Untitled Document

-We Inherited the Earth

2108
I can’t say we weren’t warned. I can’t say nobody saw this coming. We saw it coming years off, could see the fringes of it over the horizon, like a black sunrise.
People think that when the end comes, it will come suddenly, like in a movie: One moment that will change everything. I suppose that there are tipping points for major events, but their effects take a long time to be felt.

We’re still feeling the effects, fifteen years after the lights went out.

Other collapses had already come: 82 years ago, terrorists from Pakistan released a drug into India’s water that caused sterilization in ninety-nine per cent of the population. They called the attack the “River of Blood.” The drug was not broken down by sunlight, or bacteria, or even the metabolism of people who ingested it. It stayed active for pretty much ever. And being released into the water, it spread everywhere. A sterilized earth was fast-tracked for destruction. Resistance to cloning disappeared overnight. It’s the only means of reproduction we have now. Everyone on Earth now bears the recombined genes of the tiny population of people who had donated gametes before the River of Blood attacks.

There were other, smaller wars worldwide, deforestation was a problem for the hundredth time, a few random nuclear disasters as old pre-glasnost reactors failed in one backwater or another...
When the Carbon Bug hit, that was pretty much the end of fossil fuels. A wild strain of that bacterium that eats oil spills mutated to the point where it could eat coal, too. It was tainting coal in the ground, so it wouldn’t burn. Oil was contaminated, too, and the bacterium survived the refining process, and had a surprisingly long latency period. Eventually, gasoline would go bad in people’s fuel tanks and they wouldn’t know until their cars wouldn’t start.
The Carbon Bug had lain quiet in stored oil reserves for seven years, growing to the density needed for its catastrophic reaction to take place. In that time, it got into everything: the stockpiles of crude, the refined oil and gasoline, and even in the untapped oil in the ground. It was really nasty, and by the time the oil wouldn’t burn any more, it was too late. It was everywhere.

The power collapse was the final straw. Some cities had solar arrays, or windmills, but those kinds of sources had always been seen as fringe solutions instead of true replacements, and always would as long as we had fossil fuels. Well, now we didn’t, and in the three-year slide into darkness, as the Carbon Bug showed its face again and again, people found that without good oil, there was no power to build enough new windmills or sun farms to take up the slack. Solar cars had never been fully viable, natural gas prices went so high that even the obscenely rich couldn’t pay their bills, and nuclear power had been regulated and protested into oblivion. Along with us, it seems.

I remember, when I was about 9, and the end of the world was being predicted a dozen times a week, I was watching a netnews stream showing mass suicides in India. Hundreds of people with large rocks, cinder blocks, or pieces of scrap metal tethered to their ankles, wrists, necks in some cases, marched slowly and quietly into the sea. A year or two later, bodies, and parts of bodies, began to wash up on American shores.

We saw the end coming, and we denied what we saw. “The answer is right around the corner,” they kept saying, as one renewable resource after another reached the point of attenuation. You cannot renew a resource as fast as 25 billion people can consume it.

We knew. And while many tried to stop it, many times that number did nothing. “We didn’t know how.” “We didn’t know what to do.” That was what whole nations kept saying, a mantra of ignorance, as others led by example, unnoticed.

A man who builds a log cabin in Sweden isn’t news when a angry mob destroys a solar array in Arizona.
Many stopped caring. “If the world’s going to end,” they said, “why should we try?” Wretched excess reached new extremes. Our society had become decadent; the classic sign of a civilization’s approaching collapse. There were blood orgies. There was a town in Kansas where the mayoral election was decided by Russian roulette.
When it happened, when the clear, unarguable moment occurred, chaos was not far behind.

Whole states, whole countries went dark. The Global Computer Network which operated seventy percent of the world’s industry suffered massive strokes as major server farms blacked out. Panicked people wandered out of cities on foot, fighting, stealing, and carrying backpacks full of over-the-counter medicine and canned food and being killed for whatever they had. And those rich who had cyber phone implants either chatting away like nothing was wrong, or screaming in frustration at not being able to get a clear signal.

A few large strongholds have reserves of local resources, but those places are so remote to us, they might as well be on the moon. A dozen cities in Europe, one (maybe) in South America, perhaps as many as five in North America, and no one in Asia or Africa has reached us. At least, no one to be believed.

The lights here still haven’t come back on.
There are rumors of an automated city, possibly in Africa, maybe Siberia. The story is always different, and too many removes from the real witnesses to mean anything. Story goes, the GCN runs everything. An Autocracy, it’s been called more than once, with a few thousand people who live in pre-Blackout splendor, as a massive robotic factory churns night and day to keep them alive.

Ridiculous, of course.
But now, here, in American cities, things are upside-down. The people everyone laughed at, the “survival nuts,” are the most powerful stratum of society. They keep perimeters around urbanized areas, and allow no one to cross. We are imprisoned in a corpse of a city, a broken machine that offers us nothing now but a choice between dying today or tomorrow. We search, in small bands or alone, for the few resources that remain: Clean water, food (of any kind), ammunition, and a few kinds of industrial materials.

I have a thousand U.S. Dollars in my pocket. I mostly use that stuff as kindling. Not even gold is worth much now, except for its few electronic applications. The new currency is twofold: help, which is so rare as to be without price, and usable materials. There is always a huge demand for batteries, the tiny ones we use to power the cybernetic implants we have come to depend on for so much, and any usable form of wire, metal, surgical grade plastics (usually recycled), memory, and sometimes glass. Collectively, these materials are referred to as “skit.” The name refers to the scrap-chits people are issued to represent materials too large or numerous to carry.

Travel is dangerous, but still possible. There are many holes in the fences the Woodsmen keep, but as many people seem to come in as to go out. The ones who leave, they stay gone, one way or another. Supposedly there are farms, outside the cities, where they have fresh food and running water and maybe even a windmill. You hear stuff. Messages rarely come through. Sometimes, about once a month, I pick up a message on my satellite phone, from--

Yeah, I forgot. The comsats are still flying. The Talkgrid still works, sometimes. Last message I got from my sister, she was in Sri Lanka. They eat a lot of fish there, she says, and they pay a few ex-military types to guard their coastline.

The GCN still works, kind of. A few cities, so they say, still have power for the mainframes, and enough of the Mind is distributed across the satellites, the solar-powered satellites, that the cloning stations and body depots stay operational most of the time. Nobody trusts the GCN completely, but we can’t ignore it, either.
And the lights are still out in the cities, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Two nights ago, I shot a kid who was younger than I was when the lights went out. He had a ridiculously huge machine gun, and lots of chrome. The whole left side of his head was armored, and it bristled with antennas. I try not to think about how he could pay for that kind of work. When I think of it, how young he was, and how he could have bought all that hardware, I feel nauseous.
Maybe I just feel nauseous from the vapor, from his head soaking in a bucket of bleach in the back of my shop. I’m sentimental, but I’m no fool: I can make a dozen implants from what I can get out of that boy’s head.
I do okay here, in my little shop. I recharge batteries, I repair weapons, and I build or rebuild hardware, often in exchange for other hardware, sometimes in exchange for someone to stand guard while I sleep.

I still get to do that sometimes.
I keep thinking about my sister, and about how fucked things have gotten. This street I have barricaded is tough to get into without a guide, or money. I stay put, I earn a decent living, and I hardly ever get attacked any more. That kid the other night was the first to try in about three weeks.

I wanted to see the world when I was younger. I still want that, but differently now. I want to see my kid sister, or to see the robot city in Kenya, or Kamchatka, or wherever they’ll say it is next. Sadly, my world has shrunk to a two-block stretch of an imprisoned city. I can’t leave. I’m one of the few things people have come to rely on. But the number of people I’ve killed...
I tell myself I had to, to survive. Them or me. The only thing that comes near balancing the horror that life is now is the lives I have saved. The fleeting smile I see from someone truly grateful that I’m here. To give their batteries a charge, or when they drop off a few skit for a place to crash for a night.

That, and the tiny thread of hope that I don’t dare let go. The hope that maybe, someday, the nights won’t always be so dark.