In the Year 3008

“Jesus! You gotta come look at this,” shouted Pierre as he scraped the dirt and rock away from what once was my bedroom window, a millennium before. Inside was my skeleton stretched out on top of a mess of metal springs and wires; what used to be my bed had long rotted away. As Pierre slowly crept though the window frame, the floor gave way and dropped into the long untouched kitchen. “Looks like we'll have to reinforce this structure,” he said, dropping a tennis-ball sized silver sphere through the hole. As he let go, the sphere lit up, weaving a grid of bright bluish light along the floors and walls. After a few minutes, the robot had reinforced my entire house, guaranteeing the archaeologists' safety.
Moving inside, they stood over my bones and waved a scanner along my length. “Specimen is one-point-nine meters long, was 18 years old at time of death. Cause of death unknown,” said the device. “It was the meteor,” corrected Jesus, referring to the disastrous event in 2008 that nearly drove the human species into extinction. It was well known that a large piece of extraterrestrial debris made its way to Earth, causing not only massive seismic activity, but also burying a vast area of the surface with displaced matter from the crater. “Get these remains to the storage and research building,” Pierre demanded. As his supervisor left the room, Jesus prepared my skeleton for teleportation. Meanwhile, Pierre had found a bathroom. “I have read of these magnificent white objects,” he said. “Historians report that there are usually two or three of them found in each dwelling from this era. These people supposedly spent a great deal of time sitting on these things, deep in thought. We believe it may have held some sort of religious or meditative significance; very fascinating. We have rarely seen one so remarkably well preserved as this one.”
Meanwhile, the excavation team in front of my house had struck something metal. After three hours of careful extraction, a long buried car sat before them. “Ah! A ground transport!” exclaimed Pierre as he stepped outside. “Excellent. This civilization used this primitive form of travel. They constructed extensive rock pathways for these transports, and they could get themselves anywhere. Not the fastest way to get around, but it worked for them.”
“Sir,” said Jesus, walking through the now unburied front door. “It's a black box, we've found another one.” Rushing into the living room, Pierre looked frustrated. “It's the same as always. There's a black box similar to this in every dwelling. All of the furniture in each room is usually facing them, but historians have never found out exactly what these things are.” Turning around, Pierre circled slowly throughout the kitchen. “Back then, the people used to absorb their nutrients orally, this is where they would have prepared it for ingestion. And this is where they would have consumed it,” he said, now gesturing toward the table. “They spent a great deal of time each day nourishing themselves, they didn't get automatically injected with energy throughout the day as we do.” Moving aside a stone cutting board on the table, Pierre found a Best Buy sale ad, perfectly preserved even after a thousand years. Gently turning the pages, he looked through at all of the the technology that once was advanced. “This is the key!” he exclaimed. “This will tell much about their technology. The black box! Of course, it must have been some sort of visual entertainment! This is a very exciting discovery! Send this back to the lab right away!”
And so it was that civilization's ancient technology began to be rediscovered, through the help of a preserved Best Buy ad. As transportation will always be necessary, the automobile would never go forgotten, even after technology moved on. The toilet, however is a different story. With the advancement of medical science, food had been rendered obsolete. Because only the necessary nutrients were injected into everyone's body, human waste had been eliminated, along with the need for the toilet. As such, the mystery of the white ceramic throne continued through the centuries, unexplained.