Introduction

"So, which bedtime story would you like tonight?"

"Tell me about the war, and about the research center where Grandma and Grandpa worked."

"I've already told you that story a hundred times. How about a different story?"

"No! I want to hear about the robots! And the space ships!"

"Very well. Long before you were born, there was a great war, the Third World War. And during that war, our country built several massive research centers underground, using tunnel boring machines and excavators and dynamite. Inside these man-made caves built out of steel fiber reinforced shotcrete, hundreds of scientists-"

"What's shotcrete?"

"It's concrete sprayed onto a surface at high velocity. I'm not exactly sure how you would do that, but that's the definition that I read in an old book. Anyways, they planned for these centers to be protected even in the case of a nuclear attack or invasion.

"Your grandparents lived and worked in the Center for Robotics and Engineering, which specialized in making huge robots which, later on, took the place of human soldiers in the war. There were other centers too, each of which was meant to make a certain contribution to the war effort: the Center for Artificial Intelligence, the Center for Information and Communication, and several others. Each was formed to serve only one purpose: to help our country to destroy others.

"But the people in those bases were scientists, not soldiers - military personnel were not allowed anywhere where actual research was taking place. And although they were required to do the research that the government expected of them, each base also had a secret project, hidden from the government, meant not to destroy life but to preserve it.

"Your grandparents were involved in the Phoenix Project, trying to build ships that could sail to other stars. The Center for Artificial Intelligence was involved in something called the MANI Project, but their base was discovered and destroyed by the enemy, and no one alive knows for sure what MANI was. Some say that it was a supercomputer, others that it was a machine, or perhaps even a person. But the greatest of all projects took place in the Center for Information and Communication - the Xanadu Project, an attempt to preserve the collective knowledge and literature of mankind against the coming disaster.

"But after the War, the power plants and oil refineries that had driven our technology lay in ruins. And only a few people knew how to maintain the technology that still remained. Your grandparents became mechanics, and they taught everything they knew to me, just as I will teach everything that I know to you. But with each year, more and more is forgotten..."