100 Futures: Tales of Possibility

.09

2019

My mother figured he was going crazy when he started building it. My father did seem a bit fanatical. I knew he listened to an endless stream of audio books but she said he was only listening to a small number over and over, cherrypicking those podcasts that said what he wanted to hear. He made me work with him, which was alright by me because he paid me $10 an hour, let me do the easy stuff, and always did the real difficult or dirty work himself. My mom worked at home and my father was a veteran. He stopped shaving and didn't cut his hair after making his plans. My mother said something about a midlife crisis, but I figured he was just going crazy. For my 16th birthday he got me, as he explained an "Authentic Native American" tomahawk and a pair of "high powered, top-of-the-line" binoculars.  I wanted a car. I would have been happy with a imported bottom of the line piece of junk as long as it had four wheels and could go.  I really wanted to go. Anywhere.  The longer his beard grew the more we  treated him with velvet gloves, never touching him too much because he was so touchy.  This just mad him more angry, and crazier, which meant he spent more time outside digging.  He sold most of all he owned in order to pay for a digging machine, "the Cat" as he called it, like it was a stray pet he'd taken to.  My mother had to hid her jewelry.  They got into a big fight when she found out he'd taken a loan on his retirement account to pay for the steel, "Pouring money into a hole in the ground."  She said.  When  the bombs started flying we took the gloves off and jumped when he said kangaroo. He was no longer crazy, he was our savior. I was 18 years old and everything I had ever thought was wrong, and I never looked at the man the same again.  

2025

He laughed as my mother and I huddled in his safe house stunned into wide-eyed shivering that first week. Must be how Noah felt, hanging out with the hyenas, cracking inside jokes and filling up on vindication.  When my father had leased a caterpillar my mother was not happy but now that she was living in a fully 1000 square foot house under ground, safe and sound, she was very grateful to eat her words. We each had a room and my father maintained the dictator's discipline he'd always wanted to but could not prior to this life changing situation. Before we both picked at anything he said that we didn't like.  Now we shut up and listened.   He would suit up and go outside to check his chemical tapes. The fallout was spreading thinly over Colorado, but we were safely going stir crazy inside while the wind storms blew it off to the west.  He used the Cat to till the soil hoping the dirt could digest any residue so that we could eventually start planting some crops.   My mother and I stayed inside and did anything he needed us to do, but mostly we tended to aquaponic tanks.  I grew to love those creatures.  For the first few years those fish kept us alive.  He stocked dried foods of course, though not nearly as much as he wanted given the resistance from my mother, with supplies dwindling she might have to eat those words of hers for real.  We studied agriculture, survival skills, geopolitics and economics. I didn't really see the need to study the -ics, but he explained we needed to be prepared for the inevitable reorganization of those human that remained.  We didn't have very much information about the "geo" but what news we got from the infrequent radio signals we could pick up was not encouraging, most often it was some scattered pleas for help if anything.

2032

He took me on the first salvage mission. According to the radio an unknown virus was sweeping eastward and Colorado was hot. Luckily, the old man stocked two biosuits for just this sort of threat, and with it burning he saw it as an opportunity. The old truck he'd traded the luxury sedan for suddenly made so much sense. He was concerned that an EMP wave would fry the electronics of any newer cars, plus he wanted to be able to fix the truck with his own tools, and all the computer equipment in a 21st century vehicle was as meaningful as the blinking light panels in science fiction movies.  We also needed a truck to make it along the unmaintained roads, and it was amazing how fast they were falling to pieces.  He didn't expect there to be much, as the unprepared would have scavenged long before we went out, but we were running low on supplies and had to go.  He was carrying his sidearm, and there was shotgun positioned between us.  Simply because I didn't have any practice shooting, no extra ammunition now and I wasn't interested before the event, so I was carrying my tomahawk.  We drove slow, crawled down the mountain side into town, and didn't see anyone.  We made it to a pharmacy store on the corner, and found it was hardly touched.  First place we went was the supplements section. We started to clear the shelves of all the energy bars. Medical supplies and then antibiotics and pain killers were next. We collected four truck loads the first day, working late into the night, interrupted only once by the presence of a bull moose standing in the road.  He stared at us and my father said, "look at that beautiful beast," and knew exactly how he felt. We kept going back to that pharmacy taking everything he thought we could use.  He even brought my mother some chocolate and a dusty teddy bear as an anniversary gift.  We still don't know too much about the virus. Nor do we know how many people died. My guess is most. We didn't run into other people for eight years.