Some people are insomniac because they are afraid to go to sleep. Others just enjoy the quiet of the night. Some stay awake, waiting for a sign...
UTOPIA
A full moon in March, somewhere in Galilee, in a place which long ago some called Israel, but which now has no name at all. These days there are no countries. The land is divided by rivers and mountains, forests and deserts and places where the land meets the sea. Some regions have names, if anyone can remember them, but no one is really sure where they begin or where they end. It doesn't really matter any more.
We begin our journey with Saul, a carpenter. You will find him outside his cabin on the hillside, facing south - if you can find his cabin at all - hidden as it is among tall trees. Look for the white stones which mark the edges of the path, cleared of thorns. You can see them shining in the moonlight quite clearly tonight. Follow the path through the forest and you'll find him there, sitting in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe.
Old Saul, they call him. Nobody knows how old he is exactly. He doesn't know himself. Some say he is a century and a half. Some say more than two. Old Saul is old enough to remember the Great Meltdown, and that was at least a hundred years ago, by anyone's reckoning - though people these days are mostly very bad at counting. With the unpredictability of the seasons, even counting years is rarely done with any degree of accuracy. With no records, it's hard to be too sure of anything with any certainty. Stories are handed down from mouth to ear - and like a game of Chinese whispers, they get changed along the way.
Not much is known about the Great Meltdown, but what can be gathered by scattered remains of a fallen civilisation, now decayed and overgrown. As it is described in folklore, it was a time when everything that was predicted to go wrong, all went wrong at almost exactly the same time - or in very quick succession. Within the space of a single week, the entire fabric of human society fell apart. It was not so much that civilisation came to an end. It was more that when the veil was suddenly lifted, it was revealed that there had never been such a thing as civilisation at all.
When the Great Meltdown happened, almost all information at the time was stored digitally. Most of it was wiped out instantly by the magnetic storm which came with the solar flare. The complete sum of all human knowledge up to that point, deleted. Some books are still around. They are highly treasured. It's said that a complete copy of the World Wide Web (as it was called in those days) was created and coded in DNA, but nobody can know for sure if that's a myth. Even if it's true, nobody has a clue where it may have been stored, how it would have been kept from breaking down, or how to decode it, if it ever was discovered.
None of this concerns Old Saul as he sits outside his cabin in the moonlight, on this unseasonably warm night, rocking in his chair, smoking his pipe. Those days were so long ago, he rarely thinks of them at all these days. Tonight Old Saul is thinking about the future - about a long journey he is contemplating. He's waiting for a message to reach him. He's been waiting for three months now and is starting to wonder if it will ever materialise. Perhaps he should just set off in the general direction without knowing exactly where he's destined. It would be better that just waiting and not knowing. But then, if he wasn't here to receive it, how would the message reach him, if it ever did arrive?
Lost in thought and indecision, Old Saul didn't notice the footsteps coming up the path until they were quite close.
The messenger was out of breath and limping badly. His clothes and his bag were torn to shreds. He held a single, tattered piece of paper in his hand as he came stumbling through the gate, preceded by his dog - a white, wolfish hound with one ear up and one ear down...
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