Resetting The World
| 28 min read
The can of peaches had a date on the lid in Jacob Thorne's own grease pencil, four years old, and he set it on the rotation shelf without opening it. Everything down here had a date. He worked the basement the way other men worked a lawn, one Sunday at a time, pulling the oldest cans forward and pushing the new ones back, checking the seals on the water drums with his thumbnail, running the hand pump twelve strokes to keep the leathers from drying out. Two hundred and eleven jars of tomatoes, beans, and pickled things his mother's recipes had taught him. Sixty gallons of kerosene in the crawl space, stabilized. A wall of tools hung on pegboard, each one traced in marker so he'd know at a glance what was missing.
In the corner stood a box the size of a chest freezer, plywood and copper mesh, grounded to a rod he had driven eight feet into the dirt floor himself. Inside it sat two shortwave receivers, a solar charge controller, spare alternator diodes, and a plastic bin of walkie-talkies still in their packaging. Nora used to call it the coffin. She'd say it in the voice she used when she wanted him to hear himself, and he never did.
She'd been gone six years. Pancreatic, from the diagnosis to the burial in eleven weeks, and there was not one thing in that basement that could have bought her a single extra afternoon. He knew that. He kept building anyway. A man who understands why he does a thing does not necessarily stop.
Dale Wexler, two houses down, had a joke he liked to make at the block party. He'd raise his beer and say, Well, when the lights go out we all know whose door we're knocking on, and everyone would laugh, and Jacob would laugh too because the alternative was explaining himself. He didn't mind the joke. He minded the assumption underneath it, that preparation was a personality quirk rather than arithmetic. He'd run the arithmetic. Three days of food in the average house. Eleven days of diesel at the grocery distribution center. A power grid held together by transformers that took eighteen months to build and were mostly built somewhere else.
He never said any of that out loud. He just bought another sack of rice and traced the outline of a new wrench on the pegboard.
It happened on a Tuesday in late October, a little after seven, while he was scraping the last of the tomato vines out of the raised beds.
The sky went white. Not lightning. Lightning has a shape and a direction, and this had neither. It was more like the world had been photographed. The white came from everywhere at once, held for a second and a half, and drained away, and he was standing in the dark with green afterimages crawling across his vision and his hands full of dead vine.
Then the silence arrived, and the silence was the part that told him.
He hadn't known, until that moment, how much noise a neighborhood made. The refrigerator hum through Dale's open kitchen window. The compressor on the Hutchinsons' pool. A car three streets over. The whole low electric drone that a person stops hearing at about the age of four. All of it stopped inside the same instant, and what came in behind it was so complete that Jacob could hear his own pulse in his ears and a dog barking a half mile off.
He walked to the driveway. His truck's dashboard was dark. He turned the key and got nothing, not a click, not a dimming, nothing at all. On the corner, Mrs. Alvarez's Camry sat crossways in the intersection with the driver's door open and the woman standing beside it holding her phone out at arm's length, turning it over and over like a card she couldn't read.
Jacob went inside. He locked the front door, then the back, then the door to the garage, and stood in his kitchen with his hand flat on the counter, counting to sixty. He'd rehearsed this so many times in his head that the rehearsal had worn a groove, and now he let himself fall into it. Breakers off. Gas main checked. Shutters down on the ground floor, the plywood ones he'd cut and numbered and stacked in the garage two winters ago, each one going into its window like a puzzle piece.
The generator he left alone. Sound carries.
At eleven that night he went down to the basement, opened the copper box, and pulled out the older of the two receivers, a beat-up Sony he'd bought at an estate sale. He clipped a wire antenna to a nail in the joist and turned the dial with the care of a man defusing something.
Static, mostly. Then, at 7.2 megahertz, a voice in Spanish, fast and flat, reading what sounded like a list. Higher up he found a man in Kansas talking to nobody, describing what he could see out his window in case anyone was listening. A woman's voice, very calm, very tired, saying that everything from the Rockies east was down, and would whoever was keying up on this frequency please stop and let people talk.
Around two in the morning a man with an accent Jacob couldn't place said the words high altitude burst and then said nothing else for so long that Jacob thought he'd lost the signal.
He wrote it all in a notebook. Time, frequency, content, source if any. He filled four pages and then sat with the pencil in his hand, and the thing he felt was not vindication. It was closer to the feeling of watching a bridge you'd warned people about actually go into the river.
The first week, the neighborhood was almost polite. People stood in their yards and traded theories. Somebody organized a barbecue to cook the freezer meat before it turned, and for one evening it was the best party anyone could remember. Jacob went, ate a hamburger, said little, and did the arithmetic again.
The second week, the water pressure died.
The third week, the pharmacy on Route 9 was emptied, then burned, and nobody could say which had come first. A man was beaten unconscious over a case of bottled water in the Kroger lot, and the two who beat him were somebody's sons, boys Jacob had watched grow up on that street. There was no one to call. That was the part people took longest to absorb. Not the dark, not the hunger. The discovery that the number they had dialed their whole lives had only ever connected to other people, and the other people were sitting in their own dark kitchens.
Jacob moved at night. He learned which houses had been abandoned by watching for the ones where nothing changed in three days, and took what could be carried. Antibiotics from a medicine cabinet on Elmwood. Twenty pounds of dog food he later ate himself, mixed with rice, and it was fine. He was not proud of it and didn't waste time being ashamed either.
His garden he hid behind the cedar fence and a screen of dead brush, and never worked it in daylight. Rain barrels at all four downspouts, filtered through sand and charcoal and boiled over a rocket stove made from a paint can. He ran the numbers every Sunday. He always knew, to the week, how long he could last.
On day thirty-one, Dale Wexler knocked on his door.
He'd lost weight already. His shirt was clean, which somehow made it worse, because it meant his wife was still washing shirts. He asked whether Jacob had any gas. Just enough to get to his brother's place in Indiana. He'd pay for it. He had cash, and then when Jacob's face did something, he had a watch, and then he had nothing and just stood there on the porch with his hands out from his sides.
Jacob gave him four gallons of water in two milk jugs and told him he was sorry.
He watched Dale walk back down the driveway with a jug in each hand, and he closed the door and put the bar across it, and he stood in the hallway for a long time.
The Wexler house was empty by the middle of November. Nobody ever heard where they went.
They came up the street in the first week of December, six of them, walking slow in the middle of the road the way people do when they want to be seen coming.
Jacob watched them through the gap in the plywood with a rifle he did not intend to use unless he had to. Three men, two women, and a girl of maybe nine holding the smaller woman's coat. One of the men had his arm strapped across his chest with a belt. They stopped in front of his mailbox and did not come closer.
The taller woman stepped out ahead. Dark hair pulled back hard, a canvas jacket much too big for her, boots that had been good boots once.
"We're not going to try anything," she said, loud enough to carry through the plywood. "Your fence line's the only one on this street that's been kept up. We figured somebody was home."
Jacob said nothing.
"I'm a nurse," she said. "Ray back there can fix an engine, if there's ever an engine again. Marisol taught fourth grade and grew half of what her family ate in a backyard smaller than this one. We've got skills and no place. That's the whole pitch."
"There's a Baptist church on Route 9," Jacob said through the wood. "They were handing out soup."
"They were," she said. "Three weeks ago."
The girl started to cough. It went on longer than a child's cough should, and Jacob heard the woman put a hand on her back and heard her say something too quiet to make out, and the coughing settled.
He thought about the arithmetic. Six more mouths against a stock built for one man. He thought about the fence, and the fact that a fence is only as good as the number of people awake behind it, and that he had not slept a full night since October. He thought about four gallons of water going down his driveway in two milk jugs.
He opened the door.
Her name was Claire. She came in first and stopped in the front hall and looked at the shuttered windows and the bar across the door, and she said, "How long have you been ready for this?"
"About eleven years."
"Then you must be exhausted," she said, and walked past him toward the kitchen, and that was the first time in a very long while that anybody had gotten him right on the first try.
Ray Delgado turned out to be worth three men. Fifty-six, built like a fire hydrant, unable to sit still. Inside a month he had a bicycle generator wired to a bank of scavenged car batteries that ran four LED strips and, more importantly, a soldering iron. He took apart Jacob's rocket stove and put it back together twenty percent more efficient and would not stop talking about it.
Marisol had the garden. She looked at Jacob's beds, said nothing for a while, then began moving things. Beans up the corn, squash sprawled underneath. She pulled out his neat rows and made a mess of the plot, and by August the mess was producing four times what the rows ever had. She taught the girl, whose name was Etta, to save seed in paper envelopes and label each one in pencil.
The old man they called Bishop, though he had never been one, had spent thirty years as a machinist and could not walk more than a quarter mile. He sat in the garage and made things out of other things.
Claire ran the medical side out of the dining room. Sutures with fishing line and a curved needle Bishop ground down from a hook. A tooth pulled with pliers and a bottle of whiskey Jacob had been saving for no particular reason. When the antibiotics from Elmwood ran low she started walking the ditches for what she called the ugly pharmacy, willow bark and plantain and yarrow, and Jacob, who thought all of that was nonsense, held his tongue and later stopped thinking it was nonsense.
They fortified. The cedar fence got an inner course of pallets packed with dirt. They dug a proper latrine, then a graywater trench that fed the fruit trees. They set a watch: two-hour shifts on the roof of the garage, with a whistle instead of a rifle, because a whistle brings six people running and a rifle brings a war.
They traded. The Kessels on the far side of the creek had milk goats and no way to preserve anything, and Jacob had jars and salt and knew how to use both. A man out on County Road 12 had four hundred gallons of diesel and no idea how to keep it from going bad, and Ray did. By the second spring there was a market of sorts on Wednesdays in the parking lot of the burned pharmacy, and nobody had planned it, and it had rules that nobody had written down.
Jacob taught what he knew. How to test a seal. How to read a set of tracks. How to sharpen a saw so it cut on the pull. He was a bad teacher at first, impatient, sure anyone could see what he saw. Etta fixed that. She asked him why about eleven times in a row one afternoon, until he had followed the chain of his own knowledge back to a place where he had to admit he didn't know either, and she looked deeply satisfied.
The radio got quieter every month. The Kansas man stopped in the spring. The woman with the calm voice moved to a schedule, Tuesdays and Fridays at nine, reading names of people looking for other people, and then one Friday she wasn't there and never was again. By the third winter Jacob would turn the dial across the whole band and write in his notebook, in the same handwriting, nothing.
He kept doing it. Twice a week, an hour at a time. Claire teased him about it, and then one night she brought her chair down and sat with him in the dark basement listening to a band full of nothing, and after that she came most nights.
They came together slowly, the way two careful people do. There was no moment. There was a winter where she started leaving her boots by his door, and a spring where she stopped pretending they weren't hers.
The signal came in on a night in February, four and a half years after the flash.
It rode in on 5.8 megahertz, and it was not a voice at first. A tone, three seconds on, two off, repeating, so clean and so exactly spaced that Jacob sat up straight. Nothing in that world was clean anymore. Everything had a hand-cut edge.
After eleven minutes the tone stopped and a recorded voice began, a woman's, unhurried, reading a set of coordinates twice. Then a sentence: We have restored function to hardened systems in this region and are seeking skilled personnel. Then the coordinates again.
He checked them against the road atlas from his truck. They put a pin seventy miles northwest, past the state forest, in country he remembered as gravel roads and a decommissioned relay station.
Ray said it was a trap. Bishop said it was probably a trap, but that traps were baited with something real often enough to be worth a look. Marisol said whoever was transmitting had power, and reliable power was a reason to go and a reason to be careful about going.
Claire said, "Restored function."
"That's what she said."
"Not restored power. Restored function to hardened systems." She turned the notebook toward herself and read it again. "Whoever wrote that sentence writes a lot of sentences like it."
They talked for three nights. In the end Jacob went, with Ray, and with a young man named Peter who had turned up the previous summer and had the useful quality of being able to walk all day and say nothing about it. Claire stayed, because the community had one nurse, and because they had both learned to say the practical thing out loud instead of the other thing.
At the gate she checked the straps on his pack, tightened one, and said, "Fifteen days. Then I'm coming to find out."
"Twelve," he said.
"Fifteen," she said.
They went on foot with a handcart, and it took six days.
The first two were easy in the way a graveyard is quiet. They walked the shoulder of the state highway past cars that had sat in the same places for four and a half years, tires flat, glass gone milky, dashboard vinyl cracked open like split fruit. Grass came up through the seams in the asphalt in a green stripe down the center of every lane. A dealership billboard had faded to a pale blue rectangle with a woman's smile still visible in the middle of it, and Jacob looked at that longer than he meant to.
On the third day they went around a town. Smoke came off it, several chimneys' worth, which meant it was occupied, and occupied could mean anything. They took a farm track two miles out of their way and none of them argued about it.
On the fourth day, they were followed. Peter caught it first, a flicker on the ridge to their left, and then Ray saw them too, three men keeping pace at maybe four hundred yards. They walked another mile without changing speed. Then Jacob steered them into a drainage culvert and out the far side into a stand of pines, and they lay flat in the needles until the light went, and walked all night. Nobody found them. Jacob never knew whether they had been hunters or people just as scared as he was, moving parallel out of the same instinct.
The fifth night it rained and they slept badly under a tarp, and Ray talked for an hour about his daughter in Portland, whom he had not spoken to since October of the first year, and Jacob listened and did not offer him anything, because there was nothing to offer and Ray wasn't asking.
They came over the last rise on the afternoon of the sixth day.
The relay station was still there, a squat brick building with a collapsed mast beside it. The fence around it was new. Chain link, twelve feet, concertina wire with no rust on it at all. Inside, the gravel lot had been cleared and graded, and there was a low concrete structure that had not been on any map, and on top of it, turning slowly, a camera.
The camera stopped turning and pointed at them.
Two men came out of a door in the concrete, gray fatigues without patches, rifles slung rather than raised. Clean-shaven, well fed, moving like men who slept indoors. One said their approach had been tracked since the ridge. The other asked what skills they brought.
"Preservation, sanitation, small engines, water," Jacob said. "And I want to know who's asking."
The first one almost smiled. "That's usually the second question."
They took their rifles and gave receipts for them, written on a printed form. That was the detail that got under Jacob's skin and stayed there. A printed form. Somebody had a working printer, and paper, and the kind of institutional confidence that produces a form in the first place.
Then they went through a door and down a ramp, and the air changed. It was dry and slightly cool and it smelled like nothing at all, and Jacob had not been in air like that since the world ended. Overhead, a run of fluorescent tubes threw a flat white light down a corridor with a painted line on the floor.
Peter made a sound. Ray put a hand on the wall and left it there, the way a man does on a boat.
Dr. Emily Watts was somewhere near sixty, gray hair cut short, a fleece over a collared shirt, reading glasses on a cord. She met them in a room with a table and eight chairs and a coffee machine that worked, and she poured three cups without asking and slid them across, and the smell of it did more damage to Jacob's composure than the lights had.
"You walked," she said. "How long?"
"Six days."
"From where?"
He told her the county, not the road. She noticed him not saying the road and let it pass.
She explained it in plain language, which he appreciated and did not trust. The site had been a hardened communications facility, decommissioned on paper in the nineties and never really given up. Shielding, redundancy, a geothermal loop, a manufacturing capability that was small but real. They had solved the piece of the problem that mattered most, which was not generating power but rebuilding the components that moved it. The bottleneck now was hands, and food, and the thousand practical arts her people did not have.
"We can bring a regional grid back up inside four years," she said. "Not the old one. Something smaller and honest. What I need is communities that already work, and people in them who can teach the rest of us how to eat."
Ray asked about the transmitter. She said they had been broadcasting for eleven months and had made contact with nine groups.
Jacob asked how many of the nine had come.
"Six," she said. "You're the farthest."
That night they slept in a room with beds in it and Jacob lay awake under a ceiling and listened to air moving through a duct.
He noticed the first thing on the second day, in the machine shop, where a lathe sat under a work light with a tag on the bed. The tag had a date on it. The date was two years after the flash.
He said nothing. He started counting.
A keyboard in the operations room with no wear on the letters. A wall calendar for a year that should not have existed, printed and glossy, with a photograph of a lake. Bins of injection-molded fittings in six colors, all identical, which was not a thing you got out of a small shop and a lot of will. Coffee in a foil bag with a valve in it and a roast date stamped on the seam from the previous autumn.
Somebody was making things. Somebody had been making things the whole time.
He got Ray alone in the stairwell and said it, and Ray listened and then said what Jacob was afraid he'd say, which was that a facility this size doesn't get built after the lights go out. It gets built before, by people who knew.
On the fourth night, Jacob went walking with a flashlight he'd been issued and a story ready about looking for the latrine.
The corridor on sublevel two had a door with a keypad, and the door was propped with a fire extinguisher because somebody had been carrying boxes and hadn't wanted to key in twice. He stood outside it for the length of about ten breaths. Then he went in.
The room was long and dim and cold, and it was full of monitors, and most of them were showing places.
He saw a hillside with terraced beds and people working on it. He saw the inside of a fenced compound with laundry strung between two poles. He saw a market in a parking lot, and it took him a moment to understand that it was not his market, it was somebody else's, some other Wednesday in some other county. Each screen had a label in the corner. SITE 04. SITE 07. SITE 11.
He found SITE 14 in the second row.
It was his street. It was the roof of his garage, taken from somewhere high and to the east, at an angle he could not account for, and the image was clear enough that he could see the whistle hanging on its nail by the parapet, and the tomato cages stacked against the fence, and a figure crossing the yard with a bucket in each hand that he knew, by the walk, was Marisol.
Under the label was a line of text. SITE 14 — THORNE, J. — COHORT B — VIABILITY 0.81.
He was still standing there when the lights came up behind him.
Watts did not pretend, which was somehow worse than if she had.
She sat down on the edge of a desk and took her glasses off and let him say all of it. He said a good deal. He got to the part about Dale Wexler walking down his driveway with two milk jugs, and his voice came apart in the middle of the sentence, and he stopped and got it back and finished.
"The burst was ours," she said, when he was done. "Not mine personally. I want to be careful with that, because you'll want to hear me lie about it and I'm not going to. I knew it was coming. I argued against the timing. I lost."
"Timing."
"There was never a version where it didn't happen." She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Do you want the argument or do you want to hit me? Both are available."
Jacob sat down, which surprised them both.
She gave him the argument. Interlocking failures, she said, all of them past the point where a democracy could have voted its way out. Aquifers going dry under the grain belt. Six hundred million people who would be moving inside twenty years because their countries would be too hot to stand in at midday. A system that had to keep growing to keep from dying, and nine hundred warheads on hair trigger sitting on top of it.
"We ran it a great many ways," she said. "Every model that let the machine keep running ended in the same place, later and worse. Two to five billion dead, and nothing left to rebuild with, because we'd have burned the easy oil and eaten the easy soil and pulled the last of the phosphate out of the ground."
"And your way?"
"A hundred and ten million dead in the first two years." She said the number like a woman who had said it to herself many times and had never once gotten used to it. "Most of them in the first winter. It's the largest number I will ever be responsible for, and I would like you to understand that I have not slept properly in four and a half years, and also that I would do it again, and that both of those are true at once."
"You watched us."
"We measured you. There's a difference that matters to me and probably not to you." She nodded at the wall of screens. "Nobody was going to come save you. We didn't withhold aid. We had nothing to give at that scale. What we had was the ability to see which communities held together and which ones came apart, and why. Site 09 had more food than you did and it ate itself inside a year. You had a man alone in a fortified house and by the second spring you had a market with rules. We needed to know why. Not out of curiosity."
"For the next one," Jacob said.
"For this one. There's no next one. There's just what gets built now, and one chance to build it knowing something we've never known before about how people actually behave when the floor goes out." She put her glasses back on. "You can leave in the morning. Your rifles will be returned, and we'll load your cart, and nobody will follow you. That's not a kindness, it's a term. Or you can stay, and your community can stay, and we can start putting power back into a region that hasn't had it since October, and you can spend the rest of your life knowing what you know."
"You're asking me to work for the people who did this."
"I'm asking you to work for the people who are here," she said. "It happens to be the same set. I don't have a clean version to offer you. If I did I'd have opened with it."
He walked back. Six days again, and he barely remembered any of them.
He told them all at once, in the front room with the shutters still on the windows, because he'd decided somewhere around the third day that the alternative was becoming a man who sorted the truth into portions.
Marisol wept. Bishop asked three technical questions about the shielding and then went quiet for two days. Ray wanted to burn the place down and said so for about an hour, then sat with his head in his hands and admitted he wanted his daughter, and there was a phone down there that might reach Portland, and he hated himself for how fast he'd thought of it.
Etta, thirteen now, asked whether the woman on the screens could see them right now. Jacob said yes. She thought about it and said that if somebody was going to watch her she'd rather they watched her do something worth watching, and it took a while for anyone to say anything after that.
Claire didn't say much for three days. Then she found him on the garage roof during his watch and sat down on the parapet with the whistle between them.
"If we go," she said, "we're the argument. Every year it works, we're the thing they'll point at to prove it was worth it."
"I know."
"And if we don't go, the grid comes back anyway, and we're just further from it."
"I know that too."
She was quiet for a while. Down in the yard, someone had left a bucket out, and it was filling with rain.
"My brother was on dialysis," she said. "In Cleveland. He'd have gone in the first week. I've never said that out loud to you."
Jacob didn't answer. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't have been an insult to it.
"I want the lights on," Claire said finally. "Not for me. I want a working X-ray machine within a day's travel of a thirteen-year-old girl, and I want to be the one standing next to it, and I want to make that woman look me in the face every single day while I do it."
They put it to the whole group. Eleven to stay, four to go. Two families left in the spring for a settlement past the Kessels', and the leaving was not bitter, and twice a year afterward somebody made the trip in each direction with salt and news.
The lights came on in their county on a Thursday in the ninth year.
It wasn't much. Four hours a day at first, in a grid of eleven blocks, off a substation Ray had spent nineteen months rebuilding with a crew of forty. No ceremony. A string of bulbs came up along the market street and made everyone squint and look ridiculous, and Etta, seventeen now and running the seed library, said it was ugly, and it was.
Jacob was sixty-one that year, teaching two mornings a week at the school, canning and cold storage mostly, eleven students and a chalkboard. He was better at it than he'd been with Etta in the garden, because he'd finally learned to let people find the answer half a step before he handed it over. He never went back to the basement inventory. A young couple lived in his old house and kept the beds going, and someone had painted the shutters, which he found he didn't mind.
Watts came out to the county once a year until she died, in the fourteenth year, and he never forgave her and he worked with her the whole time, and he had stopped trying to make those two things resolve into one thing. Some arithmetic doesn't balance. You carry the remainder.
There were still cameras. The network had been made public in the sixth year, and there was an argument about it every few months at the assembly, and Jacob had come around to thinking the argument was the point. It was the quiet years that had cost them.
In the last spring of his life he sat on a bench outside the school with a jar in his hands, waiting for a class of nine-year-olds to come back from lunch. Peaches. Somebody's from the orchard on the creek road. He turned the jar over and looked at the lid, where a kid had written the month and the year in grease pencil in enormous crooked figures, and pressed his thumb against the center of the seal to check it, which was a thing he did now without noticing, and it held.