- "Sounds about right, then you'll explain me the job requirements and we'll start ASAP".
Ignatius shook his future employer's hand and headed toward the parking lot. Once inside his car, he started the engine, clutched on gear A and drove down through the lower middle, upper-bases and base-base floor to finally exit in the city center. At the red light, he reached for his back pack on the passenger seat, pulling out his hourglass and upturning it against the back rest. He would meet his soon to be boss again, before the sand had filled the bottom half, which would leave him free until the next morning.
He hated the thing, an older model with a heavy aluminium base and thick plexiglass casing.The standard A-A caliber sand, most common in the nothern hemisphere, did nothing to diminish the weight. Luckier southerners would live on standard C-A African grain, much more compact and better flowing, allowing for smaller containers. Only, that very hourglass had been in the family since his great-grandfather, who had been alive during the Disappearance, when people could still use numbers.
Stories about numbers had always fascinated him. How they were used to define precise quantities, coordinate event, or even as memories and means to understand concepts defied his imagination. But just as magic, numbers were from another realm.
When his great-grandfather had still been a boy, people had slowly started to forget how to employ them. Complex operations were the first to go. Specialists in the field suddenly became inept. Several industries had threatened to collapse, although the use of number processors called computers, later relegated to museums, had avoided a massive catastrophe. Despite everyone's best efforts, numbers continued to vanish from humankind's collective intellect, untill even counting (whatever that was -apparently something very basic) had turned into a mistery.
Speculations were made about the phenomenon, successively blaming a new kind of virus, radiations, long term effect of specific food enhancers… without ever finding out a cure.
Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, scholars from all around the planet saw the importance of preventing existing technologies from fading out of existance. The Counsil For Knowledge was founded for that purpose, and issued scores of references and manuals to guide, step by step, the production of the most vital transportation, communication and medical tools.
Following the passing of the last Counting Elder, the Council refocused its aim toward organizing an increasingly chaotic society, renaming itself the Counsil of Measurements.
The post Disappearance era had begun.
Time standardization had been the first problem to be tackled.
If people could still refer to the day-night alternance, they would not be able to keep track of more than a single cycle. Hourglasses were introduced, comming in tiny, small, medium, large and huge sizes, keeping people synchronized as long as the sand would flow.
Distances were measured via hourglasses as well: A walk to the city was a small hourglass away on foot, and a tiny one by car. Quantities would range from single to 'many lots', speed from 'almost stopped' to 'as fast as can', and many more approximation were found to feel the gaps left by the total absence of anything mathematical.
The result was a slowed-down world, where things would only happen after many failed attempt and endless adjustments.
Ignatius arrived home.
He went for the kitchen, unwrapped a standard size pack of frozen french fries, then another, poured a large size pack of oil into his pan and proceeded to cook.
Food packaging was said to be one practical side of life without numbers. Everything would fit into boxes, standardized, off course, from very tiny to very large, and one would rarely resort to cutting and 'measuring' as shown in the archive from the old times.
Waiting for the fries to be ready, he sat near the stove and started handling a Rubik's cube.
His hobby was shared by many others. When counting had left human brains, logic had -quite fortunately- kept on standing its ground. If none of them could figure out how many facets composed the surface of a cube, they were all aware of the steps needed to achieve the right block position. Twist left, again, again, up, back. Cube solved. Dinner ready.
After moving to the living room, he turned on his television. A filler program was on.
The insipid shows, meant to keep the audience waiting until the production had re-synchronized the hourglasses, always left him with a bitter taste in his mouth.
As he often did, he started talking to himself. "We had industries going on and growing, we had innovations, you can see it in the archives. Now nothing ever gets new, we don't travel anymore, we just keep our activities to a minimum compared to our great-grand's epoch.
We just read the manuals… even our barters are settled in those damned manuals. I want to create things and I want people to use them, but how can you trade things you don't know the value of? I'm tired of watching fillers because TV station are incapable of good synchro…"
His reflexion stretched until bedtime.
His next morning was spent sitting in wait for his future employer. The sun was well into its upper-low quadrant when the suit wearing, almost over-groomed man showed up. Government officials were always touchy about their appearance.
"I'm sorry, I must have kept you waiting. My cat knocked my hourglass sideways during the night."
"Standard excuse", he though. That man didn't look like a pet owner. He'd probably spent too long perfecting his tie knot and was too proud to admit it.
"Anyway, Ignatius, glad we could still sync. Hopefully you didn't wait for too long"
-"Well, I can't be exact about it, but it would be around two and a half small standards HG, sir."
His interlocutor paused, a smirk slowly forming on his face.
"Yes… yes, as I said yesterday, you're the perfect man for the job. Come, I'll brief you on the way. We have a lot of work to do… reforming the Counsel will take some time."
- "At least five years".
This time, they both smirked.
Fin
This story is based upon a request from Ignatius (Keywords: Numbers, Hourglass, French Fries)
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Count On Me by Danny Hefer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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