Marshall went upstairs to his room. It got quiet in there. He had a battery-powered lamp with LEDs that used next to no electricity, and he was writing in longhand when the juice was off. Colin wondered if he could scare up a typewriter from somewhere for the kid.
He lit a candle. You could get those without too much trouble. He wouldn’t have wanted to write or read or even play cards by candlelight, but it was enough to keep you from barking your shin on a table or tripping over a footstool and breaking your fool neck.
Kelly came and sat down beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. She snuggled against him, for companionship and no doubt for warmth as well. The heating system was gas. But, again, the thermostat had a built-in computer chip. The people who’d designed all this stuff had assumed there’d be electricity 24/7/365. Well, Colin had assumed the same thing. Which only went to show that you never could tell, and that assuming wasn’t always smart.
“I tried to use a manual typewriter in the library at Dominguez Hills on a paper the other day,” Kelly said, echoing his thought of a little while before. “They put them out where the light’s good so people can, you know? But I don’t have the touch for it. You’ve got to hit the keys so hard! I felt like a rhino tapdancing on the keyboard.”
“Ever mess with one before?” Colin asked. She shook her head; he felt the motion against his shoulder. He went on, “I did-I had one when I was a kid. But I didn’t miss ’em a bit when computers came in. Typewriters aren’t-waddayacallit? — user-friendly, that’s it.”
“No shit, they aren’t!” Kelly burst out. Colin gave forth with a startled laugh. He wouldn’t have said that himself, not where she could hear it (though he wouldn’t’ve hesitated for a second if the intended ear belonged to Gabe Sanchez or to Chief Pitcavage). She laughed, too, but the amusement quickly left her face. She went on, “The world’s not user-friendly any more, you know?”
Colin started to laugh again. This time, the laugh didn’t pass his lips. Gasoline was a king’s ransom a gallon when you could get any. Most of the time, you couldn’t, not for money or for love. (Sex was a different story. The Vice Unit had closed out a pimp’s stable of hookers, who’d been turning tricks to keep his Lincoln Navigator’s tank full.) Power came on when it felt like coming on, which seemed less and less often day by day.
Not much TV. Not much Internet. Cell phone connections rare and spotty. Even good old-fashioned radio took electricity, for crying out loud.
“Well, we’ve still got books,” Colin said. His arm tightened around her. “And we’ve got each other, and maybe in a while we’ll have a baby to keep us too busy to worry about all the stuff we don’t have.”
“Marshall’s probably writing now,” she said. “Want to go upstairs and see what we can do about that?”
“The wench grows bold,” Colin said, and squeezed her again. Up the stairs they went. He closed the door to the master bedroom behind them.
* * *
Every once in a while these days, you read a newspaper story about somebody who killed himself because he couldn’t write on his Facebook wall or tweet any more. I’m cut off from the whole world, so why stay? one guy’s last note read.
The story said that particular suicider was all of nineteen years old. The reporter quoted John Donne’s No man is an island, entire to himself, and went on to talk about how, in the aftermath of the supervolcano eruption, we were all cast back on our individual resources in ways we couldn’t have imagined before first Yellowstone and then the whole country fell in on themselves.
Actually, before the supervolcano went off, Marshall Ferguson wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a newspaper. That was something else he left to his father and other antiques. If he needed news or anything else, he got it off the Net with his laptop or his smartphone.
He’d got a lot of his fun in the virtual world, too. He hadn’t spent all his free time playing World of Warcraft with buddies scattered cross the world, but he had spent quite a bit of it in front of a monitor.
Now those choices were mostly closed off. Even when he had power, the WoW servers often didn’t. He had the game on his hard drive, of course, but playing solo was to the massively multipersonal variant very much as masturbation was to sex. Better than nothing, yeah, but nowhere near so good as the real thing.
When the Net was up, seeing yesterday’s story in tomorrow’s Times just reminded you how pathetic a paper was. But it was yesterday’s story only if you’d found out about it yesterday. When you read it for the first time as it ran in the newspaper, it seemed new to you. Sports broadcasters doing the Olympics had called some of their shows plausibly live. The Times, these days, was plausibly live, and seemed authentically live because its competitors, which should have been really live, were in fact too often dead.
And damned if Marshall didn’t find a substitute-well, a substitute of sorts-for his MMRPG. One of his friends’ dads dug a beat-up maroon box out of the back of a closet and presented it to Lucas. The game was called Diplomacy. The board was a map of Europe with funky boundaries: the way things had looked before World War I rearranged political geography.
Fighting World War I was the point of the game. You could negotiate before you moved. You had to write down your orders. No fancy graphics or anything, but it turned out to be a pretty good way for a bunch of guys to kill a Saturday afternoon. . and evening. They finished up by candlelight.
“Gotta hand it to my old man,” Lucas said after Austria-Hungary’s red pieces had conquered a majority of the supply centers on the board and therefore won. “That’s not half bad.”
“Pretty good, in fact,” Marshall agreed, thinking his own father would probably get off on it, too. Another question occurred to him: “How long has your dad had this, anyway? I mean, dig it-the pieces are wood, man. When was the last time you saw that?”
“Dad told me he played it when he was in high school,” Lucas answered. That put it back in medieval times, or maybe further: Lucas’ father was paunchy and bald and graying. He might not actually have more miles on his odometer than Marshall’s father did, but he sure looked older.
“It’s a hella good game,” Marshall said, and all the players gathered around the board nodded. Judiciously, Marshall went on, “About the only thing wrong with it I can see is, how often can we get seven people together and, like, blow off a whole day?”
More nods from his comrades in skulduggery (you didn’t have to tell the truth while you were negotiating-only your final written orders counted). A guy named Tim, with whom Marshall had gone to high school and who didn’t seem to have done much since, eyed the board and the other players.
“When you wargame online, there’s lots of other people all the time,” he observed. “Or there used to be, when the power worked all the time. Here, it’s just us, y’know?”
People nodded yet again, with more or less patience depending on their own personalities. Tim was fun to hang out with, but he’d never be the brightest LED in the flashlight. He was the kind of guy who ordered pie a la mode with ice cream on it. He had no clue that he’d just said the same thing Marshall came out with a little while before. Tim had no clue about quite a few things, but he’d done a better than decent job of playing Italy in the game. Winning with Italy wasn’t impossible, but Marshall could see it wouldn’t be easy, either.
Lucas said, “It may not be as tough as you guys are making it out to be. I mean, we aren’t all stuck in nine-to-fives.” His mouth twisted. “No matter how much we wish we were.”
He was living with his dad, the same way Marshall was living at his old family house. Three of the others shared an apartment that would have been about right for one of them. Tim had lived out of his car for a while, till gas got too scarce and too expensive to make that practical. Now he was just kind of around. Maybe he crashed on one girlfriend or another, or on one girlfriend and another. Marshall didn’t know the details. These days, with so many people from sea to shining sea scuffling, asking a whole bunch of questions was the worst kind of bad form.