Murmansk Stone

In the before

After my wife died at age 51 (I was 54), I sold our house and applied to my company's internal job-transfer website, looking for something with travel. As a telecoms expert, they had jobs, and I wanted to see the world. We'd never had kids, so I had nothing to tie me down, and travel seemed like it'd be fun.

Over the next 2 years, via a continuing series of 3 day to 3 month gigs (most were about 3 weeks, to be honest), I'd visited almost every continent (missed Antarctica, of course). Some of the most remote places on Earth had telecom equipment that needed fixing or upgrading, and I found going to new places and talking to new people invigorating.

Ask any serious traveler, they'll know their country-count. Define it carefully! Just an airport or train station layover didn't count - you had to have a meal there outside of a terminal. That let me count Vatican City, which had a restaurant in the museum, and Andorra, which I really just drove through but stopped to have lunch in. My country count, The Before, was 134, though it was getting a lot harder to bump that number without going out of my way to do so.

Sometimes traveling alone was lonely, but that just gave good contrast to conversations and even dinners with a vast network of coworkers. In side trips, I stayed at youth hostels and met interesting people, though there was a range of 'interesting' I was okay with, and beyond that, I tended to steer clear, 'those' people weren't my scene. Happily they were easy to spot.

The closest big city on my last work trip was Murmansk, Russia. Murmansk is about as far north as any sane person would go, but, then, that was the easy leg! I had to keep going. A two-day river-boat ride, a change to an ancient Soviet-era float plane, and a series of 3-hour hops got me to an oil rig in a swamp.

The destination was a telecoms relay station used by giant oil companies.

To say it was hell-and-gone, yeah, that'd be an understatement. And, I was scheduled for 2 weeks, a long deployment for a simple relay station, but there was a long to-do list and I was just the one guy. Not many people were willing to spend time utterly alone with 500 km of empty, dense, tundra-forest in all directions.

The float-plane pilot and his crew member helped me unload my equipment and camping gear and ruck the heavy stuff up to the prefab building, then shook hands and took off again. I waved and let them go, and got busy setting up.

Not dying alone in a wilderness tends to focus the mind.

Setting up the equipment and kicking off the hardware and software upgrade processes took two days, but I punctuated the indoor time with my secondary outdoor duties, trimming back trees from around the site to get the area cleaned up. They'd given me battery-powered tools - a chainsaw, a brush cutter to clear undergrowth, and the normal carpentry tools because some parts of the cabins always needed repair.

I burned the refuse and delighted in getting to be a super-duper highly-paid landscaper.

The fact that I knew not to cut the cables between the antenna towers and PV array field justified any expense on their part, I was sure. Russia was famous for having drunk idiots blindly drive expensive equipment into sinkholes, cut vital cables randomly, and otherwise generally die needlessly doing The Wrong Thing (making for expensive funerals, too).

I should note the problems with Russian workers wasn't bravery, it was the opposite, a cavalier attitude to just trying the bang-it-harder, jury-rig, make-do, see if it works perspectives mostly characterized in the USA as, "Hold My Beer." That's fine for seeing if a riding making a shopping cart into a luge seems fun, but when you've got $10m of telecom equipment, NO, that's not the guy you want fixing it.

Some of my handyman tasks were fun - repairing ripped up crap where bears had tried to get in, for one. The more normal stuff balanced it out - tightening the permafrost-loosened guy wires on the dishes, and ensuring the foundations were stable from the giant frost-heaves, etc.

The computer work was the simple part, I'd been doing that a long time. You'd think that all of it could be done remotely, but sometimes hardware would fail, and we'd have to bring in a new unit, or fix a leaky roof that dripped on the server rack (it happened). Some things could ONLY be done in-person - swapping out equipment with more modern versions, patching software, looking at blinking lights to diagnose which component was failing. And, yes, seeing if the dang power plug had fallen out (I'd seen this on previous jobs).

I had some books to read, and a ton of summer sunlight to read them in. Granted, being summer, mosquitoes were horrid, but I had bug repellant and a beekeeper's mask. It's possible to choke to death on gnats and skeeters out there. I had been warned, but I'd also been around permafrost tundra-swamps before and came prepared.

Between tasks, my "off time" in nature (after cleaning up) meant some hiking and nature photography. I liked to do close-up work on fungi, what animals I could see, and even rock outcroppings (geology being a lifelong amateur passion).

It was almost by-chance that I spotted a strange looking rock outcropping on one of my walkabouts, right about at the limit of how far I was willing to walk from my 'camp'. It didn't pay to get stuck walking home in the twilight and miss a step into a deeper-than-expected puddle.

The outcropping wasn't visible from far away, so I was surprised when I happened upon it. It was so oddly shaped I had to go look closer. Indeed, it undercut the rock hillside to make an expansive overhang.

This was NOT a natural formation!

Pillars came up to support the overhang, and deep inside it was obviously well-sheltered from the weather. The 5 meters (15 feet) ceiling of the 'patio' under the rock face felt open but it was so deep there was a lot of area in there to walk around in, and a lot of chest-high rocks scattered inside as well.

Once I got in the space, it was obvious the outcropping's shape wasn't random.

Underneath

The space itself was the size of a medium-sized bus terminal, or maybe about half a U.S. grocery store. It wasn't small, but it wasn't empty, either. Odd looking boulders with almost-deliberate shapes filled the area in groupings.

The 'almost' part faded away as I got in far enough to see a carved stone chair, integral to the back wall and almost throne-like in appearance. Quickly, I took some pictures, all around, knowing this was ancient-beyond-ancient, just by the look of the place.

As I got closer, I could see the walls, overhanging ceiling, and even some boulders had ornate carvings on them, letters in some other language. I knew a lot of languages by then, but some characters were cursive like Thai and others chittish like cuneiform.

Of course I took tons of pictures!

The obvious focus of most of the place was The Chair, and I began to notice sets of arcs in the floor that made it look ever more like a throne, with a slight lean-back angle so whoever sat in it definitely would either sit up straight on their own or could appear relaxed. That aspect of it appealed to me - a relaxed throne, a funny idea in itself.

I'm not going to say it called to me, or I was forced, but I felt increasingly compelled to sit in it, just to see what it would be like.

Yes, you're probably yelling at me for doing this, super sus and creepy situation, but hell, I was in the middle of freakin' nowhere, and the rock looked really, really cool!

So, yeah. I sat in the chair.

This was a life-ending mistake -- not my life, mind you, physically, but... it's complicated.

What followed my sitting down was a sense of immense tiredness and relaxation. I had long enough to shrug off my day-pack, but then... sleep.

Yet, it turned into something that Definitely Wasn't Sleep.

I'd heard of drug trips before, and if I had to guess it was something like that.

Time passed in a dimly-lit waking dream of immense length. My earliest moments in life came forth as vivid re-livings of events. I saw my parents again! They were alive and young and energetic and happy (mostly), and I was, too, as my young self.

On one level, I had great joy from seeing them again. But, the main level of this memory included the emotions I had during the events, the sensations, the tastes and smells and sounds loud and soft.

I found the utter silence again of ears that didn't have tinnitus, the Free Clarity of eyes that didn't need glasses.

Every bit of my childhood came through, though definitely NOT in chronological order - one memory would trigger another, a place or a face or an idea would spawn a different thing coming out. It was mostly in age-order, but not entirely.

Friends and enemies (bullies, mostly) along the way, the trip seemed much more vivid in my adolescence, and even had memories of times I pooped, or jerked off, or cried from either physical or emotional pain. These ideas flowed easily through me and over me.

My adulthood, my jobs, my coworkers, my wife, our inability to have kids, my professional life, our home and family life, our pets, the messes I'd made, the joys, the sorrows, all up to the current day.

Even my travels, all the countries I'd been to, cities I'd seen, museums and artworks and churches and Over-the-Top Oddball People I'd met (and the mundane ones, too), they flowed up and over my mind, the conversations we'd had, the where and why and how of their lives, it all came up and out through me.

Then, I slowly woke.

Opening my eyes gradually, I realized my reverie was done, and a fresh bright sunlight greeted me. Birds chirped, insects buzzed, and I was awake and alive. And, in The Chair.

The second thing I noticed (after where I was) was that I was famished and tremendously thirsty. I took a long drink from my hip water flask, but then realized I'd peed in my pants... and... Oh, golly, I'd pooped my pants, too.

My watch said 3 nights had passed.

They'd be wondering about me. I had to have missed some check-ins in work chatrooms.

All this realization took about 20 or 30 seconds, maybe. And, then, I felt the artificial relaxation that obviously came from the chair, and I had to lean backwards again. This time, I stayed awake, but a set of noises started in my head, and then, a voice, clear and distinct.

I covered my ears. Like ringing in your ears, covering them doesn't help. This didn't either.

The voice said, "Kevin Fenimore Cooper. Species, human, aged 57 years. Diseases, infestations, and conditions: 455. All faults corrected. Say your name clearly, out loud."

"Kevin Cooper?"

"Good, consciousness confirmed. You are the 1,621st human we have analyzed, over the last 22,773 years on this planet. You are only the second to be found in the last thousand years, however. Please repeat these facts to validate that you understand us."

I did.

"In compensation for causing you pain during this analysis, for invading your privacy, and for stealing 3 days of your life, we have fixed your health faults."

"Oh?" I knew I wasn't exactly super-healthy, but I did exercise some.

"Ethics require we inform you of our analysis, as follows. You are human. We have identified your species' evolutionary history. This includes primary and secondary self-actualization goals. We have confirmed you conform to most human norms. Humans are omnivorous, apex-predators, metaphor-cognitive, language class 7, intelligence class 12. You have two-gender sexual reproduction using double-helix 4-amino acid molecules in 23 pairs, alongside mitochondrial symbiosis."

"Nominally you have 1.05 children per opportunistic non-seasonal pregnancy, live birth, glandular infancy feeding to 1 year, median age 7 to moderate self sufficiency. Semi-herd mentality, optimized for both mated-pair and alpha-pride reproduction, with tribe-defense groupings."

What the voice was saying made sense, but it was using such abstract terms, it was odd to hear it out loud. The sensibility was very alien if all these considerations were variables that could be different.

"Maximum senescence at 120 years, cognitive max at 16, strength max at 24. Fertility lifelong in males, females median ages 12 to 45. Gender equality in cognition, male median is 1.4 times median female strength. External sexual traits, artistic and power-dynamic capabilities reinforce social mate selection or pride inclusion."

"Inborn female priorities emphasize social cohesion, with military capability as a backup. Male priorities include acquisition and securing of physical needs and safety, impregnating females, and negotiating social complexities as secondary goals."

"Kevin. Your mental state was incorrectly optimized given your species characteristics. This has been corrected. Please announce your primary life goals."

I spoke, as if it's something I've known forever and was just admitting out loud. "Have as much sex as possible. Make as many babies as possible. Protect my babies and their mothers first, then my tribe second. Optimize for the mothers to ensure they provide good care to the young. Maximize the number, safety, and dispersion of all descendants."

"Secondary life goals?"

"Maximize pleasure. Achieve artistic goals. Safeguard my children, wives, tribe, clan, nation, humanity, planet. Obey ethical traditions to encourage further social cohesion and simplify decision making."

"State additional goals of The Chair."

"Provide technological and engineering solutions to prevent various impending catastrophes, as revealed by The Chair."

These answers had (obviously to me) been newly installed in my head.

It continued, "Return to The Chair exactly 100 years from today. Your body will not age until that date. You remain vulnerable to physical damage but have been made generally more resilient. Secondary sexual characteristics have been enhanced to achieve species, personal, and Chair goals. Cognition has been increased to class 17, language skills to class 9. Your skull size will increase by approximately 10%. These improvements will be passed to your offspring to encourage further species enhancement."

It paused, and I considered what it was saying. It all was rushed as a presentation, but I was pretty sure I got most of it.

I asked, "I'm ... not going to age? Stay at this age for 100 years?"

"Your apparent age will decrease over the next year at a non-linear exponential rate. You should seek shelter in a known safe location for this regression. Your social context will fail due to appearance changes. The chair will at intervals fix this failure by providing new identity documents and social supports. Comply with all instructions given, or The Chair will punish you with exponentially increasing pain levels. Recompense for this punishment is your enhanced abilities as previously noted."

I thought about this for a few moments. "Where should I go first?"

"Southeast. As far as anyone is concerned here, the person named Kevin Fenimore Cooper wandered away, was lost, and died without a trace."

"I'm not sure I know enough to survive..."

"Survival information will be provided. Depart immediately. Do not delay. Do not leave traces of your path."

== ==

Getting up from the chair meant moving my oh-so-stiff body, picking up my backpack, and just going. I couldn't return to the base, about a half-day's walk away north, so I did as instructed.

The first stream I got to, I waded in and lowered my pants into the icewater, scrubbing and scrubbing to get my underwear and jeans clean, and myself, too. My skin was irritated but okay. I was surprised at how well I tolerated the cold, usually I was much more of a wimp.

I had a compass, so I just kept walking. My pack had some emergency rations, and I knew my way around wild berries. I was so hungry that I even used the survival course my company had paid for and ate some (yuck!) grubs from under a rotting tree. Oh.My.God.Yuck. They were very bitter but gave my stomach something to do for a while, quieting the hunger pangs.

I got to a lake and used my small collapsible sport-fishing pole to start catching stuff, and Wow did that work well. Apparently no one fished in these lakes and the fish were chock-a-block ready to eat anything I dangled on a hook.

Building a fire and making a boulder-lined 'smokehouse' where I could stack my catch, in two days I'd dry-smoked two weeks' worth of fish. I could continue on with some food safety.

The map I had (my habit for remote areas) was a laminated printout of a topo map of a county-sized area, but it didn't go farther than 50 km from my starting point - I hadn't needed that.

Still, I passed a super-big river, and started following it upstream.

The rule when lost in the wilderness is, follow rivers Downstream.

In Siberia (or the extreme north), Downstream is north and that gets colder as you get near the ocean. I didn't want that anyway, and the Chair had said southeast.

On the 8th day, I got to a point where there was a path by the river - humans!

Not being dumb, I followed the path.

It led to a village on the edge of a lake, only 20 houses surrounded by thatched-wood high fences around fields. Inside were goats and very small odd-looking deer that I eventually figured out were reindeer.

A few dogs came out to greet me, friendly enough, so I turned my side to them and looked into the forest. They came up and sniffed me, barked some, I presumed we were friends, and then we were. We got along great. My wife had loved dogs, we'd had several, but I'd outlived them.

Very soon some kids came running out, and then a whole group of people.

Language was going to be a problem.

A nice older lady led me back to a central clearing where there were (of all things) some sturdy plastic chairs (yes, I was confused, too) and a lashed-together log picnic table. Most of the construction was log-cabin themed.

Immediately, I noticed that there were many more women than men in this village.

Sign language got some questions asked, like, where did I come from (I said the Russian word for 'China', lying through my teeth) and why was I there ("lost" took some pantomime).

They wanted my name and I knew I couldn't give them that, in case someone came around and asked. Still, I wanted to recognize it when someone called to me, so I settled on my high-school nickname from sports, Moe. As in, The Last of the Mohicans, a famous novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Yeah, my friends weren't too inventive.

As far as they were concerned, my story was that I was running away from a war, and they liked that invention, because it fit their worldview. Frankly, it was close enough to true - I didn't like fighting, I was peaceful, and I liked nature. This, they understood. I showed them nature pictures on my camera (figuring they'd search my things when I was asleep anyway) and rocks I'd collected.

There was a change from my normal mental state that I noticed right away. I could smell things much more vividly, I could remember almost every word that anyone said to me, and I seemed to be picking up their language on an intuitive level quickly.

Three of the kids, a boy about 9, and two girls about 8, walked me around the village and pointed at things, and then named them. It was a really fun game for them. I got the words for 'next to', etc., then some verbs, and maybe by the fourth day (with very intense work and me sleeping a lot), I could start to converse with them.

The men in their village had been removed four winters before by some army people who drove up the frozen river, put all ten of the younger men in the village in a truck, and drove south again. There were many tears in their eyes at the telling of this.

I was crying with them, it was very sad. One man had been taken before his wife gave birth. There wasn't much hope those men would ever come back. Fucking Russian Army.