Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Not much TV. Not much Internet. Cell phone connections rare and spotty. Even good old-fashioned radio took electricity, for crying out loud.

  “Well, we’ve still got books,” Colin said. His arm tightened around her. “And we’ve got each other, and maybe in a while we’ll have a baby to keep us too busy to worry about all the stuff we don’t have.”

  “Marshall’s probably writing now,” she said. “Want to go upstairs and see what we can do about that?”

  “The wench grows bold,” Colin said, and squeezed her again. Up the stairs they went. He closed the door to the master bedroom behind them.

  * * *

  Every once in a while these days, you read a newspaper story about somebody who killed himself because he couldn’t write on his Facebook wall or tweet any more. I’m cut off from the whole world, so why stay? one guy’s last note read.

  The story said that particular suicider was all of nineteen years old. The reporter quoted John Donne’s No man is an island, entire to himself, and went on to talk about how, in the aftermath of the supervolcano eruption, we were all cast back on our individual resources in ways we couldn’t have imagined before first Yellowstone and then the whole country fell in on themselves.

  Actually, before the supervolcano went off, Marshall Ferguson wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a newspaper. That was something else he left to his father and other antiques. If he needed news or anything else, he got it off the Net with his laptop or his smartphone.

  He’d got a lot of his fun in the virtual world, too. He hadn’t spent all his free time playing World of Warcraft with buddies scattered cross the world, but he had spent quite a bit of it in front of a monitor.

  Now those choices were mostly closed off. Even when he had power, the WoW servers often didn’t. He had the game on his hard drive, of course, but playing solo was to the massively multipersonal variant very much as masturbation was to sex. Better than nothing, yeah, but nowhere near so good as the real thing.

  When the Net was up, seeing yesterday’s story in tomorrow’s Times just reminded you how pathetic a paper was. But it was yesterday’s story only if you’d found out about it yesterday. When you read it for the first time as it ran in the newspaper, it seemed new to you. Sports broadcasters doing the Olympics had called some of their shows plausibly live. The Times, these days, was plausibly live, and seemed authentically live because its competitors, which should have been really live, were in fact too often dead.

  And damned if Marshall didn’t find a substitute—well, a substitute of sorts—for his MMRPG. One of his friends’ dads dug a beat-up maroon box out of the back of a closet and presented it to Lucas. The game was called Diplomacy. The board was a map of Europe with funky boundaries: the way things had looked before World War I rearranged political geography.

  Fighting World War I was the point of the game. You could negotiate before you moved. You had to write down your orders. No fancy graphics or anything, but it turned out to be a pretty good way for a bunch of guys to kill a Saturday afternoon . . . and evening. They finished up by candlelight.

  “Gotta hand it to my old man,” Lucas said after Austria-Hungary’s red pieces had conquered a majority of the supply centers on the board and therefore won. “That’s not half bad.”

  “Pretty good, in fact,” Marshall agreed, thinking his own father would probably get off on it, too. Another question occurred to him: “How long has your dad had this, anyway? I mean, dig it—the pieces are wood, man. When was the last time you saw that?”

  “Dad told me he played it when he was in high school,” Lucas answered. That put it back in medieval times, or maybe further: Lucas’ father was paunchy and bald and graying. He might not actually have more miles on his odometer than Marshall’s father did, but he sure looked older.

  “It’s a hella good game,” Marshall said, and all the players gathered around the board nodded. Judiciously, Marshall went on, “About the only thing wrong with it I can see is, how often can we get seven people together and, like, blow off a whole day?”

  More nods from his comrades in skulduggery (you didn’t have to tell the truth while you were negotiating—only your final written orders counted). A guy named Tim, with whom Marshall had gone to high school and who didn’t seem to have done much since, eyed the board and the other players.

  “When you wargame online, there’s lots of other people all the time,” he observed. “Or there used to be, when the power worked all the time. Here, it’s just us, y’know?”

  People nodded yet again, with more or less patience depending on their own personalities. Tim was fun to hang out with, but he’d never be the brightest LED in the flashlight. He was the kind of guy who ordered pie à la mode with ice cream on it. He had no clue that he’d just said the same thing Marshall came out with a little while before. Tim had no clue about quite a few things, but he’d done a better than decent job of playing Italy in the game. Winning with Italy wasn’t impossible, but Marshall could see it wouldn’t be easy, either.

  Lucas said, “It may not be as tough as you guys are making it out to be. I mean, we aren’t all stuck in nine-to-fives.” His mouth twisted. “No matter how much we wish we were.”

  He was living with his dad, the same way Marshall was living at his old family house. Three of the others shared an apartment that would have been about right for one of them. Tim had lived out of his car for a while, till gas got too scarce and too expensive to make that practical. Now he was just kind of around. Maybe he crashed on one girlfriend or another, or on one girlfriend and another. Marshall didn’t know the details. These days, with so many people from sea to shining sea scuffling, asking a whole bunch of questions was the worst kind of bad form.

  “We’ll try,” Marshall said. “What else can we do?”

  * * *

  Louise Ferguson fidgeted while she waited for the bus. It was—surprise!—late again. When cities had trouble getting enough fuel for public transit and police cars, you knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket. It wouldn’t be going to hell in anything requiring gasoline, that was for sure.

  Like most cars, hers sat in the garage under her condo almost all the time, a monument to the way things had been before the supervolcano erupted. She hoped Mr. Nobashi would understand. He still drove in to the ramen works two or three times a week. But then, he was a fancy executive, not an administrative assistant. And he got his pay straight from the home office in Hiroshima. With the way the dollar had nosedived against the yen since the eruption, that made his salary go a lot further, too.

  Here came the bus at last. It left a black plume of diesel fumes behind it as it rumbled north on Sword Beach. It wasn’t supposed to do that. It was supposed to be clean, and not stinky. God only knew the last time anyone’d serviced that overworked engine.

  Before the eruption, even people who didn’t think of themselves as green would have had conniptions about that smoke-belching bus. Not today, Josephine! Anything that dumped CO2 into the air and helped fight the supervolcano’s big chill was wonderful, even if it smelled nasty.

  The bus stopped. Louise handed the driver a buck and a half. Like a lot of SoCal towns, San Atanasio had stopped using computerized bus passes. When the computers didn’t run all the time, you couldn’t rely on them the way people had for so long. You had to make do with simpler things.

  Mr. Nobashi, for instance, had brought an abacus into the ramen works. It wasn’t just for show, either. The way his fingers flicked the beads was a sight to behold; Patty from the Farm Belt called it a caution. He was about as fast and accurate with the abacus as Louise was with a calculator. Next thing you knew, he’d dredge up a slide rule from somewhere.

  Only a few cars shared Sword Beach with the bus. Most of the traffic was bicycles, with occasional full-sized trikes and skateboards. From what the papers said, random street crime (except
for bike thefts) was way down. Getting away was harder than it had been, and people were more willing to chase you. The world was less impersonal, less withdrawn, then it had been when the automobile was king.

  The bus stopped at Sword Beach and Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Louise got out there, because it turned the wrong way on Braxton Bragg. Back in the day, she would’ve grumbled at walking a couple of blocks from the bus stop to her workplace. When everybody did it, it was no big deal.

  No big deal when it wasn’t raining, anyhow. Right this minute, it wasn’t. The spring sun, the sun that the supervolcano eruption had turned pale and watery, was shining as brightly as it ever did these days. Louise had stuck an umbrella in her purse just the same. No guarantee it wouldn’t be raining when she came out this afternoon. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing? If you couldn’t trust SoCal weather, what could you trust?

  Nothing. Nothing and nobody. Louise’s mouth thinned to a bloodless line. She made herself relax, because otherwise she’d screw up the lipstick she’d so carefully applied before she left. But if having James Henry hadn’t taught her that lesson once and for all, she couldn’t imagine what would do the trick.

  Here was Ramen Central. The sliding security gate was open: the only connection between the property and the outside world. Steel fencing topped by razor wire protected the rest of the perimeter (for that matter, razor wire topped the gate, too). Despite fence and wire, they’d still had stuff disappear from parked cars. That was why they had a full-time armed security guard.

  He touched the brim of his drill-sergeant hat in what was almost but not quite a salute. “Mornin’, Mrs. Ferguson,” he said.

  “Good morning, Steve,” she said. She’d given up trying to get the big Hispanic guy to call her Louise. He’d served a long hitch in the Army, he’d fought in Afghanistan, and he had a strong sense of rank and hierarchy. Sometimes all you could do was roll with things.

  She remembered having that thought before she went into the building. The power was on, which made everything seem almost the way it was before the supervolcano threw things for a loop. Almost, but, as with Steve’s touch of the hat brim, not quite. Before the supervolcano, she wouldn’t have heard anybody here burst into tears.

  Which she did, right as the door closed behind her. It wasn’t just anybody, either. It was Patty, who’d been here since dirt and who, as far as Louise could tell, had a soul machined from the kind of steel that went into armor plate for tanks. These weren’t little sniffly tears, either. She was weeping and wailing as if she’d just found out her oldest son had been eaten by bears.

  Hoping Patty hadn’t found out something too much like that, Louise rushed toward the older woman’s office. She almost ran into Mr. Nobashi, who was coming out. The salaryman looked upset, too: not only because Patty was crying but also, Louise judged, on account of what had made her cry. Whatever it was, he must have told it to Patty, and the telling must have set her off.

  “Oh. Mrs. Ferguson,” he said. He wasn’t terrific with English. What he did to her name usually made her want to snicker. Not this morning. And what he did next scared the crap out of her: he bowed low, the bow of inferior to superior, and went on, “So sorry. I am so sorry.”

  “So sorry for what? What happened?” Louise managed. Patty’d told gruesome stories about the manager from Japan who’d worked here before Mr. Nobashi. The guy’d thought the rules here were the same as they were on the other side of the Pacific. He’d gone home in a hurry, and the company got hit with a big, juicy sexual-harassment suit.

  Mr. Nobashi had to know about that. In all the time Louise had worked here, she’d never heard that he’d fallen off the path of virtue. And if he chose now to do it, would he come on to Patty? She was about as sexy as a snapping turtle, and had the same kind of wattle under her chin. Wouldn’t Mr. Nobashi decide to try and butter his biscuits with somebody younger and cuter?

  But Louise turned out to be wasting her time worrying about that particular misfortune. “Hiroshima call me just now,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Oh, Jeeesus Christ! How I can tell you? Home office say, with times so hard, we not profitable enough in America. They close this office. They send me home. You people . . .” He gave that humiliated bow—that had to be the kind it was—again. “So sorry!”

  “Close . . . this office?” The words sounded as strange, as wrong, coming from Louise’s lips as they had when she heard them from her boss. The ramen company’s corporate headquarters in the USA had been here on Braxton Bragg Boulevard since the 1970s. Wouldn’t closing it deprive college students yet unborn of the chance to harden their arteries with cheap shrimp, chicken, beef, and Oriental noodles?

  More to the point, wouldn’t closing it pound one more nail into the coffin of San Atanasio’s economy? Most to the point, wouldn’t closing it cost one Louise Ferguson her job at a time when people swarmed like so many starving locusts on any work that appeared? Too often, that was about what they were.

  “Hai. Please believe me, I do everything I know how to do to stop this,” Mr. Nobashi said miserably. He spread his hands, palms up. “I fail.”

  Patty came out of her office. Her face looked like the Mask of Tragedy with runny mascara streaks. “I been here twenty-six years,” she said, maybe to Mr. Nobashi, maybe to Louise, maybe only to herself. “Twenty-six years,” she repeated. “What am I gonna do without this place?”

  Mr. Nobashi bowed to her the same way he’d bowed to Louise, or it might have been even deeper. “Please excuse me,” he said. “I am so sorry. Oh, Jeeesus Christ, I am so goddamn sorry.” For the first time, Louise heard him spice up his English the way he did his Japanese. He went on, “Like I tell you before, I do all I can to keep this location open. I think company make big mistake to close it. But I cannot stop them.”

  It’s not my fault. That was what he was trying to say. No doubt it was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It cut no ice with Patty. “You’re closing this place,” she said in J’accuse! tones that made it sound as if Mr. Nobashi would be out front in person, nailing boards across the doorway. “What am I supposed to do for work now?”

  It was a good question—a hell of a good question, in fact. It was the good question uppermost in Louise’s mind, too. Mr. Nobashi had the grace to look distressed. And well he might. They were sending him back to Hiroshima. They weren’t firing him, laying him off, downsizing him, shit-canning him. Call it whatever you pleased, but they weren’t doing it to him. Whereas the ramen works’ American employees . . .

  “Before I leave this country, I write you most excellent letter of recommendation,” Mr. Nobashi said. “And you also, Mrs. Ferguson.” Before either woman could interrupt to tear him a new asshole, he rushed on: “I know this is not enough. Please understand, I know very goddamn well. But it is the only thing I can do now.”

  He sounded like somebody throwing old clothes in a trash bag to give to the Red Cross after an earthquake—or after a supervolcano eruption. Yes, he was doing what he could. That wasn’t anywhere near enough, though, not if you had the misfortune to be on the receiving end.

  “My husband’s outa work now, too,” Patty said, and started crying again. “How’re we s’posed to make the mortgage payments if we’re both collecting unemployment, huh? We’re neither one of us spring chickens any more. Gettin’ somethin’ new wouldn’t be easy even if times was good. When times’re this shitty, we’re screwed.”

  That was the word, all right. Louise had enough trouble making payments as things were. She had no one to fall back on now. Two unemployment checks were bound to be better than one.

  Her cell phone chose that moment to go off in her purse. She reached in to kill it. She’d get the voice mail later on—unless the power died again, which wouldn’t affect her phone but would affect the network’s ability to reach it and be reached. With power failures so frequent, the you-must-take-care-of-it-right-this-second-i
f-not-sooner fixation of the years before the eruption was fading. Later would do, because later often had to do.

  “What about Steve and the other guards?” she asked. She was thinking What about me? but Patty’d already taken care of that.

  “It is most unfortunate situation for all concerned,” Mr. Nobashi said, which meant the security guards were screwed along with everybody else.

  Well, almost everybody else. “You’ve still got a job, Mr. Nobashi,” Patty said bluntly. “You may have to go back to Japan to do it now, but you’ve still got it.”

  “Please excuse me.” Mr. Nobashi got out of there at top speed, perhaps to spread the good news to the rest of the building.

  “That rotten, no-good pissant.” Patty usually talked loud. Now she had no reason on God’s green earth to care if Mr. Nobashi heard her. “I oughta pinch his little head off.”

  “Tell me about it!” Louise said.

  “I gave this lousy company the best years of my life,” Patty went on, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “Tell me about it!” Louise said again. Patty sounded the way she had herself when she talked about leaving Colin, substituting only company for man. It had been true for Louise, it was just as true for Patty, and it did neither of them one single, solitary goddamn bit of good.

  “I oughta burn this stinking place down.” Patty shook her head. “Nah. If I do, the fucking noodle people’d collect insurance. They’d laugh. . . . Well, fuck ’em all.” She went back into the office that had been hers and soon would belong to nobody.

  Fuck ’em all. The fired person’s motto all through history—and that did no one any good, either. Alone there in the hallway, Louise fished out her phone. Might as well see what the message was.