Up to three hundred years ago Europe was a happening place. Culture. Literature. Knowledge. Soaring cathedrals. Kingdoms bristling with warriors and weapons. But then something happened. Like a candle being snuffed out. The llamapox hit, along with polio, chagas fever, and the mould. Within a few years 98% of the population had died. The forests reclaimed the farms, the villages, even the cities. Skeletons were left scattered over the earth.
About the same time dozens of new foodstuffs appeared. Hot peppers. Chocolate. Corn. Potatoes. And potent medicines, rumoured to have come from Atlantis. Coincidence? Who could tell? Everyone was dead, and civilization had evaporated.
Africa wasn't hit as hard. It expanded to fill the vacuum. Within two hundred years all of Europe was split into colonies of Morocco, Ethiopia, and the Bantu Nation. Wales was now a wholly owned property of the Western European Trading Association. A company archaeologist who had been digging in Portugal found documents which suggested that Atlantis was real, it had been the source of hot peppers, and it had also been the source of the mould. The records of Atlantis were sketchy and fantasmic. Something about golden cities, living lights, and visions. Which brings us to the present day: I, David, a lowly Welsh slave, shoveling coal aboard an iron trading ship of the WETA flying the Bantu flag, setting off across the Atlantic to rediscover Atlantis.
Atlantis was a mythical evil we'd been taught since childhood. The laws against venturing West were still rigorously enforced. We set sail from Oko aboard the Thursday Princess with little fanfare. The cover story was that we were headed to Ireland. But where we should have hugged the coast of Africa and turned north, we took down the sails, fired up the boilers, and we continued due west. The iron ships had evolved naturally from the making and the defense from cannons. My iron boiler was a recent novelty from my own country. Messy, temperamental, often fatally explosive. But, combined with a screw, with the power to cross unheard of distances quickly. Our ship doctor had another forbidden preparation: a stash of malaria mosquitoes, tsetse flies, guinea worms, plague rats, smallpox blankets, and all the other nasties the company had been able to gather covertly on short notice.
The Atlantic knocked us about with its usual violence, but we plowed straight through it. What we didn't know, exactly, was how far Atlantis WAS. We knew the earth was round. About 25,000 miles in circumference. And we could account for about 10,000 miles of that. We had enough coal to drive us three months at 10 knots. If we were lucky, we could get there and back no trouble. Unlucky, we could just get there. Our crew was heavy on skilled slaves; our cargo heavy on war supplies and cannons.
To our great surprise, we made land after only three weeks. How could we be this close without there already being active trade routes? We hoisted sails and turned off the boilers. The land was low, sandy, with palm trees. To the south the land stretched east, so we'd actually sailed further than we needed to. We sent a landing party in, but they found no inhabitants. Campfires, paths, yes. Inhabitants, no. No wildlife larger than a squirrel, either. On the beach there was a pole with a board with squares of squiggles, and a cartoon of a campfire with a blue slash through it. The landing party planted the Bantu flag, claiming Atlantis in the name of the WEPA. The doctor let loose some of his nasties. They gathered some of the local plants. Then returned to the ship in hopes of finding a town. We followed the land southeast.
At dusk we saw more signs of habitation. Some huts, docks, boats and rafts. But no people. Suddenly, a thin glowing beam came from the shore, twisting slightly in the wind. It cut through our mast, which fell burning to the deck. People covered head to toe in white suits appeared from hiding, mounted rafts, and started paddling towards us. Our captain, a big black bald headed fellow, was yelling to the crew to fire the cannons. As soon as the gunports opened though, the beam appeared again, along with cries and awful noises from the cannon crew. It smelled like steak. A cannon let loose aimlessly, punching a hole in the dock. They closed the gunports, but the beam cut through the iron siding like paper. There was an explosion belowdecks. The captain issued new orders: retreat! We found, though, that our ship had been anchored. Crewmen started dropping like flies. I felt a prick, saw a dart sticking out of my arm, then everything went dark.
When I came to, I was tied up in a stone cell with a thick wooden door on iron hinges. A black-haired swarthy fellow with a wide mouth was squatting on a stool next to me, dressed in a white tunic and skirt with a rope around his waist. "You're being held as an accomplice to attempted murder," he said, in passable Bantu. "I expect it to be as an accomplice to actual murder shortly. You are NOT going back home, ever. Or at least until we've conquered you Aztecs. Now, do you have any questions? We've got all the time in the world."
I asked what Aztecs were. He said it was a general term for senselessly violent, but backwards, people.
After talking awhile they untied me and let me go. I was in a city like none I'd ever seen. Streets of yellow brick. Main thoroughfares with steps right in the middle of them. Houses crafted from living trees. Occasionally, a giant sloth, bigger than a house, that they'd bred for hauling. And their fruit! Their food! Indescribably good, and varied. And some food made you happy, or relaxed, or energetic, or sweaty, or have strange dreams. Whatever you wanted.
Pretty soon I had a smiling girl, Akna, hanging on my elbow, too. They even gave me apprentices to learn how to build and operate boilers. Good ones, too. Apparently, gears and engines had never occurred to them! Even though they had wheels and complicated manual devices. They'd always used manual power. I was able to give them a bunch of metal making tips too, since boilers are finicky that way. They'd never taken ships seriously either. Or carts. Or pulleys.
They had apparently tamed lightning, for that death ray we'd seen (it was lightning and metal shavings), and to make machines that could reason and remember, and to talk at great distances. Just the other day one of my apprentices brought in a lightning-driven engine they'd just put together. They were simultaneously proud, and apologetic they hadn't done it ages ago. This lightning craft is beyond me.
And they'd tamed life. They'd been expecting the doctor's nasties and could actually cure most of them. But what is more, they were able to breed new things almost at will. They were going on about cells and atoms, with pictures drawn by lightning, but so far I haven't followed. When the Portuguese first visited Atlantis, the visitors had seen fungus on rags that had been bred to glow bright enough to read for hours when the rag was soaked in sugar water. That was three hundred years ago. It would be child's play for them now.
It's been several years, and true to their word, they never let me go back. I don't know what happened to the rest of the crew. But why WOULD I go back? Back there, I was a cog in their machine. Here, they tell me to tell them stories and eat their roasted sloth. And I've got my Akna.
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "The discovery of the New World was devastating for Europe. Armies were crushed, the fleeing soldiers brought back deadly diseases which killed more people than the plague. For centuries no one dared to set sail to the West. Today an African-European diplomatic mission departs to make history."