here on IHN.” The hologram spiraled back into its emitter as the program ended. The boy picked up the little silver disk without his mother noticing and slipped it into his pocket. He didn’t know why, he just felt like it was the right thing to do.
“I’m hungry,” he complained after a few moments.
His mother frowned slightly. “Hold your sister,” she told him, handing him the baby girl. “I’ll go heat up some NutriPaks.” She strode towards the kitchen, the door sliding open for her as she approached. The boy sat back down on the couch, setting his sister down next to him.
Suddenly a siren wailed. The boy ran to the window to see several missiles trailing exhaust clouds in the clear blue sky. He snatched his fingers back as a solid metal panel slammed down over the window, securing it. Every door in the house automatically locked and was reinforced with solid steel. The boy began pounding on the kitchen door, screaming for his mother. Through the metal he could faintly hear her yelling back. It took him a moment to make out the words. “The shelter!” she was screaming. “Get to the shelter!”
Tears blurred his vision as he realized that there was only one entrance to the bomb shelter, and it was in this room. The house may have been reinforced with steel, but he knew enough about bombs to know that nothing outside a shelter would survive. Crying, he ran to the couch and scooped up his sister, who was silently watching everything with wide eyes. He ran for the shelter, climbing inside and taking one last look at the world before he closed the trap door and was plunged into darkness.

Introduction: From the memory bank of Kumori Eirene.
If you’re reading this, congratulations. It means that either you survived the bombs and the resulting fifteen years of HEAVEN!, or you’re the descendent of someone who did. I don’t know if anyone did, but I guess if they hadn’t you wouldn’t be reading this. I’ve also left this story in our memory bank - well, I guess it’s just mine now - which you’ll find if you keep digging. But just in case this is found so far in the future that it doesn’t work, or you don’t know how to use it, I’m writing all this down. I hope you still know how to read.
That was fifteen years ago. I was the baby. It’s not my memory, of course; I don’t remember anything that early. It’s Nick’s. His are the only memories I have of the outside world. I’ve spent nearly my entire life in here, in this dark, stinking mess of a hole. But as horrible as it is, the outside is worse. Which is why I’ve come back.
Someone had thought to leave a type two memory transfer bank in the shelter. It’s almost dead now, but I’ve turned it off. Maybe it’ll still work when you find this. If you do. Nick’s memories are still there, but they’ve faded with time. They’re all that’s left of the world. Since they’re only type two, I don’t feel the emotions that come with them. That’s fine with me, though. My own are enough.
My name is Kumori. Nick told me it means “shadow” in a language they used to speak on the Islands of Steel, hundreds of years ago. It was called Japanese, I think. He said Mom had named me that because the war was a shadow that fell over our lives. It’s fitting, really. I’ve lived out my life in the dark.
For the first fifteen years of my life, I never left the shelter. The radiation outside was too strong. Nick was just ten when the bombs fell, far too young to take on the responsibilities of a parent, but somehow he had. The only people we interacted with were each other and the sims on the holographic projector, and there’s only so many ways you can reprogram a computer. It was a hard life, yes, but it was all I knew. That tiny, dark place of refuge was my whole world. The world I saw through Nick’s memories wasn’t real to me; nor were the ruins outside. Both were to be watched, observed, but never touched. In my mind, neither really existed, and neither ever had.
Even if you find this, even if you can read, maybe you won’t be able to read this. I’m crying as I write and it will probably smudge the ink. I’m bleeding too, I think, but I can’t feel the pain anymore. That doesn’t matter. I’m going to die, very soon, and I want to get the story out. I want someone, somewhere, to know what happened.
I hope you exist.

Excerpt from the memory bank of Kumori Eirene: Memory identification code 6397.
Until I was about eight, the meter that told us the levels of radiation outside was as high as it could go. After that it lowered slowly, only moving at maybe a centimeter every six months. Finally, on the 5412nd day since the bombs (Nick had used the projector’s computer to keep track), the line moved into the green area. Nick had taken on so much responsibility so young that he never really had a chance to go through adolescence, and he would sometimes go through depressed phases that lasted for days or even weeks at a time, usually followed by a day or two of major grumpiness. That’s mostly when I talked to the sims, and on that particular day he was in the beginning stages of one of the depressions.
I was perched on the rusty old ladder, performing the routine check of the seal on the trapdoor that was the only thing saving us from radiation poisoning. A flash of green beside the door caught my eye; there was hardly any green down here. I turned my head, my jaw dropping in amazement.
“Nick!” I screamed. “Nick!”
He burst out of the pantry where we kept our supplies, alarmed. “What?”
I pointed with a shaking hand at the meter. He climbed up the ladder to stop a rung below me, his head tilted back so he could see what I was looking at. His eyes widened.
“Oh my God.”
“W - what do we do?” I was scared; everything in the shelter was always so constant, and this was something totally new.
He shook away his shock to take charge. “We should probably a few days before we go out. Just in case... you know, the meter’s a little off or something.”
I nodded, though I knew the real reason was that he was scared too. Fifteen years of being around no one else had given me an uncanny view into how his mind and I was somehow almost always able to know what he was thinking. But for some reason he couldn’t do the same for me. Maybe it was because I had been so young when the bombs fell. Or maybe - and this was Nick’s thought, though he’d never spoken it out loud - the radiation had somehow managed to get to me and messed up my brain.
He climbed easily down the ladder and I followed more clumsily, trying not to trip.

The next few days were some of the longest of my life, and that was saying something. Nick acted like nothing had happened, but I saw him rummaging through the dusty pile of things we never used for a large bag and start to pack supplies when he thought I was asleep. I felt sick. My entire life had consisted of nothing but this tiny hole of a place, and now it would be left behind in favor of a whole abandoned planet.
I pretended to sleep again as he came back into the main room, the bag slung over his shoulder. He shook me gently. “Kumori.”
I sat up slowly, peering at him through the darkness. “Are we leaving?”
“Not until you’re ready. There’s no rush.”
Then I want to stay here forever, I thought. I didn’t say the words, though. Though I knew Nick was almost as scared of the outside as I was, I could see how important it was to him to go out and see the world.
For once he seemed to be able to tell what I was thinking, because he said, “We don’t have to stay out for long, not if you don’t want to. But I want you to see the sky at least once.”
Sky. The word was strange and alien. It was simply part of imagination, always just out of reach, in memories and the few books we had found stacked in a corner. It just wasn’t real. This was real, this little shelter underground, this tiny little world of our own. Everything else was fictional.
But no longer.
I took a deep breath and nodded, getting to my feet. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Excerpt from the memory bank of Kumori Eirene: Memory identification code 6401.
Nick went first, giving me the large bag before he ascended the ladder. He very carefully pushed the long combination of numbers that would undo the seal around the edges of the trap door. When we’d first come down, it had just been one big button to push, but after a close shave when I was seven, when I’d slipped on the ladder and very nearly elbowed the button that would have opened the door and killed us in seconds, Nick had somehow managed to rig up the code. I didn’t know how; I was horrible with all technology, probably because there wasn’t much in the shelter. Whoever had stocked it obviously hadn’t thought anyone would be down there for fifteen years, although there was plenty of food for it. We still had about a year’s supply, and then I didn’t know what we were going to do if we couldn’t find more outside. Starve, I suppose.
The trapdoor slid slowly open and I shrieked, stumbling backwards as the light hit me. Above me, Nick nearly fell off the ladder as his eyes got a full blast of sunlight after fifteen years of darkness.
“Close it,” I begged, my hands over my eyes. “Please!”
There were a few moments of silence as he groped blindly for the button and then the light slowly disappeared. I heard Nick’s feet hit the ground and then he hugged me, guiding me carefully over to one of the beds. It didn’t matter that neither of us could see; we knew this place so well we could navigate it perfectly in our sleep. I was suddenly aware of the remarkable flow of tears streaming from my burning eyes.
I had a very low threshold for physical pain, having not been exposed to much of it in my life. “Make it stop,” I pleaded.
“I can’t,” Nick replied, his voice taut with pain. “We have to wait for it to go away.”
It wasn’t until about ten minutes later than the burning sensation finally faded completely.
“Please don’t do that again,” I beseeched him.
“We’ll wait until night,” he promised. “It won’t be as bright then.”
“How will we know when night is?”
“We’ll know.”

Excerpt from the memory bank of Kumori Eirene: Memory identification code 6403.
When we finally emerged, the whole world was dark. I don’t mean close-your-eyes dark, I mean pitch black, whoa-where’s-my-body dark. It was dark in the shelter, but we always had at least a little light. I stayed close to Nick, disoriented by a combination of the total darkness and the fact that there were no walls. I was in open air. My teeth began to chatter.
“Agoraphobia,” Nick murmured, putting an arm around my shoulders. “You’ll get over it. Come on, let’s sit. When dawn comes we’ll take a look around.”
We sat down carefully on the ground. I felt around, trying to see our surroundings with my hands. Something sharp pricked my finger. “Ow!” I exclaimed, more in surprise than pain, as I snatched it away from the offending object.
“Careful,” Nick warned. “There’s bound to be a lot of broken glass around here.”
I nodded, then remembered that he couldn’t see me. “Okay.” I placed my hands carefully in my lap, prepared to wait silently for as long as it took.

Excerpt from the memory bank of Kumori Eirene: Memory identification code 6404.
I opened my eyes, realizing I must have fallen asleep during the night. The patch of dirt I was lying on was relatively free of rubble and broken glass; Nick must have cleared it for me. I glanced around in the dim light; where was he?
I noticed an arrow created from shards of the pink-tinted glass of Rose Sector of Quartz City pointing towards a mound of rubble in front of me. I tilted my head back to see Nick sitting on top of the heap, his back to me. I clambered up after him, clumsily slipping several times. He didn’t seem to notice as I sat down beside him, following his gaze out to the horizon. My breath caught in my throat as I saw the streaks of color that stretched across the horizon.
“What is it?” I breathed.
“Sunrise,” he murmured in reply. “Fifteen years with no sunrises, no sunsets, no sun at all.”
“It’s beautiful.”
He shook his head, and for once, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not beautiful,” he said softly. “It’s horrible, because we’re the only ones here to see it. We’re the only sentient creatures left in the world.”
“You don’t know that!” I objected, my head whipping around towards him. “There could be someone... somewhere...” My voice trailed off; both of us knew I didn’t really believe it.
He looked back out over the ruined landscape sadly. “Thousands upon thousands of years of evolution, of working for a better world. Trillions of people, dead in seconds. For what? Nothing. Because that’s all there is, in the end. Look at it, Kumori. The world is just an eternity of nothing, stretching on forever and ever. And that’s all there’ll ever be.”
I let out a sigh, unable to argue. It was true. Why had we even come out in the first place? We were happy down there, more or less. And now the images would be burned into our heads forever. Sure, we could retreat back to the shelter and pretend we’d never come out, but we could never really go back.
“The Sky District,” Nick said suddenly.
“What?”
“The Sky District,” he repeated, standing up. “The world beyond the Domes. I never went, but I heard about it. Dad used to talk about it all the time; it was right above Diamond City and sometimes he would visit. Maybe he had time to get to it before the bombs. Maybe... maybe he’s still alive.”
I jumped to my feet. “What are we waiting for, then?” I half-shrieked. “Let’s go!”
Suddenly he seemed to deflate again, turning back into a depressed man on a heap of rubbish. “We don’t have a hovercraft.”
“Can we build one?”
He shook his head. “Even if we had the parts, I wouldn’t know how.”
I sighed. “Now what?”
“Now we see if anything survived the bombs,” he replied, taking charge again. “We need more NutriPaks. We’ll split up. If you get lost, shout. Okay?”
“’Kay,” I mumbled. I started off down the hill, but within a yard had lost my balance and ended up sliding down on my butt. When I reached the bottom I sighed and stood, brushing away the dust as I looked around, trying to decide where to start. I began to dig through the dirt and rubble at my feet, searching for anything that could be of use. It was only a moment later that I heard Nick’s shout from the other side of the hill. Rather than try to go over it I ran around, arms pumping by my sides as I sprinted. I didn’t need to get to the other side of the hill to see it, though. A huge bird, larger than me and pitch black, had Nick clutched in its talons. I knew with a certainty I couldn’t explain that he was already dead. “Nick!” I screamed anyway. “Nick!” I ran after the bird until I couldn’t run any more and collapsed, crying and gasping for breath. Nick was the only person I had ever known. And he was... gone? I just couldn’t comprehend it. He couldn’t be dead. He just... couldn’t be.
I was only just calming down when I heard the threatening rustle of large feathers in front of me. I scrambled to my feet, my gaze fixing on the huge raven in front of me. It was smaller than the one that had taken Nick, but still far, far too big for my liking. Its eyes gleamed with hunger and the madness of being always alone. I took a step back, its cold gaze scaring me more than its sharp talons and curved, hooked beak. I didn’t want to become like that. And without Nick, I would.
The raven hopped towards me and I stepped back again. This happened several more times until it finally spread its wings, flying towards me. I tried to run but it let out a shrill, deafening caw right behind me and I sunk to the ground, my hands over my ears. Wickedly sharp talons pierced through my back and out through my stomach. For an instant as the bird lifted me off the ground there was only the numbness of shock, and then the pain hit.
I gasped for breath, my entire mind focused on nothing but the barbs sticking through my torso and the blood dripping down the long black claw and to the ground so close and yet so far away. The raven didn’t seem to be able to lift me any higher from the level ground than the ceiling of the shelter was from its floor. I writhed feebly, instinctively struggling to get free, although I knew that if for some reason the claws were taken out of my back I would die from blood loss within minutes, if the pain or the fall didn’t kill me first.
I fell limp, slowly blacking out. And then, by some miracle, the raven’s flight began to drop, until my dangling feet were almost brushing the littered ground below. And suddenly... it dropped me.
I landed feet first, my knees buckling beneath me as I fell to the ground, gasping for breath and trying to staunch the bleeding with my ragged shirt. I was suddenly aware that the raven was still there, standing a few feet away. He was staring at me, just watching. The hunger and madness were gone from his eyes, which were empty and blank. After what seemed like an eternity, though it was probably only a few seconds, he seemed to bow his head slightly to me before he spread his huge wings and took off, hovering for just an instant longer than he should have over a spot about a dozen yards away from where he’d dropped me. I realized that it was the entrance of the shelter. I had to get back. My irrational, pain-drunk brain was convinced that if I could only reach it, Nick would be there, and he would make everything better. I began edging towards the shelter, ignoring the shards of pinkish glass that sliced at my skin. After several minutes and only a few inches, though, it became clear that I wasn’t going to make it before blacking out.
“Nick!” I tried to yell, but my voice, hoarse from screaming and weak with pain, came out as barely a whisper. The name gave me strength, though, and I kept moving. It had to be at least ten minutes before I was halfway there and my head was spinning with exhaustion and blood loss. I needed to sleep... I was so tired... but Nick would... I had to... I couldn’t do it...
I lay my head down, hardly noticing the glass that cut a long gash in my cheek.
Keep going, Nick’s voice urged me in my head. Keep moving. You can make it.
I can’t, I thought dully, but I somehow managed to lift my head and began to inch my way towards the shelter again.
After an eternity, I reached the entrance to the shelter. I somehow made it down the ladder and fumbled for the memory bank, stuffing the chip into my mouth and tucking it clumsily under my tongue. I closed my eyes, running through the memories in my head. I felt them flow into the chip like a waterfall. As they did, I reached for a piece of paper and a pencil, my hand shaking and tears cascading from my eyes to roll down my cheeks as I wrote. Warm blood pooled on the stone around me, but I could no longer feel the pain. The pencil fell from my weak fingers and I could barely find the strength to insert----
End of memory bank transfer.

The ravens watched from above as the girl completed her memory transfer and fell limply to the floor, lying in a pool of blood. She mentally reached out to hold the hand that only she could see as her eyes closed for the final time and she slipped into the deepest sleep of all. And still the ravens watched.

That's... that's short.

I'm sort of confused, as it says she's 11 or so when she goes out, right? But then it says 15 years of 'heck', so do they add up?

It's a great story. I'm just being dumb today. xD

Awww . . . poor me! (Yes, I insist she's me. xD) That was amazing, Ratty. You did an awesome job creating the future, and there's that sadism towards your characters again that blows my mind away every time I read one of your stories. x3 (In a good way. )

When did I say she was 11, Ari?

Thankies, guys.

Night: IDK, really. xD At one point in History class we were pretending that we were in the Cold War and the bombs were coming and we had to choose the ten people who would survive, so that might have done it a little, but that was close to the beginning of the year... so I really don't know. xD

Thanks again.

Nice story, Anita. I like it...Im sleepy so I might go over it again in the morning JIC I missed somethin xD

Thankies.

It turned out a bit creepier than I expected it too, but whatevs. xD

Ha ha-I do that all the time.
Did you see what I did on Copy and Paste? Jeez, I freaked myself out xD

Meh, that wasn't so bad. xD

Amazing, Ratt-Sama!

Is it just me, or is the Maturity... Mia? XD I love that Maturity: Mia thing.

Thanks!

Yes. xD It is basically the same maturity level as your poems.

That was really good....And very depressing....Well I liked it anyways good job Ratty!

Thanks, Cat.

Yes, it was depressing. Glad you noticed. xD