Fifty Years of Peace (Abrupt Dissent Series) by Charlotte Andrews

first few steps down the steep stairs, Jenny turned and pulled the panel back down over their heads. Her grandfather held his lamp for her at the bottom of the staircase, and she expected to see a cobwebbed root cellar behind him. But as he lifted the light, she couldn’t believe what she saw.
     
    The tool shed had been built on top of a high-ceilinged room that looked like pre-war construction. Galvanized metal shelves ran down both walls of the bunker, filled with dozens of black screens connected to a rainbow of cables that twisted along the floor. They were labeled with words she’d never heard like “Dell” and “Sony” and sat behind small trays filled with letters. Jenny rubbed her index finger against one of the trays, tracing a line in the layer of dust that had accumulated on top of it. Many more of the objects were smooth glass devices that, even covered in dust, reflected the light from Grandpa’s lamp in all different directions.
     
    Her grandfather stopped next to a strange machine in the center of the room that had pedals on either side of it. Then he sat down on a stool behind it and blew out the lamp.
     
    “I can’t see!” she said.
     
    He didn’t respond, but she heard a whirring sound from where he’d been. Slowly, electric lights in the ceiling flickered to life.
     
    “It’s a generator,” he answered her unspoken question.
     
    “What is this place?”
     
    “It used to be a bomb shelter. A lot of people had these made before the war. You’d go and hide in one of these in case someone was going to attack. You put your food and supplies down here and no one would ever find you. I repurposed it.”
     
    “Are these…computers?”
     
    “That’s right. Before the war we didn’t use books quite the way you post-threes do now. Everything you wanted to know, the entire knowledge of the world, was on one of those.”
     
    “Can I try one?”
     
    “Of course.”
     
    He bent down from his stool and unhooked a small silver and white device from its cord. He pressed a narrow button on the top edge of the device and handed it to Jenny. It was so incredibly light in her hand, almost like nothing at all. The screen was lit up with a bright white apple with a bite removed against a black background, then changed to picture of a smiling woman wearing a long flowing red dress. A few seconds later, a group of small images rose in front of the woman.
     
    “It’s working!” she cried.
     
    “Of course it is.”
     
    “What do I do now?”
     
    “Touch it.”
     
    Squinting at the small print, she found an icon that said “Reader” and pressed it. She felt only the smooth glass, but the screen changed and she saw black and blue text appear under her finger.
     
    “I can read anything on this?”
     
    “Well you could once. All of these used to be connected to even bigger computers that stored all the books, but those computers needed electricity to run, and people to maintain them. When those things went, a lot of the books disappeared too. Now you can only get what’s saved on the device itself…”
     
    “What else could you do?”
     
    “Well anything you wanted. Talk to people, buy things, take pictures, play games, check Facebook…”
     
    “Facebook?”
     
    “Oh never mind…”
     
    Jenny was so enthralled in what she was looking at she had a hard time listening. She pressed another button and tiny rows of letters appeared on the screen.
     
    “How does it work? How can so much information be available at the touch of a finger?” she asked.
     
    “That’s a good question Jenny, and honestly, I don’t have all the answers. You see, back then, everyone used devices like this all the time, but there were really only a handful of people who actually had the skills to build the devices and their software.”
     
    “Software?”
     
    “You see those icons you are pressing? Those are computer programs, or applications, which are examples of software. The device you are