Hilda leaned back in her chair, she had already spent eight hours reading the thick copy and it was beginning to get dark, she would have preferred not to have to take it back to the historical texts room, but soon it would be closing time and she could not take the book out of the library, fortunately for her there had been little movement today, only a couple of engineering students who had dedicated their afternoon to prepare for next week's qualifying exams and had not interrupted her at all.
After leaving the text in Tomas' hands and telling him she would continue reading the next day, she set out to return to her room. On the way to the transport she was able to assimilate what she had read during that afternoon.
The author of the first pages of the diary never knew what really happened, he did not know the cause of what had happened to the world, for him only the sky had blackened, after a series of destructive earthquakes, which devastated his city. In reality, there was not much difference between what she knew today, almost a thousand years after the catastrophe, and what the person who wrote the first pages of that diary knew who lived through it in person.
After the earth had calmed down, the sky blackened for what seemed to those who lived through it to be little more than four years, the plants began to wither and little by little the animals were disappearing, absolutely all equipment that ran on electricity ceased to do so; for lack of sunlight and of what in various parts of the writing was called Ether. From one moment to the next mankind had been returned to the stone age.
With the darkening of the skies came a winter that lasted more than ten years, the people who survived the catastrophe took refuge in the subways of the cities where it was easier to keep warm, many others fled the destroyed cities, seeking less hostile places for shelter, taking refuge in caves in the mountains, where at least they had a less crowded environment.
These city subways and caves were what they called catacombs, and human life developed in them for at least twenty years after the catastrophe. When the almost permanent winter had definitely ceased.
The catacombs were cold, damp, dark and unhealthy, and daily disease, hunger and hypothermia claimed the lives of those who precariously inhabited them. In his story, the author of the initial pages of the text, told how, in the first months of living in the subway of his city, almost every day one or two people died and the situation worsened with the passing of time, according to his speculations, of the nearly five hundred people who were in the sector where he was only fifty-six survived the first year.
Those who stayed in the cities were the luckiest, in the mountains, as most of the vegetation died, many of the animals disappeared, so there were no food sources, that, the cold, the diseases and the lack of experience to live in a wild environment, ended up killing almost all those who decided to take refuge in caves.
Something that strongly caught Hilda's attention was the constant reference to Ether, apparently it was the main source of food, resources and energy before the catastrophe, it was the first reference she found to that in all the historical records of the time she had studied. From what he could understand, a good part of the misfortune that befell mankind was because of the dependence it had on this technology and its absence, was its doom.
The transport was arriving at the station where Hilda was to get off, she would stop by the food stalls in the square for something for her and her ferret, before returning to her room; she felt too tired to cook, she just wanted to get to rest, but she still had a long night left transcribing her notes and crossing the new information with what she had already gathered from other sources, she had to get her work done today, because tomorrow she had to continue with the reading.