Rachel's parents never spoke of the old shed in the wheat field. The unspoken truth was that it was their job to guard it. Rachel began to doubt they even knew what it was. The farm had been given to her father by his father, and his father's father, and so on. When she was younger, she sometimes asked her parents what was in the shed, but they always avoided the question and said it was just an old shed. None of the keys in the key box fit any of it's three locks. Why would 'just an old shed' need three locks?

Each morning at 7:30 sharp, Rachel and her brother Kyle left home to walk the half mile to the government funded school teleport. Most farm families weren't wealthy enough to have their own teleports, so the state government had set up public ones where allot of farm boundaries came together. Occasionally they would break down or be vandalized, but they were fairly reliable otherwise.

Her dad went out to work in the fields and her mom drove an ancient orange pick up truck down the gravel roads to her job as manager of a potato chip packaging plant. The truck had once run on gasoline, but all oil wells had run dry nearly 150 years back. Now it was fueled by ethanol that some of their neighbors produced.

Rachel's favorite subject at school was history. She loved learning about the ways people used to live their lives. She could imagine herself in different worlds of earth history. She loved thinking about how where they lived might have looked before the great depression and famine of 2378. They learned about NASA and the space program, and about the first probe to leave the solar system, which reached Alpha Centauri and found nothing. NASA was long since abandoned because the government had no money. Kyle was obsessed with going out into space, and though Rachel would rather have her feet planted firmly on Earth, she did wish the space program would be rebuilt. There was so much left to discover.

When Rachel got home from school one day, her mom was busy sorting through old stuff. "Spring cleaning," she explained.

"But its not spring, its September," Rachel pointed out.

"Its just an expression. Anyway, I could use some help," her mom replied.

"Oh, fine," said Rachel grudgingly. As she spoke she saw her mom put a small wooden box she had never seen before back into a cabinet she had just dusted.

Note: yes, I realize NOTHING has happened yet, but the next chapter will come soon, and it will be more dramatic.