The future, p.2
The Future, page 2
Will, her late husband, sat in the wooden easy chair facing the lake view, watching her. He said: Tough decision?
“It’s alright for you,” she said. “You’re dead. You go where I go.”
I would have gone where you went even if I were still alive, he said. Even to the ends of the earth.
She smiled at the empty chair. It wasn’t that she didn’t know he was dead. She wasn’t crazy, after all. He was just a hard habit to give up.
The Action Now! event had been Ellen’s idea. Well, not quite her idea. Albert Dabrowski, the ousted founder of her company, had made a huge donation to Action Now!, so she had to give a bigger one and go along to the event to make it look good.
Will would have put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head and said: “A sop to your conscience?” She’d have shrugged and he’d have said: “I prefer your conscience sopping.”
She found herself still talking to him, able to fill in his side of the conversation almost precisely. Sometimes in their house she saw him at the foot of the stair, his long body and the folded easel of his angular legs disappearing into the dining room as she walked down the steps. He’d been proud of his legs—at sixty-four, he’d still had good knees for hiking. On the day he died, his knees had been doing just fine.
“My mind is going in circles,” she said. “I’m frightened.”
Will understood. Of course she was frightened. No one wanted the world to end.
The notification had information about the protocol. She’d written the protocol herself, a while back. In the event of disaster.
“Ellen,” said the protocol on her SmartPin, “do not pack all your belongings. Only take small items of sentimental value. Your needs will be provided for.”
What about me? said Will. Am I a small item of sentimental value?
Ellen told him to fuck off.
“Have the kids’ protocols been activated?” asked Ellen.
The SmartPin responded: “Your children have been notified. They are on their way to the transport.”
“Even Badger?” said Ellen.
Will gave Ellen a sharp look. Badger was their youngest, their nonbinary child with a radical political stance. Badger had mentioned several times that they did not approve of this whole system, of warnings and private jets and hidden safe bunkers in New Zealand.
The protocol was to make no phone calls in this situation. It was no use having a safe and comfortable place to ride out a global catastrophe if everyone knew you were leaving and could follow you. Get the doors sealed before anyone knew you’d left—that was the plan. Still.
“Call Badger,” said Ellen.
An agony of thudding heartbeats before Badger answered the call. Their face, projected onto the wall of the suite, was very close to their screen—they never wanted their mother to see where they were. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is.
Still, Badger looked afraid. This gave Ellen a certain grim satisfaction. See? Your mother still does know something worth knowing.
“Are you coming?” said Ellen. “Did you get the alert?”
Badger’s brow creased. Oh, that little crease they’d had since they were a day-old baby suckling noisily at the nipple. That frown of intense engagement.
“Mom? There’s a car outside. I don’t know what to do.”
Oh, how Ellen had missed this. Being a mom to Badger had always been tricky, prickly. But her baby needed her.
“Get in the car. OK?”
“OK.”
A pause. Then, at last, the depths of the frown.
“Can I bring…”
“You can bring two people. Tell them to leave their phones behind, OK? Anvil Clips, Torcs, anything. Tell them it’s a vacation. Tell them I’m making you do it and you hate me. OK?”
Badger breathed out a long sigh. Their sweet freckles were scattered under their eyes like stars.
“OK. I’ll see you, right?”
“Less than a day, darling. I promise.”
Ellen Bywater had regained herself. Before the car arrived, she sat in front of the mirror, applied her lipstick, and blotted it. She believed in doing these things herself.
Will said: You did your own makeup for our wedding. Nineteen eighty-nine and you painted the whorls of gold, red, and yellow around your own young eyes. I watched you. Like an artist with the fine camel-hair brushes and the little golden pots. Like a priestess.
“I looked like I’d been punched hard in the nose,” she said. But after all, it’s life that punches you till your face is unrecognizable.
“You’re going to miss seeing me go all to wrinkles,” she said to Will.
Will said, You already had wrinkles when I died, remember? I kissed your wrinkles.
“Sometimes you made fun of them.”
Sometimes we made fun of each other. That’s how we were. I always believed in you.
Ellen looked at Will, who was not there. What was it they’d believed in, after all?
Sometimes, she knew what he would have said as if he’d been right there. And sometimes she had to figure it out—she hated these moments, when she knew he was really gone.
At last Will said: You’ve always done your best for your shareholders and your employees.
There wasn’t much packing to do. She took her watch. She took her topaz sweater and the gold necklace that always looked so good against it. She took her laptop, her phone, and her Medlar Torc. The idea of packing was itself a small item of sentimental value.
Although it was strictly against the protocol, Ellen checked the big survivalist site, Name The Day. If anything was out there, if anyone knew the big one was coming, it’d be somewhere on the site. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Troops in the South China Sea. A pipeline explosion in eastern Europe. The same old prepper rants. Those people didn’t know that anything had boiled over. Still, somewhere out there, something was happening. Alarms don’t go off for no reason. Somewhere in the world, a situation that used to be just about under control was slipping into “not under control at all.” A chain reaction. Somewhere in the jungle, there was a tiger.
lenk
It was dark already at the airfield. Lenk Sketlish’s bone-conducting mini-pods were playing the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Inside his skull, the Beatles had broken up, the ’60s were over, violent revolution was in the air, and now, anything could happen. He felt alive, he thought, truly for the first time in his life. The night drive out, the music beating in his head, the future was just moments away. This was what he’d planned for. This was the midnight beginning. This was the smooth running-out of the old world and the birth of the new.
Except when he got to the hangar, Zimri Nommik was there with his nervy smile, and Ellen Bywater was stabbing at her phone and saying, “There’s no reception. I haven’t had reception since we left the convention.”
She was panicking already. He’d known it. She’d never thought this was really going to happen. She wasn’t going to last a month after the end of civilization.
The nearest plane to the conference was one of Zimri’s private jets. The pilot knew the same story as the ground crew, the same story that would eventually go to the press. The three tech CEOs were in closed session for negotiations. “High-level synergies between technological infrastructures leading to carbon-saving measures.” This plane wouldn’t take them directly to the destination but to a nearby staging post where Lenk and Ellen would be met by their own aircraft and taken on. Get out quickly and you’ve got all the time you need to make sure you’re not followed. Zimri’s plane, of course, would turn off its transponder as soon as they were out of radar range. No sense letting anyone follow you to your actual bunker. One of Zimri’s own survival locations had recently been blown by some fucking internet Name The Day journalist. That was always the risk.
The plane door opened and the stairs lowered themselves to the ground with a reassuring hiss. They’d never even meet the pilot.
“There’s Wi-Fi on the plane,” said Zimri as they climbed the steps. Lenk could see Zimri already calculating and recalculating odds. Did it give him any advantage that it was his plane? Was it somehow a disadvantage? There’d be no more of this in the new world, no more neuroses of abundance. There would be a simpler, purer life.
Lenk’s bone conductors flipped over to Goats Head Soup and the guitar rolled him on into the future. It would be soon now, and while a large part of his mind knew this could still be, on the scale of things, a minor apocalypse, at least for them—a year or five of inconvenience and business opportunities—Lenk found himself at peace. The plane took off as smooth as a long drink of cool water. In one way of looking at it, it wasn’t them leaving at all. Earth peeled away from the plane, the life they’d known rolling itself up and putting itself away. They weren’t leaving the world, the world was leaving them.
PART 2 the thing that is coming
extract from Name The Day survivalist forum
sub-board: ntd/strategic
›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status. OneCorn has made 4,744 posts and received 14,829 thumbs-up.
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›› ArturoMegadog
@OneCorn: Really. You’re on your bullshit again?
You’re going to get flamed. Again.
Is this about the billionaire bunker thing?
Do I get to hate on Lenk Sketlish?
OK. You’ll still get flamed doing this on /strategic. But continue. I think I’m the only one reading anyway.
Sooooo… who’s up for a little… BIBLE STUDY?
I am on my interesting historical lessons, thank you.
Burning is the inevitable fate of anyone who tells people stuff worth hearing. Believe me. Today’s lesson is on the theme: When is it time to go?
It’s not not about billionaires owning intense survival bunkers.
No one has ever been able to stop you hating on Lenk Sketlish, AM. But yeah. This is relevant. It’s about very powerful people and it’s about social responsibility. OK?
Alright.
Genesis chapter 18, loosely translated
CW: sexual assault, murder, destruction of property, explosions, terror, incest, rains of fire, pillars of salt, violent death, blasphemy, God
So the Lord looked at Sodom and it was not a great place to live, work, or raise a family. The people of Sodom were cruel, they took whatever they wanted, they had stopped caring for strangers or the poor. They were genuinely disgusting.
Sodom was a place that embodied everything that was wrong with all of this “civilization” and “progress” that the humans had been getting up to lately. The Lord looked closely and had some strong negative feelings about it all.
But the Lord had recently been having serious and useful conversations with a person, Abraham. More than any of the other humans, Abraham ended up surprising him with the depth of his moral thinking. You’d think God wouldn’t be interested in comments on his work, but in fact, even in Genesis he’s soliciting opinions and adjusting what he’s doing.
That’s how the books of discussion of the Talmud work too. They’re essentially layers of commentary, scholars arguing with each other back and forth through time and across the centuries. Arguably, soliciting opinions and adjusting what you’re doing is the sign of some pretty advanced thinking. Arguably that’s what God is modeling for us through the work of creation.
›› ArturoMegadog is at Shelf-Stable status.
Well I will take that as a compliment and thank you kindly, ma’am.
So: involved in the process and interested in feedback, the Lord let Abraham in on his plans.
He said: “Sodom and Gomorrah. You would not believe the cries of anguish that are rising up to me from those places. They don’t treat each other with kindness, not even respect, not even basic human dignity. So I’m thinking: Destroy them. Smite them, wipe them out. Fire and brimstone. My wrath, my friend, is kindled.”
The Lord waited for Abraham’s response. He was nervous.
Now it seemed clear to Abraham that the Lord had just said something pretty self-contradictory. Because if you want people to treat each other with human dignity, shouldn’t you start by… treating them all with human dignity? But it’s tough to point out this kind of thing even to your boss. Let alone the Owner Of All Things, the Maker Of Heaven And Earth. Eventually, Abraham said:
“You’re thinking of sweeping the whole place away? The good people with the bad?”
And the Lord was like: “Yeah! Justice!”
Abraham put his fingertips to his forehead and said: “OK but, just bear with me, what if there are fifty good people in Sodom? Would you destroy the whole city? You are supposed to judge everyone fairly.”
This was a great point and to be honest the Lord hadn’t thought about it before. That was why he liked talking to Abraham—the guy came up with ideas that were right on target. Like a kid, holding their parents to good values.
The Lord said: “OK, you know. You’re right. If there are fifty good people in Sodom, I’ll forgive the whole city. Yeah, if there are fifty, that’s what I’ll do.”
Now, “forgive everyone” vs. “smite everyone” might not have been quite what Abraham was getting at with the whole “judge everyone fairly” idea.
›› DanSatDan is at One Tin O’Beans status.
ABRAHAM AND GOD? What is this religious bullshit? I didn’t come here for God shit. Got enough of that from my folks, no thank you. I thought this sub was about serious survival strategies not this garbage. Go to ntd/endofdays if this is your thing
But—like you do with a difficult boss—Abraham spoke quietly and respectfully. “Honestly, who am I to say anything to you, I’m literally dust and ashes and you’re the Lord but OK, how about this, if there are just five people missing from that fifty, you wouldn’t still destroy the whole city, would you? If there were forty-five, you’d save the city, right?”
The Lord had to agree that was right.
And Abraham went on. Like he had something incredibly vital to demonstrate to the Lord of Hosts. Like there’s something infinitely precious about literally every human life and you can’t just bomb whole cities even if almost everyone there is living a lifestyle you disagree with.
“You’d save the city for forty,” he said, then “You’d save the city for thirty. You’d save the city for twenty. You’d save the city for ten.”
There was a really important point here; Abraham was arguing against collective punishment. But from the text it doesn’t seem as if the Lord really understood this idea yet.
And Abraham was saying something else. Something about how even if you do happen to be incredibly powerful, you can’t just walk away when things go bad. That’s not what your power is for. You can’t just go “screw it, this was a mistake, I’ll get rid of it.” If you’ve got power, use it to help.
›› ArturoMegadog is at Shelf-Stable status.
@OneCorn: told you.
“OK, you’re right,” said the Lord, “I’d save the city for the sake of ten good people.” The Lord was on a learning journey, and you know that’s no bad reason to have created humanity.
@DanSatDan: Kid, back off. Before you get yourself into a flamewar… try to work out who you’re insulting. Go and check out OneCorn’s bestof, OK? OneCorn does this stuff sometimes. Like… experimenting with the form. Putting fragments together that don’t seem like they go together. There’s usually a point to it in the end. OneCorn knows her stuff. Trust.
Anyway it turned out there really weren’t ten good people in the city. There was just one barely adequate man—Lot, Abraham’s nephew—and his family. The Lord was tired of talking to Abraham, that guy was smart but he made his head ache. And so the Lord decided to rain down fire and ash upon the cities of the plains.
But I mean that is the question really, isn’t it? Is it OK to decide to give up on a place? How little goodness is too little? When is there no future left?
zhen
1. seasons time: it’s your time
In Singapore on a sweltering June day a few months before the end of the world, Lai Zhen—a Top Fifty Creator on the Name The Day forum and ranked number one for expertise in technological survival—was shopping for electronics in the Seasons Time Mall when someone tried to shoot her.
Coincidentally, Zhen had already made a video called “What Goes through Your Mind When You’re Being Shot At” and 6.3 million people had watched it. In the video, she was wry and witty, talking to the camera as her assistant fired the gun; she moved fast in a forward roll, staying low to the ground.
She said: Remember that shock will make it hard to focus.
She said: You’ll freeze, you’ll have to fight against your instincts.
She said: Remember that you might piss your pants.
She grinned.
No really, she said. This is serious.
The top comment was: “hella survival instinct girl.” It had 15,272 likes. Lai Zhen had survived the Fall of Hong Kong and seventeen months in an offshore British refugee camp. She spoke about these things with the detached and ironized humor, the expertise and the only-slightly-emotionally-broken style that was by then the popular tone to talk about the end of civilization. Zhen was thirty-three years old, and an increasingly survival-focused world of constantly unfolding crises was eager for what she had to offer.
But the symbol and the real are never the same. A friend shooting blanks for a video to drive engagement with your sponsor’s brand of outdoor clothing is one thing. Four bullets bursting through the glass of an electronics store in the Seasons Time Mall in Singapore is another. When the heavy thunks hit two televisions and the tourist standing next to her, Zhen did not in fact use verbal noting strategies to master her fear and she did not do four-seven-eight breathing. Instead, all she heard inside her head was her own stupid voice saying: You might piss your pants.
