An archivaas finds a large box from before the Shattering. In the large box are several diaries, records, and a hand-crank, antique, player. The children of the family had buried their dairies in the time capsule. The parents had added to it a player and records. Music not heard in millennia now graced ears once more, words of children still of school age, seen on the pages happily. -- Anon Guest
Time capsules were an absolute joy to the Archivaas. They were snapshots, not just of a space in time, but also of the people who thought such things were valuable. The official ones were, in the grand scope of things, relatively bland. The personal ones, the accidental ones... those were the ones Archivaas drooled over.
And Archeologist Dern had just found one under the remains of a barbecue patio from the late twentieth century.
Her breath caught. Vintage tupperware, the most indestructable container of the time. More robust, even, than the cookie tin of their historical memes. A large hemisphere with a lid, buried lid-sign down to resist the weight of the things above it. Someone had engraved the words Smith family memories 1976 in the base.
Dern carried the container, reverentially, to the lab. There, the surrounding soil was analysed, the container scanned, and documented before they began the debate about how to unpack it.
Turning it over and taking off the lid, versus taking the bottom off the lid and revealing the contents. Inside a pure nitrogen atmosphere, of course, so no contents could react with the change in their circumstances.
But -ah- what treasures they had inside. Detailed instructions on how to make a mechanical album turntable. Replete with the gear ratios and metallurgy for the springs. Vinyl albums - LP's and singles, as well as a few EP's[1]. Clippings of local newspapers relevant to the Smiths. Journals, some of which had doodles in the margins.
One, kept by the youngest in the family, was a collection of stickers and crayon drawings. Annotated in tiny print by their mother. This little tot was just learning their alphabet towards the end of the year. Proud they could write their name. The last entry was, I am Sam, and a picture of a fried egg and a ham in green crayon.
The father of the family had journalled a lot more about the year's project that culminated in the time capsule. The tween eldest Smith was the chronic doodler. Sometimes, she wouldn't even finish documenting her thoughts, caught up in the intricacies of her imagination. When she wasn't obsessing about the Bee Gees.
None could tell when their time capsule would be found, so they did what they could to preserve their own history.
With the hand-wound turntable assembled and tested with a known working copy of an extant vinyl, Dern played the first single.
It was Stayin' Alive.
[1] For those not used to the terms: LP == Long Play, a full album. EP - Extended play. Either a longer remix of one song or up to three songs per side.
[Photo by Sinan Altinova on Unsplash]
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