Day 3 (Power)

2 Power

Beep.

Maybe I dreamed it, Grant thought.

Beep.

Maybe I'm still dreaming it.

Beep.

He didn't want to open his eyes. If he did that, he'd have to give up on sleep. There'd been multiple times in his life where the noise of his alarm had made its way into his dreams, and one memorable time more recently when he'd dreamed the alarm was going off and it wasn't. Maybe this was one of those times. This wasn't an alarm, though. It was more of a....

Beep.

Sleep. I'm still asleep.

...

There, see, everything's -

Beep.

Grant Wynn sat up, rubbing his neck. He'd fallen asleep on the couch, again. In the middle of the afternoon. Again. Now something was trying to get him up. Not something so ordinary as an alarm clock, no, you knew where you stood with alarm clocks. They were the needy little exclaiming monsters of the world, after all. This was something more subtle, more-

Beep.

It was his computer. The machine that, moments before Grant decided that he'd had a frustrating enough day and getting up as early as he had on a weekend was just not worth it, had shorted out and died due to what he assumed was a power surge of some sort. This incident and Grant's frustration were not unrelated.

Beep.

It wasn't his computer. The computer was inert and likely to remain so until he either bought a new one or spent an equivalent amount of money on repairs, after all. He looked under the desk to the small ``designer'' cube he had plugged into the wall. It congratulated his discovery with another beep.

His file server. Built-in surge protection, thank God, and its own backup power supply which was at this moment beeping sedately. Of course, it would only do that if the power had gone out....

He'd been wondering why he'd turned all his lights off.

Grant reached under his desk and pressed the button that would gracefully shut the fileserver down. When it came to computers, he was a packrat, and that little cube housed a surprisingly sophisticated collection of hard drives which themselves had backups of every rough draft, source, and audio clip for every story he'd ever worked on. Losing the computer was bad, yes, he'd have to buy a new one. But if he lost his server, he'd effectively lost his career.

Journalist. It sounded so fancy. A whole lot more fancy than ``Glorified Paperboy'', which is a title he felt more befitting of himself. He wasn't delivering the paper directly to people, no, it had been made painfully apparent to him throughout his thus-far short career at the gazette that it was his job to bring people to the paper. When he'd gone to college and began studying this career it had seemed full of promise, even adventure. Journalists put themselves in danger. Journalists protect sources, important whistleblowers, they expose corruption.

In reality, Journalists get up early to interview the owner of the city's largest teacup collection, then go home to type up their report on a computer that waits until the very last minute to die horribly. Then they fall asleep and are woken up by the power going out, which should really be more of a restful situation when you thought about it. He didn't want to think about it. It was middle, going on late, afternoon and he was going to have to find some way to write his story.

Grant made his way to his kitchen, opening the refrigerator even though he knew there was nothing in it, just as he'd known there was nothing in it when he'd checked earlier in the day. At the time, work had seemed more important. Now nothing seemed more important than putting work off. He'd be damned, he decided, if he was going to have to suffer the indignity of writing a story longhand without having something to eat first.

Out of the house! Its stillness was beginning to unnerve him; he'd seen his share of horror movies in his time, and while rationally he knew that power outages happened often (more often than he'd like, anyway) he couldn't shake the idea that it was right about this time that the killer would make an appearance.

No murderers accosted him on his way to the car, nor were they lurking underneath it or in his back seat. He started it up and began to drive, and while the comfortable sensation of driving took most of the edge off of his nerves, there was still a bit there. For instance, his house wasn't the only one affected by the outage. Rationally, he knew it was unlikely that only one house would end up without power (and if it was, that itself was more indicative of foul play than an entire block's worth) but as he drove slowly past dead traffic lights and unlit houses, he found it more than easy to imagine that electricity had deserted the earth entirely.

Wouldn't that be a story? Of course, they'd have to find a steam-powered printing press or something, and then find some way to move it to their offices. Not to mention everyone would be too busy starving to subscribe to the paper. No, it would be an amazing story, but probably not worth all the trouble.

He turned down the familiar road to Tavish Grocery, the grocery store closest to his house. It also happened to be conveniently located on his route to work and back, and so had rapidly become the only place he would shop for food. He knew he shouldn't be shopping on an empty stomach, but he was also hoping the resultant overpurchasing would ensure he wouldn't need to go shopping again anytime soon. This was hardly the first time he'd made an emergency re-stocking, after all.

Grant's worries were moot. The store was closed because, as he'd know if he'd not been constructing myriad fantasies of apocalyptic power outages, there was a power outage.

He idled in the parking lot for a few moments while wracking his brain. He'd done a story just recently on the solar maximum and how it could cause outages. Hadn't he done some research into where the various power grids were? He should be able to figure out where he could go for food. He'd spent a good day or so looking that information up, at great expense to the gazette now that he thought of it. They'd hardly meant for him to use the information to go grab a frozen meal, but he was off duty right now and - more imporantly - hungry.

He rifled through his glove box until he found it - a folded map, courtesy Mason Power. Opening it up, he frowned. It took only a glance to remind him why he'd abandoned the research in the first place; calling the power grid a ``grid'' was an enormous misnomer. It was a tangle of zones, substations, transformers, and more lines than he cared to think about. The city's power had been laid out as it expanded over time, and was divided more by usage and peak capacity than anything so naive as a simple grid. The map-maker had tried to simplify all of this, but it was clear that he'd been an electrician as well and thus had only managed to dumb it down so much. To say it was inaccessible to non-engineers was an understatment, but it wouldn't be the first time Grant had needed to learn on the fly. Thus, he spent more time and more gas idling as he traced the lines. He frowned.

His house and the store were on two entirely different grids, or at least serviced by different substations. This made sense, now that he was thinking - there had been a storm a few years back, and while his house had lost power, this store had been fine.

Further tracing revealed that, if he was understanding the map correctly, nearly the whole city would have to be out. It might not have been the powering-down of the entire planet, but a citywide outage was news indeed! He had a head start on it, too - everyone else would naturally assume that only their area was affected, it would take some time for them to realize the scope of the situation. The only people who would bother to check the maps would be the people down at Mason, and something told him they were going to be entirely too busy to do that.

There was a knock on his window. He glanced over to see Ed Tavish, owner, as both the nameplate on his shirt and the large sign behind him reading ``TAVISH GROCERY'' attested. Grant rolled down the window.

``I'm probably not going to open up soon.'' Tavish said apologetically. ``Every time the power goes out, I swear I'm getting a generator, and every time I forget.'' he smiled the smile of small-business owners everywhere, the one that combined a need to reassure customers with the knowledge that Hard Times Are Coming, And Soon.

``Sorry to loiter.'' Grant replied. He'd forgotten about food entirely, again, his priorities had switched to work.

``I know you,'' the grocer insisted. ``You're a regular here, aren't you?'' Before Grant could reply, the man continued. ``Well, I'm not usually one to speak well of the competition, but the Extra-Mart, closer to downtown on 28th? It's got a generator. It's not a good one, I know because they tried to sell it to me, but if you get there quick it might still be working.''

``Thanks.'' Grant managed. He was trying to keep his mind focused on work, but 28th was awful close to his route to the office. He wouldn't have to go far. And he was still hungry.

Tavish waved and turned back to the store, while Grant rolled up his window and started driving. He was on autopilot now - driving more carefully, of course, given that the streetlights appeared to still be out, but still on autopilot while he considered his options. He could eat, or he could work.

---

Previous - Next