John remembered how a few months before everything hit the fan, how Paul and others with the IT team for the school had finished remodeling the computer center because the school was creating a new major in cybersecurity. The old machines, in an age where a computer aged faster than Detroit-built cars of the 1980s, were just simply tossed into the Dumpster after the hard drives were downloaded for anything of value and then wiped clean.
Truly a throwaway world that now seemed a thousand years away.
The fluorescent light overhead began to hum and flicker.
Ernie quickly reached behind the Apple and pulled the plug, the screen going dark.
“This power supply isn’t clean at all,” he growled, glancing over at Paul.
“What do you mean, not clean?” Forrest asked.
“Just that.” Paul sighed. “Someone throws a switch on in the hospital, it sucks up a few kilowatts, the voltage to the rest of the grid fluctuates, and that can be death, especially for these older machines. It’s exactly the thing that can kill this computer while we’re gazing in wonder at it. I’ll bring some surge protectors along.”
He hesitated.
“All right,” Ernie sighed, “I got a couple of portable solid-state solar-charging battery systems at home. Gives clean, steady juice for electronics—I’ll bring that over as well to power these computers.”
“You got one of those?” John asked sharply. “Nice to know now.”
Ernie shrugged. “Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts used to say.”
“But you didn’t have a computer stashed off, did you?”
“You accusing me of something, John?” Ernie snapped back.
John held up a hand in a calming gesture. “No, but still?”
“Look, we all got caught with our pants down in different ways. My wife Linda kept complaining that I was trashing up the basement with cast-off computers, so, like everyone else, I tossed them out when I upgraded every year or two.”
He sighed, and John could see that the memory troubled him. The old guy had most likely spent many a night kicking himself with that memory of all the computers he had once owned and then thrown out rather than storing away. Again, the throwaway society before the Day. At least some of the old-time ham radio operators had hung on to those precious devices and had them stashed away “just in case.” Some even took pride in the niche hobby of actually operating old ham radios with vacuum tubes rather than “newfangled transistors.”
Such a lost world, John thought sadly, looking at the darkened screen of the computer, symbolic of all that they had allowed to slip out of their grasp. America in an instant plunged into darkness and wondering at this moment if the few small flickering lights of hope were going out now as well.
He remembered Sir Edward Grey’s heartfelt cry when midnight struck on a warm August evening in London of 1914, and war with Germany had come to pass. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
In a way, how prophetic his words had been. That first war ending a hundred years of peace. The prophetic H. G. Wells predicting it truly was the beginning of the end, complete with atomic weapons. The steady, peaceful advance of the Edwardian era did indeed die in the trenches of Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme, with civilization taking a step backward to unleash poison gas, flamethrowers, bombs tumbling from the sky into undefended cities, and millions tearing at each other in the squalid mud of the trenches in primal rage with knives and bare fists. It led to a second war of death camps and brilliant flashes of light delivered on August mornings, thirty-one years after Edward Grey spoke and H. G. Wells uttered his prophecies, as entire cities were incinerated in a blinding flash.
Then the long years of what was called a Cold War, civilized nations ready to unleash a thousand such flashes of light over their enemies, no one realizing at first that when they created those first such bombs, it was not the blast, the fire as hot as the heart of the sun, that could destroy; it was something subtle, a mere microsecond of a massive gamma ray burst ignited out in space, that as it raced to the earth’s surface at the speed of light would free off electrons in the upper atmosphere’s oxygen and nitrogen—and as it did so building up to an overwhelming static discharge that could cripple the greatest nation in the history of humanity and leave 90 percent of its citizens dead two years later.
It was something he had long ago learned not to allow himself to dwell on too much, for surely it would drive him to impotent despair. Here he had been asking Ernie the how and why of this one computer surviving when the far greater question still was how and why his entire nation, his entire world, had allowed the unthinkable to happen. Who was responsible? Surely someone must have known it was coming. And with that coming, his youngest daughter became marked to die.
“John, are you okay?”
It was Becka, who was standing behind him, reaching up to touch him on the shoulder with a soothing gesture. He realized there were tears in his eyes, and he forced a smile.
“Yeah, sure. The babies asleep?”
“Like kittens.”
It was hard with just those two words to hold back long-suppressed tears. Those were exactly the same words Mary used long ago to describe Jennifer when she was tucked in and asleep. When they had learned she had a highly aggressive type 1 diabetes, they could not help but hover watchfully over her. The memory of it was made even more poignant after Mary learned she had something aggressive as well, breast cancer that would finally take her, leaving him with two young girls to raise. Nights when he would look in at her asleep, the two girls asleep to either side of her, knowing their mother was ill, and with childlike instinct sensing that she would soon go away from them forever.
And he would think of them as two kittens nestled in against their mother.
He struggled for control, turned away from the others, and walked off to the other side of the basement, absently picking up one of the old Life magazines as if studying it, his friends having the instinctive sense that he wanted to be alone.
The magazine was from right after World War II, falling open to an article “Our Boys Are Come Home”—pictures of the old Queen Mary being escorted into New York Harbor, fireboats around it up sending up a salute of red-, white-, and blue-colored water, the Statue of Liberty in the background. Joyful mothers, wives, and children embracing young men, young men with dark, haunted eyes, age far beyond their years etched into their faces, in tears as they returned embraces. On the following pages, an article about the new homes to be built a thousand at a time in a place called Levittown.