Fifty Years of Peace (Abrupt Dissent Series) (6 page)

Her grandfather’s boots thumped up the farmhouse’s wooden steps and stopped outside her door.

“Jenny?” he called.

“Go away,” she said.

“Meet me in the tool shed.”

She listened to his footsteps recede back down the staircase. She swore if he was going to give her a chore now… but somehow she knew he wouldn’t. His request had felt different, and she slipped on a sweater. She walked outside to the noise of crickets chirping from the bushes and a bullfrog’s great bellowing from down by the river. She could see her grandfather’s lamplight flickering in the window of the tool shed that stood off to the side of the other outbuildings. She’d been inside the shed plenty of times looking for scythes or saws or hammers or any of the other tools that her chores required, but she couldn’t imagine what he wanted to do out here in the middle of the night.

She knocked, and her grandfather let her inside. There was barely enough room for the two of them, and when he closed the door and bolted it behind her, less than a foot separated them.

“What I’m about to you show you has to stay between us.”

She nodded, unsure what to say.

“Step back against the door,” he said. As she moved against the door, he squatted down and lifted a piece of dirty plywood that had covered the floorboards ever since she could remember. He propped the panel against the wall, then pressed down on one of the floorboards that had lain underneath. The other end of the board rose up, and Jenny thought at first that it was simply loose. But instead of putting the board back in its place, her grandfather reached underneath the opening and lifted. A square of floor rose revealing concrete stairs that lead down into the darkness.

“Follow me,” he said, “and close the trap door behind you.”

After she took her first few steps down the steep stairs, Jenny turned and pulled the panel back down over their heads. Her grandfather held his lamp for her at the bottom of the staircase, and she expected to see a cobwebbed root cellar behind him. But as he lifted the light, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

The tool shed had been built on top of a high-ceilinged room that looked like pre-war construction. Galvanized metal shelves ran down both walls of the bunker, filled with dozens of black screens connected to a rainbow of cables that twisted along the floor. They were labeled with words she’d never heard like “Dell” and “Sony” and sat behind small trays filled with letters. Jenny rubbed her index finger against one of the trays, tracing a line in the layer of dust that had accumulated on top of it. Many more of the objects were smooth glass devices that, even covered in dust, reflected the light from Grandpa’s lamp in all different directions.

Her grandfather stopped next to a strange machine in the center of the room that had pedals on either side of it. Then he sat down on a stool behind it and blew out the lamp.

“I can’t see!” she said.

He didn’t respond, but she heard a whirring sound from where he’d been. Slowly, electric lights in the ceiling flickered to life.

“It’s a generator,” he answered her unspoken question.

“What is this place?”

“It used to be a bomb shelter. A lot of people had these made before the war. You’d go and hide in one of these in case someone was going to attack. You put your food and supplies down here and no one would ever find you. I repurposed it.”

“Are these…computers?”

“That’s right. Before the war we didn’t use books quite the way you post-threes do now. Everything you wanted to know, the entire knowledge of the world, was on one of those.”

“Can I try one?”

“Of course.”

He bent down from his stool and unhooked a small silver and white device from its cord. He pressed a narrow button on the top edge of the device and handed it to Jenny. It was so incredibly light in her hand, almost like nothing at all. The screen was lit up with a bright white apple with a bite removed against a black background, then changed to picture of a smiling woman wearing a long flowing red dress. A few seconds later, a group of small images rose in front of the woman.

“It’s working!” she cried.

“Of course it is.”

“What do I do now?”

“Touch it.”

Squinting at the small print, she found an icon that said “Reader” and pressed it. She felt only the smooth glass, but the screen changed and she saw black and blue text appear under her finger.

“I can read anything on this?”

“Well you could once. All of these used to be connected to even bigger computers that stored all the books, but those computers needed electricity to run, and people to maintain them. When those things went, a lot of the books disappeared too. Now you can only get what’s saved on the device itself…”

“What else could you do?”

“Well anything you wanted. Talk to people, buy things, take pictures, play games, check Facebook…”

“Facebook?”

“Oh never mind…”

Jenny was so enthralled in what she was looking at she had a hard time listening. She pressed another button and tiny rows of letters appeared on the screen.

“How does it work? How can so much information be available at the touch of a finger?” she asked.

“That’s a good question Jenny, and honestly, I don’t have all the answers. You see, back then, everyone used devices like this all the time, but there were really only a handful of people who actually had the skills to build the devices and their software.”

“Software?”

“You see those icons you are pressing? Those are computer programs, or applications, which are examples of software. The device you are holding is really just the medium for you to interact with the tools, or software, which is stored on the device.”

One icon said paint and opened a white screen with a little brush that changed colors as she swiped. Another said notes and revealed what looked like a school notepad. A flash of inspiration struck her.

“Is that what happened during the war? These computer programs stopped?”

Her grandfather smiled.

“You’ve always been a sharp one Jenny. That’s close. You see, when we were all one country, we were the most powerful country in the world. We were constantly developing more and more computers and software and technology that could be used for all sorts of stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like farming. You’ve seen the combines in pre-war fields?”

“Yes.”

“They have driver’s seats, but the computers drove them. The machines did the planting and the harvesting too. One of those machines, hooked up to a computer and a combine, would let one person harvest hundreds of acres in a day.”

“It takes twelve people just to harvest our north wheat field!”

“Don’t I know it, but before the war we just pressed a button and the computers did the work.”

“There must have been so much food!”

“There was Jenny. There was.”

“But then what happened? Why did the U.S. attack us if there was enough food?”

“Well… let’s just say the history you’ve learned isn’t completely accurate Jenny. You see, we were rich and powerful, and we were using computers in a lot of ways, including spying on other nations.”

“Are there still other nations?”

“Oh yes, there must be, but it’s hard to know these days. What happened was that we used our computers to spy on those other countries, and we did it for so long that many of those other countries got upset. But instead of attacking our army, they used their computers to attack our computers which we used to grow our food, and pump our water, and make our electricity.”

Her eyes widened, so much suddenly made sense.

“That’s where the starving came from! Someone else attacked us.”

“Yes, Jenny. Our society was completely run on our technology and without it, our lives were turned upside down. There were hundreds of millions of people living in this country, but most of them were in cities like Old Louisville where they couldn’t grow food, and when the computers stopped, so did the production and transportation of our food supply. There weren’t enough people left who knew how to grow food or had the land to do it, and those of us that could, knew we wouldn’t be able to feed everyone. If we wanted to live, we had to keep what food we had for ourselves. There was chaos everywhere that made people do very bad things to try to protect themselves and their families. The city people attacked farms all over the country. They stole whatever food and resources they could, slaughtered the animals to eat, and often killed anyone that got in their way. They were desperate, and there were so many of them. It wasn’t a war Jenny. It was survival.

“Eventually leadership arose on either side of the country to bring some stability, but then fighting amongst the new governments caused instability and a war over resources and territory. This pretty much lasted until there weren’t enough people left on both sides to keep fighting, until so many people died that there was enough food again for those who were left. Finally, after much unneeded conflict, the two governments that had built back up created new borders, and called a peace treaty effectively separating the country into two.”

“How did…how did you survive?” she asked.

“A few of us here, Manuel’s father, and a few others, we hid our animals in the mountains, and buried our food and seed. After things settled down a bit, we began farming again. We fought off any city folks that showed up.”

“That means that you fought people from Louisville?”

“That’s right.”

“And from all over?”

“Jenny, I don’t know where they were all from.”

“Did you…did you kill them?”

“If I had to.”

She sat down on one of the black boxes, shaking her head at how little people knew of what really happened.

“I never wanted to tell you Jenny because I didn’t think it would matter. You were happy, and you didn’t need an old man putting fifty-year old nightmares in your head.”

Tears came to her eyes at what her grandfather must have been through, and she flew to him and held him.

“Thank you so much Grandpa. Thank you for telling me.”

He stopped pedaling on the generator and held her for a long time. She closed her eyes and listened to his heartbeat until the lights above them flickered and died.

After a long silence, Jenny unwrapped her arms, and her grandpa relit the lamp at his side to provide light.

“Why don’t we have computers now?” Jenny asked as she followed her grandfather back up the stairs. “We never see any when we go to Old Louisville. The teachers never talk about them.”

“That is a question I’ve asked myself many times,” he said. “I took these from a library in town one day pretty soon after the computers crashed. There used to be lot of them around, but it’s been decades since I’ve seen one anywhere.”

“So why are you hiding all these in the tool shed?” she asked. “Why aren’t you telling people about them?”

“Jenny do you think your grandpa is smart?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Do you think he’s the only smart person in the county?”

“Well, no.”

“Exactly, so think about what I told you, and ask yourself why you don’t learn that version in school, and why they only ever talk about food and farming.”