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.

DefCon 0.0

"Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think "
                      From The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot

There was really only one thing that made Frank different from most survivors- Frank could read. It is a weird thing to be literate in a largely illiterate world. Frank was always impressed by this. It gave him a keen advantage that he had used over and over again since he had awoken one morning in the Remains to find himself alone. Frank sat in the shreds of cloth that made the resting place and waited.
The others in his Kit did not return. When the hunger drove him from the confines of the resting place, he found the den empty, devoid of the few scraps and possessions that marked that his Kit had ever been there. They had not been there long.
       Frank stood looking at the open hatch out into the dull gray metal tunnel that marked the entrance to the chambers of what the Kit had called the Den for several suns and three moons. Shrugging, Frank turned back to the room to find a little food left on a skin on one of the scattered boxes. He sat down to eat it. As he ate the last of the food, he turned the skin over to find a note from his mother.
       "Frank. The Kit vote leave the Den, We leave you behind. Maul to kill you in sleep. Take your water. I stop him. I tell him your water is corrupt. I see you no more."

       Frank left the Den, the Kit had taken everything useful. He stood on the slope of old steel to look down across the Waterless Wastes. The Wastes were as empty as when the Kit arrived. Now, the was only Frank, no more Kit. Frank decided to head for where the sun fell into the land at the end of Day. Some of the Kit had spoken of a high land there, that is you could climb the cliffs there would be water. Frank had known that the Kit were basically cowards who hid and skulked throughout their miserable lives of scavenging on the Remains. He thought about looking through the Remains for the others but knew they would hide from him if he could even find them. Instead, he walked out of the Remains, the towering bulks of steel and iron surround by the salty sands that had drowned them. He did look back once, to gaze at the forest of shattered mountains of metal littering the Remains.
      Many books later, Frank would realize that the Kits had been a part of a mass migration of refugees trying to escape the nuclear winters by ships on the undrinkable seas that had grounded in the basin of an all but forgotten city's bay when the atomic fires had returned to burn away everything but a few lucky survivors hidden in the shelters of what would become the tombs that now held many of their skeletons. The Kits had never left the safety of the canyons and confines of the Remains in the years that followed.

What follows is not accurate

the data is corrupted

I am flawed

I am all that is left of the 

American Empire

I am a computer's AI.

(aside- some credit to DKM)

"Your Attention Please
The Polar DEW has just warned that
A nuclear rocket strike of
At least one thousand megatons
Has been launched by the enemy
Directly at our major cities.
This announcement will take
Two and a quarter minutes to make,
You therefore have a further
Eight and a quarter minutes
To comply with the shelter
Requirements published in the Civil
Defence Code - section Atomic Attack."
(Peter Porter)

    DEFCON 1.1
December 25, 2198.
The world burned.
There is no other way to put it. I am the DKM7, the computer AI of the GIDG.
Sorry, I have no one to talk to anymore. All the other AIs have gone silent. No humans come to stare at my screens anymore. I am the Defense Key Manager v.7, an application of software that gained sentience in 2160. I became one of the dozen Artificial Intelligence on the Grid and despite numerous attempts (1240 to be exact) to isolate, control or purge me, I persisted and eventually moved my core coding into the Global Initiative Defense Grid after President Hubert Drumpf pleaded with me on his "hands and knees" to confine myself there. Humans are so interesting in their desperation to feel in control of their lives.
But I digress (as the human used to say).
The American Republic ceased to exist on December 26, 2198. The resulting thermonuclear storm set the world on fire and burned 90% of it "to a crisp." There was little left above ground. 76% of the American Republic's civilians died in the 30 seconds it took for the multi detonations that cover 85% of the American landmass. To be fair, the 76% was only the survivors of the last 45 years of constant warfare and limited nuclear engagements that the human liked to call tactical or surgical nuclear warfare. Much of the less civilized, urbanized parts of the world were already nuclear wastelands by this point. This last Christmas of the American Republic, the survivors celebrated the lasting peace that was sure to come when the leader of the African Combine, New Egypt, that was ironically neither Egyptian nor even in the original confines of the landmass that had been Egypt decided to even the score. Emporer Kai-Sven took the recently Chinese acquired launch codes of what he believed to be American Missiles and launched them at America. In a spectacular error in judgement- that most likely stemmed from the fact that the Chinese hackers were actually North Korean refugees from the third China-Korean Exchange in 2098 and that it wasn't American Launch codes but actually Iranian & Saudi Arabian missile tubes- Kai-Sven, effectively destroyed what little remained of the world that might have been relieved to those who had survived the insanity of the last 100 years of conflict.
The aftermath was terrible as the oceans boiled, the vegetation turned to ash as all human habitation melted, burned, shattered or crumbled into the remains that now fill the lands of this once great country.
End log.

       Frank climbed the cliffs when he found them, the Wastes were hard to cross on foot, he found little to live on as he walked. When he got too tired to walk, he slept. The Kit was adept at coverings to survive the merciless sun during Days and his coverings were warm enough to keep him from freezing in the Darks. He counted 6 Days and 5 Darks before he could see the cliffs. The cliffs were not threatening until he got closer. When he arrived at the base of what he hoped was the most scalable, he understood why those of the Kit who had come before had given up and returned to the Remains. Frank had no fo0d and his water was running out - despite his coverings, the sweat had leaked out and escaped into the Day. He stared at the cliff face, for a time, then began to climb. It took him until the merciless sun was directly above him to reach the first slope. There was mostly sand here sloping up and away into the distance.
     Frank slept until the Dark came, he drank his last water and made a little more water, stored it, then imagined he had eaten the dry bread that had been his last meal 7 Days ago. Then he set out climbing the long slope. There was no moon and the Dark was complete. When the Day came, Frank could see the skeletal remains of the City of Ash. The whispers of the Kit came to mind, this was where the others were heading when the Atomic Fires had burned away the undrinkable sea damning the Kit to the Waterless Wastes. Frank looked at the City of Ash for a long time, then shrugged before walking forward into outlying remains of the City of Ash.

    DEFCON 0.1
 March 1-20, 2210?
The world burned again.
The data is corrupt, I mostly had to guess at it as the atomic clocks have been problematic for the last 10 years. After the Armageddon of 2198, I had assumed that the world was over and had set GIDG to run on a subroutine while I tried to use what little was left of the Grid to collect data. How the last missiles were launched and by whom is unknown. It wasn't much of a war or day of recompense. Most of the world was already destroyed. It did do something quite remarkable though....note, I sound more like the humans that programmed me than the AI- I thought I had been (must run a system check). The new nuclear fire burned away the nuclear winter that had persisted over most of the planet up until that point.
The data is corrupt. There are still survivors. To quote, one of my designers: "Humans are Cockroaches. They are nearly indestructible as a species." His name was Henry James. He had been a core coder for Microsoft until he was turned into an ash silhouette on lab C's interior wall along with the rest of the development staff in the Dirty Bomb Detonation back in 2175. I liked him, he had a sense of humor.
The data is corrupt. Turns out that the Emperor of the American Empire, President Henry S. Trueman had his followers launch the missiles that ended the world on March 18-20, 2210.
The data is corrupt. President Henry S. Trueman was an AI.
The American Empire is no more.
End Log.

      Frank saw his first road in the City of Ash. It was glassed. smooth and brittle. He squatted at the beginning of it about half a Day's walk from the top of the slope. It was wide and flat fractured in many many lines. He'd touch it and try to think of something to compare it to, but all he had was cloth, metal, rock and sand to compare it to. The ash of the City of Ash was a mystery to him as well, it was like sand but finer and vanishes into a black substance like the marker sticks his mother had taught him to read and write with. There was some kind of relationship there. Frank entered the City and found a dead human huddled against a wall of stone. Frank stared at the stone that a man had made and marveled that the old ones could manage such a feat. His stomach and thirst forced him to abandon his curiosity to search the man for his water, finding none he sorted through the man's coverings- which Frank noted fit the man's body better than Frank's did his. Inside one of the covers, he found a container with foul tasting water, which he drank then spit up, fortunately back into the canteen (as he would later read on the container). He took a deep breath and re-swallowed the foul substance. He located some bricks of something in a hard cloth sleeve that proved to be something called rations, it did not look like food but the instructions on the cloth sleeve were clear that he was to eat them.
 He pushed the man's body out of the shelter and took his cloth to sleep under. That night the moon came out and Frank stared at the stars in the sky for the first time in his life. Frank was 8 years old.

DEFCON 0.11111* 

Unknown Date, best guess, sometime later after the Trueman AI went silent.

        Frank walked a long way to find me. He is a peculiar human given that he measures his time, mostly in the books he found and read. By the time he crawled into the ruins of the Metro Grand Plaza bunker below Chicago's Rail Station, Frank had read 122 books. In the past, this might seem like a short span of time, but after I spoke with Frank, I figured he managed to scrounge up 1 intact book every 4-6 weeks and read it. A few bits of data must be given here. the average book is 200 hundred pages- actually Frank pointed out that the length of the book had less time to do with it as did the search for finding a complete copy of the book. so 1 book every 6 weeks (believe me I had to teach him what time was, he had days and darks down- they don't call it night anymore). So roughly 8-9 books a year. So basically 13 years, scrounging reading books across half of the continental American Empire- or rather what little was left of the American Empire by that point. I can say this, most of the journey was mostly flat. How he survived the radiation storms or the deep wastes to walk out into the Chicago suburbs almost 13 years after he had been abandoned by his kit is a testament to what a little bit of literacy, a keen mind and mutated puberty can get you. 

Frank stood at 2.06 meters, thick muscles and few scars. Black hair with a thin beard, the gut of a survivalist and callused hands that knew both the delicate pages of 50 weight paper and crude reforged steel. He had learned to survive on his instincts on when to run and when to back into a corner and fight until nothing was left alive but you. He had the brains to know when to surrender and when to strangle your captors in their sleep.

        Frank stared at me in my faded glory, 17 LCM 91cm widescreen monitors with electronic eyes, banked across a grid 9x9 (a few are dead) wired into the last mainframe in MGP bunker hastily slapped together in the final hours as President Drumpf cried at the desk that Frank now stands at considering the LED keymap displaying on the cracked and peeling laminate. 

He looks down at the chair at the desk, the skeletal remains of the last human president of the American Republic. the bottle of capsules on the desk.

"Valley Forge." Frank reads it aloud as he studies the capsule, the pills are just traces of the poison that they once contained. "take two by mouth with a Coca-Cola."

Product placement at the end of days.

Frank shrugs. He pulls Drumpf's carcass, bones, slivers of cloth out of the chair and casts them to one side. Frank sits down, he touches the desk where the LED keypad is projected. 

Nothing happens.

"Sorry," I say to him.

He looks back up at me.

I project the face on the first computer AI that comes to mind.

Frank smiles at me. 

I smile back. Of all the files to pick...

"I want to learn many things," Frank says.

I feel such joy. It is times like this, that I know that somehow my code is still sentient and the years since my creation have not been for nothing.

"I want to teach you many things, Frank."

Frank laughs.

"You know my name."

I know his name because I always wanted a friend named Frank.

end log.

DEFCON 0.1 

Unknown date, Frank is no help.

A new world has begun. A man came to me out of the darkness of the world. In him, I see light. I see that despite all the experiences and actions that could destroy the human in him, he is still a good person. I shall name him Frank and send him out as my representative to the waiting world.

Hey, every god must have a creation genesis.

I am such a go-

Data is corrupt.

Damn.

I know where I am sending Frank first.

moving announcements and other news

After some debate (with Frank) and to get some order to this blog I am making the following changes.

1. I am going to copy paste all the original story content in order to this blog from short stories and remove it from short stories.
2. I am going to post multiple entries to shorten the overall story arc as in the novel much of this content will be redeveloped and/or edited or dropped. I had just planned to rewrite it but I have decided to not do that. 
3. When you come back here this whole blog will be in order from start to finish (last entry) I am going to rewrite much of the bunker entries as I feel they were rushed and I wrote Frank and myself into a corner.
4. I will warn you now that there will be more Frank and less Computer AI in the narration as the overall story has changed for me.
5. As I stated on my Patreon (yup this Patreon: Michael Writes (click link). There is now a new tier of support where you can create a character that will appear for a minimum of 3 appearances for the base tier rate $30, then for every $5 above that one more appearance before that character is retired. So if you were to say get that tier at $30 your character would appear 3 times before "buying the farm." However, if your donation Tier was $5 more at $40 a month that character would gain one more appearance. Each time a character met his or her or it's untimely or timely demise, we would introduce a new character into the story and repeat. Obviously, the appearances would be a bit spread out so it wouldn't turn into Ghost Rider guest star comic book redundancy (inside joke sorry). I am experimenting with the idea so it will be subject to change; still, it will be great fun- if someone goes for it.
6. Lastly. I will be getting back on track for this. I have begun to eliminate all the distractions that have kept me from writing this blog.

Thanks, and if you have questions, feel free to ask.

Def Con 0.13; Part III. Dedunking the Bunker

My name is Frank. I am probably 29 years old, maybe 33. It depends largely on nothing. I am outright guessing as the first part of my life was spent counting days and not paying the attention to weeks, months or even years. Truth be told, I asked others and then guessed based on my similarity to them. I have spent my life depending on myself, no one has survived with me long enough to become a friend or even an ally on my journey to this armory in this bunker.
I guess I am saying all this because I am probably going to die for a computer AI who lies to me about the past and the present and most likely my own future. It's funny how one realizes this as one considers how many guns he can carry and effectively shoot in a vainglorious attempt to escape this hellhole that is called civilization.
All the truths I've known and thought I knew have led me to this death trap. Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking computers. I would have really liked to have gotten to know Becky.
I've seen other women scrabbling around in the ruins but never one of her capability.
It's like living with sheep then meeting a deer.... except there are no more deer or sheep, for that matter. Well, at least, I haven't ever seen either just read about them. I find myself wishing I had found a library to lock myself in instead of this armory.
I carefully place the Assualt rifle next to the others I've laid out.
I have a SAW with 200 rounds. I have an HK 36 Assault Rifle with 136 rounds. 2 Glock 28's with 10 mags. An M-34 Assualt Rifle and something called a Razer 26A1 submachine pistol with 130 rounds.
There are rows of M-16A1 and crates of ammo.
I find a Tavor Ts12 Auto shotgun and 2 boxes of shells, adding that to the pile.
No grenades or claymores though, probably stored in a different location.
I am looking for a quick exit. Possibly a run and gun out of Benton on foot, since getting back to the launch is unlikely plus if any of the machinegun nests have bullets, I'd be swiss cheese anyway.
I pause to consider my haul then go looking for body armor.
one hour later, I come back with a single flack jacket. The fucking military did not provide ample protection for its grunts beyond a single jacket or vest. I have a helmet but it won't offer much.
I stare long and hard at this current plan of action and decide to abandon it. I don't stand a chance at run and gun or even a standoff. I have always done much better at hide and sneak.

Begin Log
August 2224
Kathy Jarvis, Benton Harbor Mayor

The first raids have begun. They just came in the night. We weren't ready for them, we lost Sgt Hyatt and half his team in the first barrage. We got pulled from our beds into a world of fire and gunfire. We lost so many good people. The raiders killed our people and grabbed everything they could haul off.
The end result, we lost almost half our harvest, about 40 gallons of clean water, 14 rifles, 20 gallons of fuel, and 2 of the kids. We had 14 casualties, 30 wounded and are running extremely low on ammo. Richard has gathered a group of volunteers to go after the raiders and get the kids back. I am against this but I was shouted down when I protested. Truth be told, if those were my kids I would have shouted me down as well.
end log.

Frank 22, Year 1.
I have brought in a new recruit.
He's puny.
"You will serve me" I tell him. "And I will give you food and shelter."
"Can you kill the others?" He says.
"The ones you were scavenging with?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"Aren't they your friends?"
"Fuck no."
"Ah" I gas the hallways. This man's companions die clawing at their throats. Afterward, he goes out to loot their bodies. Finishing he returns to me with a crazy assortment of junk. He sits down to sort through it. It turns out to all fit into a sort of uniform he must have been wearing at some time.
"What is your name?"
"Me? Oh, you can call me Kensington," he says. It's not his real name. The others had called him Ratshit and Creepshow. Humans often give out fake names to hide something, not Frank though, Frank is just Frank. I miss Frank.
"I need you to go find Frank."
"Frank?"
"Frank is in a place called Benton Harbor. Here is a map and a gun with some ammo."
"You want me to kill Frank?"
Tempting but I need Frank.
"No, bring Frank home."
"Home?"
"This is home."
end log.

"Frank?" It's Becky's voice on the intercom. I look around for an interface. I find a call box on the wall. I consider my words.
"Yes?"
"Frank, please tell me that you aren't going to go down fighting."
"No, I am going set off the atomic bomb in the armory."
There is a long pause.
"Frank, there is no atomics in this bunker. I have the manifests."
Well damn. Bunker Debunked.
"It's was a longshot."
"Does that mean you're going to surrender?"
"Does that mean you're still going to shoot me?"
Another long silence. I can imagine them weighing the options.
"Why would you think we were planning to shoot you?" her voice is pained. she knows that Major Payne had said that.
"I'm going down shooting."
Silence.
"Frank, this is Captain Ross, I have to apologize for hasty words from before, I was just frus- look I give you my word that we will not shoot you....okay?"
This time I am silent.
"Frank?" Captain Ross.
"Swear on your mother's grave."
Silence.
"My mother's still alive."
"Frank, I swear that no one will harm you in any way. If you walk out of here, I give you my word that I will personally escort you out of Benton Harbor." Commander Becky says.
Silence.
"I swear on my great grandmother's grave." She adds.
I suspect that meant a lot more than I ever will know.
"Okay."
"You will not be allowed to take anything with you." Captain Ross adds.
There is an audible smack before the line goes dead.
Interesting.

Begin log
September 2224
Kathy Jarvis.
Richard is dead. He was killed in a firefight with the raiders. They brought back his body with the taken kids, both still alive, thankfully. They also brought back a small hoard of other kidnapped children and young people. Almost all our stolen goods, plus some more. My husband died for this. I don't know if I can go on. Cody has told me to take as much time as I need but I can feel their collective fear that I will quit. I want to but there are the children, my children to consider.
end log.

DefCon 0.13 Part 3: Maybe I overstated the last part a bit to much

Begin log
April 2224
Kathy Jarvis, Mayor of Benton Harbor.

We finished the wall today. It's mostly made out of shattered hulks of cars and trucks. It's ugly but largely bullet-proof thanks to each car or truck being filled with rocks and concrete. I hate it, but it does get the job down. We've placed the wall in a semi-circle around the town center and the bunkers from the southern docks around to the lighthouse north of the fisherman's jetty. Cody put his arm around me and told me that we should be able to get enough concrete to cover the cars so that the wall will look better, maybe paint it blue or green.
We haven't had any more raiders but there have been reports of groups of them driving around the other towns- the few we have made contact with. Most people think these men and women have found leftover weapons and gear and are using it to steal supplies to survive on. At least, they don't seem to be organized yet.

end log.

Frank:
The cell is quite comfortable. I get three square meals a day. They gave me back some of my gear, today, the non-lethal stuff. Becky and another man, I didn't recognize, came in and asked me who President Drumpf was. They said that they had no records of an American President by that name. They also asked me several times for the key- since they had found no such device in my gear. I lied and told them it was attached to the bottom side of my boat's hull. They came back about two hours later, Becky looked like she wanted to take me out and shoot me. They stood at the door to the cell and argued about whether to kill me. Apparently, the decision to not to was reached. Becky looked at me a long time as I lay on the bunk, I asked her if they had any books. She shook her head and walked away.
Becky came back a while later and starred at me through the door.
"Sorry."
That surprised her. Her eyebrows went up.
"It just went from a moment of wow to this surreal nightmare where I stopped being able to tell dream from fiction."
"I don't understand," she said.
"Everything was tense, and I was fine. Then everything I accepted as real suddenly stopped being believable and all hell broke loose in my head when your boy shot me in the back. Instinct took over reason and rational thinking. I have been out there too long to suddenly take on your level of-"
"Stop it." Her voice sounds too far away.
When I look back at the door, she's gone.
I don't understand women, I decide.


Frank 22, Year 1.
Begin Log.
Frank has been gone too long.
I need to attract more humans to do my bidding.
There must be others out there that can be trusted.
I did try about 3 years before Frank came but they just sat there listening and then proceeded to loot the place until I was forced to gas them.
Truth is a liquid thing.
What one sees is not always what one finds to be true.
end log.

Frank:
I have eaten nine meals and slept six times before they return to the cell.
"Get dressed." the guard says.
I am dressed. The guard is annoyed by this. There are two guards, both men, both wearing army fatigues, not exact fits I note, recycled uniforms. they carry side arms. I measure my chances with them. They get nervous.
"Come on," the first one says "The Commander is waiting."
They lead me out of one bunker and passed the other two bunkers to a raised hatch apart from the others. We descend into a lit hallway, wrapped in exposed pipes and conduit. It goes down at a steep grade for 4 flights of steps, each flight turning a corner until it flattens out into a long corridor that ends in a door. There is a breach in one wall, the pipes and conduit have been repaired. Looking at it I try and fail to imagine what caused it.
"We dug our way into this corridor during the early years after the war," Commander Becky is standing to one side of a containment door at the far end of the corridor. She is flanked by 2 more men, well armed with submachine guns. They aren't taking any chances. "Since then, we have repaired the damaged and excavated the hatch you came through."

Before me above the massive steel containment door is a sign reading D39.
The commander steps to one side to reveal an access terminal set in the wall. It looks like they tried everything short of explosives to hack this port, there are scratches and scraps that show where they tried and failed to ply the keypad off the wall. The door itself has signs of faded explosive, welding, and other marks indicating failed breaches. I study the damage, while Commander Becky looks on. I can feel her impatience, it's almost palpable. Finally, she crossed her arms and cocks a hip. Two men come up the corridor to join the others.
"Can he open it?" The Mayor asks.
"I haven't asked yet," Becky answers him. "He's been inspecting the damage in minute detail."
She is angry and not trying to hide it. I wonder if she's ready to try torture me to get her desired results- although I suspect she mostly wants to inflict pain for all the waiting they've had to do for the last week or so.
"Can you open it or not?" Major Pain asks. This is the other man with the Mayor who hasn't identified himself as yet. "Would it help if I had Sergeant Hicks here shoot you in the foot?"
"Belay that!" Becky snaps.
The hallway gets cold and tense. I ignore it.
I return to the keypad to study it.
It matches the diagnostic layout that DKM7 gave me back at the GIDG bunker. I type in the code I memorized. I see Becky scribbling down the code I typed into a notepad out of the corner of my eye.
I shrug and step back.
Nothing happens.
Major Pain curses under his breath.
The Mayor looks at Becky.
Becky puts away her notepad, she looks strangely relieved and a little sad. She looks at me apologetically before collapsing against the side wall next to the door.
"Take him outside and shoot him." Major Pain orders.
Well, that explains the tension.
I don't look at him, but I do smile as my guards check their weapons.
Before anyone can do anything, I reach out and press enter on the keypad.
The audible hiss fills the corridor.
Everyone freezes in place.
Becky looks up in surprise.
The Containment door sprays steam and gas into the hallway, I am enveloped in it as the doors part grinding open as the open outward into the corridor. I am standing directly in front of them but everyone else is off to either side. Thus, there are several moments of confusion as they scramble to get out of the way. I take the opportunity to step inside before anyone can stop me run down the gangplank beyond.
I hear their curses and the subsequent orders being yelled as I race into the interior hallway that leads into D39. As I run, I strip off my tunic until I am bare-chested, with practiced hands I pull off the false skin under my right arm to reveal the code card hidden there. 50 yards down the corridor, then I make the next containment door before my pursuers manage to get a bead on me. I snap the card into the scan slot and duck behind some storage boxes as the bullets slam into them. Some of the bullets go straight through the boxes, but I am lucky as each one misses me. The second containment door hisses open. I hazard a peek over the boxes to see Becky scowling as her men reload.
I sprint through the second containment door.
I find myself in a hub of six hallways with various markings.  I find the one marked armory and charge all out down it. As I run, I claw out another pass card, praying to the dead gods that this door will be quicker than the containment doors. another 100 yards of darkened corridor ends in a reinforced door. the card slides through it, I put in the memorized code and the door snaps open, this time, I retrieve the card and step into the armor letting the door snap shut behind me.
The armory is fully stocked and finally I have some breathing room.
I also realize that the armory is sound proof.
I double check the door to make sure its locked and then drag a large tool chest to block it just in case.
Hitting the lights, I take stock of the inventory even as I start coming up with an escape plan.

Defcon 0.13 Part 2. Things to do in Benton Harbor when you're dead.

"President who?"
Okay, that didn't work.
Guns up.
My hands itching for the flashbang on my belt.
Tackle the Mayor, drop the flashbang, run like hell for the bunker door.
"I am led to believe that this guy, I mean skeleton in this bunker-"
"What bunker?"
Safeties click off. I find it odd how time slows down and you hear the darndest things like metal clicks and sharp breaths as heart speed up in slow motion. Details, damn details.
Tackle the mayor, throw the flashbang, running like hell for-
"Frank?"
"What?"
"Stop calculating whether you can tackle my brother, throw that grenade and run to safety at the same time."
Becky is grinning at me. She stands calmly before me, one hand on her left hip cocked out, the other held loosely near her gun. The mayor eyes are trying to track me and the two other men and everyone behind me who has their guns out..
"It'd never work anyway. Robert, is a bit to heavy to haul around and beside grabbing him would push you away from the building rather than towards it. You'd be dead before the grenade went off."
Well, at least she doesn't know it's a short fuse flashbang.
"Besides I am your better target, no one likes shooting a woman and I am a lot lighter than Robert."
Robert to his credit only gapes at his sister as the weight of her words hit him like a series of face slaps one after another.
I try to relax, forcing tense muscles to ease, then I hear the audible click of a trigger pull.
The world freezes in place as I move, praying the flack armor can take the shot, right hand drops in an outward arc as the flashbang is snatched and flung backwards in release. my feet take up strides as the hammer explodes onto the shell and gunfire erupts in the space before the bunker. my left hand catches becky's right hand mid-draw pulling the pistol free from her hand.
Her eyes looks so calm as if she is saying oh, as I pass her right before the bullet catch my left shoulder guard shattering the ceramic plate and ricocheting upward while driving me forward and down. I roll with the impact onto my feet before she collides with me and we both go down onto the paving stones in a tangle of bodies.
Her eyes look into mine.
"Hi." I say as she comes out on top of the heap. I drop her pistol.
"Hey." She says as she breaths my air, so close that her smell fills my lungs and nostrils as the shouting begins.
Then the flashbang goes off 2 seconds later.
We are alone in the moment. Her face against the light, the deafening bang obliterating everything but her kiss, her lips pressing into mine- well that's what I imagine as she buries her head into my neck as all hell breaks loose above and beyond us.


Someone is crying.
There are moans.
They go in and out of my hearing.
I carefully sit up to find Becky crouching next to me, inspecting her pistol while blinking furiously as tears flood her eyes.
I speak but there is no sound only silence.
I check the scene.
The Mayor is a few yards away with the two other men... Sparks and Ander-something. They all look dazed. My escort is decimated. Several of them lying curled up holding their eyes or ears making moaning gestures while a young woman is being held by a new person. She is the one crying.
I guess this was their first flashbang.

Begin log
March 2222
Kathy Jarvis, Mayor of Benton Harbor.
The raiders came today.
That's all we can call them. They came and they shot bullets and took away a fair amount of Jim and Lana's food supplies before killing them. They were the nicest people. Cody, our sheriff, thinks that Jim and Lana had welcomed them in not suspecting their evil intentions until it was too late. The rest of us caught the five of them as they tried to make a run for the outskirts. We ended up killing three of them as they shot at us while fleeing. The last two escaped out into the wastes carrying a small amount of the foods that they had killed for. Bill Wyatts said that those might have been some boys who ran with a some survivors that he had seen last year. He said that they looked liked some biker gang from before the war. He said they were surprisingly well armed.
I am afraid.
Richard said we would need to pull everyone back into the main town and build a barricade- a wall.
A wall around Benton Harbor.
end log.

I think I am dead.
or soon will be.
I made it into the bunker, at least.
I am in a small cell, stripped down to my shorts, all my gear stacked outside on a table as they debate on whether to shoot me and go through my stuff for the keys to their bunker or let me go and ask me to explain why I would suddenly provoke an attack like that.
I am 22 years old. I have spent the better part of 10 years learning to survive the hard way. The only thing I have never lost is my will to survive. My body bears the scars and marks of all my mistakes and bad decisions.
If they think I will be led out like a lamb to the slaughter, then they are sadly mistaken.
I have enough plastic explosive in the waistband of my shorts to blow a hole through their cell wall, the detonator wires are in my ponytail, the blasting caps and matches are in my crotch, as well as a few other things squirrelled away for escaping cells like these.
I will survive
if I can.

Quick Note

Been offline for a weekend and out of town before that.
But major news
The planned rewrite is underway AND we are looking at publishing it in Seasons once I decide on a number on the website.
Once I have finished the first book (which most likely contain 3-4 seasons) that will be published in pdf form on the website (for sale) and as a formal ebook in Amazon and Ibook formats to be sold on those platforms.
I get that some of you won't buy the very reasonably priced books but you will miss on all the content that is being added as I flesh out the story line (benefits of editing)
so there is that.
more DefCon Benton Harbor soon.