The Words - An Autobiography

What Was and Is

The modern world, as it once was before IT, no longer existed. It hadn't been thrown back to the Stone Age, as many of the doomsayers had forewarned. But thrown far enough back, everything we'd once considered modern technology would require rediscovery or re-invention. The world had made some strides to re-establish itself during the centuries of my epic battle with IT, but no further than what appeared to be the mid to late nineteenth century. For most, other than walking, horses and horse-drawn conveyances were once again the most common way of getting anywhere.

Non-drone humans still drove a few motorized vehicles in the early years of the AI Wars. But these were primarily antiques stolen from car collections or cars, modern at the time, having the electronics requiring Magick Hats to operate them stripped out and the computerized fuel injection systems replaced with carburetors. But few early IT-era drivers had access to gasoline once the abandoned service stations ran dry. IT had control of the oil refineries, all of which operated using computerized control systems. The only way to acquire gasoline for anyone else was stealing it from IT - a treacherous endeavor. And as replacement parts became increasingly difficult to find, maintaining and repairing these cars became nearly impossible. In the end, two hundred years later, only a few pre-IT-era vehicles remained - oddly cobbled-together contraptions that appeared nothing like the original.

Of course, during my two-hundred-year battle, IT continued using IT's fleet of well-maintained vehicles to shuttle about IT's army of human drones to maintain the infrastructure that IT required for IT's continued existence. But IT was careful not to risk having these vehicles stolen, or IT's human drones overpowered and their Magick Hats torn from their noses. There were many attempts with some success in the early years when people were still alive who remembered the convenience of hopping in their cars and driving wherever they wanted. Of course, as years and decades passed, fewer remembered owning cars or had any notion of what those weird things in the drones' noses were. Just that they fought ferociously against having them taken away, protecting their noses at the cost of injury to other sensitive parts of their bodies, and the aggressive belligerence ceased the instant the odd things were extracted from their noses.

If electrical appliances had been reinvented and in everyday use again, it might have been described as someone pulling their plugs. They collapsed in limp heaps and were often unable to stand, walk or eat, even with efforts to feed them. There was no way for non-drone humans to know, but those from the second generation of drones and beyond had Magick Hats inserted in their noses as infants soon after birth and never learned to perform these basic human skills without IT's detailed and continual instructions. They'd been born of IT's breeding program, which was necessary since drones were mortal, grew old and died, then needed to be replaced. And without their Magick Hats, there was nothing to be done but watch them die within days and bury their bodies.

Once IT was gone, more people began venturing into the areas once IT's domain, unaware IT was gone or what IT had even been. Those few still seeking gasoline reported a lack of resistance from the crazed human drones protecting the refineries and storage facilities and the discovery of a few sad, disoriented, and broken humans, who ran and hid rather than aggressively confronting anyone who approached. But there were far more who'd dropped the instant IT was gone and died of dehydration within days. There were bodies to bury or burn scattered wherever they'd looked. And there was evidence that those few who'd survived had been feeding on the dead.

The adventuresome also discovered abandoned cars, some appearing to be brand new, which were towed back by teams of horses since they no longer ran, and no one could figure out why. Which hardly mattered since there were still no parts to repair them, and gasoline became even more impossible to find once IT was gone. No one alive knew how to operate the refineries except the military, who'd operated their own for the past two centuries to fuel their vehicles.

New borders and governments were established during the past two centuries, only to be replaced by subsequent wars and civil unrest. The larger cities were abandoned in the beginning and fell into ruin. There'd been chaos and disorder for decades. Then small villages began re-emerging from the compounds of survivalist groups, some of which banded together as they intermarried, creating order in the expanding areas around them – eventually forming new townships with new borders. New townships joined others to create new towns and counties. Some, in turn, grew into new states, most retaining the names they had historically in those areas now centuries in the past. But the borders had been redrawn based on the redrawn boundaries of new townships, towns, and counties.

These states operated as small independent countries, with central governments and armed militias. And there'd been debates and disputes over new state borders, with claims that the old borders had existed for centuries and should return to what they originally were. A few such disputes had been resolved with civility and rational negotiations. Most were resolved as such disputes had been for millennia, with force and bloodshed. Whereupon areas of the defeated states, often many times larger than those originally in dispute, became the territory of the victors, and the borders were redrawn still further from those of the claimed traditions.

Anarchy finally ended the welfare nation that so many had decried. Without Virtuality, there was no longer a system to distribute welfare checks, so the previous recipients were forced to do something else to earn their keep or die. Unfortunately, those who'd been far more fortunate were immediately thrown into the same fight for survival as the former welfare recipients since there were no longer viable businesses, jobs, or a system to distribute paychecks. Those with less before the crisis had a natural advantage at first in that they'd never expected as much as the more fortunate. A dumpster diver was better prepared to survive an apocalypse than someone who'd looked down upon all but the finest restaurants. However, most of those once more fortunate were also quickly driven to eat what they could find. And a CEO was likelier to eat an unfortunate dumpster diver than the other way around. Garbage wasn't the only once unthinkable food source, especially once garbage ceased to exist. Cannibalism was not uncommon in those early, desperate days and not restricted to scavenging dead bodies – as those few surviving drones had done.

Since the country that had once been mine no longer existed as such, the military was all that remained in the way of a central government in many areas it had previously included. In some problematic regions controlled by the military, martial law had been enforced for most of the past two centuries. But the military could only maintain control of so much territory, especially since a significant portion of its resources had been dedicated to hiding and protecting me. And IT had cared nothing about anything except what IT had required to survive, which included IT's efforts to track down and assassinate me. Large portions of the world had existed in relative anarchy for the past two centuries.

Since many who'd participated in Virtuality had abandoned verbal communication long before IT's arrival, they needed to learn how to do so again without telepathy, and new spoken languages had developed. Some, thankfully, were at least odd derivations of languages traditionally spoken in those areas before the rise and fall of Virtuality. So, I could understand some in part and make myself understood in kind. As I wandered home, others were too foreign, so I could not communicate effectively, and this also identified me as a stranger, which generally meant I was unwelcome. Fortunately, I came well-armed. Thank the fucking military.