The Great Outage

Rachel had been searching the runs for most of the morning. What had once been a bustling city was now a mess of tangled steel and broken concrete. The magnificent skyscrapers now just muted shells of what they once were. Weeds, vines and trees were taking over the once proud city at an alarming rate, growing out of cracks and crevices that appeared as the city decayed. When the people left the animals returned. Eagles and hawks nested in the empty skyscraper shells. Deer roamed the city eating the new vegetation and predators hunted them.

Rachel was on a scavenger hunt of sorts, an activity that has become almost daily for those who remained after the chaos of the great outage. Before the outage, society was bustling, store shops were full and most people were fairly comfortable and relatively happy. They had cars to drive, homes to live in and technology, along with making the business and banking worlds easier, was creating new methods of entertainment daily. Everyone and everything was connected. People used cloud storage to hold personal information thus making it available everywhere they went. There was even talk of following up the Mars mission with a serious attempt at colonization. Things were not perfect for sure, but they were moving in the right direction.

Then came what some refer to as last day of human civilization. It started out normally enough for most but those who watch the sun could see the danger. A large CME, 240 times stronger than the Carrington Event in 1859, had erupted from the surface of the sun at a high rate of speed and was on a direct heading for Earth. It took only 5 hours for the highly charged particles to reach the planet, striking the North American continent directly. The CME fried basically everything bigger than a cellphone or transistor radio. Battery powered items seemed to far better as they were not directly attached to the power grid. The power grid itself was completely destroyed in the CME – all transformers and power generation stations went offline. Some of the nuclear facilities melted down as the backup generators failed to kick in thus causing the entire system to over heat. The effect was global, no one escaped it.

Once the power was gone humanity fell apart almost immediately. The death toll in the first 3 months was catastrophic, billions died. There was no one to bury the bodies mostly so scavengers had a field day. Parts of the world were irradiated due to nuclear facilities failing and all the cities fell into ruins.

That was 20 years ago, Rachel was 7 years old when it happened. Although her small family survived initially, mostly because they lived in a small village in what was then Northern Saskatchewan, the loss of a functional health care system left the family susceptible to diseases, infections and other misadventures. She lost her mother first, a serious cut had become infected and she died shortly afterwards. Her father had died a few years after that when a group of hostile humans called ‘vultures’, after the bird that ate carrion, ambushed his group while they were scavenging for supplies.

Today, Rachel was on the prowl for anything the little community could use from dried goods to pieces of useful tech that would still be usable, like solar panels and items used to make windmills. Her village used such things to generate small amounts of electricity. Although things like cell phones still basically worked, they were useless without the underlying infrastructure that supported their use. Radios were also not very useful without the broadcasting stations. The electricity was used to help preserve foods as well as power a couple of smaller appliances and consumer products.

As she rummaged through what was once the provincial capital of Regina she noticed the sound of people screaming and laughing in the distance. The noise seemed to be getting closer. ‘Vultures’ she thought as she looked around for a place to duck into real quick to avoid detection. Vultures were nasty people who were basically devoid of any type of compassion and survived by raiding and stealing everything they could get their hands on. About 50 meters away from her she could see the ruins of an old apartment complex and she decided to hide out in the basement area to avoid detection.

The old building still had a roof on it so it was quite dark when she entered the building. She immediately headed down to the basement. She found a quiet spot in the laundry room to relax and wait out the passage of the vultures when things took a scary turn.

As Vultures were basically nasty scavengers they did occasionally enter buildings to search for goods and other useful things. She could hear them enter the building as they were talking quite loudly. They did not seem to know she was close by based on what they were saying to each other. Her heart jumped as she heard one of them say he was going to check out the basement. She looked around frantically to see if she could improve her hiding spot. The only option seemed to be a small trap door built into the floor underneath the table used for folding clothes. She would not even have noticed it except for the crease that appeared when she put her weight directly on the door, otherwise there was no indication that door was there. She opened the trap door and slid into the dark space beneath it. She closed the door behind her ever so quietly so as to avoid detection and it fell right back into place, almost totally invisible to anyone on the other side of it who did not step directly on it.

The room she was in was dark and she was on a step ladder leading up to the trap door, which was in the ceiling in this side of it. She turned on her flashlight, precious as recharging batteries was not a simple task anymore. She blinked twice after looking around. The room she was in was fairly large, almost as large as the laundry room above it. The walls were lined with routers and computers, all powered down of course. A thick layer of dust had settled onto the equipment over the last 20 years. There were support pillars spaced out at intervals to support the ceiling.

As she walked about the room getting a closer look at the equipment she noticed that it was in incredibly good shape for it’s age. As she reached the far end of the room she noticed a tiny green light blinking under a table containing a router and what looked like a server monitor. This was amazing as there has not been electricity for over 20 years, at least not for something like a computer network hidden in a sub basement of an old apartment building. As she bent down for a closer look she realized that it was an old UPS system in stand by mode. The batteries still held a charge which was surprising actually. She pushed to power button on the UPS and it jump into full use mode. She could see by the lights on the face of the UPS that the batteries retained a full charge. He stood up and turned on the monitor on the table in front of her. Nothing happened. A small orange light came on under neath the monitor screen to show it had power but nothing was displayed. Then Rachel remembered that the monitor was only part of the computer. She followed the monitor cable back to the machine it was hooked up to and turn it on as well.

To her surprise the machine fired up immediately. The monitor displayed the boot sequence and was sitting at a login prompt. Her community had managed to get enough power generation to run a commercial PC and all the children in her village are required to learn how to use it so she know what she was looking at. She found the login credentials under the keyboard and logged into the machine. Just as she was doing a directory scan the UPS started beeping. The batteries were not lasting very long. Must be because of the age. She shut down the computers to avoid wasting any more power.

After a brief time she pulled out a screwdriver and began taking the panel off the computer she had just started up. Taking the whole computer would be too cumbersome and she most likely would not have made it past the Vultures if she tried. However, the hard drive contained the information according to what she had learned and that she could easily remove and carry in her pack. Her reasoning was once it was back at the village they could attach the hard drive to their PC and read it that way. Once she had the hard drive in her back pack she paused thoughtfully while looking at the other computers there. The room had four of them along with other pieces of equipment she was not familiar with. Then she decided that she had time to remove all the hard drives and take them back to her village.

Hard drives in hand she approached the step ladder leading up the trapdoor she had entered from. There were no other entrances to the room so she had to go out the way she came in. At the top she paused to listen for sounds from the other side of the trap door. Hearing nothing she slowly opened the trap door enough to see out. No sign of the vultures but she could still hear them. The one checking out the basement had obviously finished the search and returned to the group. There seed to be an argument over who had possession of a hat they had found. The argument was quite heated by the sounds of it.

As Rachel crawled out slowly from the sub basement she heard shots ring out, first one then another then another. This was strange, vultures were not known for possessing firearms and ammunition is even less available 20 years after all the ammunition factories shut down or were burnt down. After the shots the arguing escalated further with individuals screaming profanities and physical altercations happening. Someone screamed and Rachel heard ‘you killed him!’ in a very loud voice. She poked her head out of the laundry room door and carefully checked the hallway. The building had a front and back entrance and the vultures were at the front so she went towards the back hurriedly but quietly as she climbed the flight of stairs leading up to the back door she heard someone scream at her from behind. They had seen her. She bolted through the door as she heard another shot ring out and the bullet strike the door frame.

As she ran she could hear the vultures trying to get organized so they could pursue her, but their infighting was still going strong. After a time Rachel slowed down and looked behind her. No one was following, the vultures appeared to be more interested in fighting over a hat than chasing her down. She was OK with that.

She made her way back to her village, a full days walk from the city, and then she presented the hard drives to Sonny, who was responsible for looking after the remaining computer and the small solar power grid the village had setup. Sonny’s eyes lit up hen he saw the hard drives she had and realized they were in functional shape. As he pulled out the necessary cables to hook up the Hard drives he kept peppering Rachel with questions. ‘where did you find it?’, ’was the whole room in good shape?’, ‘how long did the UPS batteries last after you turned on the first machine?’. Once the hard drives were setup he booted up the machine and logged in to open the directory structure. After a few minutes his face broke into a wide grin. The Hard drives were loaded with data regarding how to build things like houses, underground shelters, and whole lot of other things. Also contained files on gardening, how to clean water using field filtration systems. The other hard drives contained information regarding combustion engines and how to build them, power grids including magnetic power generators that required no fuel medical knowledge and everything else one would need to rebuild a basic society after a fall.

The recovery was worth it’s weight in gold. The Great Outage had taken most of the information that was on the hard drives with it when it took the power grids. Sure there were still people who knew how to fix combustion engines and treat wounds but after 20 years they were becoming rare. The knowledge was being lost. Rachel’s find may just be the catalyst that rebuilds human society. Knowledge is true power