by John M Grier
Jack’s Home
Jack was never comfortable in the city of Harmony. Maybe it was because he remembered the world of a thousand years ago all too well. He would be the first to admit that it was far from perfect, but in his opinion it was much preferable to this nightmare he secretly referred to as a ‘Tree Hugger’s Paradise’.
Sometime in the past, about 850 years ago as far as he could tell, the Environmental Protection Agency took full control of the Federal Government of the United States. Apparently, there was some sort of massive die off of the majority of the population of the world…he had some truly frightening theories about that. The world was in chaos and the environmentalists of the world united with the EPA as their ultimate choice of leadership.
Naturally, what happened next was the complete takeover of all the governments of the world by the EPA. It didn’t take very long for them to drop the ‘EPA’ from their name and soon they were just known as ‘The Government’.
Enough people had died in a relatively short period of time that people just quietly let them have it all. There had been enough pain and suffering. Finally someone was willing to do whatever it took to make things good again. Who had been at fault to cause the big die-off no longer mattered to anyone so long as peace reigned supreme and life settled down to something like it used to be in ‘the good old days.’
Over the course of the next few hundred years, the government gained control of literally everything. Anything that was deemed bad for you by the government was outlawed. Salt, red meat, eventually all meat, coffee, soft drinks, alcohol, gasoline, internal combustion engines, firearms, and the military, literally anything that could have been considered dangerous by someone, was made illegal. Private ownership of many things became unheard of. Anything at all that could possibly cause injury to anyone, that wasn’t already banned, was regulated by the government.
There were exceptions of course. If you were a government employee, you were exempt from many of these laws and of the rest, certain things were consistently overlooked. The result was that government employees and civilians slowly separated into two classes that only rarely interacted. Two completely separate civilizations sprang up in the midst of each other and neither knew much about the other.
The cities were what bothered Jack the most. Everyone lived in these massive walled constructions that were museum-like inside and all the grounds were park-like, to the point that many people had never even seen true nature in it’s beauty. The only people, aside from archeologists and the like, who ventured outside the walls were the farmers, who didn’t stray too far from the cities, and the crazies who didn’t wander very close. There were a few outlaws as well, but they generally wanted to be in the cities, and were only hiding out until whatever they had done was forgotten.
Once you got a few miles away from the cities, you only saw people if they were on an expedition such as the one in Canada that they had just returned from…and those were rare indeed! Actually, Jack seldom encountered anyone on his way home. Most vehicles were hovercraft-type monstrosities that worked well over any type of land or sea. He had managed to acquire one for his personal use shortly after landing here ten years ago. It was an old government model he managed to purchase for nearly nothing.
People had become so complacent with their society, which had endured now for many centuries that it was assumed by everyone that the great outdoors, away from the cities, was vacant land and not worth the bother to ever look at. Jack soon discovered that no one paid very much attention to anyone who was outside the city walls, which suited him just fine. If he had tried to remain in the city and blend in to the current society, it would have been discovered that he was not properly registered with the government.
The current system of government control required everyone to have a DNA sample taken at birth and its pattern kept on file with the government. Since he was in his early 50’s when he arrived here, as near as he could tell anyway, that could never happen.
His actual age was vastly distorted by the lifetime of time travel he had experienced and to be perfectly honest, he really had only a vague notion of how old he really was. He was born in 1966, but his idea of the current year, in his own time was 2002, however, he thought he looked like he was in his 50’s and that was close enough for him, after all age was just a number.
It hadn’t occurred to him as he was jumping all over time for his own purposes and entertainment for so many years that his age would suffer. He would, for example, jump into the past, spend a few weeks or months and then return to the exact moment he left. Then, after a week or a day or sometimes even a month or so, he would do it again. That sad result was that after spending a lifetime traveling through time, he actually had no idea just how old he really was. A large portion of his life had been spent using the years between 2000 and 2002 as a ‘home base’.
Jack let his mind wander a bit as he drove home. He made his way over what he thought must have been the old Interstate 66 in northern Virginia, as near as he could tell anyway. There was very little of it left, but Jack recognized the twin grassy lanes as an obvious highway. As he drove, he reminisced about his past. One thing he greatly missed was his old pickup truck.
Sure, he had this great old hovercraft as well as other vehicles at his disposal, but they could not be driven on the surface for fear of government interference in his personal life. He longed to just drive a ‘normal’ car down a ‘normal’ road, waving to random people going about their lives as he passed. Instead, everywhere he went there was nothing but ruins and a total lack of people. He was reminded of those old post apocalyptic movies of his youth.
He made his home just a short drive west of Harmony outside of what used to be Winchester, Virginia. Most of the town was long gone, but several decent ruins remained. The home he now occupied, however, was a former secret government installation during his time that must have simply been forgotten about in the past few centuries.
During his day, it was known as Weather Mountain and was one of those ultra secret installations that everyone in the local area knew existed, but knew nothing about. Jack had heard the rumors when he was a kid and no matter whom he asked no one seemed to really know anything about what went on there. The rumors were as vast as the actual installation turned out to be, and most of them were probably somewhere in that gray area between reality and fiction.
Although he never gave much credit to the conspiracy theories about his new home, after ten years of living here, he really had only a vague grasp of its original purpose. As an odd tribute to his memory of the past, he referred to his new home as Freedom Base since it was the only place he actually felt free to be himself in this crazy world he found himself in.
At one time there was a large surface base, with an enormous underground facility. Now, all that was left was a small part of the subterranean structure. Actually, not much more than a very elaborate underground shelter and warehouse, but big enough for quite a few people. Jack had spent his free time these past ten years setting it up just the way he liked it.
Most of his furnishings were antiques, which he was far more comfortable around anyway. He had raided the ruins of Winchester for some of it, along with whatever he could smuggle out from under Paul’s nose during the bigger digs. Of course, much of it simply came from the enormous warehouse located on the lowest level he could safely access.
As he approached the last bit of road on his short journey home, he snapped back into reality and set his thoughts aside. His hovercraft was capable of flying a considerable distance off of the ground, but he preferred to keep it low, near the ground. As a result, he had to take this last stretch slowly due to the fallen trees and other debris on the old crumbling roadway. He considered cleaning it up a bit and possibly repairing the road, but that would be a dead giveaway as to where he was living. In his many travels he long ago discovered that living in secrecy was most often the best way.
He parked the ho
vercraft under the remains of one of the surface buildings. Long ago, he had cleared a space that was invisible from both the air and the access road. The building he parked in also happened to have a stairway into the underground facility. So, to any outsider that would happen to wander by, it would look like any other ancient ruin that dotted the landscape.
He once considered exploring the elevator shaft down to see what else was there, and to see if the rumors were true but thought better of it and remained on the levels near the surface. It would be just his luck to discover the government still occupied those far distant levels and had just forgotten about the ones he now occupied. Better to just let well enough alone. He had plenty of space, much discarded government surplus equipment to keep him occupied, and access to the current version of the internet, so further exploration was unnecessary.
One of the rumors that really intrigued him was the tunnels that were supposed to be here. Back in his day, he had heard many stories about this place but the tunnels really got his attention. Supposedly, there were both natural and man made tunnels carved out of some very hard, green rock. The government of the former United States could be run completely from here.
There was supposed to be a city with buildings, roads and a huge fresh water lake, all underground. So far, Jack had not found them. He still firmly believed they existed, because sometimes he thought he could hear strange sounds emanating from the elevator shaft, which was yet another reason to steer clear of the lower levels.
He never found the power source for the facility, but never had a problem with a lack of power either. He had assumed it was still connected to some external power source somewhere, but realized that it could be some sort of geothermal facility deeper underground that was automated to the point that it still worked after all these years of neglect.
One thing he learned here was that the government had a far superior version of the internet than the civilians had access to. His internet terminal accessed itself automatically when he sat in the “command chair” as he called it. It was basically a big comfy chair with some sort of sensor thingies he could never locate, but it knew when he was there.
The first time he sat in the chair, he just about came unglued when a pleasant, but stern looking government official appeared in front of him and asked “May I help you?”
He actually fell out of the chair backwards, a feat he did not care to repeat, and began backing away, looking for the exit before he could get cornered and in trouble. The man just disappeared as he backed away. Stunned, he looked around, figured he was just very tired and had imagined the whole thing. He sat the chair up again and cautiously sat back down.
Instantly, but this time while he was watching, the man appeared and asked the same question “May I help you?” This time, he managed to remain sitting and spoke to the holographic image to see if it was a live person somewhere else, or merely a computer generated image.
It turned out to be computer generated and he eventually found a way to program it to appear how he would like to see it. His choice currently was a lady, perhaps 30 years old with reddish-blonde hair and an Australian accent. She introduced herself as Suzie.
Eventually, he learned how to access the terminal from just about anywhere in his home. Now, when he walked in the door, Suzie met him saying “Hi Jack, how was your day?”
“Depressing, Suzie, very depressing. I was so close to the lighthouse yesterday that I could see it well enough to know it was the right one. I know I was only a few miles at most from my boat. But Janet decided to close the dig, and now I have no idea how to get back there to it.”
He had learned enough to know that although this terminal had the ability to access the internet, it would not allow anyone from outside this facility to access it. The result was that the government remained unaware of his existence here. Eventually, he became comfortable enough to confide in Suzie. He had to have someone he could talk to about his problems or he would go insane. Over time, he began to think of her as a real person and simply forgot at times that she was actually a hologram.
Jack dropped heavily into the command chair as Suzie walked around to face him from the front. He let out a big sigh, partly because of the weariness of travel, and partly because of his frustration at being so close to his machine and yet seemingly worlds away. “Suzie, do you have any idea how I would go about getting permission to dig with no government official present? The last thing I need is to be so near my boat that I can see it and suddenly have a team of government people swarm in and confiscate it.”
Suzie adopted a look suggestive of a librarian scolding an unruly child, with her hair in a bun on top of her head and her arms crossed as she looked down on Jack. She made a move mimicking the act of pushing up her horn rim glasses further up on her nose as she said “You know they’ll never allow that. Most people these days assume anything the government didn’t think up itself is strictly forbidden. You would actually be breaking the law to even suggest it.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I figured. I was just wondering.” He raised the briefcase he was still holding to eye level and asked “By the way, have you ever seen a briefcase like this?”
Suzie studied the case for a moment from every angle. “It looks like a model that was popular with government officials about 800 years ago. It seems to be in pretty good shape for an old relic. The locking mechanism was the reason it was so popular. It was supposed to be unbeatable.”
“Great. Now I want to get it open even more than I did before.” Disappointed, but not ready to give up, he sat the case aside and walked to the kitchen. The kitchen was enormous, literally designed to feed an army, but Jack had come to enjoy cooking there. He had gotten used to the idea that he could cook as much as he wanted and not have to juggle for space on a stove top.
One of the advantages to living in an old government facility as ancient as this was the access he had to the store rooms that were left behind. They looked to him to be long term storage of supplies in case of nuclear attack or something. But, inside was a wealth of surplus materials including many cases of Rifles and ammunition. As a result, Jack not only had access to an abundance of supplies, many of which were now unavailable due to the current laws, but he had the ability to hunt his food.
One of the weirdest things he found himself doing these days was hunting cows. Apparently, sometime in the past most of the farms were abandoned and the livestock was allowed to just run free. No doubt violent, quasi-militant vegans protesting cattle abuse or some such nonsense had something to do with it. As a result, cows wandered around everywhere. Being the docile creatures they are, hunting them was no problem. There was a large herd that stayed nearby, supplying him with all the beef he could ever want.
Jack chose a nice thick steak from his giant walk in freezer and, remembering his conversation a few days ago with Paul, and out of sheer rebellion, he used a bit more salt than he should have. He seasoned it to near perfection, but a bit salty, and after searing it with the skill of a master chef, sat down to eat. But, just before he could take the first bite, Suzie spoke up. “Jack, Paul is calling on the headset for you.”
“Okay, transfer it here, if you would.” After a moment he could hear Paul speaking from some random speaker nearby his current location in the base. He spoke to the air as if Paul was standing in front of him. “Hey Paul, do we have another dig already?”
“No, sorry Jack. It just occurred to me that I had never seen your home and wasn’t really ready to face the world alone just yet.”
Understanding where his friend was coming from, he realized he could use some company as well. “Well, I suppose I could meet you at the gate in a half hour or so, if you like.”
“That would be great, thanks!”
Jack leaned back in his chair and pushed his plate away. “Well Suzie, it looks like we may have a visitor. This could be interesting, indeed.”