Three ways out - preview

Jericho glanced down at his topo map and cross-checked the horizon, looking for the outcropping he knew held the object he sought. It had been a few years since he placed it initially and he hoped it was still intact. Most times, it was. Hoping for the same outcome. He was here to recapture a little bit of the past and his mind drifted to a time when information was more readily accessible.

Verifying easily what he knew to be true... Wikipedia and Google were his tools and he used them both proactively, surfing threads of interconnection during the sleepless wee hours and reactively, to fact check postulates bandied about in casual conversation. History is written by the winners. Bartlett sat collecting dust at home, quotations (mis)ascribed to Ben Franklin abound. What if all the rich information available at his fingertips fell victim to entropy, as all ordered systems tend to? And what could hasten that demise?

Ranging up the ridgeline. Exertion. Caution. Hope. Outcropping. Information has found an old friend of a home in the post digital era, nestled in the physical world it describes. There were always two originals per region - a Voice and an Echo. Jericho's breath frosted in front of him and a glint in the early morning light showed him the decoy that he often used to draw attention away from what was concealed feet away, underground. On top of the steel lid, inscribed with a nail were the characters E-IW23. He pulled out his Echo List and scanned down the entries. A third of the way down the page, E-IW23 - Watermill - 285_32BL. Striking off WNW a little over 30 feet up the hill, Jericho found the black rock under which he had placed E-IW23 years before. The cannister fit snugly in the newly exposed space. He flipped it over casually, pulled a necklace out from under his shirt that held a key, and opened it up.  He removed what it concealed, the distinctive blueprint on paper and description of an Echo.  Information was safeguarded these days, not because it could be stolen but because it could be lost.