An Original Story by Albert Lin
TEBO1 · The Cave of Firsts
The imagined life of the 31,000-year-old wounded child of Liang Tebo, told across the deep past and the present-day return to the cave.
Chapter 01
The Hunt
A present-day expedition pushes upriver toward the cave, and the film slips thirty-one thousand years, into a hunt, a kill carried home, and the first mark set on the wall. It returns to the same cliff at nightfall.
NarrationPresent-day voice
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Mist, and black water. Three canoes push upriver, into the fog.
Maxime“were crossing into an ancient landscape, a land of the earliest explorers.”
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Maxime“The walls hold so many undiscovered images. The one we just dated in Sulawesi goes back sixty-seven thousand years, the oldest narrative rock art in the world.”
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Albert“the library of our earliest memories!”
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Maxime“We have already found so many incredible images up there. Hand prints, rituals, their whole world. Look at this, an ancient bearded pig, drawn over 30000 years ago!”
turn the page · 31,000 years
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The pig. Alive, and heavy, and it is warm now.
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The pig roots on, unaware. Bulan draws.
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The arrow only wounds it. She comes anyway, fast and low.
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Sero throws. She takes the blade from the air.
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She is on the animal, and finishes it herself.
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No words between them. They lash it to the pole and lift.
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Cord, stone, a good pole.
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Sero has done this a long time.
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They carry it home, three under the pole. Tebo runs to meet them.
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Tebo watches, imagining the hunt.
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Go get water, Sero barks. Be useful.
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One small camp, and a whole world around it.
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That night, Batu sets his hand to the wall and draws the pig.
Maxime“And now.”
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Ochre into stone. A mark to outlast everything.
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Pull back. The turning world, and all the time there is.
turn the page · the same place
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Albert“So this is the cave of firsts.”
Maxime“It’s strange. This cave, its story, it feels like our fates were both tied to it. It could be tied to the deepest parts of us.”
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night falls over the karst
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Albert · V.O.“Self Cam Narration - Maxime’s words stay with me as the fire dies. The first people ever to cross open ocean. The great beasts of the Paleolithic they hunted and lived beside. Other kinds of human, not sapiens, walking the world at the same time as us. I lie here imagining all of it, and I drift off in wonder.”
Chapter 02
The World and the Wound
One unbroken dawn, before first light. Tebo wakes while the band sleeps on.
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Tebo wakes in the pre dawn and rises, while the band sleeps on.
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The fire has burned to embers. Tebo blows it back to a flame.
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And works the last of the meat off the bone with a small stone.
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someone else is awake
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Bulan wakes, and crosses the dark to the fire.
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Tebo offers her the first of the meat. They sit at the mouth of the cave and watch the last of the night.
what would not leave Tebo
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Tebo“I could not sleep. I keep seeing the pig. The whole hunt, again and again.”
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Quietly, so the others sleep on, Bulan gives Tebo the whole hunt again.
Bulan“The pig turned, and it came at us.”
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Tebo“That is not how it happened.”
Bulan“It is exactly how it happened.”
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Tebo“Why are you awake?”
and why Bulan was awake
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Bulan“Tonight I dreamed a thing I have not dreamed in years. I could not tell it from a memory.”
Bulan“I had another people once, before this band. I lost them, and the memory of them went in the same night.”
the dream that came back
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Bulan“In it, sea people read the moon and the stars across a great water.”
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Bulan“Then the water rises, and it takes them. Every time, it takes them.”
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Bulan“Our band found me half-drowned. I know they accept me, for my spear.”
Bulan“And I am happy now. But I no longer know if it was a memory or a dream, but I still care about that whole lost part of me.”
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Tebo“Then it is not gone.”
Tebo“Nothing is really gone if you still care about it.”
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and then, far off
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A fire on the last ridge before the sky. The first light either of them had ever seen out there that was not their own.
across the dark, another fire
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In this age the world still held more than one kind of people. Out in the dark were the heavy ones: big-headed, broad-boned, far stronger than the band, clever in their own way, and wholly other.
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Alone up there, the big stranger fed his fire, and did not sleep either.
morning · a few go up to the light
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By morning, a few of them go up to find the fire, drawn to know what keeps it burning, and afraid of the same thing.
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Bulan“Every fire that is not ours, I wonder. Whether any of mine ever walked back out of the water.”
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Sero“Something out there keeps a fire alive. I will not walk up on what I cannot name with my hands empty.”
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Batu“Or it is someone. Someone like us, even. I would go just to know we are not the only ones.”
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Sero“The forest took one of mine once, in the dark I could not see. I came so it takes no one else.”
Batu“And what if it is only someone as alone as we are?”
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A bare footprint in the mud, wider than their own and driven deep. Whoever made it was heavy, and not long gone.
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Sero“The old ones told of a giant people out here. Heavy, and taller than any of us. I never believed the telling.”
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the ridge · first sight
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And there, across the last of the valley, the fire they had climbed to find. A huge stranger, not their kind, alone with his dead.
they hold, and watch
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Sero“That thing looks dangerous.”
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No one responds. Across the gap the stranger tends his fire with his back to them, momentarily caught unaware.
Batu“It is alone. It looks to be with a dead one.”
he was not the only one watching
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All at once the jungle threw itself into the air. Macaques shrieking, hornbills bursting from the canopy. A hunter was on the move, and it was close.
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Bulan knew that cry. She had read the forest to stay alive since she was small. Whatever sent the birds up was worse than any stranger, and it was close.
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He looked up with the alarm, but his eyes first saw faces almost his own, and at the same time not.
whatever the birds had fled was already close
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At the edge of the rock the green held a shape. Low and striped and watching. This was the thing the birds had fled.
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Then it was moving. Low along the top of the rock, fast as falling water, straight at them.
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They broke apart across the stone, each their own way. Under the running child the wet rock gave.
CONFIDENTIAL · Property of TEBO1 Entertainment LLC.
THE BOOK OF TEBO1 · The Cave of Firsts · Chapters 01–02.
THE BOOK OF TEBO1 · The Cave of Firsts · Chapters 01–02.