20/20 -
© 2007-
I’m not sure exactly why it is I started writing things down in these here manuals or, more accurately, why Harrison started doing that, seeing as how I really just took over what he was doing and all. He was chronicling what we have been up to these days – “these days” being the future, that is.
That is why they are known as the Harrison Chronicles.
I know, I know, by the way things are described in the manuals you probably think of the place where I live now as being in some sort of dystopian future world. Sure, what with the rising waters and the constant storms bearing down on us, we had to live our lives in what you may think of as a primitive existence. But what do you expect? Our Village is right on Biscayne Bay on the East Coast of Florida, otherwise known as smack in the middle of Hurricane Alley.
Besides which, who is to say the way we live today, more in tune with Mother Nature, is any better or worse than the way things used to be back in the Twenties? Why, from where I sit, here in the future, life back then looks a whole lot more like dystopia than it does now for me and the other Villagers.
Back then, me, my mom and my kid sister were huddled together, bracing against the harsh reality of economic deprivation, struggling to survive in a deteriorating landscape beset by rising waters and intense storms that, in hindsight, we know now were already getting more frequent and intense, starting right about the year 2020. We sure had it bad back then, but the people living in Little Haiti, across the way from what we called the “Great Divide”, which was Biscayne Boulevard, had it a lot worse than we did.
At first my mom, and the other people in our neck of the woods, so to speak,
didn’t trust the mysterious hermit who lived with a reputed Amazon Princess
Warrior in a compound a few streets over from our house. He was weird.
Doing weird experiments and all, she told us. Stay away from there, she said.
But it wasn’t that long before both the hermit, who turned out to be the
aforementioned Harrison, and the Amazon were coming to our rescue,
saving us from The Big One – the worst hurricane to hit these parts
in history – or at least history up until that point in time.
We were devastated . . .
. . . in more ways than one.
Come to find out we had to figure out what to do next on our own, seeing as how the government was stretched thin fighting all those wars and paying closer attention to other folk whose neighborhoods were a sight more important than our little bayside community, being just a stone’s throw away from places that were, well, let’s just say, even less important than we were on account of the color of their skin and all.
Besides which, ours was a lost cause. Wouldn’t be that long before another storm would hit, then another, and another, knocking down the houses made of cards people had a habit of rebuilding in the same old way they used to. Nowadays, sounds a little crazy from where we sit if you ask me.
Like I said, sounds a lot like dystopia to us future-
After that big hurricane hit, back in the Twenties, life was never the same for us in the old neighborhood where I grew up. We had to learn how to do things differently in order to survive.
As things turned out, our leaders in this new world we had to build were an Amazon Warrior Princess who was a descendent from a lost tribe of indigenous peoples, and a hermit who I came to learn many things from, especially seeing as how my father was not around, until that fateful day back in the Twenties when we finally met up again.
You’ll read all about what happened -
Yes, all this stuff is there in the manuals, as recounted in that book I was asked to narrate cleverly entitled “20/20”. It’s all in there. How we enlisted the help of a tribe from the Everglades to rebuild our village, how we became such close friends with the island people from across the Great Divide, how we came to fly the colors, so to speak, of a new tribe, under a banner bearing the Mask of the Ancient Ones, how we came face to face with a new breed of pirates that had nearly free reign in the waters of the Caribbean, how my mom went off with the Amazon to start a mission on the other side of Florida, how in my adventures at sea I learned the truth about Harrison and the Amazon, and my own father.
Do the Harrison Chronicles tell the story of a dystopian past, seen so clearly now, in hindsight, from the vantage point of an older man such as myself, who lives in a future world just as far from utopia as you are now, dear reader? Maybe the answer is how you look at things.