The Forkmakers

Imagine our civilization fell tomorrow. What would our descendants think of us? What would they know about the 21st century?

They would know surprisingly little about our greatest material triumphs. Our civilization’s favorite building materials aren’t made to last. Reinforced concrete only lasts a century; asphalt far less. Most of what we make out of steel will turn into a brownish oxidized dust in a few decades.

Information is even worse. The ancient Mesopotamians did their writing on clay tablets. Our knowledge is stored on hard drives, which die in a few years, or acidic paper, which dies in decades.

We do create things that will last. Glass (especially its shatter-resistant varieties), ceramics, stainless steel. 1000 years after the fall of our civilization, we will be known for one thing above all others: cutlery. Our heirs call us the Forkmakers.

What Survives a Thousand Years

Our civilization is large and powerful. We will leave lots of relics for the post-apocalypse. Coins, tires, aluminum cans. Vast landfills of disposable diapers. But all of that is useless. The most durable thing we make that our successors actually want to use is our silverware.

Cutlery is metal - thick metal. Anything designed to last a hundred runs in the dishwasher can withstand the elements. And we’ve made a lot of it. In this post-apocalyptic world, even the poorest peasant can afford to eat with a stainless steel fork.

The situation with plates is more complicated. Few natural processes can destroy them. But when the Forkmakers’ civilization died, they left many of their plates in wooden cupboards off the ground. The few survivors didn’t really prioritize safely removing the plates before the cupboards rotted, so billions of ceramic plates shattered in those dark decades. But somewhere like the Bay Area, which had a large and rich Forkmaker population, most middle-class families still have the ancestral Fiestaware.

And it’s fortunate they have the cookware of a more advanced civilization, because one of their plentiful foods - acorns - is difficult to prepare. But with enough resourcefulness and inherited forks, the people of the Bay Area enjoy a diet of acorns, wild oats, grapes and figs. They call themselves Oaklanders.

What about the rest of our metalwork? While stainless steel objects last forever, most other forms of steel rust away. The chassis of a car or the springs inside a mattress will be red dust before the first century is over.

Aluminum will be more interesting. After iron and steel, it’s the most important metal in the modern world. It’s corrosion-resistant. Early scavengers looking for finished goods they can use will ignore decaying engine blocks and crushed soda cans in favor of our forks and knives. But as they move up the tech tree, the Oaklanders will start to see aluminum as a useful raw material. Aluminum melts more easily than bronze, and can be cast just as easily. During humanity’s first rise, we didn’t learn to extract aluminum from ore until the 1880s. But with millions of tons of the stuff already extracted, the Oaklanders will have an Aluminum Age before their Bronze Age. For a shining moment, before easy aluminum reserves are exhausted, they could appreciate their ancestors for something besides forks.

A thousand years from now, they still have some of our glass. Our phone screens survive, long after the rest of the phone is gone. They might be fun to play with; I imagine my distant descendants hunched over the glass screen ignoring their parents.

Windows and lightbulbs have mostly been smashed: either by time or by barbarian raiders from San Jose. Tempered glass - most of the windows of a car - is cooled non-uniformly, putting it under a constant pattern of stress and strain. This means if a car window breaks, the break spreads, turning it into gravel.

But tempered glass is tough. The future Bay Area has hundreds of thousands of car windows. Oaklander architecture allows for plenty of natural light, shining through glass from another civilization.

Interestingly, while conventional wisdom holds that the Forkmakers are responsible for glass, natural philosophers have long disagreed. They rolled their eyes at a ‘Forkmaker of the Gaps’ who can be invoked to explain any unexplained phenomenon. Eventually, large window quarries are discovered in what was once Southern California. Each one corresponds to a large concentration of forks. The scientific consensus on what the Forkmakers could do shifts.

So much for metal and glass. What about plastic? No individual piece of plastic will see as much usage as our forks and plates; plastic degrades too fast when exposed to UV light. But anyone digging through our cities will find literal tons of the stuff: mysterious shapeable substances that nobody knows how to replicate, that aren’t made by any known processes. Still, if you aren’t superstitious, you can just go into an old city or landfill and get more. There are countless plastics, but the Forkmakers conveniently stamped a little code on each of them. The plasticsmith is one of the most learned people in the village. He knows which plastics mix with what, and what their properties will be.

Plastic can be melted down by even a primitive culture, and reforged into something new. It’s lightweight, waterproof, and cheap. In the Bay Area, that mostly means cups, jugs, and buckets. But in rainier climates, homes will have plastic roofs.

It’s interesting to compare the roles of plastic and aluminum. Both are lightweight substances that are easy to work with. Both need advanced technology to produce, but were thrown far back in the tech tree by the fallen Forkmakers. Plastic and aluminum share many applications. Plastic actually melts at a lower temperature, and requires much less physical infrastructure to work with. But it comes in countless complicated varieties. And the fumes it gives off have the unfortunate tendency to kill off all but the most carefully tutored plasticsmiths before they reach the point of mastery. Today there are about five tons of plastic for every ton of aluminum, but the most easily accessible reserves will be degraded by UV radiation in a few decades. Whether the Plastic Age comes before or after the Aluminum Age depends on the details of the recovery: how quickly do the Oaklanders amass technological know-how versus material capital?

The Words of the Forkmakers

A thousand years from now, the Oaklanders are a powerful civilization. Recycling ancient plastic and aluminum is an important part of their economy, and they’ve even learned to work with steel, making our forks more valuable than ever.

But I don’t want to be remembered for my forks. Forkmaker society produced so much information: photographs, essays, newspapers, scientific journals. Unfortunately, the next thousand years aren’t going to be kind to the things we write on.

Digital information is toast. Even if this laptop was somehow preserved from the elements, even if someone could find electricity in the post-apocalypse, information on an SSD only lasts decades. CDs might last a little longer. But anything lasting a millennium is a deliberate stunt by an archivist, not a widespread storage technique that just happens to be millennium-rated. There are a thousand books carved in ceramic buried in a salt mine in Austria, and a couple thousand Rosetta disks (unreadable unless you have a microscope).

So digital is out. I’ve written millions of words in my life (and been the subject of trillions of bytes of espionage by tech companies). All of that is gone.

I’ve also been written about in a newspaper. But newspapers don’t last a thousand years. Paper, in general, doesn’t really last. It’s biodegradable and slightly acidic. Certain kinds of mites can eat it, water and fire both destroy it.

But we do have examples of paper-like things lasting a thousand years with nobody to take care of them. There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of papyrus that survived twice that long in the hot, dry desert of inland Egypt. There’s Roman writing on pressed wood as far north as England. There are thousand-year-old sutras written on paper - actual paper! - in a cave in China.

You can’t exactly curl up at night and read the Oxyrhynchus papyri: they’re too brittle. In the course of researching this piece, I learned that there are more types of paper than I had ever imagined, and their fates are at least as varied as the fates of our windows. Roughly speaking, paperbacks are all doomed. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper not unlike ancient papyrus. It’ll dry out, but if you take it to a humid environment, it might become bendable again. Glossy stock (think nice magazines) survives the best of all of these if you keep it dry. If it ever gets wet, though, mold will devour it, and it’s hard to stay dry for a thousand years anywhere on this planet.

What does it take for a library to last a millennium? It can’t be anywhere humid. Bad news, since we Forkmakers do most of our building on coasts. Nowhere with precipitation. Nowhere that will be inhabited at any point in the future: we humans have a nasty habit of burning each other’s cities to the ground.

But we Forkmakers live in many places. There are a hundred thousand libraries in the continental US, ranging from elementary school collections to the Library of Congress. They’re built in every architectural style imaginable: many from the doomed mix of concrete and steel, some from wood or glass, but some from brick or stone. Many have archival stacks buried in basements. And, most important, some are in places that nobody- not a barbarian warlord, not a hunter-gatherer looking for kindling, not even a rat or termite, would ever think to venture. I’m talking about Las Vegas.

The Lied Library at UNLV is perfect for preservation. The books are packed into metal bins the size of refrigerators. In our time, patrons can ask a robot to retrieve any title they wish. But fifty years from now, the bins will be buried under four stories of rubble. Many will be smashed when the building falls. But many will survive.

Imagine the excitement when an archeologist, digging in Las Vegas, discovers a university library. Millions upon millions of pages, more than she could read in a lifetime. She reaches out to touch one, and it crumbles to dust. But the Oaklanders are resourceful. Our heroine realizes that if they take the pages back to California, some become readable.

Well, readable is a generous term. In the time of the Forkmakers, there were only two major languages in North America: English and Spanish. A truly unprecedented amount of linguistic uniformity. After a thousand years, the Spanglish our Oaklander archeologist speaks is similar enough to English that if she had a modern recording, she could recognize the words, if not the grammar. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a recording; she has writing. And English is a very hard language to read.

The breakthrough comes when she finds two different Forkmaker translations of the Bible. The Oaklanders have Bibles of their own and are able to decipher the strange writings of their forebears.

Understanding the text is the work of decades. The books are organized by size, fiction next to science next to self-help. There are scholarly debates about whether Elon Musk was a real person. There’s a scientific boom as Oaklander scholars work their way through the university library. But the greatest mystery of all is never answered: why do so few of the books talk about how to make a fork?

1. Sorry, copper, no hard feelings
2. At least if you alloy it with silicon, which the Forkmakers helpfully did.
3. There’s a pernicious rumor going around that glass is a slow-flowing liquid. People sometimes justify this by pointing to old windows and noticing they’re uneven. By this logic, Roman glasswork couldn’t possibly have its incredible detail, and Neolithic obsidian arrowheads would be puddles by now.
4. After a great deal of debate with Claude, I conceded that Canadian and Alaskan libraries are getting swallowed by fire- either natural or man-made- well before the millennium mark.
5. The city was abandoned soon after the collapse, but its location was remembered by desert nomads for centuries. A thousand years from now, the Hoover Dam is still a tourist attraction; the Las Vegas ruins are for serious historians.