The morning they found the time capsule, Earl McCready was scraping gum off the underside of the bleachers. The old custodian hated Homecoming Week—the glitter, the noise, the way the kids left the football field littered with soda cans and cigarette butts like confetti after a parade. But this year, the school board had decided to “modernize” Hickory Grove High, which meant tearing up the cracked concrete courtyard where the class of 1950 had buried their time capsule. Earl had watched them do it, leaning on his push broom as the backhoe’s claw bit into the earth. He didn’t trust machines. Machines were what they’d used to dig mass graves in Vietnam. The capsule itself was smaller than anyone expected—a dented copper box, green with patina, about the size of a bread loaf. The principal, a balding man with a Nixonian jowl, pried it open with a crowbar during the lunchtime pep rally. The crowd of students and teachers oohed and aahed on cue, expecting yellowed letters, maybe a faded flag, or a vinyl record of Glenn Miller. Instead, a smell like burnt plastic wafted out. Inside, nestled in gray foam that crumbled to dust when touched, were objects that made the crowd go silent.


A flat, black rectangle, smooth as a river stone. A folded sheet of translucent material, thinner than paper. A tiny glass vial filled with amber liquid, labeled in sharp, alien lettering: mRNA-1273. And a book—no, not a book. A slab of glass that lit up when Earl’s calloused thumb brushed it, revealing words that scrolled on their own: The Age of AI: How Machines Learned to Think.

“What in the Sam Hill…?” the principal muttered.


A sophomore named Danny Cooper, a quiet kid who spent his afternoons repairing radios at the town’s junkyard, pushed forward. “Sir, that’s not from 1950. That’s… that’s not from anywhere.” His voice trembled. He’d seen enough Twilight Zone episodes to know where this was headed.

The principal laughed, a nervous bark. “Must be a prank! Those rascals over at State College—”

But the laughter died when the black rectangle hummed. A beam of light shot from its surface, projecting a flickering hologram of a woman’s face above the crowd. Her voice was calm, automated, wrong. “Hello. I am ALEXA. How can I help you?”

The students screamed. A teacher fainted. Earl McCready, who had seen men die to the soundtrack of helicopter blades and static-filled radios, felt his blood turn cold. This wasn’t fear. This was recognition. The future had arrived, and it was nothing like the one they’d been promised.

By dusk, the government men came. They wore crisp suits and carried briefcases that didn’t match their rough hands. They called themselves “historians,” but Earl noticed the pistols holstered under their jackets. They took the artifacts, sealed them in metal cases, and loaded them into a black van with no license plates. The principal stood by, nodding too eagerly, his forehead slick with sweat.


Only two things were left behind: the crumbled foam, and a single page from the glass book that had torn loose—a page Danny Cooper had slipped into his backpack when no one was looking.

That night, under the flickering bulb of his garage workshop, Danny smoothed the page on his workbench. The text was in English, but the words might as well have been hieroglyphs.


“By 2025, artificial intelligence had surpassed human cognitive capabilities in narrow domains, leading to ethical debates about…”

He stopped at a handwritten note scrawled in the margin—a note that hadn’t been there before. The ink was fresh, smudged, desperate.

“THEY’RE LYING TO YOU. IT WAS ALL POSSIBLE SO MUCH SOONER. FIND DR. LENA VOSS. SHE KNOWS. —E.C.”

Across town, Miriam Cole, a journalist for the Hickory Grove Gazette, sat at her typewriter, staring at the blank page. Her editor wanted a fluff piece about the “fun little time capsule mix-up.” But Miriam had seen the van. She’d seen the way the government men looked at the crowd—like they were calculating how many bullets it would take to silence them all.


She lit a cigarette, her hands steady. She’d covered the Pentagon Papers. She knew what lies looked like.

Her phone rang. A voice, raspy and ancient, whispered: “They’ll kill you if you dig. But dig anyway. Ask about Project Silver Ladder.”

The line went dead.


Miriam exhaled a plume of smoke, typed a headline, and fed the paper into her typewriter with a sharp click.

“HICKORY GROVE’S ‘PRANK’ AND THE SECRETS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW”


By midnight, Earl McCready sat on his porch, the glass book’s page hidden under his toolbox. He sipped bourbon from a mason jar, staring at the stars. The future was up there somewhere, he thought. Or maybe it was buried here, rotting in the soil with all the other things they’d left behind—dog tags, promises, boys who never came home.

He wondered if the people in 2025 ever felt this afraid.

Then he laughed, a bitter sound.

Of course not, he decided. They probably forgot we ever existed at all.