Quintessence

35 Percent.

Understandably, this news was difficult for the Residents of the Safehold to accept. This bunker of humans, who were largely selected for their unusual intelligence, capacity to adapt to change, and combat their own cognitive biases, had suffered the worst existential crisis we would ever know.

The First Pass hurt us, the Moonfall almost broke us, and the residual effects of the Dark Star had caused panic on a mass scale, but none of these compared to the harm which was brought with the discovery of our Release. This is not something we could ever truly adapt to. We could never again spend our lives beneath the stars. Our new sky was metal and rock.

At first, disbelief was common. Many couldn’t accept what they didn’t want to accept. Grandfather told me we were once the wanderers of Great Plains, as masters of the surface of the world. Following the Release we were confined to being moles, living as best we could off the technology and scavengings of the old world. Our new lives were built on the corpses of billions of men, and of trillions of animals. The first suicide occurred within a week of the news. These would become a common fact of life underground.

They had gone over the data dozens, then hundreds of times. Many learned astronomy and physics in the hope of proving this wrong, though they never did. It was as if the entirety of the planet no longer felt the pull of the sun. We didn’t simply suffer a shift of orbit, to a course analogous to that of a distant comet, instead, our planet had headed out on a straight trajectory, as if the sun had disappeared entirely and the earth, with no anchor, had simply sailed on. Sailing through the gap in the belt left by the Dark Star, one less thing to worry about. A cosmic coincidence to match our astronomical misfortune.

Grandfather had said that this was the lowest point the collective mood the Safehold would ever fall to, which surprised him given the tribulations it would suffer in later years. From this, there arose the same sense of duty which was inspired from the days of the Safehold’s creation. For better or worse, these Residents had been entrusted with the future of mankind.

As the weeks and months went on, my Grandfather became highly respected by those not taken in by despair, though there still existed considerable animosity among some Residents for the suffering he had put them through and the truth to which he had exposed them. By popular vote it was decided there would no longer be a singular position of utmost power, all would be shared, and all would be transparent. They held elections from which twenty delegates were selected to replace the old command structure, their daily workload being freely visible through the active computing systems. These delegates never had a formal name, though they were often referred to as the communion, or simply the leadership.

One of the first plans put into motion by this leadership was to order another, unbiased stock of the supplies of the Safehold, and to calculate how long these could conceivably last. This was a complicated task as many of the more intensive calculations and formulae had been erased by the Coordinator. Nevertheless, it was determined that, with the current supplies and capacity for growing new food and mining out new tunnels, we could exist in such a state for at least three decades, provided there weren’t any major malfunctions or internal issues.

The reactors which provided energy had been given enough fuel to last our meager needs for centuries, provided the reactors held steady, which our engineers assured us they would.

With our immediate safety ensured, we had two more courses of action which were decided upon, again by popular vote. The first was to send out more scouts into the city of El Paso to determine the state of the immediate environment. The second was to dedicate all possible resources to the restoration of long-distance communications. This depended on the recoding of the transmission software which was wiped by the Coordinator prior to her exile.

There were many volunteers for the first major scouting mission who were unfit for duty. Those who applied because of their crippling claustrophobia were instead led out in short shifts under the watchful eyes of trusted caretakers, rather than being relied upon to perform a mission as important as scouting.

Those who made it into the scouting legion were the volunteers who had prior experience in sub-zero exploration. In this case, seven men and four women were selected from those who had lived in the colder areas of Colorado, or who had traveled all the way from Canada and Alaska.

They were sent out with the type of gear that would usually be reserved for long-term expeditions in the Arctic or Antarctic, and supplies enough to last a week, though the initial observations were only scheduled for one day. When they arrived back they were awaited by almost all of the off-duty Residents, and their forthcoming reports were not ones that inspired confidence. From a city which had once held six-hundred thousand, which had dropped to thirty thousand in the time approaching the Second Pass, now remained only minor signs of life.

Their collected reports painted a picture of death and suffering that convinced five of the scouting team to refrain from ever again stepping outside the Safehold. From the exterior of the mountainside, from which the Safehold entrance was located, they had a view over most of the city. Through their telescopes and binoculars, they saw no signs of movement. There was a rough line of frozen corpses following the road back into the main drag of the city. Some in groups, huddled for warmth, others having dropped dead in mid-stride. A few nearby, who the scouts had investigated, had been frozen in place where they leaned against buildings. Some of these people remain there to this day, almost perfectly preserved as a morbid reminder of our failures.

What was encouraging were reports of light sources appearing within the city. They were not common, numbering only twelve, but they gave the scouts and the Residents both hope that there could be life outside which could yet be saved. With great haste, a new scouting party was built, with replacements quickly being found for those who refused to continue in their task, and additional members being recruited for the purpose of splitting up into two teams. They left on four-wheeled motorcycles, dragging hastily built sleds that carried small attached shelters and supplies, in case they were able to find survivors who could be transported back into the Safehold.

It was a full year before they stopped pulling in survivors, and over a dozen of the volunteer rescuers had been lost in the work. Those they brought in were usually heavily emaciated, and suffering from multiple deficiencies brought on by the meager food and lack of real or artificial sunlight. Of course today all our useful sunlight is artificial, with many of us in the Safeholds having never once felt the warmth of the actual sun.

The reports which were gathered from the survivors all followed a similar course of events. After the Safehold doors failed to open the Outsiders quickly assumed the truth. After a week of freezing cold, and with no contact from the inside, they had attempted to override the door controls, only to discover what my Grandfather had, the protocols could not conceivably be overridden from outside.

Following this discovery they attempted to break their way in, again, the designers had anticipated this. The only way inside would require such a grand use of explosives as to render the adjoining rooms uninhabitable, and from here the next set of doors could be sealed where the process could only repeat. Thus, the Outsiders had only two courses of action, they could sit and wait, or they could build up their own shelters and try to move forward.

Those who had decided to wait, convinced this was only some sort of internal mistake or error with the locking systems, mostly ended up dragging themselves through the cold and back into the city. Those who didn’t have been unmoved for five decades. We could have moved them, given them a proper burial, but it was ultimately decided to leave them, in memoriam of what had been sacrificed in our name. Father said it made entering and leaving the Safehold tunnel doors as introspective and morose as it should be, he said we always needed greater respect for the old world and its people.

Those Outsiders who had traveled back into town quickly set themselves up into groups. They sealed themselves in with as much food and water as they could, usually settling for buildings that included fireplaces, or ones where fireplaces could be easily installed. That’s where they stayed as the cold grew worse. Occasionally a scout would be sent out to check the status of the door, but the results always came back the same, the doors were locked, and there was no hint of communication.

Eventually, the firewood and food supplies began to run low, so the Outsiders who had managed to reach shelter were forced to brave the cold in order to continue their survival. At first, this went relatively smoothly. Food, while not abundant, had been stored in backup packs for resupplies to the Safehold. While there was no longer a supply train running into the city, this was enough to extend the livelihood of the Outsiders for another few months.

In this time those of the outside spent considerable energy in attempting to find other avenues of entry into the Safehold. Entry through the ventilation systems was easily thwarted by the Coordinator’s control of the blocking mechanisms. Three women, the only ones small enough to crawl through the ducts, were locked in. Their bodies were only discovered once the Coordinator had been exiled. These young women were later seen as heroes, by both the Outsiders and the Residents, for their sacrifice for the greater good.

Attempts to blast through the rock of the tunnel structure in order to make their way to the lesser of the Safehold doors had gotten the Outsiders slightly further. While passages were successfully opened, the Coordinators’ inner staff had informed her of the attempt. She sent out a crew who simply collapsed the cave around them in such a way that prevented entry, at least without a massive amount of work or construction equipment suited to the cold.

From there, many of the Outsiders had resigned themselves to their fate. They had no crops that could survive the change, and the vegetation and animal life surrounding El Paso could never adapt to such a sudden onset of cold. Their supplies were limited and falling, and with each day the people grew increasingly desperate.

They started gathering up local wildlife and pets which had frozen to death, eating birds, dogs, cats, insects, and rats, along with whatever else they could get their hands on.

When this food source ran thin they turned to scavenged supplies from the old world. Tins of food which were decades old. When those were gone they moved to any remaining preserves of animal feed, dog food, chicken pellets, whatever they could find that wouldn’t make them physically sick. Grandfather said that when you’re starving you can keep down almost anything. From there they went onto boiled leather. Anything leather was torn to pieces and attempted to be consumed. While some of these items proved edible, others were so heavily treated with chemicals that those who ingested them became dreadfully ill.

Desperation came to the Outsiders, and as their hunger grew they ultimately lost some of their humanity. Some of those with the strength turned to raiding other survivors, ones who had been more fortuitous in their scavenging. Some of the survivors spoke of their families being slaughtered in front of them after they refused to give in to the demands of the raiders. Many more died after suffering severe beatings and being unable to recover, with their bodies barely having enough energy to remain conscious.

Some, who refused to raid, turned to cannibalism. With the frozen bodies of humans being common, this was a food source that would not soon be exhausted. Around half of the survivors who were retrieved had relied on this ghastly method of survival. Many of these survivors would commit suicide, unable to come to terms with their actions. The rest would become withdrawn, suffering a stigma that was almost unknown in modern society. They hadn’t harmed anyone, but the load upon their psyche, bolstered by the looks of the Residents, led many of them to never overcome this period of their lives.

The integration of these Outsiders into the society of Residents went smoothly, otherwise. Aside from the cannibals, many of whom were suspected of hiding their actions to avoid judgment, the Outsiders were treated like royalty. The collective guilt of the Residents towards the choices of the Coordinator and her actions, along with those of her direct staff, lead them to entertain those not guilty of the ostensible crime of cannibalism as if they were family. The Safehold had more than enough room for those left, and most were familiar with some of the Residents. These survivors and their progeny were given preferential treatment all their lives, a decision to which nobody seriously objected.

Once it became apparent that there were no more survivors to rescue, the Residents turned to reclaim as much of the outside as they could. They slowly developed an enclosure that led all the way down the hill and into the center of town. From here it split off and spiderwebbed into any buildings which could maintain some degree of insulation from the cold and wind of the outside. The completion of this five-mile tunnel took over a year of hard, dedicated work, but ultimately left us with far greater access to external resources, and with far lesser risk.

Heating these distant buildings was, naturally, an issue. Wood fires could be used, but as no more trees were growing and the number of houses that could be torn down was limited, this was only seen as a short-term solution.

Instead, the answer was to run power cables from the Safehold, attached to the tunnel, down into the center of the city. While there weren’t any cables in the Safehold storage which could handle the intense cold, there were cables outside which could be adapted to the job, including the previously built ones that had utterly failed in the first days of the reactor’s operation but could still be salvaged and reworked.

Work teams of strong men and women, alongside electrical engineers, stripped cable from the less damaged power lines, which had mostly been inactive for decades, or never used at all, but had not suffered any major damage. From here they were insulated and placed inside plumbing pipes that ran parallel to the walkway tunnel and into the middle of the city. Here it was a matter of splitting the cable and leading these new lines out into other insulated and well-sealed buildings.

As this plan was in motion other teams were sent out to find smaller, self-contained air conditioning units. While most of these had, again, not been used for decades, there were still plenty in good enough order that they could be taken and adapted for use in the connected buildings in the city. This is how portions of the city again became livable. In the end, around a third of the Residents ended up moving out into the buildings of El Paso. After some renovations and corpse removal, they became quite nice places to live. In fact, in a story I never wanted to know but my Grandfather used to remind me, my Father was conceived in one of these reclaimed buildings.

Growing food outside was no longer tenable. Though much of the soil remained fertile, El Paso didn’t have any edible plant life which could survive the harsh cold. The increase in total land gained from the reclamation of the town, however, allowed the building of many new growing facilities, and even for the storage of the few surviving animals that had been kept inside the Safehold. With proper horticultural techniques, these farms could last for many years, and once the soil became drained of nutrients it could be replaced or fertilized with the soil and supplies outside the shelter of our nest.

It was a bizarre place to live, while it lasted. So many old buildings, looted and abandoned after the chaos succeeding the First Pass, still stood as reminders of the old world. Those who took up residence in these buildings took pride in their repair and upkeep. This city was a history lesson, a standing token of what we had once been able to accomplish, of the lives we formerly lived. The people who cared for these buildings did so under the belief that we would never see their like again. These were to stand for the rest of time, if we could help it.

Once the extension of the Safehold was complete we looked into further, long-distance, scouting missions. While the cold was unrelenting it was not, at this point, indomitable. The roads still stood, though covered with a thick layer of ice and snow. Engineers modified eight of the trucks which had been stored within the Safehold in order to equip them for conditions of which they had never been designed to handle. The fuel and fluid containers and lines had to be heavily insulated, the fluids themselves needed to be treated with various chemicals that would act as antifreeze agents while, at the same time, not heavily dampening the effectiveness of their operation.

The tires were chained to prevent slippage, and each truck took a front and rear winch and a load of rough salt to combat any particular areas of stubbornness. Onto the front of the trucks, they welded heavy snowplows, which could be raised or lowered as needed. The second trailers of the trucks had all been removed, to save weight. The first were filled with supplies of food, fuel, and repair parts and equipment. The three-man crew for each of the trucks was to sleep in the cabin bunks or retire to the trailers if necessary.

At first, there were no long-distance missions, as the conservation of lives had been the foremost priority. The trucks all spent over a month practicing on the roads around El Paso, getting used to the ride and loads, and practicing unsticking and winch operation. It was four months after the modification of the trucks had begun that they finally left out, into the cold dark of the new world.

They left in groups of two trucks, each group had been given a cardinal direction and been told to go as far as possible, gather whatever information and useful supplies they could, and, most importantly, return home safely. Once we had more data we could make additional decisions as to potential sites of interest, or even areas of expansion.

The northern group had opted to travel the eastern part of New Mexico, and up through eastern Colorado and into western Nebraska. Their goal was to stick to the flatlands and avoid the cold mountains which had proven their treachery time and again, even before the world had slipped away. This group ended up returning only a week after it had left, having only made it as far as north-eastern New Mexico, before finding all possible roads either destroyed or blocked.

On their way through the former Fort Summer military base, and the city of Tucumcari, they had stopped to gather what little supplies they could. In the military base, they were able to use their winches to remove heavy doors which had been locked and never reopened in the early days of the First Pass. They managed to salvage several hundred kilograms of food, edible salt, and various useful stable chemicals.

According to the report, on the way back one of the travelers had wanted to dig up the supposed grave of Billy the Kid, as a memento of both their travels and the old world, but was overruled on the grounds of grave-robbing not being a priority.

The eastern group took the longest to return, out of the four units, taking some 54 days until they reentered the range of short-wave radio. Their route took them east-north-east, through Texas and Oklahoma before crossing into Missouri. While there were many roads that still held, these roads had been jammed with so much long-deserted traffic that forward progress was slow progress of pushing with the plows and pulling with the winches. At least, they said, the roads were now cleared enough for simple return trips. This group hadn’t had much success with gathering supplies, even given how many towns and cities they had traveled through before they hit the point of maximum safe fuel use.

The problem this group met with was that these areas were still relatively populated up until the Second Pass. This had meant that when the cold came the people had behaved in a similar matter as those El Paso Outsiders. Everything which could be looted had been looted, everything that could be eaten had been eaten, and those locals had been left to live the last of their days in bitter hunger.

On their return trip, the group had taken a scheduled detour in the north-western Texan city of Amarillo. In the eastern part of this city was a plant that had been dedicated to the processing of nuclear material, the only such plant in operation on U.S soil.

While the crew had not, at that time, the gear or storage facilities to carry any nuclear fuel back to the Safehold, they had determined, with the use of Geiger Counters and the examination of old manifests, that there was still viable fuel which could later be taken, if need be. There was no hurry at any rate, at that point the Safehold had enough fuel to last for centuries, and given the stored fuel had a half-life of over one-hundred-thousand years, nobody was in any rush to take additional backups.

The southern group took 45 days to return from their journey. They had traveled down Mexico to the east of the Sierra Madre Mountain Range, down through Chihuahua and Durango, and all the way to the State of Mexico and into Mexico City itself. This crew reported back much the same outcome as the eastern crew. Food supplies had been stripped down to nothing, and most of the blankets and clothing had been attached, frozen, to the bodies of the dead. They were fortunate to be able to loot some of the chemical processing and storage facilities for materials that had been requested by various science officers of the Safeholds. The most useful items they had taken, at least to the common man of the Safehold, had been large cuts of tarpaulin, which could be used as basic wind cover and insulation in the expanding covered city of El Paso.

The western group took 49 days to return from their trip. Their path had taken them through the south of New Mexico and Arizona, and finally into Southern California and their target of San Diego. This was the only of the first parties which lost a member on the way.

It was assumed by the crew that San Diego would be abandoned or otherwise dead by the time that the crew managed to reach them. Abandoned because the city had once been the recipient of an enormous Icarus Climb and subsequent devastating wave, dead because after this event the city had been thought abandoned and without the facilities or supplies to maintain any level of habitation. Unknown to the Residents, San Deigo had been a late recipient of an Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarine. This submarine had been on a trip down the western coast of North America before the Final Chill started and prevented any possibility of further movement.

As the cold had fallen on the city the sub was hastily modified by the crew and local straggling populace to extend its power grid into the community. The locals had never learned of the earth’s full release from the sun. The cold, they had assured themselves, was just a passing effect of the Dark Star, like the rest of the oddities it had inflicted on its path. When the temperature refused to bounce back, and instead kept its slow but steady decline, the Residents became predictably worried, and then, predictably violent.

Those from the submarine, even as understaffed as they were, massively outnumbered the local stragglers. The importance that the crew placed on themselves gave them ample sway to place their survival above those of the Outsiders. Their rations, limited as they were, had been restricted to the crew while the Outsiders were left to focus on their own survival. These Outsiders followed the same path as had been seen in El Paso, and most of the other populated towns which the survey parties had crossed in their travels. From food to desperate food, then largely inedible food substitutes, and, finally, cannibalism and violence.

These locals had no chance against the trained might of the still collected submarine crew. All of those who chose to fight ultimately had chosen to die. Those who chose to avoid the crew had, instead, to rely on riskier methods of survival, or accept the inevitability of death. I have come to learn that this is not a difficult finality to accept when you are completely deprived of choice.

The only Outsider to be brought back with a survey crew was one drawn by the sound of the passing truck.

When this survey crew had first encountered the man, who explained the recent history of the city, they were understandably hesitant to take him on his word, given the level of deceit which they had experienced back in the Oven. This man had claimed he had survived by sheer luck, having found a field containing several sheep which had recently frozen to death. He dragged them back to an old carpet warehouse, his new home.

Two of the survey crew had remained behind to guard this man. The others gathered in one truck, detached the trailer, and drove down to the docks to see if they could speak with the submariners.

These two, a man and woman, had gotten the attention of the submarine crew by taking a slow, direct route down a road that sat perpendicular to the docks. Once they had approached and stopped the truck they had been shot at by an unknown source, followed by more who had quickly begun to exit the submarine and open fire.

The woman was struck in the leg as they jumped into the truck to escape. With most of the bullets bouncing harmlessly off the plow, the two managed to flee back to the others, where they quickly abandoned all plans of inviting these submarine crewmen back into the Safehold. The woman died of blood loss on the return trip, a bullet having severed her femoral artery. Her name was Maria Olander.

The local man, however, gladly accepted an invitation to return to the Safehold. On their way back through the city, he had asked them to make a few stops to see if anyone he had traded with before the cold had fared as well as he had. None of them had, out of the twelve he had known before the Chill, none survived.

Also reported in from the western survey crew was the answer to a curiosity that many Safehold Residents had been wondering, my Grandparents included. The answer had not been unexpected, however, it did open a new avenue for exploration which had been closed since the last ice age, and even then not nearly available on this scale. The ocean, flat without the tidal effects of the moon, had completely frozen over. With the right equipment, it would now be possible to drive over the surface of the ocean to any continent in the world. Though the depth of the ice had varied, based on local conditions, it was entirely thick enough to take the heaviest loads of any potential truck setups the crew could imagine.

As for sea life, we didn’t quite know, and we still don’t. It is assumed that the depths of the ocean are still liquid, and are likely to still team with degrees of life that are no longer found on the surface. These creatures had, long ago, evolved to thrive in temperatures that would freeze us mammals, far below the reach of sunlight. Even if the majority of life-forms had not managed to survive the shift in ocean composition and temperatures, there were still large underwater thermal vents that would remain active for billions of years. Finding one of these and snatching a fish has always been a dream of mine, though not one I’ll ever accomplish.

Once all scouts returned, the Safehold held community gatherings in which the reports of the crews were discussed in the then common smaller groups with singular representatives, and then with groups of the representatives. The decision came back quickly to avoid further journeys westward until the threat could reasonably be expected to have ‘dissipated’, as the official documents put it.

The paths which had proven safe, and the most promising, had been chosen as travel routes for further scouting and material acquisition. Various engineers and scientists pored over the reports by these travel parties and, with the aid of old recovered literature, set out areas and plans which would most likely compensate them with useful scavenging rewards.

As further plans were being laid the Oven finally had a breakthrough with the long-range communication system. Thousands of hours of work going over every reachable inch of wiring, and thousands of lines of rewritten code later, the systems which had been sabotaged by the former Coordinator had become as repaired as they ever would. With that, it was time for the people of the Oven to finally get a real look at the state of the rest of the world, or at least of those who could respond.

After the first month of operation, our Safehold finally had a reasonable idea of the state of affairs of the rest of the world. Of the six other Safeholds only two were in contact, these were the Safeholds of Western Australia and northern India. Their reports had shown a similar course of events as what had happened at the Oven. When the cold came, as it had everywhere on the planet, they had locked their doors under the command of their own Coordinator, under the guise of a standard operations drill. Unlike the Oven, these groups had not waited until death had taken most of their Outsiders before they had reopened their doors.

Like all Safeholds other than the Oven, the Australian Safehold had been feeding power through large portions of the surrounding areas. When the doors had locked, the people left outside had more to survive on than those left outside of the Oven. With ample power supplies from the Safehold generator, they hadn’t been frozen off as those in Mexico and Texas. Their food supplies had also been much more robust, and their available technology had been much more useful than what had been available in El Paso.

Two weeks after the doors had closed and they had received no response, the Outsiders had used their digging and mining equipment to drill small holes through the reinforced steel walls of the Safehold, where they had effectively reopened communications with the Residents.

On hearing the Outsiders for themselves the Residents revolted and overthrew the Coordinators but, as would become standard, not before he would enact a sabotage protocol which temporarily crippled long-range communications. Since then, the Australian Safehold had been open to all Outsiders. With no close surrounding town in which to connect, the Residents had temporarily invited all Outsiders into the crowding Safehold while they worked on a more permanent solution of outside housing.

The Safehold in Jaipur had been overthrown by the word of the Coordinators wife, his close confidant. This Coordinator had shared his actions with his wife as he ordered the doors closed. Unbeknownst to him, his wife was not as dedicated to him as he had thought. In her own words, she had put it as being more concerned over the greater good, than her own personal safety.

Before this Coordinator had been banished, he enacted the sabotage protocol from a public terminal. This had proved to me that, as long as a system was connected to the local network, it was possible to activate dangerous hidden commands, if one knew what they might be. This raised the question as to what other commands could be hidden behind these computer systems. Despite an investigation by computer science experts, no other commands had ever been found by anyone other than Hwei-Ru. Like Australia, the Indian Safehold had not the space to comfortably house and feed all of the Outsiders but, like Australia, they opened their doors anyway.

Aside from these two Safeholds, communications were received from thirty different active bunker sites across the world. These were split between sites that survived off the excess power of the Safehold, and those that had their own nuclear reactors from which to draw power.

These individuals had already been informed of the likely course of action of the local Safehold Residents by the people of the Australian and Indian Safeholds. They had been encouraged to keep an eye on the various entries of these Safeholds while keeping in mind the possible deadly fervor of the Residents within.

There were questions from those locked out of the remaining Safeholds whether the power which ran from these facilities, which in many cases was the only thing keeping them alive, would remain operational. They wondered if the Resident Coordinator would cut it off to end their resistance or the possibility of revolution. Fortunately, none of these lines were ever cut, though many connections to nearby regions weren’t implemented to begin with before lock-in began.

Of all the sites which had access to power, only a few of them had solved the problem of food scarcity. With the oppressive cold and the dwindling power of the sun, which still illuminated but barely warmed, they had to be clever. Some had managed to overcome this problem by being lucky enough to have access to facilities that were able to be convertible to homes of flora and fauna, like the Residents of the Oven were. With artificial sunlight and heat, these fortunate few sites managed to scrape out just enough to survive, provided their take was properly managed and cut with the remaining rations they had stored.

More common was the panic which was slowly gaining momentum in the less fortunate powerless areas. Many of these regions had previously contained ample farmland, but again, crops and animals could no longer stand against the cold. As the local frozen supplies and wildlife had been quickly gathered and stored, it had become obvious that this was not a permanent strategy. Some sites with ample supplies had volunteered to attempt the perilous trek to these less fortunate sites, with the goal of taking enough supplies to enable a self-sustaining community. A few of these eventually succeeded, though most did not.

Two years after the communications systems were restored, only a third of the sites which were disconnected from the main power grid remained in contact. Some had chosen to hold out as long as they could, in the hope of some miracle, others had decided that death of starvation was not worth fighting for, and ended their lives on their own terms. Grandfather always took the time to impress upon me how fortunate we were to be in a Safehold, how we were a fraction of a percent of earth’s former population, how we were so damned lucky.

I used to wonder how long the people who lived in the coldest parts of the world prior to the Second Pass managed to survive. Some of them had family local histories for thousands of years. They had lived off the rare plants and animals which could survive such conditions, but after the Second Pass, even these hardy forms of life could not have lasted long.

When the ocean completely froze over the fish and mammals that were used as a source of food would either become unreachable or die out. Those predators, other than man, who made meals of these creatures would follow suit. The polar bears, the arctic foxes, and all of the cold-dwelling herbivores would not have lasted long. The lack of direct sunlight and increasing cold would have led to the death of the herbivores which would, inevitably, lead to the death of the carnivores and omnivores.

Could the people in these places, experiencing less of a total shock, find a way to survive? We never knew for sure, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Human ingenuity among less technologically inclined societies was impressive, but it could never protect against a change as profound as the death of the planet.

With our new, expanded city of El Paso, the lives of the Residents started to again approach some degree of regularity. Maintenance and upkeep became one of the most important jobs in this new world. Those who kept the Safehold engine running were held in high regard, to the point where some people with experience in only unrelated fields would request training and time from the official engineers and scientists to further their personal feelings of worth and usefulness.

Proper schools began to form, in a manner and on a coordinated scale that had not been since the First Pass. Children were encouraged to learn all they could on mechanical operation and the sciences especially. The world was growing darker and colder by the day, but the human spirit lived on.

It was not long after this that both of my parents were conceived, my father to the people I have grown to call Grandmother and Grandfather, and my mother to two teachers, both of whom died in a scouting accident years before I was born.