Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

– I have seen what I came to – but somehow I feel drawn to the sight in front of me, stepping carefully across the sopping ground until I am at the rim of the rubbish. On the edge, wedged into the mud, is what looks like a cross between the thinkwatch strapped to my wrist and the thinkpads we use in school. I crouch and pick it up, running my fingers across a cracked screen and fumbling around its hard metallic edges for anything that might make it work. I don’t know what it is about it but I feel some sort of spark as I weigh it in my hands. I know instinctively that this object comes from before I was born, probably from before the war. I feel an uncontrollable urge to find out what it does.
    As the rain starts to ease, I notice three more of the items and pick them all up, hurrying back towards a large tree that offers a degree of shelter. Each of the devices has a button at the top which pushes in but nothing happens when I try it. I twist each of them around in my hands, knowing they must have done something at one point. I compare them to my thinkwatch.
    Grabbing a fallen branch, I whittle it on a tree stump, rubbing as hard as I can until I have filed it to a point. When it feels sharp enough, I use the wood to dig into the side of the device, pushing as hard as I can until it pops open. One by one, I open the other three too.
    I am not the best reader in my class but I make out the word ‘phone’ written on a label inside one of the devices. I have no idea what it means but think I’ll memorise it and perhaps ask my mother at some point. I can pretend I heard someone in the streets talking about one.
    I pull out all of the pieces inside, laying them on the ground next to each other, choosing the shiniest from each of the four sets and rebuilding one of the phones as best I can. My thin fingers dig easily into the corners behind the glass, pressing everything back together until I am convinced it will show me whatever it is that it does.
    I press the button on the top, holding my breath, waiting for something to happen.
    Nothing does.
    The rain has gone by now but I check my thinkwatch and know I have to head home. Colt will have had his tea by now and Mum will start to get worried if I’m not back soon. Standing, I brush all of the parts underneath a bush with my feet and start to plan when I might be able to come here next. I glance at my watch again, wondering if the parts underneath are anything like the ones I have just taken out of the phone.
    Somehow I know I will return here many times in the future.
    *   *   *
    I gasp again as I finally manage to shut down the memory. I had forgotten that day, the time where I first started exploring the items around the gully, taking them apart and putting them together again, trying to figure out how they worked. It wasn’t long after that when I first risked opening up my thinkwatch. I shake with shock at the fact the Reckoning has taken these thoughts from me, but that only makes me want to fight back.
    I wonder if the Reckoning is going to keep pushing me, if it is trying to catch me out for all the things I have done wrong in the past, but somehow it doesn’t feel as if that’s what it was after. Perhaps my resistance was what it wanted all along?
    I sense that the thinkpad wants my emotions, not my memories, so I don’t hold back, embracing the anger it has made me feel. Suddenly I am full of confidence as it continues to probe my mind. Words are drifting into my head but I push them away, instead forcing my questions towards it, wondering where the information goes, who invented it, how exactly it works. Each of my thoughts is resisted as a dull pain creeps through my forehead. When it shows me a crinkled black ball and asks me what I see, I respond that it is a crinkled black ball. When it says it has nearly finished and allows me to see myself standing and walking away, I think of myself in the spot I am