(Uri)
I sat by a campfire, burning old papers, cardboards and broken wooden furniture. To heat, and to cook our food on skewers.
I still couldn't believe our time had come to that.
U - It's nice, these camping and barbecues. Great idea for these holidays friend. But when are we returning home?
My friend and previously colleague grinned at my joke.
M - It will just take a minute or so, after we've found negative dynamical entropy.
Now I'm the one tittering and laughing. Good man, good.
U - Did you consider adding a gamma zero professor?
M - I like to keep my cosmological constants simple. But an adaptation coefficient can be of use sometimes.
We're good friends just like before. Even though our employer is no longer there to bother us.
Nor our homes.
Nor electricity generally.
Nor anything that would avoid us dining and living freely.
Like we've been transported a million years into the past nearly.
U - I wonder if we could train monkeys to carve stones?
M - Wild ambition... Enjoy your meal.
I eat my skewers with little appetite. I don't really know what to live for now, but I still have strong urges to survive.
I'm an ape too in the end.
~
Another night. Another day.
Mushio pulls on his hood under the sun. His skin disease has grown significantly worse since the white day. My aftermath is more in headaches or migraines recently. I'm still doing well otherwise.
But overall we're both glad to still be alive. These costs to live through the historical event of our generation and its aftermath were rather mild. We were lucky.
U - Where's the next target?
M - Probably in the southern mountain chain.
U - Whose turn is it to bet?
M - Yours friend.
U - Then I bet we won't find anyone alive, and no useful notes.
M - Not taking any chances hey? Okay. I bet we'll find one person alive but nearly insane.
He laughs, me too. Good. We're in good company. This may be the utter end, but we're having a rather enjoyable time all and all.
So we pack up. We hop into the only working car of the countryside we've been through so far. I make it roll and we're on our way.
We pass beside empty cities and weirdly floral highways, in the middle of barren lands. Like droplets from pierced buckets of paint were carried by bikers into the distance.
It's not the first time we pass by these odd ley lines of fresh shrubs stretching into the distance for no apparent reason. We still haven't figured out that one out, nor much else either.
We stop by a truck side along the road. To have a look and pump some gaz from its tank for ours.
Mushio takes the fuel. I have a look at the cargo behind.
The stench of death takes me as soon as I manage to crank the door open behind.
I step back and cough. The air rapidly dries the nauseating dampness inside now. I leave the door open. It was bad.
I spit beside. I sigh.
I then have another look inside. It's as horrible as I expected if not worse. Were they trapped inside? I don't want to know. I shut the door back.
U - Nothing useful inside.
M - Alright...
He's not stupid, but also a little more sensitive than I am. We both know it now, and I'm fine checking these kinds of things.
We restart the car and roll for our next objective. Nothing we haven't done before, with still low chances of success.
Only now, no one else either remains to help us in toolings and information sharing.
We're using our own tools and science, trying to understand the world.
~
We reach the district university campus, and its laboratories.
Everything looks deserted from a distance. And thankfully, all the buildings appear to be standing intact.
We disembark and go ahead through the open streets on foot. Not that many stains from dried organic fluids around. Perhaps they weren't too many people around when the event happened.
But here too are traces and hints that the event indeed occurred.
We have still very immature ideas of what or how.
But now we're on the road trying to get more food for thoughts, and more food to hold on as well. Although things have been rather okay on that end so far. It's not like we're in the worst of Earth's deserts.
We enter the building, fracturing the door that was still locked. My crowbar is my impolite skeleton key lately.
We enter the corridors of a research laboratory. Although from this building it's mostly open space offices and desks with computers of various kinds.
We do the usual. It will take me a while to rig the electrical systems of the building, to rewire with staples what the solar panels outside can still provide, toward a simpler subsystem and our portable batteries.
From there we'll be able to connect and use a few computers otherwise bound to eternal slumber currently.
I begin my butchering of electrical engineering. My friend begins his prospect for data where possible.
Most things will be locked and encrypted, and if he's good with these technologies, he can't get everything to open.
Ideally we would reactivate the server farms of the old internet and other big data networks, but we won't ever have enough power to boot them.
Some data drives can be skimmed through still. Even if we can't unlock them, they can be scanned by another tool sometimes. And Mushio is talented at finding the useful clues this way with his own tools and softwares.
No one around once more. Just rapture as it would seem. I'm surprised so many people were worthy of heaven.
And most computers don't reveal anything informative about the changing of times.
Because who would have taken time to record their observations and analyses of what is happening, when the world was apparently coming to some kind of end?
No sane human. But sensors of machines and laboratories, they would.
The world is littered with laboratories that were still studying cosmology, quantum physics, meteorology, geology and everything else, automatically. So we're looking for the data records of what the automated systems found, before they lost power. We have more chances of finding that today than meeting other humans with their testimonies apparently.
It still is like a work of archaeology. Good data is too rare, and more often than not, all we find is unusable or revealed itself being pointless. Lots of it we find, computers litter the streets, but most is unusable or useless.
That is a treasure quest keeping us busy.
I get a spark connecting a cable. Aha! Nice. I scratch my beard below my smile.
I lean beside the edge of the roof and yell.
U - That should be good! Try it!
He replies okay and begins to do some tests. He has his variety of equipment to do his tests and investigate. He had time to gather a good collection of computers as well.
While he does that, I head for the next building of advanced technologies research. To see if I can't grab a handful more. The answer I bet is yes.
~
I break open many a secured door, some now brittle. Until I reach the nanomachines ward.
I didn't know our country was even researching these technologies.
Immense and powerful machines are gathered from ceiling and walls to floor around here, to create and assemble the smallest possible ones reliably.
It was useful for making high end materials, to finetune molecular printing and assembling in space for instance. But beyond some very specific construction uses, not much was achieved.
I heard this wasn't reliable as we wished it had been for biology. But it improved greatly solid materials technologies.
I don't expect much but I do check the suitcases on storage, that might be holding some ready-to-use tools we could find useful. Just in case. But I know nothing here is going to print us food nor a source of electricity.
With some luck, one might be a good mechanical repairs aid however.
I rummage a little but find nothing working nor useful.
So many polished diamonds turned to coal once the context have changed.
I bet the priceless works of art from the past centuries are left to rot, or best used as rugs now.
I moved to the microfluidics department building. We might get some interesting things there actually.
Static machines can do so much we underestimate them. Lower the mechanical strains, increase the longevity of your tool.
Maybe that's why nanomachines didn't go much further than filters in chemistry and biology. They were too complex and costly to maintain and their specificity was outweighed by their low overall efficiency.
Anyway here if anything, I should find some foams to filtrate waters. Well, some gels and crystals technically.
I look for them.
The day goes by while I'm rummaging drawers and cupboards one after another, one office and laboratory after another. Some geek must have used some high end equipment to clear their coffee or cigarettes, I just need to find it.
In the first building, my friend spent as much time checking everything digital we had gathered.
Not much came out of it again.
We're spending our days investigating. We don't have an employer to guide us anymore.
Even if we're not finding anything, I quite like it.
~