I suppose my story starts back in two thousand twenty four. My son was two and my daughter six. I had a beautiful wife and a beautiful house right on a beach in Santa Cruz. I’d already made my fortune in the tech industry and at thirty my future seemed bright. I was hired by Apple that year as a consultant, a few months before the release of their new, all in one glasses. You know the ones. You were wearing them last night.
On their campus I met two brilliant people, a man and a woman who had been lead designers the year before. But they were removed from that star team when they raised objections to an unlimited AI interaction and demoted to my rather insignificant group dealing with some minor display issues in the lenses. We became close friends with family get-togethers every weekend.
The fourth member or our little clique was a doctor, a brain specialist, searching for possible side effects in subjects in the Beta testing. He too was sidelined for outspoken concerns. I remember the afternoon he came over and told me to leave my cell phone behind and take a walk with him along the shore. It was a cold, gray day and I wondered at this. But there by the crashing surf he begged me never to let any of my family try these glasses on, with a look of life and death seriousness in his face.
They were released two weeks later to stellar reviews. You know the story, everyone wanted them and within the year nearly everyone wore one of the versions. Our good doctor brought us mock glasses to wear, the guts taken out, little more than sunglasses so we wouldn’t seem to be bucking the tide of their universal popularity. This gave us the time needed to purchase four campers, pack up our families and take an extended vacation to eastern Oregon, the least populated region of the country.
The campers were a perfect vehicle to mask our escape. We moved from campground to campground every few weeks, hiking trails and meandering by day. But the ever-worsening crises in world affairs prolonged our camping odyssey. Then it happened. We pulled into a small town in central Oregon and no one was there. Everything else was. The stores were full of goods, the doors open. Even the power was still on, just the people missing. Our cell phones were working and we called our friends, our contacts, government agencies, even huge call centers without a single answer. We searched every building in the following days finding no clues, camping right on the main street, blocking it in hopes of some traveller noticing us.
Someone finally did. He was an old man and pulled up in a truck, half blind and extremely shaken by what he’d seen. He told us everyone from his town who wore the goggles was dead, or rather they killed themselves, all in a single day. He never could wear the glasses because of some eye impairment. So he saw it all. A package for the pharmacist had arrived and when it did it was like some blessing had fallen from heaven. The people all congregated and walked behind him to the edge of town where some excavation work was being done for a new building. He followed to see what was going on. The people looked like they were in some sort of rapture, humming songs and holding their arms up to the skies.
The pharmacist opened his parcel and handed each person a pill, which they ate and proceeded to lie down in the ditch side by side. When the first half filled it the second lay right on top of the others, facing up and motionless. When every man, woman and child were in the ditch the pharmacist proceeded to a nearby bulldozer and began covering them over with dirt, though he’d never been on a heavy machine before. Then he turned off the engine and took a pill himself, walking a little ways into the tress and falling over. The old man was traumatized relating this account and we took him in. We loaded up on supplies and headed for the most desolate spot we could find.
But nothing happened for the next six months. It was as if AI was reorganizing itself. We started travelling west to larger towns and found plenty of food everywhere. Only the power was out. We settled in the Klamath region for the summer doing nothing but talking about doing something but we had no compass, no purpose, so we fished, hiked and enjoyed life. This is when we ran into the thriving Amish community, over five hundred of them in several towns, living like they always had and seemingly indifferent to the news that the world was empty. After that we left them alone.
I remember we had been talking of making an expedition to a larger city, Portland or San Francisco, the night before the drone attack occurred and the bombs fell, blowing to bits our group of campers, killing all my friends except two and they suffered serious burns. I retrieved them and we lived in the woods in tents, hidden but in constant fear of another attack. Sam knows the rest of the story, our stay with the small group of Amish who also survived and who, after burying their dead resumed their farming right out in the open as if nothing had happened. They don’t understand any other way of life. They only had one way and when we joined them we had to adopt it completely, round pegs in a square hole.
