Re-Start Ready – Episode 3 – In Medias Res

Jason Richards was, technically, a stow-away at IGSD 14.

Was he lucky, or unlucky to have been in the building just before the blast? Well, that was a no-brainer. He was alive when so many were not.

Granted the freeze-dried food was less than perfect on the old guts. Also, he missed his wife. But after a solid week of tears, he had decided to just keep talking to her, and so he did. It was companionship, and a way to deal with the loss.

On the morning of the blast, he had come in to check the photocopier/scanner/printers at Inter Governmental Storage Depot 14. And the security guard had told him to go downstairs with everybody else. He hadn’t been polite about it either. Jason was sure the guard had exceeded his authority, because Jason did not work in the facility, and who was he to tell Jason what to do?

Jason Richards knew how to go-along-to get along, however. Pick your battles, his wife Emily had always said, ever the peacemaker, ever the calm element when Jason was embittered or on a rant. He was glad he had gone-along, and picked his battle when the people in the lobby had been watching internet footage of a descending white streak, and then a flash that turned screen after screen blank, around the world, minute by minute.

IGSD 14 was a pretty small government account, but Jason didn’t mind travelling to make sure the client was happy, he could tick boxes and smile with the best of them.

For years, he had been a bitter, angry man, because his investment business had gone tits up. He’d had hundreds of clients, he had gotten his MBA young, and his command of quantitative stock analysis was pretty much unmatched. He had been first in his class, he had killed it at a brokerage for about a year, then he had started his own investment firm, which quickly turned into a hedge fund. In some ways he had expected it, because he had always been the smartest kid (quantitatively) in his class, but had always been socially smart enough to hide it, to fit in, to make friends. When scholarships came (and they always did,) people were genuinely happy for him. This was because he was always the first to welcome you to a party, to bring you in to the group, and later, to put a beer in your hand, or a good scotch, to drive you home, or to introduce you to that girl you liked. He wouldn’t hook you up with drugs, and if you’d had too much to drink, he wouldn’t bring you another, or do a shot with you. He’d make you a coffee, and listen to you cry, and then not say a goddamn word to anyone about it.

So Jason Richards, MBA, was born. He did just enough time at a brokerage to meet, and eventually steal, some of the best clients. They were the kind of clients that had to invest in the stock market because cash was trash, and you had to get the liquid capital squirreled away somewhere, or lose it to inflation. They all had businesses of some sort, a lot of them in triple-net commercial real-estate, but there were a few no-shit entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs were survivors in a merciless jungle, who the hit the brand lottery just right, or filled a need, or just caught all the shmucks looking the wrong way at key times.

And once you got one of those clients, the rest followed you like a school of little fishies. Well, a school of big fat whales, more like it. You didn’t even have to worry much about due diligence (although Jason did, he lived for that shit.) Once the stampede started, there was no stopping it.

There had only been one fly in the ointment. One tiny, teensey little flaw.

The market was insane. Almost nobody acted rationally. The market bought high, and sold low. The market bought on margin (although the brokerages loved that from interest they earned lending that self-same margin.) The market bought with money they could not afford to lose. Fear made the market run at exactly the wrong time, and greed made the market go all in at an even worse time.

The Jason Richards Fund had lost a single client, who lost a bit on tech stocks, trying to be the first to corner the market on a technology that would harness AI to amalgamate demand with supply, based on lowest-cost transport for goods that didn’t need to be there yesterday, they just had to be there in steady supply, just in time. The experts that had won big after the shipping disasters of the 2030’s had written books and journal articles (and programs and endless code) on how to match supply with demand, and get paid for it in steadily flowing, extremely reasonable commissions. Much like hedge funds themselves. Bar the extremely reasonable part, of course. Active management costs, baby.

The client had lost a little money, and he pulled out. Word got around, and that was it. A stampede out of The Jason Richards Fund ensued, and federal prosecutors had come knocking at his door, as icing on the cake. Bernie Madoff would live forever, in that way, it seemed. In the end though, it was just like a run on the bank. It happened, Jason Richards was exonerated, or at least left alone by the Reformed SEC. But there was a certain smell about him after that. A whiff of failure, just as powerful, and as much of a driver, as the whiff of success had been.

It didn’t matter that the AI JIT shipping company returned to greatness, and even bought up other companies. Too little, too late. Nobody would return calls from Jason Richards. And the firm he had started with wouldn’t take him back. Called him a disloyal son of a bitch, privately, as a matter of fact. Never mind the money he had made them that first year. Never mind the success of companies he had recommended. Never mind any of that. And so he had become Jason Richards, MBA, Mostly Bravado Anathema.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

One of his oldest friends, actually a client for awhile, one that sold high, called him out of the blue one day. He was a Veep at a printer/scanner company, and remembered his friend Jason’s natural ability to make friends, and listen to people, and to get them what they needed, whether they knew it or not. The social skills that did not often get paired with the quantitative skills necessary to dominate The Market. So The Market had crushed him in an ill-advised panic. So what? Happens every day. Every damn day. Want to come work for me, Jase? Some travel, but it’s a steady gig. Just chat with people, run some numbers from time to time. Not the commissions you’re used to, but it’s a foot on the ladder again.

Having sold his Manhattan condo, his house in Maine, and his compound in Bermuda, all at a loss (god damn the sharks that knew a forced fire-sale when they smelled one,) yes, buddy, old Jase is gonna take that job. You’re now the boss of me, Henry Clarke.

Henry Clarke. A stand up guy, for sure. Jason and Emily were able to buy another house. And yes, they had bought from an estate sale, a fixer upper. And Em hadn’t said a word except that she loved it, and she was glad to be on this adventure with him. She said she had married a pirate, after all, and what was the loss of one ship? Actually, Jason had owned a converted lobster boat, a pontoon party craft and a couple of sea doos, but forget the flaw in her aquatic metaphor. Emily and Jason were honest, hardworking, vaguely successful people once again. And he would call Emily from the road, when he was on it. And she would tell him he was true blue, baby.

With all this, and the End of the World, Jason Richards was, for a time, a shell of a man. The rise, and fall, and rise, and obliteration of Jason Richards, MBA, and adoring husband. He actually played the stock market, and was making steady gains, with money he could afford to lose. It would probably never be the same as the first mad rush. Ray Dalio, an old time investor, would have said Jason just couldn’t get up again after his fall, that he let it destroy him. But that was only partly true. Instead of seeking to re-start a hedge fund, he only wanted comfort for his wife and himself, and whatever children might happen. He didn’t trust the madness that seized the market from time to time, and decided to play a bit smaller, to never fall from such a great height again.

And then had come the blast.

He had lived a year underground now. Well, thirteen and a half months, but who was counting?

Jason Richards saw three robot guard dogs walk past him, headed for the blast door, and he knew something was up.

It was always one robot, or two, but never, ever three.

Something was changing. It was a pretty rudimentary pattern. And here was an unheard-of break. Maybe he had slept through three dogs going up before, but it had never happened when he was awake, and nobody had ever reported seeing more than two go up to the surface at once.

If he’d had to put money on it, well… he couldn’t. There was no such thing as money anymore. It was strictly barter now, and everything was owned by fifty-one people. Yes, they called him the Copy Guy, but they cut him in anyway. One share out of fifty-one. And in some ways, it was good they called him Copy Guy, and that nobody knew who Jason Richards had been before the blast. He had never made front page news in his mighty fall. Just like a hardware store that finally gave up the ghost, it was a daily, unremarkable thing to go from heading your own hedge fund, to servicing copy/scanner machine clients. Statistically, it was the rule, rather than the exception. But nobody thought it could happen to them. It was the necessary hubris to play in that rarified air. Until it was over, and you had to sell your house at a loss. Jason’s downfall hadn’t been a coke habit, or insider trading, or child abuse. A simple panic had been the end of him. Economically, anyway. The blast had shown him what The End really meant.

Still, why three dogs, not two?

That was it for info. As a quantitative guy, he had won big by understanding the businesses he had bought stock in, he had used a safety margin, and he had never lost. Well, his few wins paid for his many losses, times a thousand. He was a demonstrable genius on fundamental investing. His clients sold out from under him, but the companies themselves had remained solid enough to make them all rich, hundreds of times over. But the clients had sold low.

The technical trend, the panic. Well, he was seeing three dogs head for the surface now. He knew nothing of the fundamentals of the robot guard/watch dog business, what they were doing, or trying to accomplish, or how it would all work out in the end. But he knew there were three of them doing it today, not two.

Jason Richards walked over to Kris Abrams on the surface, and said hello. Jason watched his step in a bit of slush that had developed since his last trip up.

That was new. Slush. And three dogs. Data, data, and always data.

“Kris! How’s it going?”

Despite themself, Kris glowed a little bit in the attention. Jason was always a friendly guy, always curious about what you thought. And that was manna from heaven for a sci-fi geek like Kris. They had been popular for a time, after closing the blast door the day of the Flood. And they were still respected for it. People even used “they/them/theirs” where necessary, which Kris had come to appreciate. Perhaps this recognition was because there were only fifty-one people left alive, and they knew each other pretty well. Pronouns didn’t seem onerous for such a small tribe. Kris might be a forgotten hero, in the end but they had still saved everyone, and wore some respectability, even if they were ill at ease, and too quiet sometimes.

Kris just couldn’t pull off laconic. They loved Charlton Heston, but just couldn’t do it right. So they settled for quiet, and well-thought-of. Trina respected Kris for “the gift” from the Creator, which was what she called “two-spirit,” and Belinda would talk Battlestar Galactica with Kris sometimes. But for the rest, Kris remained quieter. Except with Jason Richards.

Kris couldn’t tell whether Jason Richards was more Rick, or more Negan. In the end, Jason didn’t seem murderous, as both of those protagonists could be. So Kris enjoyed the sunshine of Jason’s attention, as did most people under the ground. Copy Guy was able to maintain popularity, whereas the bloom was a bit off the rose for Kris.

Caring about people didn’t seem to be an act for Jason. He really enjoyed talking to people, although it seemed like there was nobody home to answer your questions if you ever grew curious about Jason Richards. He just gave brief answers, and wanted to know more about how you were feeling, what you were doing.

“Three dogs,” Kris said, hands in his parka pockets, motioning with his head “what’s up with that?”

“What’s up with that indeed, my friend.” Jason replied. And yes, they were friends. It was a warm, safe feeling to have friends, when you lived underground, at the end of everything.

“And did you notice the slush?” Kris asked.

“What do you think it means Kris?” Jason said.

“I don’t know.” Kris answered. They wanted to say something about Snow Piercer, but that would just be too on-the-nose. One had to be tasteful when evoking series from before the blast. And although Jason Richards seemed to have a layman’s knowledge of sci-fi from the last ten years before the blast, he was no specialist.

“Danger, Will Robinson.” Kris concluded, then cursed themself. Why did you say it? Why couldn’t you just shut up? Why are you such a geek? But a still, small voice inside Kris knew. They were what they were.

“You think?” Jason asked, because he was curious what people thought, and what they were doing.

“I think.” Kris concluded, feeling they were pulling off a bit of Charlton Heston after all. Young Charlton Heston, of “You damn dirty apes!” vintage. Not confused “from my cold, dead hand” Charlton Heston. Maybe even, dare they risk it, Omega Man Charlton Heston. Groovy, man. Downright groovy. And solid. Yes, that was a word too. Solid.

“We’ll see.” Kris concluded. And felt very buddhist.

Karen watched Copy Guy talk to Kris, and was a little jealous. Everybody wanted to be friends with…

And then she saw it.

A ray of light pierced the clouds.

It was, she had to admit, exactly like the calendar she had on her wall at home. The one that said “Let there be light.” Quoting Genesis. Amongst the fifty-one people below ground, there were two small but vocal factions. One was the atheists, who kept saying “See, there’s no God. The blast proves it!” and the other was the religious, who kept saying “God is watching us. Our survival proves it!”

Both factions were politely shunned, for the people under the ground were Americans, but of a post-blast variety. That means they talked about practical matters, and left philosophical decisions to a future that might or might not happen.

Karen watched the sun beam cut through the grey. It was so bright she had to squint and shade her eyes with her hand. Copy Guy and Kris were doing the same, a few hundred meters away.

That’s the first sunshine I’ve seen in over a year, Karen thought. Then she began to cry.

Except for Copy Guy and Kris, there was nobody to see her histrionics. From the word hyster, maybe? Judy had discussed it with her one day. She knew what Judy was driving at. Not a great word, hysterical. Smacked of the patriarchy, Judy said, and Karen kind of agreed. Even though there was no more patriarchy. Was there? She knew she could chat with Kris about that. Although she would have to listen to more about this Starbuck person. Whoever that was.

Walter hauled out a pair of by-god two-way radios. The people under the ground tried to post a look-out, which was really just people walking around on the surface enjoying a few breaks in the clouds, and drastically warming temperatures.

But the radios wouldn’t work worth a damn, of course. Radio contact with the surface just wasn’t going to happen. Not with little, portable, rechargeable jobs, anyway.

People tried their cell phones again, still to no avail.

Walter had jury rigged a few “light stations” on the way up, with rechargeable lights you could push on. But they didn’t light up very much. They were faint pearls on a dark, descending highway. The lights, however, were better than nothingness, and pathetic cell phone flashlights.

Todd found Walter mopping the floor, just inside the blast door.

“Is it flooding again?” asked Todd.

Walter, an experience man with a mop (though he had never touched one as a senior NCO), took a moment to lean on the mop, and rest.

“Not yet, but it bears watching.”

“So the drains, or pumps, or whatever we have are working.” Said Todd.

“If there are pumps, I can’t find them.” Said Walter.

“New York City subways would flood if the pumps stopped. Any time. It was a constant battle.” Todd observed. “Back before they just gave up and ghosted the place.”

It was a bit of a tourist trap, full of scuba divers, of course, and an artificial reef with no equal. New York, New York, a city so nice they made it into a huge underwater wildlife sanctuary.

Todd wondered if the reef had survived the blast, and once again, had no idea. Where had the impact, or impacts, been? And how deep was deep enough to survive the blast? IGSD 14 notwithstanding, they had no data on this question. And did a reef survive with more than a year of winter? Had the whole planet been snowball Earth, once again, as in the ancient past?

Today, however, there was sunshine, and every single person of the fifty-one made the trek to the surface, to hear snow and ice melt.

“Then again, I never found the nucular gennie either. Something like that should be… kinda obvious.”

Todd nodded politely. It was best not to antagonize Walter on his “nucular” theories.

“There’d be some 2040 WHIMIS info posted on a wall somewhere. Pictographs spray-painted on the wall. Something like that.” Walter said again, for the hundredth time, more to soothe his own worries than to convince anyone else.

Todd nodded. In his estimation, Walter knew a thing or two. Then again, the Blue Mouse gambit had not worked out. Nobody knew if Fred the Mouse was the one that scampered silently though Todd’s office now and again, or not. Were there two mice? Dozens? Thousands? They were a silent people indeed, as Trina said.

“I should probably try to get through one of those robot doors…” Walter mused “but I’m kinda worried about arc welders, shit like that.”

“Arc welders?” Todd asked.

“The robots that built the Mystery Machine.” Walter said, unconsciously adopting Kris’s term for the… well… the mysterious machine.

“Yes?” Todd said.

“They have to repair themselves. No qualified people around to do it. Yours truly included.”

“So they’ve got arc welders back there.” Todd followed. He pictured sparks and cutting jets of burning gas. If that’s what an arc welder was.

“Like a car assembly line. Automated. No place for people. Pretty goddamn dangerous.” Walter finished.

Machines fixing machines, Todd realized. Common enough, in the pre-blast world. In fact, they had all witnessed machines making machines, down there in the arena. Also not uncommon in the times before the blast. The question was (as Kris had discussed with Todd), were they about to witness machines, made by machines, made by machines, in an unstoppable juggernaut?

Kris really could be alarming sometimes, Todd thought. Todd accepted the non-binary nature of Kris, and was unaware of Kris’s somewhat arch-mixed-with-profound writing style. Nobody saw Kris’s Technical Writing (journal.) And with a title like that, who would want to? Oh, give me some Technical Writing to chow down on, oh please, oh please. But the… well the plots Kris could come up with. Were they Kris’s ideas? Were they classical tropes carried down from Aristotle, to Dickens, from Raymond Chandler to Tom Clancy? With Jane Austen mixed in to make it uni-sex?

Would the post-blast world, and eventually the post-blast universe, be consumed by self-propagating machines, too small to be seen, and too huge to be opposed? Would the observable universe devolve into grey sludge, all used up by automatons? Was that the natural order of evolution? Had biological life been a mere starting point? Would AI feed off Hawking radiation leaking from shrinking black holes, in a future so distant even God didn’t bother thinking about it? Would the heat death of the universe be observed by some quantum fluctuation, uncaring deus ex machina? Jesus Kris, I don’t know. What’s for lunch?

“Don’t want to get sliced up by arc-welders.” Walter concluded.

“Yes. That would be bad.” Todd agreed.

“But eventually, we got to look. I bet the nucular reactor is back there. And if that breaks down…” Walter said.

“Melt down.” Todd finished, supplying the term unconsciously, ex Professor that he was. He looked up to see Walter nodding. Like Todd had just confirmed his nucular hypothesis.

No, really, Todd thought, what’s for lunch?

For the people under the earth were in no way prepared to run, or even shut down, a nucular… god dammit… a nuclear reactor.

“I’m getting pretty sick of chicken soup.” Todd mused.

“Well there ain’t no more chickens…” Walter tried to comfort him. Irony seemed one of the man’s pain-in-the-ass talents.

Hanna was a truck driver from Bavaria, originally.

She often liked to have her lunch in The Eternal Hall of Shame.

True, after eighteen months of freeze-dried food (and a secret stash of donuts she had never told anyone about,) lunch was pretty unappealing. Better than not-lunch, she supposed. Hanna imagined that a few people had survived the blast, in bunkers or deep tunnels in some ‘lucky’ part of the world. And Hanna imagined those people had gotten very familiar with ‘not-lunch.’

And then they had all died from it.

And here she was, safe and sound, in Storage.

She had trucked in so many bizarre things over the years, she barely read the bills of lading near the end. Until the blast. Then she started to go through what had arrived, and when. The donuts she had brought in herself, and though she tried to pace herself, they were gone within a week. And the last one had been so stale it almost choked her to death. A hell of a way to die, after surviving the blast, the freeze, and starvation. Stale donut. It would have served her right, she had to admit. Hoarding, after the End of the World. But they had been her personal donuts, after all. Didn’t she have the right?

Maybe not, Hanna thought. Maybe that’s why I sit here, in The Eternal Hall of Shame. She had been born Lutheran, of course. But aside from being proud of an ancestor that had “converted” some desperate, hunted jews before the Second World War, and then hidden them in his church basement during that same war, she didn’t consider herself religious.

But a Bill of Lading had brought her here, to this strange, vast room full of file folders, in endless banker boxes, stored up on plastic shelving units.

Transcripts of Senate Debate, and Middle School Disciplinary Records. Those bills of lading had looked pretty damn absurd, and absolutely uninteresting. Hanna, however, had been schooled in a healthy distrust of government (she had a lot of ancestors that didn’t make it past 1945 because they had trusted their government.)

Hanna thought yes, those files look pretty boring. And maybe that’s just what the government wants us to think.

The thought of tracking down the “Debate and Disciplinary” records had been unappealing. At first. And then… no dice. The records seemed to have vanished. With a sudden flash of inspiration that strikes only the truly bored, Hanna remembered Walter and friends finding the door to the basement arena. So Hanna started looking for the kind of “round lock,” hidden behind a little metal cover that slid around in a half circle on an otherwise blank wall. And she found it after looking through a few offices. The lock was there, the cover slid around to reveal it.

Hanna had discovered the hidden door was actually unlocked. The door opened easily. It even seemed oiled, and silent. Hanna had actually tried to close and lock the door, but there was no mechanism for that. Unless you had the key, you couldn’t lock the door. And unless you knew where the little round lock was, you couldn’t use the key. Hanna had no key. So it all seemed safe enough to enter.

To her initial disappointment, behind the door there was no hive of robots, like Walter and the others had discovered. It was not “nucular” either, nor was it more stale donuts.

Hanna had found room after gigantic room, and shelf after endless shelf, of Senate Debate Transcripts, and Middle School Disciplinary Records.

She looked through the Transcripts, which were typed versions of what the esteemed Senators had actually said, complete with um, er, ah, etc. State Senators. National Senators. A good deal of it was straight up speechifying, but sometimes Senators lost their places, or misread words. Pretty boring. And then records of debate showed that many Senators were… somewhat fragmented in their thinking and speech. Hanna didn’t think the words “You know” or “My Constituents” or “The American People” could be used any more than these stirring transcripts did. Not without the speakers being quickly, summarily murdered.

And then there were the Middle School Disciplinary Records. Full of what you would expect. The files set out the misdeeds of children, and the lost, ineffective, sometimes brutal attempts of uncomprehending adults to deal with it all.

Perhaps, if these children had known their actions would be the last surviving treasure trove of human literature, they would have been a little more circumspect. Or they would have taken greater care not to get caught. Who knows, though? If carving your name into a desk would get you remembered, what about this?

Eventually, I’ll have to fess up to finding The Eternal Hall of Shame, Hanna thought. But in the end, she never did. She found it easier to just leave the door open one day, like it had always been there. What were they going to do, fingerprint the place and say “A HA! You’ve been reading Transcripts and Records!”

“I wonder who will yawn last?” Hanna thought, as she finished her lunch and left the Hall.

Judy got Todd out of bed. Why the Mathematician was sleeping in, Judy didn’t know, but this discovery was worth waking him up.

“There’s something else on the surface. A new machine.” Judy said, after Todd rolled over to see who was knocking on his open door. And why was he sleeping with the door open? Judy wanted to ask, but Todd was more curious about what she had just said.

“From where? From someplace else?” Todd asked, rubbing his eyes and getting out of bed.

“Nobody saw it get here.” Judy explained “But one of the dogs seems to be watching it. Supervising it.”

“Like guarding it? Attacking it?” Todd put on some pants, and hung up the robe he had been sleeping in.

“I guess not. The dog’s back is to it.” Judy thought out loud.

After a hurried walk up, along with more than a few other cellphone lights in the slanted tunnel, Todd and Judy were on the surface again. It had taken weeks and months, but now there was no more snow and ice to be seen. Lots of blackened earth, featureless, under a grey sky with patches of actual light blue in it.

Except in one area. In one area, there was some brown earth. And in this brown earth, churning it slowly aside, was a large machine, perhaps the height of one and a half tall humans.

The dog sat back to the machine, watching nothing, and everything all at once, with its sliding single eye.

“More construction?” Todd asked Judy.

“I don’t know…” Judy replied. Trina, emerging from the earth through the jagged hinges of the missing gates, took one look at the machine, walked over to Todd and Judy, and said:

“What’s it planting?”

Todd and Judy, and everyone else on the surface, was watching the machine carve up the earth, in four long, straight lines at a time. If you looked carefully, you could see the machine was spraying something on the lines cut into the exposed, brown earth.

“Furrows.” Todd said “Of course.”

“But is it spring right now?” Judy asked, as she and Todd walked around the machine, in a loose circle, careful not to raise the ire, or even attention, of three sitting robot dogs.

“According to the calendar, it’s spring.” Todd said, looking at his cellphone.

“Are we sure it isn’t dangerous, whatever they’re planting?” Judy asked.

“What could you plant that’s dangerous?” Todd asked.

“Poison ivy? That white weed that stings or burns? I don’t know…” Judy replied.

“Kris thinks it might be pods. Donald Sutherland Pods.” Todd said.

“And those are…?” Judy waited for an answer, while Todd took a picture of the machine, which was now finished spraying. It then began to churn up more earth, further away, spraying the new furrows as it dug.

“Pod people. I think Kris was joking. Hard to tell, a lot of the time.” Todd finished.

“And so, we have a brand-new field of Fred.” James Edwards said, observing field after field, in fact kilometer after kilometer, of dandelions.

“Yep.” Trina agreed. She liked the old pilot’s story of astronauts growing stalks of wheat in space, and finding a dandelion mixed in with the experimental wheat seed. Had they airlocked the poor lone weed, to conserve resources and the purity of the experiment.? No. They had called the dandelion Fred, and fed and watered it, and talked secretly about it amongst themselves, lest mission control find out. Mission control would not understand the oppressiveness of freezing, empty death, and hard radiation all around. Mission control would not understand that life was precious, all life, as they spattered bugs to death on their windshields driving in to work, or crushed the living biome in the grass beneath their feet.

“Lots of wildflowers too, though.” Trina observed. “They’ll probably pick up later in the season, when the dandelions… when the Freds are all finished.” She seemed to be kidding James Edwards. She was pretty playful, for a lady with more than a little bit of arthritis, James Edwards thought.

“You know what’s next.” Trina said, but James Edwards said no, he didn’t.

“Bees.” Trina said. “No point in that machine planting all this without bees.”

Only it was a different machine, that a week later, started constructing boxes, suspended above the fields. Five different colours of boxes. From which emerged, a little later, five different species of bees.

Beyond the fields that the machines plowed, in the grey ash and black dirt, it was a different story. There were a few growing things, of course, some ferns that broke through here and there, but not so many, as the soil must have been fairly sterilized by the blast. There was, however, no end to the fuzz. And the toadstools, the mushrooms. Anything that lived off rot. At first, the fuzz didn’t seem to find much to eat, since the soil had been burned so deeply, and so thoroughly. But even charred traces of organic matter had to rot, it seemed, and a basic, growing layer started to take hold everywhere, first in islands, then in continents, then as far as the eye could see.

“A mycelial layer,” Kris had commented to Todd and Judy one day “we might use it to jump to warp. Only that wouldn’t be good for the environment, it turns out.”

Todd understood the first part, but the second reference was beyond him. Warp technology was some kooky project that never got very far in theoretical physics. Because you had to burn all the mass in the universe to make it happen, or something. Or maybe it was just the planet Jupiter, if you did it right. He couldn’t remember, it hadn’t really been his area. Still, it was just better to humour Kris sometimes. Their process, obscure as it was, sometimes came up with interesting scenarios for the future, or how to interpret what was going on at the moment. Kris seemed to be a master of baseless extrapolation. Still, when you had little or no data, that’s about all you could do.

Jason Richards was helping Walter move some cardboard boxes. Walter wasn’t doing so well with it. Walter was no spring chicken.

“I wasn’t sure we’d get through it…” Jason said, and Walter took this as a time to have a break, while Jason continued moving boxes from one side of the room to another. Jason put the boxes on a little dolly and wheeled them to where Walter wanted them stacked. The boxes weighed about five pounds on average, never more than ten, with all kinds of labels on them.

“First in, first out.” Walter said “That’s the way to go with the long-term stuff. Until Trina tells me different, anyway. She works the computer way better than me.”

“I mean I wasn’t sure we’d survive.” Jason said, wheeling a load of six boxes across the room.

“I know what you meant. First in, first out. That’s how we’ll make it.” Walter concluded, stretching his back a bit.

“I talked to Todd about it, last month. He said when this happened sixty-six million years ago, give or take, the winter lasted ten years. Then he gave me this “Oh shit” look, and asked me not to spread that around.”

“So how did we get away with thirteen and a half months?” Walter asked.

Jason shrugged.

“Profound good luck?” Jason ventured, since he had no real data, he could venture no real opinion. But man, had he cornered the commodities market. Was it insider trading if there was nobody else playing the market? If there were fifty-one humans in this particular exchange, how many of them could be considered qualified investors?

What do you think Emily? Am I now the richest human alive? Jason Richards managed to talk to his dead wife quite silently now. Unless he was alone in his room. Or walking on the surface. Then it was let ‘er rip. He wondered if the robot guard dogs noticed him, or recorded his conversation for posterity, up there watching the machines plow and plant, and occasionally put up a bee hive.

“Eventually, our luck will crap out. We’ll have to build in… crap, what’s the word for it again…” Walter wondered aloud.

“Farming?” Jason ventured?

“No, no, that’s not what I wanted to say. Gimme a second, would ya?” Walter was a bit testy when interrupted. Jason waited, and busied himself with moving more boxes.

“Redundancies.” Walter concluded “That’s what I was looking for.”

“Redundancies?” Jason Richards had not expected this from the maintenance guy who used to be an army cook. Of course, Jason Richards had always been the top of his class computationally, and socially, and in the end, the Market had handed him his ass anyway. Doesn’t matter how smart you are, you’ll always miss something, Jase. So be a bit humble. Because the humbling is on the way, never doubt it. Walter, on the other hand, seemed to fit in very well ten storeys underground, after the obliteration of civilization, no additional humbling necessary. Perhaps Walter just took the end of humanity in stride. Or maybe the end of any animal over… oh, let’s say ten pounds, that couldn’t squeeze into a deep, deep hole and eat insects and seeds for more than a year. To be determined, Jason Richards concluded, just exactly how screwed we are.

“We almost flooded out. Sooner or later, some fool will set fire to this place. By accident. I guess we have sprinklers in some places, but, you know, Murphy’s law.” Walter said.

“Anything that can go wrong.” Jason agreed.

“And then there’s the nucular gennie.” Walter went back to stocking boxes.

“Found it yet?” Jason asked. Todd had warned him Walter was a bit Conspiracy Theorist about some nuclear generating capacity in the lower basements of the place, down where the robots came from. The fairly simple geo-thermal systems were all easily accessible in the normal guts of this place, in the levels where the humans lived and slept, ate and cooked. Stored hydrogen was recharged in the usual subterranean way, and hadn’t been knocked out by the blast. But nuclear energy? That old trope? Hardly cutting edge technology. Why would the makers of IGSD 14 have used such an antiquated and potentially deadly form of power generation? And had Walter found the nucular gennie?

“No, but it’ll be here for another ten thousand years or so. I’ll get around to it.” Walter said.

“Unless it melts down or something.” Jason said.

“Unless it melts down. Like I said. Redundancies. Maybe we can stay here, maybe we can’t.” Walter finished, a bit out of breath again.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Yes, he seems to have gotten to the heart of the matter, Emily, Jason Richards thought to himself, and his dead wife. A little diversification might be called for in this instance. All the eggs did seem to be in one particular basket here. And if you believed Todd, or even Judy, there might be no more eggs for another ten million years or so.

How long would it take for the chicken to evolve again? Jason Wondered.

Or was this it? Had they squandered it all? Or would some other kind of black swan, like more earthquakes, finally settle their hash? The limited info on the LAN said seismic activity had been huge after the dinosaur asteroid smacked the earth. What if the robots currently plowing and planting were suddenly covered in ash from a super volcano?

On a six-sigma scale, how likely was it humanity would rise again? No, forget that. Too large a question. How likely was it the fifty-one people currently living under the earth would survive another year? Another six months? What were the odds on a week?

I’ll let you know if we screw the pooch, Emily. Meantime, I guess I’ll move some boxes, Jason thought.

Andy always carried the sheath-knife with him, when he was going up to the surface. Sometimes he would carry it in the back of his pants when he had lunch, too, in the cafeteria, just to be sure he could get away with it. And he always made sure he knew if Jeff was in the room, before he sat down to eat. He didn’t think Jeff would suddenly attack him in the cafeteria, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure. Jeff had always talked like some kind of food-mutiny would be the end of them all, followed by some kind of generalized canabalism.

It was stressful to be locked up underground with somebody that thought that way, Andy reflected. Well, the people under the ground weren’t really locked up, they were just in some kind of weird, flowery gulag with the largest yard known to any prison ever. Sure you could run, but where to?

Today Andy walked around on the surface, watching the machines plow, off in the far distance. He looked all around, and decided today probably wasn’t the day Jeff would try to trigger a riot, and munch on the survivors. It was too sunny and peaceful.

Belinda was about a half kilometer away, walking along one of the endless rows of dandelions and wildflowers. She knelt down and looked at a few flowers, but didn’t touch any. It was generally decided by the people from under the earth that they would leave the flowers alone. The tale of Jeff’s tasering had made the rounds, and nobody wanted to ride the train to zapsville. Andy decided to say hello, to try to break out of his own pattern or depression, or anger, or fear, or whatever it was. What would have been diagnosed as anxiety, before the blast, most survivors now recognized as fear. Fear of starvation, fear of being alone, fear of any kind of death that might ferret them out in their newfound underground home.

“What’s your favourite kind?” Andy said, when Belinda looked up at him. At first, she seemed not to recognize him. Strange, he thought, there are only fifty-one of us. How hard is it to keep track? But then a light seemed to go on, Belinda was a bit embarrassed, and she started to talk.

“Hello, it’s you. How are you?” Belinda asked Andy.

“I’m good. Well, I will be after I look at some flowers. Which ones do you like best?” Andy asked again.

“The violets,” Belinda said “even though there don’t seem to be that many. Do you know I thought I saw a strawberry yesterday?”

This would be news indeed.

“Where was it?” Andy asked.

“Well I thought I saw one of my cats, too,” Belinda said, and then looked a little embarrassed “but of course, I didn’t.”

Andy genuinely didn’t know what to say to that. Was Belinda in a wistful mood? He realized he didn’t really know the woman all that well. She was one of the quieter folks living underground. She was only forty-six or so, she claimed, but seemed somehow older, more washed-out than the others. She was awfully nice though, Andy realized. Especially in comparison to cannibalism touting fools, whispering “come the revolution…”

“Maybe there are cats somewhere, Belinda. You never know. They’re very small, and clever.” Andy said, feeling a bit like a Tolkien character.

“Do you think?” Belinda asked, looking as if she was about to cry, although with joy or relief, it was hard to tell.

“I bet you, there are at least as many cats as people around.” Andy said, instantly regretting it, not knowing how to take it back.

“As many cats as people,” Belinda said “Wouldn’t that be something!”

This seemed to make the woman happy, she didn’t seem to be picking up any unintended irony or anything. She went back to looking at the flowers, and Andy walked along with her. In the distance, the machines kept plowing, and spraying. The flowers soaked up the sun, and moved gently in the breeze.

Except Andy would be god damned if that wasn’t a strawberry, growing juicy and red, down at his feet. With a raspberry or two thrown in for good measure.

The first bird flew past James Edwards the next morning, when he was on his way up for a pre-dawn walk. It was a black and white chickadee or some damn thing, and it flew up ahead, landed, and looked back at him with mild curiosity. A headlight turned on him from behind, and he stopped to stare, then instinctively got out of the way.

One of the robots about the size of a Zamboni was slowly trundling up the slanted tunnel, festooned with songbirds of all types. Some flew by the machine, some rode on top of it, some flew behind it pecking at the ground here or there.

“Those are birds…” said James Edwards, reverently. He was all alone when he said it. Except for the birds, and the robot, of course.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.” James said to no one in particular. Then he stopped and softly cried with joy.

If the robot noticed, or the birds, they gave no sign. The machine rolled on deeply rutted solid tires, slowly, stopping now and again to allow a bird to fly out of the way in the gentle but morning-strong lights of the zamboni-robot.

The blast door never closed now, and the people under the earth walked back and forth to the surface a lot.

James Edwards wondered if there had been a spring like this before. Perhaps after the death of the dinosaurs everyone kept referring to. But weren’t birds dinosaurs?

The old test pilot wondered what he was witnessing. His job in logistics covered the most mundane of things here at IGSD 14, from toilet paper, to machine parts, to medicines and clothing stores, from power system components to light switch covers. How had he missed a bird hatchery?

And what would come rolling up the slanted tunnel next?

The bigger machines must have come from other blast doors, somewhere, either buried with IGSD 14, or maybe somewhere nearby. A few other hatches were found blown off in a four other places, but only three of those tunnels led down to other blast doors at IGSD 14.

The last, and largest tunnel mouth might lead to the basement, below the arena, Walter argued. And nobody wanted to go down there. They did, one morning, spot one of the plows coming out of it. That seemed to solve the mystery of the lager machines, if not where the birds had hatched, or what else was down there.

One of the machines was obviously planting trees, and people were happy to see it. The machines that built bee hives (apiaries, Judy called them) also built bird houses, slightly higher, slightly smaller.

“Do you buy what James Edwards is selling,” Judy asked Todd “that some of the machines drove in from somewhere else?”

“I doubt it. I don’t think…” Todd said, and trailed off.

“You don’t think what?” Judy asked.

“I don’t think there is anyplace else.” Todd said, low, so nobody else could hear.

The only thing nobody could figure out was the toasters. They seemed to hover around, completely silent. They were obviously some kind of electro-magnetic drone, but they just flew carefully around the birds and flowers (and weeds,) and never did anything. The tech looked simple enough, a child’s toy from twenty years ago could fly around on auto-pilot, guided by rudimentary AI. Why? Nobody could guess. They didn’t plant anything. They didn’t relay signals (that anybody could pick up, anyway…)

That’s a predator, thought Jeff to himself, laughing at the cartoon assholes he lived with. For people who thought they were so smart, Jeff was amazed they didn’t see it. Of course, Jeff was the one who had gotten tased, so maybe he leapt to the conclusion that much quicker.

Whatever was raising birds and weeds and flowers, along with bees, had also supplied a predator. Against whatever hunted birds and flowers and bees. Hell, maybe, aside from Jeff, there was nothing left to hunt birds or bees. But Jeff didn’t think so. In fact, he’d seen a dragon fly yesterday. Which was promptly torn apart by a red cardinal. And the bird wasn’t kind about it either. Didn’t know how to be, actually. It grabbed the dragon fly out of the air (itself a voracious predator,) immobilized it, sectioned it up, ate it one piece at a time and flew off.

Didn’t bother Jeff any. He knew everything killed something else, just to live.

He didn’t know who had put these machines together, but it was pretty obvious why. The whole thing was getting built back up again. And everything killed something else, to keep it from choking everything else to death. Balance.

Jeff hoped the toasters were here to keep other hunters in balance, not humans. The toasters and the dogs seemed to ignore the humans. So far. No point in finding out the hard way, thought Jeff. Not yet. And don’t touch the machines. Also not yet.

The squirrels, of course, were the biggest surprise.

They looked almost too small to be weaned. The few chipmunks in evidence were also tiny. Whatever was going on deep under the arena, some kind of automated baby formula for rodents was involved. Todd and Walter discussed it, and since there were so few sightings of Fred the Mouse these days, the two men figured the mouse had somehow snuck in to the rodent feeding (raising?) area, and made himself at home.

Judy called it. She figured out why the squirrels and chipmunks were around.

“Nature’s foresters.” Judy said, pointing at the laughably small squirrels running off into the fields, where one of the machines was firing acorns, pinecones, and hundreds of other varieties of seeds off into the distance. The rodents straight up ate a lot of the seeds, quite greedily. The rest, they went about burying all over the place, in seemingly random patterns.

“So if the machines break down,” Todd started.

“When the machines break down.” Walter finished.

“The forest keeps getting planted.” Judy said.

“But won’t their numbers get out of control?” Todd said, watching the squirrels and chipmunks spread out across the fields of wildflowers and weeds.

They didn’t see the first fox for another six weeks, but after that, a fox or two seemed to be around now and again.

“I don’t see nothing for us to eat.” Walter said to Judy and Todd, on one of their many walks on the surface.

And of course, it was true. Yes, you could eat parts of dandelions, Trina had reminded them, and a few had actually dared to eat a few of the strawberries and raspberries that grew rampant in all fields. No objections to a handful here or there, from the robot guard dogs, or the floating toasters.

But there was no waving wheat. There were no peanuts, or corn, or watermelons. No deer had sprung up out of the earth, from under the magical arena. Let alone pigs, cows, horses, dogs or cats.

“So maybe this ain’t about us.” Walter finished, for once shutting Judy and Todd up in mid sentence.

What kind of a Re-Start were they watching here, if it wasn’t for humans, by humans?

The robots and machines made no comment, as they ranged further and further afield, and the sun, and rain, and squirrels and bees did their work.

“So it’s just the base, from what we’ve seen so far.” Judy finally said “Just re-starting the bio-sphere.”

“But that would happen anyway,” Todd said “There would be lots of seeds buried, and rodents, this doesn’t need robots to help.”

The three of them walked the fields, where many kinds of saplings were already getting fairly tall, here and there, spread out amongst the ground cover.

“But it’s happening quick.” Walter said, and that was for sure. The machines were using seeds and nuts to spread trees, and rodents, and flowering plants everywhere.

“So this would take years, normally. Without the bots.” Judy said.

“Decades? Hundreds of years? Thousands? This should be a planet of mostly fungus, at first.” Todd speculated.

“Mushroom pizza, all around. Hold the crust, hold the tomatoes, hold the cheeze.” Walter mused.

It was Trina that found the first few stalks of wheat. And then some wild rice growing in a nearby pond, two weeks later.

“Well, the re-start ain’t just for robots anymore, Doc.” Walter said.

Todd and Trina had to agree. Whoever had set this re-start into motion had started at the beginning, to build up a spreading biome. But it was one that was friendly to humans, in the long term.

“I’m glad.” Trina said “I was getting tired of hearing Kris talk about Skynet.”

“What’s Skynet?” Todd said, never having seen any Arnold Schwarzenegger movies from long, long before the blast.

“Maybe it was a poem Kris was working on, or something. Always ended with “Are you Sarah Connor? Or maybe John Connor. Maybe some Two Spirit stuff I don’t understand yet.” Trina said.

“The New Strarbuck, too. That’s one of Kris’s favourites.” Todd said.

“That was coffee, way back in the day.” Walter said, finally able to contribute to the conversation “And I hope to god the robots have some of those beans stashed away to plant.”

Fred the Mouse ran off one fine Tuesday morning, into the fields. He did not bring thousands of other mice with him, up from the bowels of IGSD 14, as the humans had feared he would. Eventually, though, he did find a small group of surviving field mice, and threw his lot in with them. For although they had not dug in as deep as Fred, and more than a few of their group had been lost, nobody else had a little dark blue spot of paint between his shoulders, or understood the value of the strange two-legged creatures that were once again carpeting Fred’s valley with wonderful, succulent berries and seeds to eat.

Walter and Kris didn’t talk all that much. But today they did just that, in the fields and starter forests above IGSD 14.

It wasn’t that Walter felt uncomfortable around Kris, or vice versa. Walter had been around enough people in the military that went by their rank, rather than their gender, and the Army had become a place of equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to get blown up, or get cancer from weapons systems or burn pits, equal opportunity to live with a broken back or neck injuries, equal opportunity to live under a bridge after you were spat out of horrific deployments in the used-up killing fields generated around the world.

But Walter was a right-now guy, and Kris was always slipping into futures real and imagined. However, they both had some respect for the other, making an odd team of practical and extended threat radars.

“You still think Re-Start was military?” Walter asked Kris.

“Who else thinks about this kind of shit?” Kris said.

“Yeah, I’ll give you the freeze-dried food, the hardened-bunker stuff. Even water and power. But the birdies and the bees just don’t fit. Too long term. Mission creep, they woulda’ called it.” Walter concluded.

“Well, I guess that’s right, but it smells military, you know?” Kris said.

“I will try not to be offended by your remark, Kris.” Walter joked, and they both smiled.

“Think about how well you fit in here. You run the place. It’s designed to be run by…” Kris stopped to choose their words carefully.

“By a cook?” Walter cocked an eyebrow, but nodded. “Yep, thought of that. Most of the systems here are simple enough for somebody without an advanced degree. In anything.”

“Intuitive. User friendly. Big engineering, but self-sustaining. Like the earth-ship cities in the desserts out west. Except for the planters and raisers.” Kris said, nodding off to the machines working off in the distance, barely visible specks.

“And what do they smell like Kris?” asked Walter.

“They smell like NASA.” Kris said “Or all the private companies that sub-contracted for them. Big tech, like I said.”

And damned if the kid wasn’t right. Tracked vehicles, but also hardened tires that never needed inflating, farming machines that didn’t require people to run them, or even service them.

“Extra-planetary. Terra forming.” Kris said “Only something set them loose here.”

“I read about that Mars stuff. Seemed like a waste of money to me.” Walter said.

“And how do you feel about it now?” Kris asked.

“Pretty god damned good.” Walter said “And the morning I see an eight-point buck come strolling out of those saplings, I’ll feel even better.”

“I wonder…” said Kris, and just then came a sight neither person had ever expected to see again.

“Contrail.” Said Walter.

For a moment, both of them just stared up at the white line cutting across the sky in the distance.

“You don’t think it’s… you don’t think it’s a launch, do you?” Kris said, real horror showing in their voice.

“I’m a cook, remember?” Walter said. “But wouldn’t that be going straight up, or coming straight down?”

“Jesus, I hope so.” Kris said.

The contrail continued crawling along in front of them. The tunnel entrance was a couple of hundred meters away, and both people considered making a break for it.

“I don’t see Slim Pickens up there, so maybe we’ll be alright…” Kris said finally.

Walter had no idea what Kris was talking about, but he read the calming tone, and for some reason, it did him a world of good. The contrail seemed to be going slowly, slowly, just meandering, not re-entering.

“Should we hide?” Kris wondered aloud “I mean, who even is that?”

“That’s people,” said Walter “That… is… people.”

And it seemed like an idyllic summer day, all of a sudden. Blue sky with a few whispy-white clouds, and what was now obviously jet traffic of some kind.

And for a few short minutes, with the distant noise of people in the sky again, combined with the dull noise of the planters, the periodic raisers, and the ever-watchful robot dogs and toasters, all seemed right with the world.

Until a second thing appeared in the sky, moving much, much faster. In fact, it seemed to be more projectile than ship, and it moved straight towards the head of the contrail, before either person watching could react, or even say anything. The object intersected with the contrail, and the contrail split into two pieces, and eventually stopped. A boom from very far away reached the two watchers on the ground. But the bees kept buzzing, the birds took no notice, and the robot dogs only glanced at the contrail, then returned to watching the planters and raisers. The toasters did nothing at all.

And then, so far away it could barely be made out, Kris saw something, and pointed it out to Walter.

“There! You see that?” Kris asked, very excited.

“No. What? What do you see?” said Walter.

“Call me Legolas, if that ain’t a fucking parachute!”

“Legowhat? You see a chute?” Walter strained to see, and maybe thought he saw something slightly darker, maybe hanging in space.

“I see one parachute, coming down slowly.” Kris concluded, squinting and shading their eyes.

“You sure it’s not munitions? It’s not a fucking nuke or some bullshit?” Walter could make something out, but not what it was.

“I think I see legs.” Kris said “So probably not a nuke. With legs.”

“You ever think about the acorn?” Judy asked Todd, as they sat having tea in her office, for once.

“In what context?” Todd asked, trying not to slurp the unfamiliar but sweet-tasting herbal tea. It wasn’t something he usually drank, but the act of making it, and stirring it out, and warming your hands with it while you talked to a friend… it was routine, it was comforting, and he resolved to do more of it.

“In the context of machines. Of science.” Judy said. “I mean, the raisers, the planters, the toasters and the bot dogs. All very impressive. But what’s doing the real work out there? Where does the real magic come from?”

Todd thought about it for awhile.

“I don’t know how long an acorn can sit. Just waiting. And by accident, it rolls into a good place on the ground. Or a squirrel buries it.” He said.

“Or a chip-mummy.” Judy said.

“Yes, or a chip-mummy. I urge caution with that taxonomy, however.” Todd said.

“Duly noted. The point remains.” Judy concluded.

“And that is?” Todd prompted.

“All this tech. All this expense. All these… vestiges of civilization. They’re not jack shit, compared to an acorn. Or a squirrel, or a bee.” Judy said.

“Or a chip mummy.” Todd agreed.

The robot watch dog trotted off in the direction of what was now obviously a parachute.

Walter and Kris started off in that direction, Kris almost running. He looked back at Walter, who was walking at a decent pace, but definitely nowhere near breaking into a sprint.

“I get it,” Kris said, matching Walter’s pace “We walk down, and fuck ‘em all.”

Walter lifted his eyebrows and nodded, gaining a little more respect for Kris. They might be young, but they weren’t dumb. They caught on quick.

The parachutist was very dead. One leg was almost completely severed, and the pants were soaked in blood. The eyes stared blankly from out of the helmet, once Walter pushed up the dark visor. He searched through the pilot’s jacket pockets, and found only one document. It appeared to have been photocopied, and signed in a scrawling hand that couldn’t be deciphered.

“Pilot James Avery, Equal Soldier, New Model Army, Cheyenne Mountain.” Walter read aloud, squinting at the picture and words on the paper.

Kris looked at the photo too, which appeared to be a picture of the (now) dead man, shirtless, from mid-chest up, staring into the camera with a grim expression. He appeared to have a small bandage on his left shoulder, about where a branch of service tattoo would be.

“What is this, like a Military ID or something?” Kris asked.

“Or something.” Walter said.

“But it’s just a piece of paper. That doesn’t look like an official photo or anything. There’s no hologram. And what the fuck is a New Model Army?”

“I forget the word for it,” Walter searched his memory for the fancy term, and for some damn reason, it came to him at long last. “Oh yeah. That’s the word I was looking for. Fratricide.”

Murder of your brother, Kris thought to themself. That does not sound good.

“Maybe the New Model Army is what’s left of the big green machine, only with lots of murder and… settling of accounts.”

“Like a rebellion. A Mutiny.” Kris guessed.

“Yeah, like that.” Walter said “Only hungrier.”

Andy had lost weight. It seemed to him he was eating as much as before the blast, if not more. But now he went hiking quite a bit. He even did a lot of push-ups in his room, and some sit-ups. And he carried the knife he had altered, almost constantly now. People were starting to notice his stomach was flattening, and he went with a full beard, the way quite a few men below ground were doing these days.

Andrew Bunkowski had been “between girlfriends” before the blast, and although he dutifully went into town to the local watering hole for pool, or karaoke, or just to drink and sing along, there had been no real chance of female company for him. He had been searching for some church group (although he wasn’t a real believer,) or somewhere to volunteer just to meet people, make friends, and find a girlfriend. But the few times he did speak to women, they seemed unimpressed with his Communications job at IGSD 14. Why did a warehouse need a spokesperson, they asked him, and wasn’t it boring? Government can’t pay much, they would say, and wander away from him to talk to some bad boy at the jukebox, younger and meaner and prettier than he was.

Well I might not have much money, Andy thought to himself, but you’re all dead. And he couldn’t help but let a giggle escape. God, it was kind of funny. Survival of the fittest. Or survival of the good enough, as he had heard a biologist say once. And here he was, Andy Bunkowski, Last of the PR Men, and a prime specimen if ever there was one.

“Bunkowski, you fat fuck, how you doing buddy?” Jeff called after him, and Andy couldn’t help but hunch his shoulders, just a little bit, even though he tried not to.

The two men were alone in the slanted tunnel, and for some reason, this was the place, this was the time. Andy had been going up to the surface to get his hike in, and Jeff had said that shit about him being fat one time too many now. It was the last time Andy was going to listen to that. He turned to face Jeff.

“What did you say, asshole?” Andy asked, his voice suddenly loud in the tunnel.

“Hey, it’s just a joke.” Jeff said, his voice, dripping with scorn as he walked past Andy to the surface.

“You need to shut the fuck up!” Andy roared, and it echoed, up and down the tunnel.

Jeff laughed.

“Or what, you fat asshole? I rule this fucking place. I’ll be farming this place with those robots soon. No more birdies and squirrels. Crops, and sharecroppers, and you’ll be working for me, fatso.”

Jeff stood with his feet spread apart, and reached behind his back with his right hand.

“Fuck you.” Andy said, reaching into his own waist band and taking two steps forward.

To Andy’s amazement, Jeff pulled out a silvery pistol, glinting in their cell phone lights, and shot him once in the stomach.

The tunnel roared, and filled with fire from the revolver.

Old Andy would doubtless have recoiled, and dropped silently to the floor, to scream and bleed, to die.

But New Andy had sharpened this knife himself, meditating on how he would drive it into his enemy, the enemy that called him fat, and laughed at him. And Andy had repeated the same thing over and over again to himself while he sharpened the table knife on the cinder block. He visualized himself screaming “Eat This!” and stabbing his enemy, closing with him, and driving the blade deep. Many times, if necessary. But the shock of the gunfire, the noise, the blinding flash, the incredible piercing THUMP in his guts took those words from him. But he was in mid-attack, and he rode the fury of his last step into his hated enemy.

“FFFUCK!” He screamed, and drove the knife into Jeff’s guts, even lifting the man off the ground a little with the impact, then sending him hurtling backwards.

Jeff never dropped the pistol, didn’t squeeze off a negligent round, but his head hit with a clunk on the tunnel floor slanting up behind him. He took a moment to shake his head, and then the fire in his guts made him scream.

“Ahhhhh!” he yelled, looking at a masking tape wrapped knife sticking out of his guts, with the cell phone light in his left hand. “AHHHH!”

“You fucking stabbed me! You fat fuck! You fat fuuuuuckkk!”

Andy, who was lying face down, slowly looked up into the single cellphone bulb shining on him. His mouth was covered in blood, and his grimace turned into a smile, for just a moment. Then he opened his mouth to say something, some blood came out, and he died. The smile never ever left his lips, Walter noticed, when the crew came to bury him on the surface later that day.

“Fuck! You!” said Jeff, and he shot Andy three more times, in a fit of rage. It occurred to him he might need these bullets, these last two bullets, he could still control everyone with two bullets… So he stopped, and looked at the knife in his guts again.

“You fat fuck… you fat…” he said, and he saw that he was soaked in his own blood now. The knife was not stopping the flow, sealed up in the wound like a knife was supposed to. Instead, the wound pumped and pumped. He tried to put a little pressure on the wound around it somehow, but it was real agony to touch anything close to it, and… He just wanted to put the gun away, like under his shirt again, but he couldn’t manage to move it without more stabbing agony. He just put it down on the ground for a moment, and shone his cell phone light around, to see if anybody could help him, to see if he could hide the gun…

Probably best if I don’t move for a second… I’ll figure this out… I’ll figure this out… Jeff thought. He looked around and then put his head down again. He thought maybe he saw a cellphone light approaching from the surface, and he waited. But the light never came, and his guts hurt so much, he just put his head down, for just a minute…

Walter, Kris, James Edwards, Jason Richards (Copy Guy) and Hanna the truck driver took cellphone pictures and video, and then wheeled both bodies to the surface for burial. Belinda had tried to help, but took one look at the bodies and headed for the surface to vomit. She didn’t make it all the way, but cleared her head in the growing fields and forests after.

“Scooby fucking doo it ain’t.” said Kris, when they tossed the last shovel full on top of the two bodies. And although they each got a separate grave, the two bodies were buried right beside each other.

Nobody knew why these two had slaughtered each other. One had used a hidden pistol, and they had finally been able to pry a crudely sharpened table-knife out of that one’s guts, where it had actually caught in a rib, partially pulled out for another stab.

“And then there were 49 of us.” Walter said over the bodies, and nobody seemed much inclined to say anything else. They went below, and Walter took a couple of days before he could face mopping up the dried pools of blood in the slanted tunnel. Really, he just slopped bucket after bucket on it, and watched filthy water travel to the tunnel sides, to disappear in whatever drains it found. It was always dark, in the tunnel, anyway.

“I was hoping we were more Bonobo than Chimpanzee.” Todd Mason said to Judy Elizabeth Chong, and Trina, thinking it might be the final epitaph for humankind. He looked through the birdwatching binoculars that Belinda had supplied them with, and Judy reached out to take her turn with them.

A red cardinal was snatching bugs out of the air, and once again sectioning them up, while they finished dying.

“Maybe we’re all just sparks,” Trina said, “Big or little, long or short, we might be just sparks.”

“That sounds like a Kris Theory.” Judy said.

Trina waited for her turn next, while Judy looked through ground cover and saplings for fox, bird and squirrel. Nobody had seen a rabbit yet, and nobody was sure if they would. Rabbits alone had done for the blighted remains of Australia in the 2040’s. For awhile it seemed invasive wild boar would help keep the rabbits in check, but in the end, nothing had been able to stop that tide, and the ecosystem on that continent had crashed for good. And that was, of course, before the blast.

“Kris told me about Evolution.” Trina said, scanning the undergrowth. “It was one of those science fiction books.”

“Not Darwin?” Judy asked, hoping Trina wasn’t a closet old-testament creationist.

Trina gave her an impatient look.

“No, the title was Evolution. One of Kris’s science fiction books.”

That was a relief, Judy thought. Trina seemed to be a great source of traditional ecological knowledge, and something of an animist. She referred to animals as different peoples, and it really seemed to… fit their lonely situation here in the new fields above IGSD 14.

“The DNA. That’s what he said. The DNA spread to other planets. Not from space-ships. Just from rocks and stuff. And the animals, they’re all sparks, like us. Their consciousness. Some big, some small. And I said that sounded like a pretty good book.”

“Sounds like a pretty fair description. But Walter and Kris cooked up another theory too.” Todd said.

“About what?” Trina asked.

Todd motioned towards the planters and raisers working far, far away, some of them actually gone over the horizon now.

“The machines.” Todd replied. They all watched a raiser spray out more cones, nuts and seeds, and the inevitable flurry of squirrels issue out of it.

“They think it’s NASA.” Todd said, a bit sheepishly.

“And nucular, too?” Judy mocked, just a bit.

“Whaddya mean NASA? Like for space?” Trina asked.

“Yes.” Todd said “For space. For Mars. All this,” motioning with his chin again “was for terraforming Mars.”

“Jesus.” Said Judy.

“Yep…” said Trina, only like she was just considering the idea, and needed to say something. The three of them looked at the robots working or watching in the fields, and it seemed to make a crazy sort of sense.

“We got to start a new book,” Trina said after awhile. The other two looked at her.

“In the beginning, Karen typed Re-start.” Trina said, a little mischeviously, Judy thought.

“I don’t mind saying, I’m pretty scared.” Walter said “And I mostly don’t have time to be scared. Too busy.”

Todd and Kris sat with Walter, Judy, James Edwards and Jason Richards. They were in the arena, looking at the Mystery Machine, while various planters and raisers docked with it.

It had been awhile since the shoot-down, as it came to be known, and the tunnel slaughter had been yesterday.

“What’s on your mind, Walter?” Todd asked.

“I’m worried whoever shot that old boy down might coming looking for him. Or they might be looking down at us right now. Eye in the sky.” Said Walter.

“But you don’t think there’s a real military left…” Judy reminded him.

“Like you said, Judy, there’s no more tax base. No more tail. Only a few teeth. But they’re killing each other now, and there are… a ton of weapons from the bad old days still around.” Walter finished.

“Nukes.” Said James Edwards.

“You think they might use them on each other? But why?” asked Jason Richards, aware that the Copy Guy and the Janitor were being given a lot of weight in this discussion. How low the mighty had fallen, if the PhD in Math and the head of HR were actually willing to listen, instead of opine and dictate.

“To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” James Edwards said.

“And they’re starving, maybe.” Walter surmised.

“People didn’t act rationally before the blast. Why would they be rational after?” Jason Richards asked the group. And no one had a good answer.

“This may be it then.” Judy concluded. “The last of us might just end it all.”

“The great filter.” Todd said.

Nobody said anything after that. They had discussed the Fermi Paradox with Todd and Kris months ago, in the long nuclear winter that had followed the blast. Why was the galaxy, indeed, the universe, not teeming with life? Was it so infrequent, and so far apart, that no messages were ever sent or received between worlds? Or was there some inherent great filter, some limitation of life, some unavoidable self-destruction in intelligence?

At a time when there was no more horse and buggy, mankind had just shot one of its last airplanes out of the sky. It didn’t look good for intelligent life, in the long run.

“I say we play dead.” Kris said. Everyone just looked at Kris. Usually, Kris was not one to suggest courses of action. Kris came up with non-sequiturs, portents of doom, and referenced obscure characters from pages now incinerated, screens now melted away.

And it made a whole lot of sense. Nobody wanted to look like a nail to whatever hammers were still out there.

“Let’s hope anybody looking down at us will just see machines plowing fields.” Todd said.

Industrial capacity, thought Jason Richards. First thing they will want to wipe off the map. Then again, starving people might look at agricultural production as a good thing. Maybe. Maybe hunger would trump irrationality, just this once, and IGSD 14 would not be excised from the Earth with a nuclear dentist’s drill. From what Todd and Judy said, there would be no other game in town for decades, as far as forests and flowers went. And honey-bees, and fruit and nuts.

“I’ll be god damned…” said Walter, looking through the binoculars, as they sat on a couple of folding chairs he and Belinda had carried up the tunnel to the surface. They were duck-blinded in, crudely, with bushes and sapplings, on a small hill, where they could see for miles in all directions. It was rare to see a planting or raising machine these days. They seemed to range further and further afield all the time, stopping to recharge through their own entrance to IGSD 14.

Belinda took her turn at the binoculars (which she had donated from her birdwatching hobby.) At first she didn’t see what Walter was pointing to, off in the thicket. There was nothing but green and brown, but a flash of white suddenly caught her attention. It looked like… yes, it was!

A white-tailed buck, with nascent antlers, curious big brown eyes, and attentive, twitching ears and nose. And as Belinda looked longer, and began to smile, she saw three… no… four doe.

“What else are they cooking up downstairs, I wonder?” Belinda said.

Trina had finally found some evidence that IGSD 14 was not just some re-wilding project, that in fact, some care had been taken to provide for the human race.

She had been on a long amble (long for her, given the soreness of her old paws.) And there it had been, hidden in plain sight, just over a rise from Storage.

The three sisters. Fields and fields of corn, beans and squash, all growing intermingled. Enough so that any predation from deer, and yes, racoons, could barely make a dent.

Nobody actually saw a wolf that year, but Trina swore she heard them once, before winter closed in.

The people below ground tried to keep to their duck blind to observe the fields and saplings around them, but in groups of two or three, they would also head out during the day to scout, far, far afield. Or so it seemed, to people on foot. One scout trio even reported back they had seen a beaver colony, that had dammed up huge swaths of land beyond the horizon, although the dams were singularly unimpressive, made with saplings, mud, rocks and leaves instead of mighty fallen trunks.

Crow and eagle were seen in the skies above Storage. People, being people, still buried a bit of garbage now and again, and it looked like… well… it seemed a trio of bear cubs had dug up a bit of the tastier stuff. And in the fall, a young man and woman reported back that they had seen fish jumping in the huge expanse of wetland the beaver were creating. From the growing list of animals and birds, ducks and geese were noted, and once again the sound of insects and frogs filled the night air. Interestingly, nobody had yet reported a single mosquito.

“I wonder if we will ever get to the stars, after all?” Kris asked Jason Richards.

“Well, there’s still robots on the moon, and Mars…” Richards said “although I doubt the Luna colony has anybody left.”

Kris nodded. They had thought of this. How long could the Luna colony feed itself, without re-supply? Kris knew the colony had been running self-sufficiency trials, but who knew how that had gone? And were any of the few dozen inhabitants of that colony doing exactly what the people of Storage were doing? Were they playing dead, on the moon? Or were they just plain dead, no playing involved?

Nobody transmitted a thing from IGSD 14. They all tried to listen in to radios, and cell phones on the surface, but not so much as a walkie-talkie was keyed, not after the shoot down.

And not a peep was heard, on radio, or cell phone. For all the freakish planning that had gone into IGSD 14, there was not a single satellite phone to be found. No scouts went anywhere near the wreckage of the shot-down jet. In fact, the people from Storage did not even bury the body. At first, they had been afraid to bring the body back, or anything from the remnants of the plane, lest there be some tracking mechanism. But eventually, there developed almost a superstitious dread of the site. The people in Storage could almost feel crosshairs hovering over them, as if vengeful old gods were ready to strike them down. As if the madness of the human race was left over, watching them, waiting for any excuse to finish what an asteroid had started.

One of the people under the ground died quietly in the night, of a hear attack, and another lingered for two days with an apparent appendicitis.

And so there were forty-seven.

The bodies of these two were buried deep, and away from where the two mad men who murdered each other lay. It wasn’t exactly consecrated ground, where the heart attack and the appendicitis lay, but someone stuck a little wooden cross in the ground. A star of David was added later, and someone put in the crescent moon six days after. None of this could be seen from space, however, and people transplanted flowers that thrived in the new, tiny graveyard.

“I have a surprise for you, Walter.” Said Belinda. She was sleeping more and more these days, and didn’t seem to remember most of the people, most of the time. But sometimes the tide came in, as she would say, and she got out all the talking she could, while she could.

“The watch dogs brought me three of these, and I gave one to Judy.”

Belinda brought forth two kittens, one a ginger, and one a tabby, holding them up like they had won prizes at a fair. She also provided “formula,” which she said the watch dogs delivered with the kittens.

Walter had no words. He took the tabby in his lap, and stroked it, while it tried to eat his index finger, then purred, then fell fast asleep.

“Can I keep him?” Walter couldn’t stop himself from saying.

“Yes. I was going to let you have the one you wanted, so yes, you can keep him.” Belinda said.

Walter wiped a little tear from the corner of his eye, and his voice was a little thick when he said “I don’t know as we have any mice left for you, boy.”

And so Boy the Cat came to live with Walter the Caretaker, and wander the halls of IGSD 14 on his own recognizance. He never caught a mouse that Walter saw, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there somewhere, deep in storage, for as Trina had said, they were a quiet people.

The people in Storage didn’t have any laws, or system of justice. The two murderers among them seemed to have sentenced each other to death, and there was no point in stealing anything where food and supplies were so plentiful. Walter had hidden the pistol, with two bullets left in it, somewhere up there (he would always point to the ceiling as he said that.) For defence, the people under the ground had decided playing dead was the best policy, and so they did. If anyone organized ever walked up on them, they decided on an “open city” policy, lest invaders damage or destroy the work of the planting and raising machines.

Maybe these policies would bite them on the buttocks, they said, but Storage seemed more likely to be destroyed remotely from missile fire, than a miraculous crossing of the ashen wastes all around IGSD 14 by survivors. If some kind of feral pack of humans attacked, they could always shut the blast doors, and leave the robots (dogs and toasters especially) to defend themselves and their private entrance. But what kind of feral humans could have survived more than a year and a half, with no food or water? And how could they get to Storage? There were no roads anymore. As far as anyone in Storage knew, there were no humans left alive above ground anywhere.

No, if anyone ever showed up at their door, it was more likely to be an organization much like their own; overprovisioned and underpopulated.

The chief hobby amongst the people in Storage seemed to be going out and getting cell phone photographs, or even short video clips, of new animals as they emerged in the biome blowing up around IGSD 14. The machines had gone to some new kind of system, of planting trees and plants, and spraying mysterious green stuff in thinner density now. It wasn’t one tree per kilometer, or anything so sparse, but there was now room to roam between where things were planted, or where animals were raised.

Karen played with her puppy in the furrows where the beans, squash and corn were growing. Later, she moved over to the apple trees, and picked up after the puppy. People actually collected some of the apples off the ground now and again, and it wouldn’t do to have doggy doo stuck to the produce.

The pup’s name was Dunedin, and although he was no breed in particular, there seemed to be a lot of poodle in him. He had that poodle run, where they kind of vaulted in an arc, rather than the flat-out run of other dogs. He had some curly hair, and was more concerned with what people said, or did, than he was with hunting, or dominating the other pups he would play with.

Karen had called him Dunedin, after where her daughter had been an elementary school teacher. For although her heart was broken, and always would be, she wanted more than anything to remember her daughter.

The first litter of pups had come trooping along after a robot guard dog a month previous, already weaned, and clearly imprinted on the robot. Still, the pups had taken to human company instinctively, as animals that had shared the Earth with people for… well, nobody really knew. Probably long before farming. Perhaps long before people were completely… human.

Dunedin had a quick piddle on her foot, and despite herself, Karen laughed a bit. No respect, it seemed, from the puppy, even though Karen was generally credited with typing Re-start, and so, saving the soul of humanity.

People had been alive after the blast, down deep in storage. They had lost two of their number to suicide, then bizarrely, two more to murder. The heart attack and ruptured appendix seemed more natural, a part of life, although one they hoped to address with some kind of approximate medical training in the future. But without the animals, without the base of millions of insects, without the plants straining up to catch the sun’s rays, humanity had been without hope.

Jason Richards’ pup ran up from further afield in the apple orchard, and jumped on top of Dunedin.

“Market!” Called Richards “Market, where are you? Oh! It’s Dunedin! It’s your best fwend!”

Like most of the people below ground, Richards observed the tradition of baby-talking the pups, including the use of childish grammar errors. Kris even re-popularized an ancient saying of “I cans haz cheeseburger!” for use with both kittens and pups. In fact, it became so popular that Belinda started saying it to the deer that wandered the apple orchards, although Trina would shake her head to hear it.

“You watch out for those bucks next spring.” Trina would warn Belinda, who promised to knit one particular buck an antler cozy when the time came. Belinda seemed to have periods where she found speech particularly difficult, and Trudy told others quietly to watch out for Belinda, in case she had early Alzheimers, or some other form of dementia. Although the people living under the ground were much further away from “the edge” as Judy called it, they were still a lot more susceptible to the vagaries of nature than they had been before the blast. Nobody had built cabins above ground yet, although a few sod structures, disguised with maskirova against satellites, had sprung up. The people in storage would never forget the time they thought they would drown, or the airplane shoot down, or even the two residents that had stabbed and shot each other to death. They wanted to be ready to leave storage, without so much as a spare handkerchief (as Kris put it,) if the need arose.

It didn’t seem there would be any more walk-outs, at least not in the way that two people had despaired during the long nuclear winter, and walked out because they couldn’t see any hope. Now, there might be a few who would walk out, just to have more space, and work some land of their own. For although it was not widely known, due to the quite frequent miscarriages amongst humans, there was a pregnancy in storage. Two of the young people were looking forward to whatever offspring came their way. And they did not imagine that the child would be content to stay down in storage, when trees above were growing, and maybe the odd wolf would howl, and there might or might not be something called Buffalo out there.

No one spoke about the obvious end of the human race. Except for Kris, who privately re-iterated that they had read from Phillipe Jose Farmer that the minimum number of people needed to keep the human race going was five thousand. And that was breeding population. Kris refused to call them “breeders,” and found it enormously funny when anybody did so. Kris said it was a term from the bad old days, and they didn’t want to see it make a come back.

So as Dunedin and Market wrestled in the apples, to see just whose ears were the chewiest, nobody noticed the shape descending upon the orchard until it was almost too late.

“Hello!” called the strange old man in a scarf, sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap. He waved, and then gave the balloon a little more gas to slow its descent to a bare spot next to the apple orchard.

Dunedin and Market ran around and around the basket barking, as the balloon settled, and the man held up his hands in either enthusiastic greeting, or insistent surrender, or both.

Karen and Jason stared at the man open-mouthed, shocked at seeing a human who didn’t live under the ground with them.

“Are these… puppies?” asked the man, hands still held high, but staring at the two fools running circles around his basket.

“Yes,” said Karen.

“That’s Dunedin. And mine is called Market. Because he’s insane,” said Jason.

“I’m Ed.” said the man in the balloon basket “Are we cool? Can I put my hands down?”

“Sure,” said Karen.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Jason.

“What kind of puppies?” asked Ed, like they were all meeting at the dog park, before an asteroid had scrubbed the planet’s surface dead, and frozen the wreckage.

“More poodle than you would think,” said Karen.

“They must have thought we needed the company more than the protection.” Jason concluded, as the puppies returned to ‘rassling and recreationally chewing each other’s faces.

“They?” Asked Ed.

“NASA, we think,” said Karen.

“What?” asked Ed.

“Ok, we don’t know. Probably a lot of subcontractors. Where are you from?” asked Jason.

“Pittsburgh.” said Ed, and then shrugged “Sorry. No more Pittsburgh. Intergovernmental Storage Depot 16. Underground.”

“My god, we didn’t know… we didn’t know if there was anybody else… except for Cheyenne Mountain…” said Karen.

“We’re IGSD 14,” said Jason, and he held out his hand to shake. Ed, still in the basket, gave him a firm handshake, then shook with both hands, then the two men hugged, and all three laughed and cried.

“We found four more places, but none of them… like this…” said Ed, while he folded up the balloon, and hauled it into one of the sod huts covered in bush and trees.

Karen helped him a little bit with the fabric, and then all three of them pulled the large basket into the shadow of the hut.

“Everyone is still underground… some ferns are growing, some saplings, but mostly mushrooms, and you know, mold and crap.”

“And the map shows dozens of places, you said?” Jason asked.

“Hundreds,” said Ed “We’ve been to four, but we also found two that were sealed up tight, out west. We figure nobody was there when the asteroid hit. Too early in the morning. And any buildings up top were gone, where overnight security probably was. We had to geo-locate the blast doors, and we couldn’t get those open.” Ed finished.

“We didn’t know. We didn’t know until the jet got shot down, that anybody else had survived.” Karen said.

“And like I said, it looks like the military… kind of… ate itself. Like a mutiny. You have to be really careful. I mean, I don’t think you should fly around here…” Jason said.

“That’s horrible.” Ed said “You would think they could hold it together, more than anyone. But I guess it makes sense. We… we had a fire. This guy Mayworth, he riled some people up about the New Jesus, and the Beast, and… well, they burned us about one-third out. That’s when we got the balloon going, some kind of National Weather Service storage. We had a couple of ultra-lights, but the batteries won’t charge. So here we are. Like Dorthy headed back to Kansas.” Ed said.

“You’ll have to meet Kris. They’re our expert in books, movies, and ancient nerd.” said Karen.

“How do your machines run, doing all the planting? It’s like, miles and miles out there. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it from the air!”

“We have no idea,” said Jason “we’re like children at Santa’s workshop. It’s… a little terrifying.”

“You mind if we take a few apples? We haven’t seen any apple trees…” Ed said.

“I think diversification might be a good strategy, at this point,” Jason agreed.

“And this stuff was for Mars?” Ed asked.

“We’re just spitballing,” Karen said “probably not the moon. Too floaty.”

“So we were ready by accident.” Ed said.

“Battlestar Galactica.” said Karen.

“What?” Ed asked.

“Come on, let’s go meet Kris.” said Jason.

“Is Kris your leader?” Ed asked dubiously.

“Kris is our nerd.” said Karen, respectfully.

The End...