Food Bank
Leslie turned the truck around and they headed back to Mr. Drake’s house. They hadn’t gotten especially far down the road before it had dawned on him that this was actually a life and death situation. Leslie wasn’t dumb, or slow to pick up new ideas, but the advent of the end of the world was a large concept to actually take in. All told, it was actually a beautiful morning. Holding the concept of this gorgeous February day with everything clean and gleaming from the snow, and the fact that everyone was going to freeze or starve to death was a tough pill to swallow. That’s why it had really taken a few minutes for Leslie to get up to speed, apocalyptically speaking.
“Hey, Les,” Mr. Drake called from the floor of the passenger side of the cab, “don’t forget to save.”
“What?” Leslie asked, puzzled.
“Before I do anything big, I like to save,” he offered sagely, “that way if we die or something, we can restart back here.”
Mr. Drake had lost it. Leslie had been a bit worried about this since he had mentioned Narshe village. While Leslie had no idea what or where Narshe village was, he knew it wasn’t anywhere around here, and probably only existed as a string of bits somewhere. Whatever halfassed mind upload scheme that he had taken part in apparently didn’t go very well.
“Mr. Drake,” Leslie said, calmly, “I need you to snap out of it. I need your help here.”
The sword was silent, which was not reassuring to Leslie. He got out of the truck, snagging the sword and made his way to the garage where the printer was. He leaned Mr. Drake against a workbench and started poking around at the control screen of the printer.
The printer, like all printers, had some emergency settings. Basically, the printer rearranged atoms. In an emergency, this could be a pretty handy thing to have. The printer had two main parts, the hopper where you put things in to be broken down, and the end effector where things were printed out. Into the hopper, you could place dirt or garbage or really anything you had lying around, and it would be broken down into the base elements that made it up. These atoms would be sorted and stored safely so that they didn’t react with one another in an unanticipated manner.
Once stored, these elements could be called upon to become anything you could think of. Loading the hopper full of trash could yield a pretty decent chunk of the periodic table. Trash, being mostly organic in nature, would yield a bunch of carbon, a lot of oxygen, and a fair amount of hydrogen. Other trace elements like iron, nickel, nitrogen, argon and cadmium would come along for the ride as well, but organic things were mostly some kind of recombination of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.
With the net down, Leslie didn’t have access to any blueprints for things to print out and had to rely on what was cached in its internal memory. This consisted of pretty much everything that Mr. Drake had ever printed. These were mostly things like plows and nightvision goggles and not stuff that was generally useful in an emergency situation. Luckily, the printer had a useful set of emergency recipes that could print out things like potable water and soylent bars. In a perfect world, there would be millions of these printers turning the world’s trash into gourmet meals and effectively creating a post scarcity utopia. This generally wasn’t done because people found the idea rather repugnant, and there wasn’t much money in it.
The food chain did this all the time. It turned shit and garbage into perfectly edible food. Take a pig for instance. You could feed a pig pretty much anything you have lying around. Things like rotten vegetables, spoiled milk, other pigs, they are all on the menu for our porcine pals. They happily eat this garbage and turn the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into delicious pork that we in turn make into people. People seemed to be fine with the idea of eating a pig that slopped up rotten milk from the shit that it walked around in everyday, but the idea of turning a bag of trash into a roast pork loin kind of grossed them out.
As Leslie was navigating through the user interface of the printer, looking for the emergency settings, the power went out. This was not an unusual state of affairs in Kingston, Vermont. They tended to lose power for a couple of days every month around these parts. The world was wired up with a smart grid and a bunch of micro-nuke powerplants that made the power generation and delivery system very robust. It was chock full of redundancies and protocols that guaranteed stable power delivery twenty four hours a day. In cities.
Out in the country, things were a bit of a different story. The main issue with reliable power transmission in a place like Kingston was gravity. If you were to look at a satellite image of the town of Kingston, what you would be looking at was an image of 99.3% treetops, and .07% rooftops and other shit. This .07% rooftops and other shit were where the humans lived. Connecting these roofs were strands of copper and fiber optic cable that made it possible to live a relatively modern life. They snaked their way through the canopy, under widowmakers and deadfalls, sagging under the incessant pull of the planet.
Statistically speaking, a tree only has so long to live, a hundred years give or take, depending on the species. Of the couple of million trees in Kingston, maybe one or two die everyday. Trees are made of wood. Wood is rather robust and resistant to gravity to some degree. This means that even after a tree dies, it kind of sticks around and goes through the motions of being a tree from beyond the grave. This leads to a significant inventory of standing dead wood in any given forest. When there are swift environmental changes, like a stiff breeze, or an ice storm, these standing deadwoods tumble to the forest floor like bowling pins on league night. In the 99.3% of the forest, this is business as usual, the trees fall and there is nobody to hear them. In the .07% the trees outsmart the grid, and the power goes out for a couple of days every month.
Leslie shook his head. He had been zoning out for a minute. While he did that, Mr. Drake’s generator had kicked on. This was a diesel generator that had a very efficient engine that purred away and shoved watts into his house’s battery. During this brief loss of power, the printer had done a hard reset. For a modern computer like the one in the printer, shutting off its power without warning was like caving in the back of its skull with a lead pipe. Its screen flashed a few times and then started outputting bios messages that let him know that it was booting back up and everything was probably fine.
He took this opportunity to run over to Mr. Drakes dumpster and grab a few bags of frozen trash. He stuffed these into the hopper and headed back to the main interface of the printer, where he continued poking around in the UI looking for the emergency settings. Once these were finally discovered, he told the machine to turn the trash into as many individually wrapped soylent bars as it could. There was a flavor option, he went with vanilla.
The generator had him spooked a little bit. It was quietly humming along at about 70db, which was not very loud. Given the loss of power and the time of year though, this could be heard from a significant distance away. The forest in February had some interesting sonic qualities. The snow and still air hoovered up any ambient noise and made only two things apparent. The slight tinny whistle of blood in one’s ears, and any sound that wasn’t inherently produced by the forest. Of course there was the occasional deadfall giving into the gravitational pull of the planet, but those were statistical outliers.
The generator would be stark proof that there was power here to anyone lacking it. Depending on their level of desperation, this could sound distinctly like a dinner bell to Mr. Drake’s neighbors. His neighbors generally fell into two categories though: very chill, and indignantly self reliant. For the most part, they would have their shit together enough to have their own generators. Leslie was acting on the assumption that people were about to start acting uncharacteristically unchill in the next couple of days, so he stepped outside and cocked an ear listening for evidence of other generators. He could hear a couple of them buzzing out different frequencies, that was inherently a good sign.
He had to make a calculation. He wanted to shoot up north and check in on Ray and make sure the Vikings weren’t causing too much trouble. If he were to leave the property, there would be nobody here to mitigate any theft or larceny. If everybody was still content in their warm homes with their generators chugging along, he had a little bit of time to run some errands before shit went sideways. He also had to get his own shit together. He was reasonably confident in his ability to survive the winter if he had access to food, but he needed to formulate a plan for long term survival.
What was the rest of his life going to look like? What did he want it to look like? He was obviously going to move into Mr. Drake’s house, that was a no brainer. His yurt, while charming and quite cozy at times, was strictly a temporary structure to live in while he got his shit together. Mr. Drake had gotten his shit together years ago, and his house was exactly the sort of place that Leslie envisioned himself having some day. Mr. Drake, being a sword now, would need a little help around the place, seeing as how he didn’t have any arms or legs. He had also hinted at Leslie being his sole heir in his suicide note, so that settled it right there. This would be his base of operations.
“Mr. Drake?” Leslie hailed, stepping back into the garage where he had leaned him against a work table. There was silence again for a few seconds.
“Glenn?” Mr. Drake asked.
“No, It’s me Leslie,” Leslie answered.
“Cyrus’ death wasn’t your fault,” he continued, his voice younger and more virile, “you must take up the sword. Our fate depends upon it. Your curse doesn’t define who you are, you do. Take up and wield the Masamune. Break the curse and we will travel to the future together. You will find that your former foes will become your greatest allies.”
“Mr. Drake snap out of it,” Leslie began to be a touch less than calm, “we are in Kingston and it is the end of the world.”
“The 1999 end of the world?” he asked, a bit confused, “isn’t this 600 ad? All this time stuff has me all cocked up”
“No, the 2055 one. The real one.” Leslie said in exasperation, “I’m going to head north and check on some buddies while the food prints out. I’m taking you with me, but we are coming back here, and I am going to stick around and help you out.”
“North… yes… To the Mountain of Souls. We will need the mushroom shoes, lest we slip upon the ice,” Mr. Drake mused, “and we should speak to the Master, so he can record all that we have accomplished.”
Leslie began to resign himself to the fact that Mr. Drake would be, at least for the moment, intermittently coherent. Possibly in the future, totally unintelligible. This situation seemed to be gaining some dynamic qualities that he would have to account for. Mentally, he was beginning to circle the wagons a bit.
He was thinking about his apocalypse team. This was something that he had spent a bit of time musing about as a fun mental exercise. This was usually some sort of zombie scenario, or governmental collapse, not the kind of nebulous unknown threat he was facing now. Some things remained true though. Namely, the threat of possible violence on the part of his former friends and neighbors, and the fact that life from now on would require a dedicated application of demonstrable handyness.
He once again took up the sword and headed for his truck. The mission north would require a change in vehicles, as his truck only had room for two, maybe three very good friends in the cab.