Going Home

Copyright 1980--2002 madengineer3

all rights reserved

*

It is a damp and windy outside. Through the bay window I can see low flying deep gray clouds passing overhead, and hear the low throated moans that come from the sound of the wind blowing across the top of the fireplaces' chimney. My favorite pipe is making friendly gurgling sounds as I draw on it. In the background is a recording of the Rachmaninoff prelude in C# minor. At my feet, sitting on the floor, is my son and one of his best friends, who is spending a week with us. My son has just asked me to recount the story of how I came to live here, for his friends sake.

As I began to think of that time I find the old feelings coming back. Fear, real gut-wrenching fear, almost has a life of its own. It can seem dead for years and then suddenly spring to life again. Moments ago,my son's request, the right combination of mood, music, time of day, and pipe tobacco threw me back into the jaws of deep depression and fear. The chill in my spine, the cold sweat, the tightness in my chest and throat were back again.

"Now, son, I know that you've probably heard stories about the plague, but the people who told those stories didn't personally live through it. Let me tell you about it. The time was early in the third decade of the twenty-first century. At first nobody knew that the civilized world was fighting, and losing, a war for its survival. This war was not being fought with tanks and guns. This was a war fought in molecular biology labs, a war to stamp out a new and unique virus. All of the technically literate societies on Earth were working together at a level that would have been unthinkable during the twentieth century.

The virus was most strange. It attacked both the central nervous and endocrine systems. In most people its effect was to produce, in an almost totally painless fashion, a docile, sterile person who was not capable of using abstract rational thought. The plague was capable of transmission by surface contamination, air, and water. As an added problem, the virus would grow in domesticated animals without harming them. The virus had a dormant phase that lasted for one to two years.

At first it seemed like the plague had two levels of activity. Most people just became docile and went on "living", but some people died from it. The virus had already spread over the entire globe before the first major outbreaks, in humans had been detected. As the plague progressed, certain disquieting anomalies had become apparent. Certain people, or rather groups of people, were seen to be immune to the virus. The absolute best people in their fields of expertise, for example Nobel laureates, were seldom stricken, while the less fortunate around them were. The three other groups that survived in far greater numbers than could be explained by mere chance were radical ecologists of a type similar to the old "earth first" crowd of the late twentieth century, radical Darwinists who held that man was only an animal and was qualitatively no better than any other animal, and lastly the news media and entertainment people who fell into the support sphere of the first two groups.

It was only much later that I found out that two drugs had been given to certain people two or three years before the virus first showed up. One of these drugs rendered a person immune to this evil virus; and the other one caused the virus to be lethal. Some of us had been chosen to receive the first drug since it was thought that we would be "useful" to our new masters; others were chosen to receive the second drug, and die!On the "unwanted" end of the probability curve were teachers, conservative clergy, governmental leaders, military people, police, and union leaders. These seemed to die off in the first wave of the virus attack in any given community. In the organizational vacuum that followed, the well organized super-green parties of the world "offered" their services to provide a framework for order.

All those who had not received one of these drugs became all but idiots. Their analytical skills were somewhere below those of a sharp kindergartener.

My wife, a teacher, was one of those who died relatively quickly. I've never fully gotten over her loss!I wonder which of the conferences that she went to was the one where they passed on the drug that would cause her to die? Was it the one to show her how to help handicapped students fit in better, was it the sign language course she took to help her communicate with a deaf student that she knew that she'd have the next year, or was it perhaps the course in how to help support abused kids? ...

I'll never know, but I'd still like to meet the person who drugged her, preferably in a dark alley .... with no witnesses. For the first three or so years, I didn't think too much about these details. I was up to my neck in work. You see, I design automated process control systems. With the number of people who were now incapable of technical work, someone had to run the factories for food products, run the rail transportation system, and so forth.

Clothing wasn't much of a problem since shame at nakedness was lost when most of the higher faculties were destroyed by the virus. It was a real trip to venture out in "public" after the virus. There were too few people to really do a good job, so I had been assigned the job of designing a globally distributed network for coordinating production and transportation of raw materials and finished products,water resource tracking, sewage control systems and the chemicals that they needed to render the waste products clean and safe, the generation of electrical power, etc. If you've ever read up on how people used to run manufacturing systems the system I was working on was a cross between a super MRP (Materials Resources Planning) program coupled to an SPC(Statistical Process Control) package.

After all, it was unthinkable to run out of the real basics of food, water, and medicines. These were the items being coordinated on a world wide scale! It is a sickening feeling when you realize that the bug that you found in your program, or the communications link that didn't work correctly led to the deaths of several thousand people! I still have nightmares about system flaws after system flaws causing death, off and on, during the ten years that the system was being designed, built and debugged!

It is hard to live with the deaths of others as the price for too few resources and not enough help to get the system going faster. Granted, the system that was to come on line in year ten would only fully cover the northern United States, and Canada to the extent that life could be comfortable. However, control to even that level that would allow life at the subsistence level on a global scale. When you consider all of the control needed, it was still a massively complex job. I guess I had been"chosen" because I was an expert in the design of control systems, and was highly knowledgeable regarding the Worldnet communications system.

Some of us began to be suspicious that the ever so fortunate Super-Greens may have had something to do with the plague, and the "accidents". One day, my old friend, Neils, sent me a message that had a tremendous impact on me. Neils was a Nobel laureate in molecular-biology and was my brother-in-law until the plague killed my wife of twenty years. He had found fifty four Rabiznik splices in the virus that had caused the plague. Now, you must understand that Alexandr Rabiznik had nothing to do with the plague. He was a brilliant genetic engineer who had developed an exceptionally effective way to splice genetic material into exactly the spot that a person might wish to place such material. Rabiznik was most famous for developing the virus that killed only cancerous cells, thus ridding the world of that dreaded killer. Rabiznik used to tell his students that the only difference between a virus made by God and one of his home made ones was the quirky little side chain consisting of one extra Lysine group that was left at the site of the splice.

Such a splice mark did not occur in nature, and the presence of fifty four such marks implied a very carefully designed and crafted virus. Rabiznik had been Neils' doctoral adviser. If Neils said that there were fifty four splices, he meant that there were exactly fifty four splices; no more, no less. That meant that the plague hadn't been a mistake! My wife had been murdered.

Unless you have also lost a spouse, you cannot imagine how lonely life can be. What was missing was the friendly talk, the purposeful brushing against each other in passing, the cuddling in bed like two stacked spoons, or like an overgrown kid hugging his teddy bear. It wasn't just the question of sex; as all truly happily married people know, they are simply incomplete without the other person.

Some nameless person had stolen this from me! ... Angry,you have no idea how angry I was. As I said, Neils and I had been suspicious for a while, and as such had taken precautions in our communications. We corresponded via messages over the Worldnet communications system. Worldnet was a mesh of ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) nodes, sometimes bridged to SONET(Synchronous Optical NETwork) rings, that allowed fast, highly reliable data transmissions on a world wide scale.

My messages to him took on the form of non-printing characters in large graphics files. I'd send him a "harmless", and mostly meaningless, note accompanied by a large file of a landscape or pin-up and he would respond in kind. We seldom even looked at the pictures, but processed them via an encryption/decryption scheme that removed text from what appeared to be transmission noise and fuzzy edges created by the digitizing of the picture. I had come up with this scheme of communications as a lark while Neils and I were in grad school. Neils and I had been the only ones left alive who knew how to use it.

It was two days after finding out about the Rabiznik splices that I heard about Neils' "accident". He had supposedly been out partying,had too much to drink, and driven off a mountain road into a deep ravine one dark moonless night. It would have been a good story for anyone who didn't know Neils. There were two reasons that the story had to be a lie. Firstly, Neils had extreme problems with night vision. He had too few rod cells in his retina, and was as blind as the proverbial bat after sundown. Secondly, Neils' wife of twelve years had died as the result of a drunken driver. Neils had not touched a drop of alcohol since that accident. Neils had been murdered just as my wife had been murdered!

Shortly after the "accident" I was questioned by our security chief, Martin O'Donough. Martin, in actuality, was a secret police officer for the Super-Greens. He was responsible for the political correctness of our research center and the surrounding area. He wanted to know what messages I might have received from Neils. I told him about the clear text message which came with the "picture"; and told them that I had scrapped the picture because it was a duplicate of one that I already had. When I returned to my home that evening I found that my house had been broken into, and searched.

It was obvious that my home computer had also been searched. The official explanation from Martin was that "hooligans" had broken in to try to find some money. But, where would computer literate, thinking hooligans come from? The virus had taken care of all the "thinking" hooligans on earth. From this point on I started to really watch what our benefactors, the Super-Greens, were doing.

I started a monthly news letter to others, like myself, who had "luckily" survived. In each of these I'd ask after their health, and progress; and then have them try running some inane"communications test" for me. It was through this means that I started to hear of the other "accidents". One by one the various scientists, who had been spared the effects of the plague, started to die in unusual ways. It was amazing how accident prone this population had become.

No sooner would a scientist reach the point where the project no longer really needed their expertise, and they became "gravely ill" (pun intended) or they had a "fatal accident". One or two of these people had ghastly accidents in their own laboratories. I suspect, even now, that these were the result of a sudden realization of what our "benefactors" had done for us! Statistically there was a vanishingly small chance that these deaths were random events. As my project entered its final year, two thoughts gripped me. One; there were only two thinking scientists yet alive who were not members of the Super-Greens; and Two, I was being watched very closely any time that I went near the project. I had been given almost all of the freedom that I could ask for in my "private life". After all, what could I do against them since they controlled the entire world? My private life was sort of a "pacifier" used to keep me happy.

Since the death of Neils I must use the word private in a somewhat reserved manner since sophisticated "bugs", listening devices, started to appear in my home. One time a bug would be berried in a wall outlet box, another time it would be a strain gauge instrument attached to a floor joist so that my entire floor became the microphone diaphragm, other times it would be a circuit which used the mouthpiece of my telephone while it was on hook. It got to the point where I didn't speak at home any more. I was, however, still allowed to take long weekend trips into the mountains, on my large dirt bike.

The Super- Greens hated that bike, but so far had not taken any open action to take it away from me. I'd even made sure that they couldn't suddenly find it impossible to get gasoline! ( I lowered the compression ratio by spacing the head out a bit so that I could easily run on alcohol, or even kerosene. What they didn't know was that I had been working on my hide-away. Unless they had dedicated a spy satellite following me on a weekend they couldn't know where I went. Unless, that is, Sonya was one of them.

Except for my faith in my God, Sonya was my one bright light in what had become a dark, dark world. Sonya was an unusual lady. And I mean lady in the old sense. She was a very brilliant logician, but hid it so well that it had taken me months to discover that she was as good, or better, at logic design than I was. It was a humbling discovery to make.

Sonya; now there was a subject that I could gladly dwell on for lengthy periods of time. I'd never asked her much about her background, and she had never offered any information. On the one or two occasions that I had attempted to breach the subject Sonya had changed the subject ... firmly. Sonya had come to work in my lab, as a technician, about five years before the virus had hit. For about a year before the virus came, she had made a threesome with my wife and I when we went to concerts, the theater, or for special dinners at our home. She was a marvelous conversationalist. Sonya could seemingly speak knowledgeably on almost any subject that could be brought up in polite company. As I now know, she can also speak with great knowledge an imagination on several subjects that can't be brought up in polite company.

The Super-Greens were very curious about Sonya. As I was to find out, she was not one of the people who received the anti-viral treatment. She was the only untreated person that they knew of who had not succumbed to the plague.

Sonya has many things going for her. I think that she is beautiful! She has a complexion that's somewhere on the reddish copper side of a rich deep brown and her hair was jet black, and wavy. She has large brown eyes, a beautiful face, wide-ish shoulders and very strong arms and hands. Her hips are a bit wider, without being fat, than any that I could recall in a woman of her size. Her breasts were slightly on the small size,but very delightful, just as King Solomon had indicated they should be. Sonya wouldn't have experienced any discomfort on an old fashioned hayride! She was honest, warm, and kind to those that she was close to. In all ways she was the type of person I liked to be around.

We had reached an "understanding" about six years after the virus had hit. It was obvious then that the population would not be "cured", and it was equally obvious that we were deeply in love. Neither of us could stand the idea of having a member of the Super-Greens officiate at a civil wedding, and none of the Super-Greens were believers in God. Sonya and I are. As a net result we took vows together before our God asking for His blessing on us. However, to keep the Super-Greens from using either of us as a hostage against the other, we worked hard at looking like fairly good friends who were not serious lovers. Our choice of meeting places was somewhat limited. There were few, if any places that we wanted to go to that catered to "thinking" people. After all, the only other "thinking" people were the ones who had brought about this catastrophe.

We couldn't get over the reasoning that had led to the development of the virus. You might get a kick out of hearing it; it goes like this: 1) Since people are the product of a chance occurrence, they have no more value than any of the other animals on planet earth; and perhaps no more value than any group of plants if taken as a whole. 2) If other animals, or entire plant groups, are threatened by human encroachment; the human encroachment must be stopped. 3) If the majority of people could not see this, then it was necessary that the fittest (those with the right mind set) should survive. Nietzsche, or more correctly Nietzsche's wife, as interpreted by Adolph Hitler, was right; only the superior people deserve to be in power. 4) But, Hitler was wrong because he caused suffering. So the majority of people had to become "harmless" to the environment, and there had to be a serious reduction in the number of people demanding products from the biosphere. Hence, docile and sterile simpletons who feel no pain. 5) In this way the earth could be saved from human damage.

It was just like thinning out a deer heard that had grown too large to be supported on the local forage. I'd heard this line of reasoning from a drunken Super-Green one night. He had become depressed, had too much to drink and became talkative. It was as if he were trying to sell himself on the moral honesty of the choices that had been made. It was for reasons like this that we didn't wish to socially mingle with the Super-Greens. After all, would you have liked to go out for an evening on the town with Herr Hitler or Chairman Mao?

As it was, we met either at my place, her place, or my hide-away. Fortunately, we didn't often go to her place. Brother, you talk about a weird house; this one gave me the "creeps". It was a small place, and I mean small, about five miles outside of town. The setting for the house was much like the setting for the movie version of "The Fall of the House of Usher" which starred Vincent Price.

Her house, an earth sheltered dome that was almost completely under ground, was situated on a high spot in an old marsh. The dilapidated road that led to it had more hairpin turns and twists in it than a good grand-prix race track. It had to be that way to stay on relatively dry solid material. I did tell you that this was in a marsh didn't I? Anyway, the house was weirder on the inside than on the outside. The furnishings were sparse to the extreme. It had the feel of a place that had been designed by an engineer who was intent on getting the most utility out of every square foot of floor, wall, and ceiling.

I suspect that a similar feeling would have been had in a World War One submarine. After all, how many times have you been in a house that had a combination living room/dining room/kitchen/bedroom and entry way? It was semi cramped with just the two of us in the "family room", for want of a better word. Due to my less than comfortable feelings about her house, I tended to find reasons for getting her over to my place for most of our times together. At least that was the general rule until we had found relatively sophisticated "bugs" planted in my house.