A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (5 page)

The older kids would be more standoffish, but she knew exactly how to reach them if their attention wandered at all: She would ask for volunteers to operate the controls of a portable image reader that the institute had adapted to read real-time images from any location in the room and project them somewhere else. Kids liked to pretend they were flies on the wall, or bugs on the floor, and observe the presentation from other vantage points. They especially liked it when they could watch themselves in holographic form.

She arranged her samples for the touch-and-feel part of the presentation. A metal disk. A small round stone. A scrap of leather. A plastic leaf. She set up the holographic projector and tested its projection height. She liked to raise it a foot or so off the floor so that the ones in the back could see it all. She pulled out a stack of touch-and-color handouts for the youngest audience members, and a box of holographic matching card games for the older kids. The holographic cards were popular for kids in middle school too.

The kids filed in and seated themselves. A murmur of excitement rippled through the room as they spotted the image recorder and holographic projectors. When they were all seated, she stood, and the kids quieted instantly.

“I’d like to welcome you all to my chronography show,” she began. “How many of you have heard of chronography?”

Hands shot up all over the room.

“Who can tell me what it is?” She pointed to an eager little boy in the second row from the front.

“It’s where you can see and hear and smell things from a loooong time ago.” He beamed with the confidence of a child who knows he’s got the right answer.

“That’s right. But we’ve been able to make recordings of those things, which we call ‘visual,’ ‘audio,’ and ‘olfactory’ recordings, for many years. Does anyone know what is different about chronographic recordings?”

A little girl from the other side of the semi-circle waved her hand. “Because way back then they couldn’t make reco-decordings like that?” She stumbled a little on the word “recordings,” but Dani mentally gave her big points for trying.

“Yes, that’s a big part of it. Now we can see and hear things from hundreds of years ago, before they even had movies. What would you want to watch from way back then?”

Two of the boys shouted out without raising their hands first. “Big trucks!” “Airplanes! The old kind!” The latter suggestion was accompanied with arms spread out like plane wings, and she half expected him to stand up and make motor noises. She was always glad when nobody mentioned wars and bombs during these presentations. She knew, from studying history, that earlier generations had had a preoccupation with warfare and violence, and she was encouraged that the intervening years had refocused some of those energies.

A hesitant hand went up from an older girl near the back. “Forests and beaches? I’d like to see what those looked like, before all the buildings went up and the pollution made everything all yucky.” Many of the other kids nodded their agreement. Even their parents hadn’t seen forests and
beaches, although here in the Pacific Northwest, some private homes still had clusters of trees.

“Those are all really good ideas,” Dani said, “and we often record those kinds of things. Would you like to see and hear and smell a forest?”

A chorus of agreement greeted her offer.

“Okay. You’ll have to be very quiet to hear the birds and crickets. Ready?” The room fell silent.

She turned on the projector, and trees sprang up in the middle of the room. The scent of Douglas fir trees and decomposing needles and mosses filled the room. Along with the crickets and birds, they could hear a stream in the distance. The kids were awestruck. Suddenly, a little squirrel popped its head around a tree and chirped at something just outside the range of the recorder. Then the projection ended with a voice over: “It’s not just seen. It’s heard. It’s smelled. It’s PastPerfect.”

The kids applauded.

Dani continued. “Sometimes we look at things that weren’t so long ago. Does anyone know why we might want to see things from your grandparents’ lifetimes, or your parents’, or even your own?”

An older boy raised his hand. “To find out things that people might not have wanted to record?”

“That’s very good! Can you give us an example?”

“Like if you wanted to find out who took your bike, or who left the milk out on the counter. Or find out who
really
started an argument.” Some of the older kids laughed at that one, and Dani did too.

“Yes, we use chronographs to solve crimes, too. Even bigger crimes than those, like kidnappings.” She paused to gauge her audience’s attention, then asked, “Do you know that ninety-eight percent of kidnappings are solved now—that’s almost all of them—because we can see and hear the bad people right when they are committing the crime? We hardly ever have to find and arrest kidnappers any more, because they know they will be caught, and that makes all of you a little safer.”

She turned to get the source samples. “I’m going to pass around these four objects, and I want you to get into small groups of about ten kids each and come up with guesses about which ones make the best recordings.”

Three kids in the back rows were already raising their hands. “And if you already know,” she added, “don’t spoil it for the rest. Let them think about it.”

She held up the first object. “This is a plastic leaf. We find lots of plastic things: bottles, toys, bags, mixing bowls, and serving utensils, for example. Before we made laws that plastic had to be biodegradable, they made the kind of plastic that took centuries—or even longer—to break down and go away, unless it was melted or burned. So when we go hunting around for old things, we see plastic everywhere. Do you think plastic makes good recordings? Pass it around and figure out your guess. But don’t say anything until you’ve seen them all.”

She handed the leaf to a little girl with long braids in the front row. As the leaf was going around her audience, Dani turned to pick up the next object. “Here’s a leather scrap. Leather is made from animal skin, and it has the same properties as other things that were once part of something living. Who can think of some other examples?”

The little boy in the second row waved his hand. “Tree bark?”

“That’s a good example, but we don’t find it very often. Trees are constantly building new bark, and the pieces that fall to the ground decay pretty quickly.” She glanced around for more eager hands, then pointed to a girl in the back row with wavy red hair.

“Books?” the girl asked.

“Excellent! Yes, we take very good care of books, and both the paper in their pages and the cardboard and cloth in their bindings are good examples of material that was once part of something living. Now don’t forget, you’re guessing which material makes the best source for our recordings.” She gave the leather scrap to the little girl with braids, who looked at it solemnly before passing it on.

She held up the small round stone. “This stone represents things made of non-metallic minerals. Other examples are things made of clay, like pottery, china plates, and ceramic tiles. Glass, which is made mostly of sand, is the same kind of source as clay, unless it has a metal, like lead, in it, and then it depends on how much.”

She handed the stone to the little girl in the front, who by now was taking her job very seriously. Then she took the last object from the table and held it up. “Here’s a metal disk, but it represents all the metal things that we might find, like doorknobs, lamps, car parts, or other things like that. Can anyone tell me something that’s shaped like this metal disk that used to be very common?”

From somewhere in the middle rows, a young boy in a blue tee shirt put his hand in the air tentatively. “Coins?” he asked, when she called on him.

“Yes, exactly! Have you ever seen a coin?”

He looked down shyly. “My dad collects coins. Sometimes he lets me hold some of the ones that aren’t all shiny.”

“How about the rest of you? Have you ever seen coins?” A smattering of hands—she estimated about 20 or 30 kids—said yes. “Several hundred years ago, school children paid for their lunches with coins and paper money, and grocery stores would take your paper money and give you change.”

Dani handed the metal disk to the pigtailed little girl, who took it and asked her in a whisper, “Is this a real coin?”

She whispered back, “No, not a real one. But it’s shaped the same.”

Facing the assembly again, Dani reminded them of their assignment. “In your small groups, as you look at each of these and feel them, guess how well they would work for my job. Decide what order they should go in, from best to worst. And then we’ll have a little game.”

She gave them a few minutes to talk about it, then moved among them to listen to what they were saying, collect the four objects after they made their way to the back of the room, and hand out the game boards the institute had developed for presentations.

“When you’re ready to play, touch the red dot along the edge to turn it on. We’ll all start at the same time. When I say to start, you’ll see the four objects you just looked at as small images above your game boards. Your job will be to arrange them in order, starting with the one you think is the worst source on your left, to the best source on your right. When you have a guess, press the blue triangle. If your guess is right, I’ll see your answer up here. Let’s see how fast you can solve the puzzle. Ready? Start!”

The first one got it in thirty seconds. It was the group of older kids in the back who had raised their hands when she first started passing around the objects. But it wasn’t long before they all had it.

“You guys are really fast. Good job. So, yes. Plastic makes the worst source. We can’t get any images at all from plastic.” She held up the plastic leaf while she was talking about it, then went on.

“The once-living things like leather and paper are a little bit better. They let us get snapshots of visual images, but not much else.” She held up the leather scrap for a minute, then put it away in her pocket with the leaf and touched the “next” button on the holographic display. A three-dimensional image of the baseball glove at the 2089 World Series shimmered and stabilized. “This was sourced from a leather baseball that a collector let us use. He was so impressed with our photographs, he let us keep the ball for a museum display. It’s a very famous ball.”

She held up the rock next, and continued. “Better than leather and paper are the non-metallic minerals, like this rock. We found a loose piece of floor tile in a very old building and recorded this sight-and-sound moving hologram.” She pushed “next” again, and as the old-time fiddler began to play, she stuffed the rock away with the other objects. The kids were mesmerized. Everybody loved fiddle music from a master.

That clay tile had been an amazing find, one that still inspired her. How many sample recordings they must have had to take before they found that one moment of history where the fiddle-player was playing. It was even possible that he played there every day for several years, but not at all hours of the day. She was sure it had required months and months of taking samples, and she knew all about that kind of tedium. Some things made it worth the boring stuff, she had to admit.

When the music was over, she asked her audience, “Do you remember what the last item was made of?”

They all said it at the same time: “Metal!” That was an easy question. They all still had their game boards in front of them, with the objects correctly arranged.

“That’s right, and metal is the best source of all.” She held up the metal disk. “What do you think we can record with metal that we can’t get from stone or leather?”

A few voices called out, “Smells!”

She pushed the “next” button again, and there was the famous chef. “You can watch and listen to her as she talks about her blueberry dessert, but don’t forget to sniff.” She dropped the disk into her pocket as the chef did her thing. The kids all breathed as one when she poured the simmering blueberry sauce over the pound cake, sniffing the fruity, heavenly scent till their mouths watered at the thought. She turned off the projector, but the scent lingered until the projection chemicals dissipated.

This group of kids was so good, she didn’t even need to use the hologram projector to keep their interest. But it was a great ending to the presentation, and she still had about five minutes left. “Now, who would like to operate our portable image reader and make the rest of us into holograms?”

The girl with the wavy red hair stood up immediately. Dani smiled. That would have been her, twelve years ago, if they had had the simulated image recorder then. A boy on the other side of the room with an appealing grin also stood up. She invited the kids to come up front with a wave of her hand. “What are your names?”

“I’m Minna,” the girl answered.

“Sommy,” said the boy.

She turned back to describe the device to the others. “This isn’t a true chronograph, because it just displays what is going on right now. It doesn’t reach back into the past. The machine to do that is much larger—about as big as the stage up here. We’re going to let Minna and Sommy pick a spot in the room that they’d like to look at us from, then we’ll broadcast it in miniature from the projector here.”

The two kids whispered for a few seconds “From the very tip top, please,” Minna said, pointing to the center top of the domed ceiling above them.