My name is Brian Chambers. My job, within the context of this document, is to write down everything that Jake and the other members of the commune care to share. I was “awarded” this position, despite my best efforts to protest against it, primarily because I am familiar with shorthand (a skill left over from my college days). This skill combined with the fact that Jake is unable to write (or at least he cannot write in a way that makes sense to others) means that this appointment was a foregone conclusion.
We must assume that Jake can read, after a fashion; he has taught himself many things from the books in Billy’s library. This fact notwithstanding, I have witnessed him attempt to read through some bit of text while others stand by awaiting him. There is a certain charm to these events; he always tries to read the item handed to him. We all know he will stare at the page for a few seconds, shake his head with an exasperated grunt, and then hand it to one of the onlookers and ask them to explain. This is one of his behaviors that have endeared him to many here. He never betrays frustrated anger during these interactions nor does he express embarrassment. To my knowledge, he has never attempted to hide his condition from anyone. My best personal guess is that he has some form of dyslexia. He can bull through reading things, mostly through patient willpower alone, but he is not willing to make us wait for him (his advice is usually being solicited on these occasions, anyway). I am almost certain that writing coherently is beyond his ability. Despite all of this, he never utters an angry word. He only offers a sheepish, apologetic grin and asks to be helped. It is odd what things might strike a person as brave, yet this has always seemed to me like one of the bravest things he does.
In summation, I am gifted at taking rapid dictation, and Jake writes nothing at all. Some of our other members who have fallen naturally into the position of “Elder” have determined that we should begin to keep records for those generations that come after us (I would add that concerns for such concepts as “legacy” and “posterity” naturally become the province of the aged. However, tact restricts me from saying this out loud). It is certainly possible that this record is found useful by some unknown reader at a later time—I honestly think it just as likely that this is our way of leaving something behind. This is the evidence of our existence. The Census, public records, and the sum total of all digital human knowledge are lost to us. We must be our own historians.
Jake is the first of us; the first surviving member of the Jackson Commune. Additionally, everyone else who lives here follows his lead. It is natural and right that the record starts with him.
At the time of this writing, we believe Jacob Martin to be in his mid to late thirties. We have made our guess based on small details the most astute of us have managed to glean in conversation with him. The current estimate of his age is attributed to the earliest movie he has admitted to seeing in the theater: E.T. His memory of this event is spare, limited only to sitting in his father’s lap. Consequently, we estimate his age by adding five years to the film’s release date. Attempts at uncovering more information from this memory resulted in an emotional shutdown, effectively ending the conversation until a later time. With practice, one discovers what subjects to avoid.
Jake’s appearance is an odd combination of remarkable and unremarkable factors. Physically, he is incredibly strong. Another of our members, Blake Gibson, has reported personally seeing Jake lift a barbell loaded with over five hundred pounds from the concrete floor of the garage (a set of barbells, plates, and a rack are among the many items with which Billy had outfitted his property years ago). Despite his overall strength, Jake resembles a strongman competitor more than a bodybuilder. His shoulders, legs, trunk, and back are tremendously thick; however, he lacks the giant pectorals and biceps of one who focuses on physique. He has far more physicality in common with the great apes of Africa than he does with any Olympian.
He has a mashed-in nose from a previous fracture with a jaw and neck that makes his head look slightly undersized which, Amanda assures me, was far less noticeable when he was not shaving his head. The hair that is visible (in his beard and in the stubble of his scalp) is brown with patches of grey. I have asked him why he goes to the effort to shave his scalp, which must be a burdensome undertaking in a world free of abundant electricity. His reply was that he was once nearly killed by a man who was able to grab a handful of his hair. Oddly enough, his beard appears to be thick enough to present the same weakness; I assume someone will have to make the mistake of attempting such a gambit before Jake maintains a clean shave all over.
The evidence of his age is hidden from his face until he smiles, a rare enough event under any circumstances. At rest, his face is smooth with the exception of the forehead, which is always lined with worry or concentration. When he smiles, his cheeks and eyes explode in wrinkles like a fireworks show. The rest of us sometimes think we have underestimated his age when he smiles.
I ask Jake to start at the beginning of the Flare, knowing that any attempts to push back further will run the risk of ending the narrative before it has the chance to begin. He leans back in his chair and settles against the table with his blocky chin cupped in his hand, thinking.
Finally, he says, “You know, it’s amazing how everything breaks when you don’t have an army of people staring at it.”
I’m not speaking of when the Flare hit, of course. I mean after that. The Flare was what it was; what we all remember. One day you step outside (if you were lucky enough to be outside when it occurred) and saw what I can only describe as The Northern Lights on steroids. The dead of night and there’s enough light to read by with some of the wildest colors dancing across the sky that you’ve ever seen, making everything all around you take on this other-worldly, ghostly appearance. This goes on for days, and you get used to it, of course. There was nothing on the news but coverage of the event; I saw more of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s face on the TV in those few days than years’ worth of wasting time on the Internet.
Those few days of remaining twenty-four-hour cycle coverage became pretty interesting, if not outright fun. Suddenly everyone was an amateur cosmologist weighing in on what they thought was coming next. The conspiracy theorists came falling out of the woodwork, like they always do, and blamed it all on everything from space-based weapons systems to aliens. The “journalists” on TV ate all this garbage up (because what the hell else are you going to do with a twenty-four-hour news cycle?) and hit their expert guests with unceasing, breathless questions. “What comes next?” “What of the rumors we’re seeing on Reddit?” “What should our viewers at home be doing?”
At first, all the experts were very soothing. They almost fulfilled the role of Hyperbole Goalies, catching each idiotic or leading comment from the news anchors and pulling them (and everyone else) back down to reality. In the first day, all we heard were the few lines of calming mantra: Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are two different things and don’t always occur at the same time; it’s incredibly unlikely that a CME would be directed right at Earth given the distances involved; the Earth has this really neat thing called a Magnetosphere in place to protect us from this kind of activity; and so on.
A couple of days into the dazzling skylights, we started to notice the narrative change. The experts became less placating. We heard less and less about the likelihood (or lack thereof) of an impact to day-to-day life as a result of the solar event. We heard more and more side stories about disaster preparedness kits, how much water you should have stashed on hand, knowing the location of local community crisis management centers. Various local news stations started to broadcast the possibility of rolling brown-outs as a mitigation tactic just in case something really gnarly was coming our way. I actually don’t know if anything ever came of that; it seemed the officials had only just begun to discuss mitigation when all the lights went out.