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A quote: “From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.” ~~ H. P. Lovecraft
I’ll start with a story …
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“Stevens! No one is answering down here. Half the operation has been down for hours!”
“Um …”
“Um, what? We have communities depending on us. What’s your team doing?”
“There’s no more team.”
“What?!”
“After Carl died, Henry and Tom never showed up.”
“So? YOU take care of it. You have the fancy Master’s Degree. Carl & the others were old school. Borrow some people and get this fixed.”
“My degree … I mean… White science isn’t the only way of learning!!! I’ve been diversifying, re-educating my team while Carl mucked about …”
The lights died and the machinery stopped.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, Adobe Stock standard license
Politically Ambidextrous says: Jim’s left-handed approach to things usually helped the mission be less impossible. However, Barney’s screwdriver was clearly designed for right-handed people. And this electric panel wasn’t compatible with the usual jumper cable solution. This mission to Haitistan required Barney to be the frontman.
If they were caught or killed, there would be plenty of disavowing to go around, even more than when the NY Times occasionally got a story wrong.
Barney, Cinnamon, Rollin, and Willy were counting on him. It was up to Jim to steady his hand.
Jim wondered if he really should have decided to accept this mission.
Dupin says: Off the grid? You could call it that, but there is no grid.
What gasoline and diesel we had has gone bad, even with stabilizers—no generators. Our food crops are finally doing well, so we’re only thinking about crops for fuel. Right now, it’s scrounged solar cells and small wind generators. The plague made those so plentiful that we can even air-condition our central kitchen and meeting hall in the summer.
Ninety-nine plus percent death rate…quick but not painless. We survived, reestablished a community, and are our own support group. There is no grid. We are the grid.
Cameron says: I ignored the engineer’s papers that painstakingly laid out everything that he and his well-educated team had done in order to narrow the problem down. He huffed in annoyance as I made my way into the transport closet.
“We’ve already looked at that,” the engineer said testily. “You’re wasting valuable time-”
I tightened a connection and the lights on the switch went green. My voice went cold as I faced him. “Remember this next time you and your cohorts call us tool using monkeys. It took me ten seconds to solve a problem you’ve been working on for two days.”
Navig8r says: You could sense the subaudible groan across the room. Or maybe the sub was missing.
Tools in hand, he spoke the words that have inspired terror in the hearts of technicians for centuries if not millennia. “I’m an engineer. I can help.”
“Well, at least he knows to keep one hand in his pocket when working on live circuits. Maybe he’s trainable.”
I thought back to the technicians who had trained me. Forty years and several generations of technicians and they are still working on it. I like to think they don’t have to work so hard at it now.
Roger had been monitoring the frequencies ever since he left Earth behind, but as time went by, the signals grew steadily more simple, more primitive. It had been a long time since he’d detected any digital transmissions, and even FM was getting so rare he was wondering just how many working transmitters were left. What little he was picking up was mostly AM, and from the characteristics of the carrier waves, it looked like they were falling back on vacuum tubes. More than once he’d picked up something with characteristics of an Alexanderssen alternator.
But increasingly he was hearing code rather than any form of modulation. Had they fallen so far backward that all they could do was turn their transmitter on and off in a pattern of short and long blasts?
Did they even remember the time when humans could create a network that spanned the globe, that had brought a library of the world’s knowledge to the fingertips of anyone with a computer? Did they even remember that they were living on a globe spinning through space, and not a flat plate of land with a dome of sky above them? If they remembered him and his flight into space, was it only in the terms of myth and legend, of spirits flying into Heaven?
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