A quote: “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.” ~~ George S. Patton
I’ll start with a story …
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I come from a long line of pessimists, each generation grumbling about the failures of the youngest. Ain’t easy as you get lectured on your marksmanship or your lack of talent at field-dressing game. “Get it right, son, or you’ll be poisoning your family!”
This was balanced out by a couple of very sunny aunts who taught me the joys of making a starter to bake the best biscuits on earth in a covered cast iron skillet nestled in the embers of a campfire. I tried impressing my first girlfriend Katy with that one. I got a head tilt and “Why didn’t you just buy these at Krogers?”
Decades later, I think of Katy as I quietly walk up onto the train platform, empty but for one small woman. She’s looking down the tracks, holding a cell phone that I know is dead. Her head swivels towards me, “Ma’am? Can I help?”
“No, thank you. I’m waiting for 3:45 train.”
“It’s 6, ma’am. It’s not coming.”
“Don’t be silly. It has to come. My husband and children are on it. He took them to the city on a lark and…” She waves me away, “I’m fine. I’ll just wait here.”
I slip away, back to where our caravan is parked. Bonnie touches my cheek, “You had to try, dear. I love you for that.”
I start the pickup and pull gently ahead. Family winds out behind me. When we can drive no further, we will pack the horses we have and move on.
Generations, decades, we all were taught not to take today for granted. I grieve for Katy and the rest.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Trogluddite says: I certainly hope that all of these tales are consolidated into a dystopian novel someday. Shorter than King or Martin, if you please.
Cameron says: I hopped off the train and saw her standing there, mind half focused on her phone. She smiled in recognition as I moved closer.
“I thought you said you were moving,” she said.
“I am. That’s happening tonight. Going to be on the road for three days and then jump into the new job.”
For just a moment I saw the look of disappointment on her face. I had nothing to lose.
“Come with me,” I offered.
“I’m sorry. But what?”
“You heard me. Pack what you absolutely need and come with me.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“You have a college degree that is doing nothing for you, a job you hate and every night you come home to your parents’ house and wonder if this is all there is.”
She let out a genuine laugh. “And what do you offer?”
“Honestly? About one to two years of abject poverty along with a few months of making meals last for days. But I’m going to claw my way up and in a few years, I’ll have a house in my name.” I smiled shyly. “I’d like a wife and kids to come home to.”
Darleen Click says: Oooo … nice one, Cameron! Bravo! I always look forward to your stories. 😀
Cameron says: Thank you, Darleen. Much appreciated.
Trogluddite says: Nice rejoinder; positivism is in short supply these days!
Cameron says: I try to make my stories here positive. Glad you liked it.
I’ll never forget the day everything changed. I was running late, and got to the platform just as the conductor was shutting the doors. I shouted, hoping he’d relent. No, the signal had already gone to the engineer, and with a loud whistle of the train’s air-horn chime, the train pulled out, leaving me standing.
Nothing to do but wait for the next train — and the one that had left was the last of the fifteen-minute ones. At least it was evening rush hour, not morning, so I didn’t have to worry about being late. But it was annoying to have to kill time for thirty minutes.
I pulled out my phone — at work we’re required to keep our phones in a locked drawer of our desks while we’re on the clock — and started checking social media. At first I thought I’d stumbled into one of those online RPG chats, because everybody was going on about aliens and First Contact. And then I surfed over to NASA’s website, and there’s live video from the ISS, the astronauts describing spacecraft clearly not of human origin, and contact with not one but several species of aliens aboard them.
Could this be some kind of elaborate hoax, perhaps someone taking over a significant part of the Internet and re-routing everyone to fake versions of the website — but why? With friends and family in IT professions, I knew enough about the Internet to understand just what kind of resources would be required to perform such a coup — and it would be a lot more than anyone would be able to muster for a few yuks.
Remembering when I was in high school and dreamed I was listening to a radio announcement about First Contact and diplomatic relations being established with the aliens, only to get a crashing disappointment when I woke up, I gave myself a hard pinch just below the inside of my elbow. And then the sky flashed with light, and my phone got so hot I dropped it by reflex.
When I retrieved my phone, it was dead. So was the phone inside the ticket office. The commuters who filtered in over the next ten minutes, waiting for the 7:30, all reported similar failures of everything electronic.
By 8:30 it was getting clear that no, the train wasn’t coming. We all started walking, looking for anything that could get us back home. I ended up crammed with six other people in an ancient station wagon that didn’t have much in the way of electronics to fry, hoping I wasn’t making a big mistake trusting strangers, and arrived at a dark and silent home a little before midnight.
Over the next several weeks, as things got put back together, the full story came out. The Chongu had pinned the attack on the Norks, and held very public trials of their leadership — but a lot of people suspected the real culprit was Iran, or Pakistan, or some other borderline-rogue nation. But it meant that all of humanity was now suspect, treacherous, unreliable simian sophonts, in their feline eyes. Instead of being brought into their Empire smoothly, with substantial self-government, we’ve been subject to military governance, and every time one or another group objects, there are more scruffings, mass deportations to distant frontier worlds.
Maybe things would’ve gone better if they’d told us right at the beginning that they were in the middle of a centuries-old war against a star-nation of hive species that consider individuals to be abomination. But the Chongu thought that easing us in and then letting us know the real reason would help make things go smoother.
How little they understood humanity.
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