Castle on the Rock

June 2134

"Thanks for visiting! We hope you enjoyed your stay!" Matthias said cheerfully to the family exiting the circle and the ruins. 

The family was made up of two dumpy middle-aged parents, the mother holding a wailing baby, and the father looking distinctly like he would rather be somewhere else. A teenaged girl swiping at her holoPhone, tuning out the cries of her younger siblings.

As they left, the man shoved a crumpled tip into Matthias' waiting hand and ushered the family out of the grounds. 

It was five o'clock and they were closing up shop. Matthias strode purposefully over to the nearest stone and began dismantling the projections. 

The projections were someone much smarter that Matthias' idea to bring tourists to the stones and milk money from them like cows. Well, no one disagreed that they worked. Matthias still remembered being given the briefing about them on his first day as a tour guide; 

"The idea is that we take the ancient information we understand, like dates, pictures of animals, names, dug up bones and gravestone markings and use them to create highly sophisticated and realistic 3-D renderings of what we suspect were moments that occurred in this specific circle."

When Matthias just looked confused, his boss had sighed and said

"We use the carvings to tell stories with holograms". 

They use the carvings to tell stories. It was a beautiful thing, taking a frozen moment in time, a name, a forgotten grave, and turning it into something for people to watch. To experience. To laugh and cry at. 

Matthias settled on the freshly mown grass and watched some of the projections for a while, they always calmed him down. They had become such a massive part of his life, it almost felt like he had grown up with the people in the projections, connecting with them from across the stretch of time. 

He saw a red-haired girl stroking a horse. A young man curled up, bleeding to death. Heard the war chants and banging on drums. A howling wolf. An old man and a young boy. Masses of disease-ridden bodies being buried. The more recent ones, a pair of lovers being married. An artist before the digital revolution. 

He looked up.

The stars twinkling brilliantly. Matthias remembered wanting to be an astronaut after his great-grandmother told him stories of life before humans began colonizing other planets in the Sol system. 

To seven-year-old Matthias, the lights of faraway galaxies weren't just flaming balls of gas, they were an invitation. An invitation to get up there, as long as he didn't fuck anything up before he could. 

Well, he must have done something wrong. because while other people were exploring the universe, he was stuck as a tour guide on this rotten excuse for a planet.

He was torn from these thoughts by a sharp buzzing in his ear.  His spaceChip was ringing. Sighing, he tapped it twice and projected the screen onto the grass. It was Marley.

"Matty!"

He grinned. "Hey, Marley."

Her energetic voice almost deafened him. "So... come home tonight, I got extra Pow packets and I'm inviting Mr. and Mrs. Camadreas for dinner, it'll be a feast. 

"Tha-"

She interrupted, continuing at a rapid pace.  "Oh! And Sacha called, he's staying with those kids from BioTech tonight, also Karlo needs to visit his friend and he wants one of us to Skyrail there with him. He's too scared to go by himself, isn't that just the cutest-"

"Marley."

She slowed down. "Sorry. Yeah?'

"I can't make tonight."

She sounded crestfallen. "Aw, why not?"

Matthias looked around at the circle, the projections of ages long past lighting up the dusk. He sighed.

"I've got work to do."