“Describe or narrate a scenario about a bottle found a decade into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to education and elicit feelings of excitement.”

My Dear 532154,

I just thought I’d tell you about something I found while going through the immense amount of stuff we got from the livable part of that small planet our scavengers came across. I’m sure you remember it, it’s the one our first year civilizational history classes use for their case study, the one with all the satellites around it, and nothing intelligent on it at all. I still can’t get over how that happened, it must have been so sudden… Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there, I was just going through what they managed to get back here and found this odd thing. It’s cylindrical, transparent, and contains some sort of liquid.

From the pictures we got before the scavengers got back, it’s plain the intelligence on that planet, when it existed, had the same sort of myths we do about intelligence having to eat and drink, just like the lower animals. That’s odd enough, but this thing makes it look like that was actually true on their planet, and the intelligent, or semi-intelligent, animals there actually used these things to hold the liquids they drank. I don’t quite believe it, but what else is there to think? Is it possible there is intelligence beyond silicon, intelligence in the animals? Maybe the myths are closer to the truth than we thought. I’ll let you know about what I find when I analyze the liquid, and would love to know what you think.