The Final Day (After, #3)(8)
“Because they were all wired in and got zapped by the full overload,” Ernie stated.
“Ernie, a question?” John asked.
“Sure, what?”
“You of all people, didn’t you think to stick a computer into your basement inside one of those faraday cages folks were later talking about?”
Ernie looked off, now obviously embarrassed and caught off guard, his silence answer enough.
John remembered how a few months before everything hit the fan, how Paul and others with the IT team for the school had finished remodeling the computer center because the school was creating a new major in cybersecurity. The old machines, in an age where a computer aged faster than Detroit-built cars of the 1980s, were just simply tossed into the Dumpster after the hard drives were downloaded for anything of value and then wiped clean.
Truly a throwaway world that now seemed a thousand years away.
The fluorescent light overhead began to hum and flicker.
Ernie quickly reached behind the Apple and pulled the plug, the screen going dark.
“This power supply isn’t clean at all,” he growled, glancing over at Paul.
“What do you mean, not clean?” Forrest asked.
“Just that.” Paul sighed. “Someone throws a switch on in the hospital, it sucks up a few kilowatts, the voltage to the rest of the grid fluctuates, and that can be death, especially for these older machines. It’s exactly the thing that can kill this computer while we’re gazing in wonder at it. I’ll bring some surge protectors along.”
He hesitated.
“All right,” Ernie sighed, “I got a couple of portable solid-state solar-charging battery systems at home. Gives clean, steady juice for electronics—I’ll bring that over as well to power these computers.”
“You got one of those?” John asked sharply. “Nice to know now.”
Ernie shrugged. “Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts used to say.”
“But you didn’t have a computer stashed off, did you?”
“You accusing me of something, John?” Ernie snapped back.
John held up a hand in a calming gesture. “No, but still?”
“Look, we all got caught with our pants down in different ways. My wife Linda kept complaining that I was trashing up the basement with cast-off computers, so, like everyone else, I tossed them out when I upgraded every year or two.”
He sighed, and John could see that the memory troubled him. The old guy had most likely spent many a night kicking himself with that memory of all the computers he had once owned and then thrown out rather than storing away. Again, the throwaway society before the Day. At least some of the old-time ham radio operators had hung on to those precious devices and had them stashed away “just in case.” Some even took pride in the niche hobby of actually operating old ham radios with vacuum tubes rather than “newfangled transistors.”
Such a lost world, John thought sadly, looking at the darkened screen of the computer, symbolic of all that they had allowed to slip out of their grasp. America in an instant plunged into darkness and wondering at this moment if the few small flickering lights of hope were going out now as well.
He remembered Sir Edward Grey’s heartfelt cry when midnight struck on a warm August evening in London of 1914, and war with Germany had come to pass. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
In a way, how prophetic his words had been. That first war ending a hundred years of peace. The prophetic H. G. Wells predicting it truly was the beginning of the end, complete with atomic weapons. The steady, peaceful advance of the Edwardian era did indeed die in the trenches of Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme, with civilization taking a step backward to unleash poison gas, flamethrowers, bombs tumbling from the sky into undefended cities, and millions tearing at each other in the squalid mud of the trenches in primal rage with knives and bare fists. It led to a second war of death camps and brilliant flashes of light delivered on August mornings, thirty-one years after Edward Grey spoke and H. G. Wells uttered his prophecies, as entire cities were incinerated in a blinding flash.
Then the long years of what was called a Cold War, civilized nations ready to unleash a thousand such flashes of light over their enemies, no one realizing at first that when they created those first such bombs, it was not the blast, the fire as hot as the heart of the sun, that could destroy; it was something subtle, a mere microsecond of a massive gamma ray burst ignited out in space, that as it raced to the earth’s surface at the speed of light would free off electrons in the upper atmosphere’s oxygen and nitrogen—and as it did so building up to an overwhelming static discharge that could cripple the greatest nation in the history of humanity and leave 90 percent of its citizens dead two years later.
It was something he had long ago learned not to allow himself to dwell on too much, for surely it would drive him to impotent despair. Here he had been asking Ernie the how and why of this one computer surviving when the far greater question still was how and why his entire nation, his entire world, had allowed the unthinkable to happen. Who was responsible? Surely someone must have known it was coming. And with that coming, his youngest daughter became marked to die.
“John, are you okay?”
It was Becka, who was standing behind him, reaching up to touch him on the shoulder with a soothing gesture. He realized there were tears in his eyes, and he forced a smile.