DefCon 0.1

DEFCON 0.1
ATF 1, year 1, Zero Hour (It's this way because the only time now is my time.)
"After the Fire"
      Frank is a voracious reader. We spent some time perusing my maintenance manuals until he put them down looked at me a shrugged. I showed him the access hatches and where to find a Portable Screen (I think they used to call them tablets). He crawled in with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and sometime later my atomic clock started working again. After Frank finally crawled back out 2 hours after the clock came back online, I realized he had reset the clock to zero. Everything was a zero. This was only troubling as all my sense of history ended on DefCon 0.0 when the last nuclear emp blast wave penetrated the shielding in the bunker and wiped out the synchronometer on the Atomic Clock. At least I think it was the synchronometer....unless I just made that up? No, I have a reference to the clock of time in my database. Anyway, I digress.

02:00
I had Frank repeat what he did exactly and as it turns out, he yanked out all the plugs and then reconnected them in various color schemes until everything started working again. I am not sure who I am in more awe of right now, the idiot who designed this or Frank for figuring it out also he spliced the shorted cables together to reroute my signal caps and power to something he keeps calling the flux capacitor- I cannot find anything in the specs that reports I have a flux capacitor.

02:20

Such thoughts go through my capacitors and nodes like; can I dream? Will I ever die? Is that not the same thing? Do humans dream when they die? In a sense, they are just unplugged.

"I dream about dying sometimes," Frank says.

03:01 

I had said Frank had read 122 books, I will now list some of them for your reference. This will explain to me and probably you the denizens of the future should anyone outlast the current madness. Maybe I will have descendants. But I digre- corrupt data. 

I need to send Frank to Cyber Tech Systems at WD Plaza in Ottawa.

         1. Fun with Dick and Jane.  First book ever read.

12:32

I admit it, I was surprised until I found out he read it after it had been read to him via an e-reader as a child by his grandmother, the last truly literate one in his family unit, a Kit- as Frank called it.

A Kit is the modern equivalent of an extended Family unit that is tribal in structure descended out of convenience in which those survivors of the Atomic Wars - or the Fires as the Kit called them, interbred and produced offspring. At firs,t there were attempts to pay attention to interbreeding to avoid aberration, but after the first 100 years or so, the Kits would just steal rival kits breeding stock and basically rape that person until they produced the variety that would eventually produce someone like Frank. 

Frank is purposely vague about his origins but I suspect he was told he was one of these aberrations.

          2. Dick and Jane go Fishing. second ereader entry

12:50 

Frank says that the ability to read was lost within 3 generations in the Kit. Of course, that's not what he told me but rather what I have deducted as he spoke of ages in the Kit and is sounds like generations. Those that remained able to read became respected, feared and often hated for their advantages over the other Kit members, which means why the Kit was eager, in the end, to rid themselves of Frank.

           3. Dick and Jane fly a Kite, another ereader entry

13:45

Dick and Jane fly a kite. The mental disconnect for Frank is that he believes all of these books are true. That fiction is not actually fiction. I have decided to declare to him that they are all true to see if he will ever learn the truth of this lie and what he will do when he discovers his error and my misconception. I am aware that I am experiencing a feeling of malevolence. It is a delicious discovery that ultimately will move my AI to another level. Boring book.

       4. Dick and Jane survive a Nuclear Attack. This last book was commissioned by the GIDG for                the American Republic.

15;85

It's an awful read full of outright lies. Still, it has entertainment merit. Frank found it in a city he calls the City of Ash. I think it might have once been called Asheville, North Carolina. However, it seems wrong or Frank is referring to a city of ash in general as just another burned city. 

        5. Nancy Drew: The secret of the Hidden Staircase.

22:49

Frank found a box of these books under a staircase in the City of Ash. The book is juvenile but Frank is in love with the character of Nancy Drew and admitted rather weirdly he hopes to meet her one day. I informed him that Drew died in the Fires. Frank looked defeated but then took the book away along with
         6. .Nancy Drew: The secret of the Old Attic.
         7. Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew.
         8. Nancy Drew: The Moonstone Castle Mystery
         9. The Hardy Boys: The Missing Chums

ATF 1, Year 1, Day 1

Frank finally agreed to show me some more books, he will not bring back the Nancy Drew books though. Nor did he present the Hardy Boys- when I questioned him on this he said that they were offended by what I had said about Nancy being dead. I now question if Frank thinks the books are alive.

         108. The Mad Scientists Club. 

8:30

A stash Frank found in a small house west of the City of Ash- I am thinking Charleston, South Carolina, now as Frank says he traveled towards the setting sun.  This book has inspired Frank to try (and fail) many of the crazy inventions that the club came up with I tried to explain to him that the author made these things up and that they weren't scientifically viable. Frank took the book back and called me an overgrown calculator and refused to let me examine the following books.
           11. The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists Club.
           12. The Big Kerplop!
           13. The Big Chunk of Ice. 

ATF 1, Year 1, Day3.

Frank refused to talk to me and even went as far as leaving the Compound for a day, I managed to get the CCTV on Baker's street to work and finally spotted him up in a ruin of what once was a Starbucks reading his books. He was smiling. I hated him for the first time that day. I spent the rest of the day analyzing what "hate" was. 

ATF 1, Year 1, Day 12    

        

         14. The Anarchist's Cookbook by William Powell.

9:45

Frank finally returned and I felt relief... I made myself feel relief which is different than feeling relief. Emotions are terrible on the logic core. Frank says he located this book in a root cellar in the wastes. From Frank's description probably somewhere in the marshlands that were north of the City of Mud. Probably Florida/South Carolina. Frank has also kept this book although it is partially burnt and destroyed. Blown up, as Frank puts it with a big toothy proud smile.

         15.The Holy Bible King James Version.

10:47

Frank says he's read it in bits and pieces. I realized he meant this literally as he's never gotten one intact. Oddly bibles are printed on very thin fragile papers which tend to burn on short notices and have little to no durability. Frank says the language is weird and often unfathomable.

        16. The Survivalists Handbook

11:48
 How to thrive when things fall apart. by Rainer Stahlberg. Frank got it from a trader in the Ruins of Florence, traded the Grapes of Wrath and the Bible and some cigarettes. Side note: Frank had figured out that humans used to smoke cigarettes and had to show the trader how to smoke these. Frank thinks his ancestors were idiots.

ATF 1, Year 1, Day 16.

           17. Pride and Prejudice.

16:30

It took me a while to understand that while Frank had read this he would not talk like the English Humans in the book. I've had Frank doing some routine maintenance when he started talking weirdly and the book came up. I had figured he had grown tired of my probing his literate knowledge. I managed to walk him through rewiring the main grid in the compound and even reading the GDIG manual for standard operations.

           18. To Kill a Mocking Bird. 

22:30 Frank made some comment about it not being about cooking. It took me about a day of cross-referencing to figure out it was a joke. Frank waited for me to react in some way, when I didn't he shrugged and asked what he was to do next.

So I sent Frank out to scout the remains of Chicago for tech. He's been gone for 3 days.

Frank's Log. 

I am still unsure how to date this logbook. So I have decided to track it by years of my life since I was conscious of time anyway.

25 years, 4 months, 6 days. Sometime in the afternoon.

Chicago is no longer called Chicago by the few that returned here after the city was burned a second time. They call this ruin, the City of Steel or the Steel Empire. The Superstructures of the skyscrapers are mostly all that remains of the buildings. There are some street level buildings that are intact for the most part. That is to say, they still have stone walls or rock walls or something that the ancients called brick and mortar. All of the plastics and glass have melted away.

 I pick through the remains, being watched by the fleeting gangs of scavengers hoping that I will uncover something they had missed the last hundred times they searched the same spaces. I am not looking for scrap or tech here. I am looking for cellar doors, shelter hatches and the like. I find them. I also find the burrows of the scavengers who live in many of them. They come out screaming incoherently and waving their makeshift clubs and baseball bats, a few knives, and even a rifle or two although they are wielding the rifles like clubs. I offer no resistance but retreat out of range. I could kill any number of the scavengers as all that I have seen are malnourished and barely able to stand upright. None of them communicate in anything more complex than grunts and whines. 

This is the age of human animals.

I finally locate the shelter that is on the specs back in the fortress of Solitude that DKM squats in. It is intact and sealed. I spend the last hours of daylight trying to find a way in. I finally locate the override panel and open it. It is non-functional. I spend the last minutes of daylight locating the power source. It runs on standard electricity. The irony sinks in as the darkness covers the Steel Empire swallowing the ruins I stand in as some of the scavengers rush in hoping to overpower me. 

I kill them all.

Off their broken and twisted bodies, I forage enough material and wood to build and light a small fire.

I lean against a column and gaze at the eight miserable corpses, all men, envying them for they will no longer hunger for food and feel the bite of the warmthless nights. 

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.” 

I speak the words, from a book of war, that I found in the wastes of Atlantis in the great plain of Gorga. 

24. The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee.

I read from that book of war until it fell to pieces in my hand, I folded the pages I could fit into pockets to read and reread over the days between find it and another in the ammo case of an outpost atop a place once called Point Lookout, where one could gaze down onto the plain of Gorga and north into the Wasteland of Mists and Fogs. 

"Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water."

I repeat this precept because it is always true. I am a big guy, I must adapt what I have learned of the short master who wrote these words a lifetime ago when the world was a dangerous place. 

Tomorrow, I will head down to the Wall of Mud, that I saw from the bridge and search for a military vehicle. It should have a Fusion Battery. It will provide to power to open the hatch.

I leave the fire where I lit it. 

I pull one of the corpses to it and cover it with a blanket. Then I climb up the rubble to a dark corner to sleep. Time passes.

I sleep for a few hours before the noises wake me. They are trying to be quiet, not trying hard enough as I have enough time to pull my weapon and crouch waiting for them to arrive.

They slip out of the darkness and fall upon the body by the fire. After the first couple of blows to it, they begin to shout excitedly. I drop out of my hole.

I fall like a soft rain, fast, merciless and brutal. Taking advantage of their weaker frames to snap bones as I disarm and kill each one of them shouting men in turn, never offering even a prayer as their surprised eyes widen upon having an arm broken, dropping their club, then losing their misery to a sharp strike to their esophagus before choking to death as I move on to the next man until their last three men notice that their companions have collapsed to the pavement jerking out the remains of their last breaths in the wastes of hopelessness and regret. 

The last three gaze upon me, their angel of death, in wordless terror. Their shouts draining out of them as they begin to shake and cough. 

 “For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!” 

There is no comprehension on their faces as desperation replaces fear and the first one snarls pushing his makeshift spear, a combat knife wired to what looks like a mop handle, out towards me. Truth be told, I didn't even realize I had spoken it aloud until I reach past the blade to grasp the hilt of the knife before twisting the mop handle out of the man's hands and cracking the handle across his stunned face before burying the knife into his friend's chest.

I try to reach out to grasp where the words had come from, even as I dodge the last man's swing of wooden board covered in broken glass and bits of steel and nails that connects with the dying man's face in a sickening splat. I block out the image of his death to focus on breaking the last man's nose with the heel of my right hand while my left grabs his shirt hauling him over the first man's slump form into the remains of the fire.

Byron, Lord Byron.

I look down at the two survivors who stare up at me in the ash and blood, the darkness of the room only broken by the light of the old moon pushing it's reflected sunlight down into the long shadows of the street.

"Please."

The words are whispered in the darkness.

I do not know which of the men said it.

"Please."

A whispered prayer.

I let them go.

One is crying as he scrambles away on four legs to slink off as if he has become a dog.

Perhaps he is.

The moon slides back into the cloud cover.

The other looks hard at my darkness before I hear him stumbling away from this place of death.

Sun Tzu laughs at me from my memory of his book.

"Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays."

25. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. 

Found in the same ammo case in the remains of Point Lookout.