A Neighborly Visit

A second round of knocking came, Leslie and Ray just kind of looked at one another wondering what to do.

“Finn?” A voice from outside called, “you alright in there?”

“Shit,” Leslie cursed under his breath, “I think it’s Mr. Drake’s neighbor, Doctor Obermeyer.”

“What do we do?” Ray asked.

“Well, I’m going to answer the door,” Leslie tugged at his beard nervously, “but I can’t exactly tell him that his buddy Mr. Drake is a sword now. I’ll make up something plausible, but I’m a shitty liar.”

“Just tell him Mr. Drake is out and you are watching the place for him,” Ray tried to be helpful.

“Out where?” Leslie started going for the door, the longer they hesitated, the more suspicious they would look, “It’s the end of the world, Ray.”

Ray made a face like they were smelling questionable milk, trying to figure out if it was spoiled or not.

Leslie made his way downstairs and opened the front door.

“Hey, Doc,” Leslie greeted the elder gentleman, “Mr. Drake’s not in, you need something?”

“Hey, Leslie. I was just checking in to see if Finnigan was alright,” the good doctor went through the motions of greeting. While outwardly he remained cordial, Leslie could see the wheels turning in his head. “What do you mean he’s not in? It’s kind of the end times here.”

Dr. Obermeyer’s eyes kept searching over Leslie’s shoulder and darting around inside the house. To his credit, the whole situation did seem a little suspect. Leslie couldn’t help but think of Mr. Drake’s former body, frozen in the woodshed. To an outside observer who wasn’t up to speed on all the details, it would probably look a lot like Leslie and his friends had killed Mr. Drake and taken up residence in his more than comfortable abode. There were a couple of ways to go about this whole thing. He could shut the door in the Doctor’s face and wish him a pleasant evening. This would probably be unwise.

Mr. Drake was quite popular and well respected among his peers, and a murder probably wouldn’t go over very well with them. At some point in the future, Leslie and his crew would be facing down a posse of wrathful septuagenarians. While at first glance this might seem harmless, being downrange of anyone with a firearm was bad news no matter who was looking down the scope.

Another approach that Leslie could take would be to tell the truth. Unfortunately, the truth sounded a lot like somebody making up a really shitty story. This implausible truth would probably culminate in the seemingly unavoidable mob of well armed pensioners.

What Leslie ended up going with was a version of the truth where he left out the weird stuff. This was difficult, because it was mostly weird stuff.

“You want to come in?” Leslie asked the doctor, “I was about to start on dinner. Mr. Drake and I ran into a spot of trouble this morning and I could use some help working a couple of things out.”

“I already ate,” the doctor informed him, “what kind of trouble?”

“Viking trouble,” Leslie motioned him inside, “we went on kind of a rescue mission, and Mr. Drake got tangled up in the negotiations.”

“What?” Dr. Obermeyer asked, stomping off his boots in the mudroom, “why the hell would he get wrapped up in that?”

“I tried to leave him out of the whole thing,” Leslie said, leading the doctor upstairs, “but you know Mr. Drake. Once he sets his mind on something, there’s not really anything you can do about the whole situation.”

“Jesus, Leslie,” the doctor admonished, “I thought you had a bit more sense than that.”

“I underestimated the gravity of the situation,” He decided that looking a touch incompetent would be helpful, “we are planning a rescue mission right now.”

“Hi, there,” Ray said in introduction, “Ray.”

“Phillip Obermeyer,” the doctor went to shake Ray’s hand, “good to meet you.”
As they shook hands, the doctor noticed the fungal wall behind the woodstove. He gave it a puzzled look.

“What’s all this?” the doctor asked.

“Not too sure,” Leslie covered, “I think Mr. Drake was getting into mycology.”

“Apparently,” Dr. Obermeyer took a second to study the enigmatic wall of mushrooms.

“Anyway,” Leslie continued, “my friend Stephanie, she’s in the shower, was the Yarl of the Vikings. With the current goings on, I figured she might be in a touch of danger. I was right on that account. I managed to get her out of the situation, but Mr. Drake is being held captive. I don’t think he is in any real danger, but I’d really like to get him back here to his place. I told him I’d take care of his house for him in the meantime.”

Almost as if on cue, Stephanie emerged from the bathroom. Living among, and ruling a horde of Vikings, she was far from bashful. While she was wearing a towel, due to the state of her belly, the towel was just a mere suggestion of modesty.
Dr. Obermeyer looked the woman up and down with what seemed to be professional curiosity. In his head, a couple of puzzle pieces fell into place. He looked to Leslie and then back to Stephanie, and inferred the reason for the rescue mission.

“Dr. Phillip Obermeyer,” the doctor held out his hand in introduction.

“Stephanie Compton,” she shook his hand, the other occupied with towel wrangling.

“Compton? As in Compton Mills? The cereal company?” the doctor inquired.

“The same,” suddenly, it seemed oddly as if she and the doctor were at a country club making small talk over cocktails.

“A pleasure, Ms. Compton,” the doctor continued, “I do know you by a different name though. Lagertha, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yes, I went by Lagertha for a while,” she explained, “I’ve been working on my Phd dissertation in emergent digital cultures. I found the Viking phenomenon fascinating and decided to do some field work.”

This was news to Leslie. Either this was a spectacular piece of off the cuff bullshit, or the god’s honest truth. Either way, the doctor was immediately distracted.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you are quite pregnant,” the doctor pointed out, “were you able to receive appropriate medical care during your field work?”

“I haven’t been able to see a proper doctor in a couple of months,” she said, “the conditions were rather crude in the Viking camp.”

“I could take a look, just to see if you and the baby are coming along nicely,” the doctor offered.

“That would actually be a relief, Dr. Obermeyer,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes, “I’ve been so very worried.”

She gave Leslie a wink while the doctor was distracted patting down his pockets to see whether he had brought the correct medical gear. Leslie had absolutely no idea what this wink was supposed to mean. Was she not worried about the baby? Or not doing a Phd thing? She knew that she was kind of saving his ass? The wink remained an enigma.

The doctor had the correct medical gear. It was easy to miss, because it just seemed to be a couple of sheets of shiny fabric. Once Stephanie had found some clothes, a strip of fabric was applied to her left arm and one to her belly. When the fabric touched her skin, it changed immediately to a display that showed her vital signs. The one on her belly acted as a window to the conditions inside her body. The baby lay cocooned inside layers of viscera made transparent by the infomatic that the fabric generated.

Dr. Obermeyer took a few minutes to adjust things and go over the telemetry. Various frowns and other signs of cogitation were evident on his face, but like all doctors he left these as a mystery to any onlooker.

“Well,” said the doctor finally, “it looks like mother and baby are doing just fine, your blood pressure is a touch high, but I don’t think it’s preeclampsia. I don’t recommend any vigorous activities in the coming weeks. As difficult as that may be, try to relax and be pregnant for a while. I’m not calling for all out bedrest, but normal Viking shenanigans would be inadvisable.”

At this last utterance, he looked pointedly to Leslie. Leslie took this as a veiled threat of extreme disappointment if she were to become involved in any sort of rescue mission. Leslie nodded in acknowledgement.

“A healthy baby boy as far as I can tell,” the doctor claimed.

“Leslie,” Stephanie piped up, “would you mind giving the doctor and I a moment alone?”

“Sure thing,” Leslie said.

He and Ray were kicked out onto the screened in porch for a few minutes while Stephanie and the doctor had a private chat, presumably about the baby. Ray shivered and stomped in their bathrobe for a little bit, until Stephanie gave the all clear and they returned to the warmth of the house.

“Doc,” Leslie asked, “how are you doing over at your place? You need anything?”

“I’m pretty well set up,” he said after a couple of seconds of hesitation, “food might be an issue in a couple of weeks.”

“Mr. Drake and I printed out some emergency soylent this morning,” Leslie opened the fireplace and adjusted a log with the poker, “I could set you up with a bag or two if you want.”

“That would be nice Leslie,” the doctor said politely, “thank you.”

“I think if we can all make it through the winter,” Leslie went on, “we should be able to live off the land until everyone figures this whole thing out. If I can keep the generator going every once in a while and use the solar cells to charge the house battery when the sun is out, we can use the printer to keep us reasonably fed.”

“I think calories will be the priority for most people,” the doctor agreed, “that and heat. Most of us down here have a pretty diverse heating strategy, but with no power or data, a lot of people are going to have a rough time.”

The doctor was referring to a public works project that had been undertaken around two decades earlier. Winters in Vermont, and most of northern North America were cold, long, and dark. To keep a house or an office building reasonably warm over these months, historically fossil fuels were employed in vast quantities. Propane, diesel, natural gas, kerosine, these were all burned in some way or another to produce heat. As time went on, these fuels became more scarce, and therefore, more expensive.

Electric heat wasn’t unheard of, but if you traced down the powerlines all the way back to where it is generated, usually fossil fuels were being used. Turning electricity into heat was one of the more inefficient uses of the technology. Electric heat uses resistance in an element to puke heat out into the universe. Basically, the more resistive a given material is, the harder it is to push electrons through it. If you push hard enough and with enough power, you can bend the given material to your will. The material reacts by glowing a concerning cherry red and emitting enough black body radiation to heat your house or boil some water.
Pumping electrons through any material tends to heat it to a problematic degree. That’s why things like computers and electronic equipment have cooling fans on them. A cell phone for instance, will get uncomfortably warm if you task it with something processor intensive. The little copper traces and silicon chips act like discreet heating elements and cause the end user to have a case of the hot pockets.

Commonly regarded as waste, this heat was eventually discovered to be an enormous economic opportunity. Modern society had a computational problem. With every new technology that was adopted, the price was paid in computational cycles. Cryptographic algorithms, diffusion model training, accurate climate modeling, these all required vast amounts of computational power. The end result of these processor cycles was data and heat. Economically speaking, the data was already spoken for, but the heat was overlooked for a very long time.

A few plucky Vermonters employed their famous yankee thrift and started building data centers in their basements. They replaced their ancient boilers and wood furnaces that burned the lifeblood of the fossil fuel economy with vast arrays of servers that burned data and turned it into forced hot water heat for their homes.
The staggering electric bills were offset by the companies that paid for these computations. Eventually this double dipping scheme caught on and lawyers got involved. Large corporations rarely tolerate any entities other than themselves making any sort of money, so they swept in and turned the whole thing into a subcontracted government program for the public good.

The end result was almost everyone in the world north of 40 degrees latitude having a server cluster in their house somewhere that provided heat in the winter months. There was a matching scheme undertaken in the southern hemisphere due to the planet being cold on the other side for roughly half the year. In the summer months, the heat that was generated was reclassified as waste and piped outside, directly into the atmosphere.

With the recent advent of the end of the world, the whole scheme had fallen apart. This left the unprepared truly out in the cold. People in places like Kingston, where power tended to be unreliable, were forced to have a diverse heating strategy. Falling back on wood, or kerosine, or diesel was a pretty safe bet, but now with the world ending and all, wood seemed to be the horse to bet on.

“Leslie,” the doctor said, “are you alright?”

“Sorry, doc,” He shook his head, “spaced out for a second there, I have a lot on my mind.”

“I don’t doubt that,” he said, “you seem to have a lot on your plate. Let me know if I can help with anything. When the time comes and Stephanie starts going into labor, come and get me. Let me know when you get Finn back too, I have some things to talk to him about.”

“Thank you doc,” Leslie shook his hand, “want to see about grabbing you some of that soylent?”

He showed the good doctor out and provisioned him with a couple of large bags of soylent. He didn’t know the caloric needs of the doctor’s household, but it was at least enough to provide him and his wife with sustenance for a couple of weeks once their stores ran out.