The Outage

Chapter One

Our family has always been different. We were always an extremely outdated. We still read books with pages we kept on bookshelves and had conversations that lasted long into the hours of the night about silly nothings. On Sunday nights, we sometimes managed to play a board game. My favorite was always Monopoly, but the pieces were all missing, so we would use different color painted gears from my fathers workshop in the garage.m

Amalthea, however, wanted to be modern. She had a beautiful elegant demeanor that suggested fragility but in truth she was strong and opinionated with an ambitious nature. She was a cyborg in her right arm, so every time her hand would whisk eggs in a bowl and her hand would clip the rim or she grabbed a metal doorknob, a clink of steel could be heard through the thin walls of the tiny house we shared. The sound would always make me smile because it reminded every of the sister I always looked up to, but every time my parents heard it a restrained flinch was evident in their eyes.

Amalthea called them paranoid. I called them aware. They would always talk about what was coming, like they already knew the world's fate. I would sit on my father's lap while all three of them spoke of their differentiate opinions of technology. Debates would break out, and sometimes turn into fights. Amalthea wanted to see the world, be normal, download a holo-server in her arm, she would argue. Ma and Father would reason her with talk of education and keeping the old memories alive. When this happened, I would be sent to bed. It's not like we I couldn't hear them once I was in my room. I think the idea was what counted.

We had one robot in the house. It was my father's invention, and Amalthea loathed it for how makeshift it looked. It's name was Nano, and it was my best friend for ten years. It was more of Father's workshop partner than a companion or servant robot, but I would talk to it for hours, tell it stories I conjured up from my imagination, drew it pictures with broken crayons, and watched black and white silent movies on its tiny smudged screen. It was a very simple, rusted design of a robot and I loved it to death.  It spoke very little but it answered most of my occasional questions and we had small conversations about what I would wonder about. Why couldn't we leave the house? Where did our food come from? Why was the sky always black? Why couldn't we get a puppy? Why didn't I look like Betty Boop? Around that time Father still had a job. He was a robot repairman, our neighbors would send him their drones and their broken cyborg parts and he would spend hours in the garage banging on metal. Ma was a musician; we had a piano and a flute in the sitting room. She would play

The day I turned twelve was August 18th, 2028. Amalthea was scurrying around the kitchen preparing a breakfast that would never be eaten. I walked down the steps, yawning. Father was sitting at the plain wooden table in the cushioned chair reading a very old floppy newspaper a few grey and white hairs peeking through his tousled black hair and his glasses halfway down his nose . Ma was brewing coffee in an old fashioned French press in her white robe and her frizzy brown hair clipped into a messy, wilting, bun tinted slightly red by the grey sunlight pouring through the white curtained window and her soft smile flitting across her lips. Amalthea was frowning deeply, her forehead wrinkles and her dark chocolate hair fish-tail woven around a high bun with fragments hanging down around her deep set, large black eyes baggy with drowsiness. She called her bun 'very in' and took twenty minutes every morning to perfect it. It always confused me, it's not like anyone ever saw it except us. It looked ridiculous.

This was routine. The toast was laid out on a large platter beside a pile of sunny-side up eggs. A plate of bacon and sausage was already on the table. Amalthea looked over and forced a ghost of a smile as she saw me.
"Set the table, Q?"
I nodded and noting my fathers set mouth, began laying out the white plates, white napkins, and white .

Everything in that house was white. The floor, the doors, the walls, the cabinets. The beds, the dressers, the furniture, the clothing. Every home was white to make up for the blackness outside. Amalthea said it was to make up for the Black Soul of Society but I was never quite sure what she meant until much later.