(Rose)
The port, or what is left of it, is dozens of metres above the sea level, on that rocky peak that looks like scales of land flew and crashed, carrying cities around.
At the bottom of the disc is a wasteland of everything that fell and rolled along the new slope, from the constructions of old. Except that instead of being a wasteland for human tools and items, rubbish, it is for buildings, vehicles, and large constructs like entire ships.
Above in the port, beside leaning sideways, it looks like it was brushed off by a giant comb, or blown away cleanly by a tornado. Few structures still stand.
It's unlikely we'll find anything useful in this complete wasteland.
The road ends abruptly on a crevice falling directly into the sea below, in a narrow channel. Beyond this gap, a few metres away, the road resumes, only leaning sideway on that disc of land.
Bleue and I go further along the coastline until we find a way to the wreck. Maybe we'll still find something we think.
Over the horizon, we can guess an island. I think we're on the Adriatic sea, from the clues we can find. So we're not in Greece yet as we thought we could be for a while.
It would have been quite further, and probably a different landscape for a longer time.
And we surprisingly find a ship that still floats well. It really was worth a shot.
The port rose up, most of its ships ending up in wrecks, but a few remained, and got stuck in a small bay the collapse around them had built. Like fishes in a pond?
Lucky us anyway.
The small ship is self-cleaning by some mechanism we can't quite see, or just is as lucky as the pristine cars.
It looks a lot like the one from the girl that Blume and I met on that other island had...
As we manage to get the boat to start and repair it roughly, I tell Bleue more about this sad story.
Sometimes, things go chaotic, and as you try to survive, you can't always do or find the best choices.
Sometimes, you make things turn for the worse even though you had the best intentions in mind.
This truth haunts me.
Sometimes, you will fail.
And someone will die.
~
The boat is leaving the wrecks a little forcibly.
It has the same black or bluish mirrors on top of its hull, that gives its engine some energy in the form of electricity and heat. It helps machines work longer and using less fuel I better understand.
Blume did teach me about solar panels before, but I mostly forgot since then.
She tried to teach me about artificial satellites and rocket boosters chemistry. It's beyond me like most of the scientific or industrial prowess of the time just before now ours.
Amongst our other findings are some medicines. We were amazed at the number of products found in that stock of a pharmacy of the ruined shipyard buildings.
We mostly kept a cream that according to its pictograms, can stop bleeding and improve healing of severe wounds.
Since we suspected the ink from the octopuses to have a similar effect, we've been carrying a bottle of it all this time. It did heal our scars noticeably after all.
So next time one of us hurts herself, we'll be able to compare the two products.
If the magical or whimsical things we encounter every day amaze us, the engineering and production power of the old world is at least as impressive, if not more.
The mastery of physics and chemistry allowed humanity to build and create everything. Buildings, tools, food that lasts for years, vehicles, weapons, clothes, drugs, toys, arts...
What we had in our old days was already beyond our engineering understanding.
And we see every day almost some proof that humanity kept pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibilities further, without rest, always hungry for more.
After living on the roads and in the wilds for a while, you get accustomed to live without technologies; aside what you can carry and handle. So the contrast becomes stronger when you rediscover our wonders, after a time away from civilisation.
Goodness, how did we achieve creating that?
I'm thinking this to myself a dozen times a day when we're venturing around ruins.
I think I've heard someone say that magic is just science that hasn't been discovered yet. Well... No.
Well, even in a world where a form of magic now prevails, I can safely say that some of our applied science still feels more otherworldly than most of the magical symptoms I can witness.
Between a skyscraper with elevators and a moving stain of rust, the former is still more wondrous to me today.
Meaning that old technology appears more magical to me than magic itself.
So the right saying would be more like magic is just a science you haven't learn yet.
It's less kind in sound, but I can't deny I'm ignorant when I see all these tablets of screens in their plastic wraps, that I have no clue how any of it are made. Even the tiny details like the plastic sheet, I have no idea.
The rigid structure, the small pouches, the tablets themselves, their chemistry, their processing, the physical rules that used to make these machines work. The tin foil seal, glued, its printing. Even the making of the cardboard box and its own glue, its inks.
The medical cream is also a mixture of elements unknown to me. How was such a bottle crafted? How come a glass bottle can be so hard I can't break it with all my strength? Who designed it? How?
This wasteland we leave is a technological and historical treasure. We're wasteful. We were.
And the lost or unknown to me knowledge makes everything look like magic.
Blume, the magical being, looked at everything through a pragmatic and cold blooded scientific eye. Nothing was just magic to her.
What a paradox.
But humans have an inborn ability to believe with faith rather than experience.
It helps us quickly make sense of our surroundings and own existence.
Blume... Was not born with that.
Evolution of beings-like-her didn't require them to do so I guess.
And it took her a hundred years to become self-aware.
Just like Gülnihal...
My daiûa and yours... Can the eye of science fully explain their existence? Probably yes.
And unfortunately, the holes and gaps in the theory we can build, I will fill with the faith that best suits me by instinct. Because I'm human.
Our ship is sailing now swiftly, hailing southward.
This ship is such a concentrated amount of technologies, down to a nanometric scale or even atomic; that it could only have been crafted by a godly species. To think things like that were so common at a time we barely saw them anymore; it makes me think that we reached a tipping point in culture as the new world was about to rise.
From there on, the past world's heritage will be seen as mythological powers, as leftovers of gods whom one day left the world, and their treasures behind.
Since there are little remnants of their deaths by billions, we will assume they just vanished, as if they flew back to the heavens or stars.
Humans seem to have vanished from this world as if spirited away, or back to their godly plane they could have left maybe just a few years prior. Who knows what history will look like in the future.
Humanity became as gods for the cultures to come.
Their powers shaped the Earth, created wonders we cannot grasp anymore, and left us with an endless supply of proofs that their technology was so advanced, it is like magic to even my eyes today.
~
On some occasions, I've seen technical documents of a sort or another. Industrial diagrams and graphs. Statistical analyses. In that temple that was a server room or farm, I saw some maps of electrical layout, computer network design, and electronic components maps.
They all looked like alien languages to me.
I know there is human science behind them, which I simply don't know.
But because I don't, they could all be esoteric drawings and glyphs for magical powers to be summoned. For all I care and know, if the result is there, it still could just be magic. I just have intuitive but paradoxical faith in the idea that it is science and physics that works behind these whimsical languages.
I have come to have faith in science. But it's not very intuitive sometimes.
Whether a god exists is not of my concern, and vice-versa I could arguably say, given all I've been through and done.
If you can always prove or disprove an idea in science, you can't prove or disprove the legitimacy of a faith, because that's going beside the point.
And the culture with such technological powers was also extremely religious. We came across more than enough proofs of that. In the common ruins of a city, religious ornaments are always easy to find, even in scientific and industrial places.
Scientists of these past times believed in their gods, and astrology and esotericism as well...
Humans were curious gods.
~