“So there’s a yawning gap now in the human knowledge chain. That gap is invisible to us on this side of the 21st century, but the chasm is unfathomably deep and fraught with danger. Any destabilizing event that greatly slows or breaks down the machinery of modern technological world culture will cripple the individual. Every one of the eight billion humans on the planet will have nothing to fall back on, no buffer against global tribulation. We can no longer fend for ourselves. We no longer know how. That makes us extremely vulnerable, more so than at any time in our 200,000-year history.
“Independency, then, seeks to restore those lost skills and create an alternative culture, one that….”
Through the door of the office a flying creature zoomed and landed squarely on top of Abel. As it landed, it screeched: “Hello my pop, pop, pop.”
Abel’s daughter, Pelee, managed to land in her father’s lap without breaking bones or disabling the chair he was seated in. He wrapped both arms around her and squeezed tightly. The child squealed with delight. “You’re hurting me!”
“Oh, I’m not hurting you and you know it.”
“I know.”
Pelee nestled into her father’s arms and glanced at the woman seated nearby. “Hello, Winnie.”
Winnie was startled that the youngster recalled her name. “How did you remember who I am, young lady?”
“You’re going to be here for four sessions, right? You’re the first one to stay for that many. That makes you special. I remember you because you’re special.”
Chapter Thirteen
In late night darkness, Winnie returned to Abel’s vacant office, laptop computer in hand, to carry out a simple task. She removed a tiny electronic device from her slacks pocket and rolled it between her fingers. The minute unit was a keylogger made by KeyGhost, a bit of electronic wonderment designed to capture every single keystroke that anyone sitting at a computer keyboard typed out.
Fishing behind the computer tower tucked under Abel’s office desk, Winnie inserted the unit between the keyboard port and the keyboard line. It was inconspicuous and, to anyone going about their usual business in the room, invisible.
In seconds, she had access to everything Abel might type over the next few weeks and months, including much sought after passwords, internet addresses and any computer code he chose to write. All she had to do was remove the device later, attach it to her laptop and download the information.
Her clandestine work was not finished. Winnie retrieved her laptop computer from a chair, ran a line to the computer tower and set up a network connection. In a minute, she was rummaging through file folders and pulling copies of any contents that seemed promising. She took particular note of folders labeled Elections, Alternate Futures, New Towns and one titled Revolution.
For half an hour, Winnie worked behind the mask of darkness, looting Abel’s intellectual treasures from his computer. Satisfied with her digital stash, the agent was about to flip her laptop closed when she decided to check on recent false background information about her prepared by Midlands Research Group. Buried in cyberspace were fabricated documents created in the event someone became curious enough to want to learn something about her past. She wanted to familiarize herself with the material. Pulling the internet cable from Abel’s machine, she inserted it into the laptop and went online. She googled her name. A list of dozens of web entries materialized in seconds.
Opening one listing, the woman came face to face with a phony newspaper article about her winning a pie-eating contest when she was a pre-teen. Perfect!
Winnie floated out of the office, down the stairs and out of First Day Hall into a brisk Minnesota night. Under the dim light of a crescent moon, the Missourian trotted across the village common to the Rough Diamond cabin. Not a soul in the community was awake to notice her passing, and she moved silently into the cabin so as not to wake the other women conference-goers who were housed in the little domicile with her.
Chapter Fourteen
A pane of fractured window glass in the foyer of the main lobby entrance of Yellowstone Lake Inn fell to earth and disintegrated. Everything along the rambling facade of Yellowstone National Park’s crown jewel hotel—splintered wood, shingle, clapboard, glass and trim, fixtures—was at the mercy of gravity.
Liz contemplated the slow rain of materials peeling from the once-majestic structure. The geophysicist could see through the building to the lakefront. The lower floor walls had been crushed and swept away by the brute force of the waves generated by the hydrothermal explosion bounding off the bottom of the lake. The few remaining undamaged supporting timbers and walls were losing their bid to remain standing, unable to bear up under the great weight of the rambling upper floors. The building groaned, its death rattle audible up and down the shore.
Liz drifted before the carnage, expressionless, arms folded across her chest as if to comfort herself. To step in any direction was to slip and slide in flowing silt and rubble or to trip over a veranda chair, a mattress, shattered china or a coffee urn.
Lake Village gave up its life to the inland freshwater ocean. The ranger station, clinic, store, post office and the inn’s smaller cousin, Lake Lodge, had been torn from the landscape, their foundations filled in with gravel and mud. Splintered remains of the waterside hamlet floated in the lake, its crystalline waters fouled, replaced by fluid the color of raw sewage.
Two miles southeast of the inn, out in the lake, lay ground zero, its location marked by a glistening tower of steam vapor drifting to the heavens. Beneath the column of mist, the lake water concealed a geological bomb crater where the bulging inflated plain had broken up thirty-six hours earlier. In an instant, the early morning explosion disemboweled the lake bottom. Tens of thousands of tons of rock shrapnel and sediment rocketed up through the waters. Liz retrieved tiny shards of rock missiles and pocketed them for later study.
The Lake Village buildings sustained a cataclysmic rock bombardment moments after the steam blast. Then the first of half-a-dozen twenty-foot waves came ashore and pulverized structures, all but the hotel. Its sheer size and the girth of its timbers saved the grand dame from complete destruction. Mortally wounded, it was losing its struggle to remain erect before Liz’s eyes.
North, in the direction of Fishing Bridge, figures appeared at a great distance, picking their way southward along the shoreline and stopping often to examine debris and to scan the bay waters. Keeping pace with them but hundreds of feet offshore were two others, putt-putting along in a small open boat with a low-power outboard motor attached. Liz thought the band must be a search team, and she decided to join them.
Supervising geologist Wesley Couch scrambled over debris, followed by park biologist Jamie Hebert and a park ranger. The men had organized a party in the hopes of tracking down park superintendent Orin Thresher, the geophysicist from Massachusetts, and several late-season hikers who had obtained backcountry camping permits but were now overdue.
Someone waved in Liz’s direction.
“Hello. Hello.”
Liz returned the wave and quickened her pace toward the figures at the shoreline.
“Who are you?”
“Liz Embree,” the scientist yelled.