The Final Day (After, #3)(6)

“Behold,” Paul said, still grinning, and with a flourish, he clicked the On button for the fourteen-inch monitor and then the computer.

The screen flashed to life, the room filled with light as the screen warmed up and came into focus, displaying the Apple logo in glorious RGB color.

John actually stepped back in amazement, almost feeling like some tribal primitive, a flash memory of the teddy bear characters in one of the Star Wars episodes, which he hated since militarily it was so absurd, going near crazy with wonder and then worshipful awe at the sight of C-3PO, floating around the tribal gathering thanks to Luke using the Force.

“My God, it works?” Forrest gasped.

“Hell yeah, it works!” Paul cried. “Watch this!”

He put an old five-and-a-half-inch floppy disk into one of the disk drives; it started to whirl and click, and all three stood silent as the seconds passed, and then a tinny familiar tune barely audible echoed from the monitor’s speaker and the logo for Pac-Man flashed on to the screen.

“Oh my God,” John whispered in awe, a deep, almost tearful nostalgia filling him. When Elizabeth was five and recovering from a long bout of the flu, his wife, Mary, had pulled their old Apple computer out of the attic, set it up by Elizabeth’s bed, and entertained her for a long rainy spring day with Mary’s favorite games the two of them had played while they were students at Duke.

He had written his master’s thesis on that computer, needing over twenty floppy disks to store his paper on proto-computers created for gunnery control prior to World War I. He was the envy of many students and even some of the professors who were still on electric typewriters or just beginning the transition to the first IBM Micros, as they were then called. Just running the final spelling check had taken several days, which at the time seemed like a miracle versus having to pay some English major to manually check your work one final time and then hand type it yet again.

Using a brand-new, expensive 2400-baud modem, he had actually managed typing in lengthy string codes via a system called the Internet to try to access data from a British library without success, but it was still a fascinating adventure at the time. Printing it out had taken half a day on their tractor-feed dot-matrix printer. He could still recall the speed and buzzing sound of it as it glided across the page, a momentary pause as the tractor feed advanced the paper up one line, and then the printer head running backward across the page.

“Mind if I join you three?”

John looked back to the darkened staircase and forced a smile of welcome. It was Ernie Franklin, the man who saved his life during the final confrontation with Dale Fredericks. He was grateful, of course, but at times Ernie could be more than a little domineering.

“I sent word to Ernie about my find,” Paul whispered.

“Why?” Forrest asked.

“He worked for IBM back in the days of Apollo and the shuttle—figured the old guy might know a thing or two.”

Ernie stepped up to the workbench, gazed at the screen for a moment, and snorted. “It would have to be one of those damn Apples. Damn toys.”

“I did write my master’s thesis on one,” John retorted.

“And then they screwed everyone over when Jobs dropped the operating system and went running off with those dinky nine-inch-screen Macs. We laughed our asses off over all you Apple fanatics stuck with the IIe system.”

“Wait a minute,” Paul interjected. “I asked you over here to explain something, Ernie. We can argue about which system was better later.”

John nodded, looking back at the image on the screen of the Pac-Man character, the tinny theme playing over and over.

“Could you turn that damn music off?” Ernie asked. “My daughter was addicted to that damn game, and it drove me crazy.”

Paul looked at the machine, not sure what to do, and Ernie just stepped forward and flipped the switch, turning it off. All three gasped as the screen went dark, as if he had pulled a curtain back down over a returning to the past from before the war.

“If it turned on before, it will again,” Ernie replied calmly, “but before we do that.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flashlight and clicked it on.

If anyone in their entire community was prepared for life after the Day, it was Ernie Franklin and his family. After more than three years, they were still living off long-term rations stockpiled years earlier. His all-terrain Polaris was still running, and John had learned not to ask just how much gas he still had stored and treated against degrading. The old guy was always proud to show off his solar-powered flashlights like the one he had flicked on now, and without bothering to ask permission of Paul, he popped the lid off the top of the old—one could even say antique—computer.

This basement was Paul’s domain. John waited for a response from Paul, the young man who had designed and brought back to life the electrical system of the community, but Hawkins said nothing, obviously deferring.

Ernie peered inside the guts of the old Apple like a dentist poking around in the mouth of a victim in the chair, grunting with disapproval.

“Inexcusable,” Ernie whispered. “You educators never knew how to take care of a computer. Look at all this dust, and what the hell is this?”

He pointed down at the motherboard, and the three leaned forward to look over his shoulder.

“Looks like dog or cat hair! This is a mess. For now, leave it off; I’ll take it back home and blow it out.”