The hologram turned off with a soft click. They found themselves back in their warm home unit, safe and untouched.

“Of course you know the rest,” his grandmother said. “After the humans were gone, the trees came back. It’s funny how quickly that can happen.”

“And then what?” the child asked, held in rapt attention by the violence of the hologram. The schools taught them that the human extinction had been horrific, and now he understood.

“Well, that’s how we came to be here,” she supplied. There were just some things that remained unknown.

“All that’s left,” she said, opening a small drawer, “are these, and many like them.”

She held up two pieces of a thin, almost transparent material. One had the words Thank you for shopping at Shaws! splashed across it in faded red. The other was a great deal more tattered, the markings hardly legible. But they were there, if faint: Stop and Shop.

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know, baby. No one’s been able to decipher their written language.”