Day 4 (Power)

A half hour later - thirty minutes of driving that should have
been more harrowing, considering the lack of lights and the
nontheless unconcerned for their safety drivers that he had to
drive alongside every other day - he still hadn't decided. Food
or work. Business or pleasure. He should have settled for a
fast-food burger at this point, he knew, and he probably would
have if he'd spotted any that had been open. He considered. He
could do both, after all - he hated having to stop by the store
twice, but if he just got a dozen ``cup o' noodles'' and brought
them into the office, that'd probably be enough to tide him over
for a while.

It was settled. Food, then work.

The Extra-Mart was packed. Never one to spend hours circling the
parking lot for a spot, Grant took the first one he saw and ran
into the store. His first impression upon seeing the lot, that
everyone in the city had converged upon the area, were confirmed
as he passed the checkout counters. Fortunately, the store had
long ago invested in the automatic scanners that everyone seemed
to avoid either out of fear of technology or, more likely,
because they were a pain. Grant wasn't fond of them either, but
the lines were always shorter.

He hadn't been in this store before, but it was an Extra-Mart. If
you'd been in one, he reasoned, you'd been in them all. It took
him more time to locate the aisle he was looking for than it had
taken him to find a parking spot, but not by much.

One of the things they don't teach journalists in college is how
to get somewhere fast when there are people in the way. It's
something Grant had to learn on the job and, he got the distinct
impression, it was better to learn sooner rather than later.
Cutting through the crowd to get to the person trying to avoid
the journalist - or just trying to avoid all the other
journalists - had come in handy even if it didn't often get
results. It was something he did automatically now, even when
shopping. So it was with great surprise as he came barreling
around the corner that he nearly ran into Rosetta Sandys
[(0x0046) This was an unplanned outcome of other runs, but lead to
far more efficient results].

``Sorry'' he said, without even realizing at first who he'd
almost run over.

``What the hell?'' Rosetta said, then looked at him. Her
expression changed from frustrated surprise to a more open
surprise. ``Grant?''

``Yeah.'' he said, looking around to make sure he hadn't been
about to run into anyone else. That was the downside of the
moving-through-crowds skill, it was mostly unconscious.

``What the hell, Grant!'' She repeated. ``I don't even get a
hello?''

He looked at her then, and his eyes widened. ``Rosetta? Rosetta
Stone?''

Rosetta put on an expression of false anger and poked him in the
chest. ``It's Sandys and you damn well know it! Where's my
hello!?''

``Hello Rose'' he said, a grin spreading over his features.

``Hello Grant'' she replied, curtseying.

``I'm sorry I almost ran into you there.'' he said awkwardly.
That wasn't what he wanted to say. Hell, talking wasn't what he
wanted to do. Mostly, he wanted to hug her and then pick her up
and carry her away with him, which probably wasn't acceptable
behavior.

``Well I'm not!'' Rose's face broke into the smile she'd been
surpressing since she saw him. ``What if you'd gone down that
next aisle? We'd have missed each other by a foot and never known
it.''

Grant glanced at the next aisle. ``I'm not really into coffee. I
know, sacrelige for a reporter to not like the stuff, but-''

``You're a reporter, then?'' she seemed impressed. Everyone did,
until they found out about the interviews for largest teacup
collection. ``Glad to hear it! Of course, I never had any doubt
you'd pull it off. So what are you doing here? Human interest
story on how people cope with an outage?''

``Actually, um... I was after the noodles.'' he gestured down the
aisle.

``Me too.'' she confessed. ``I'm burning the early-evening oil at
my recycling plant today, trying to catch up on some paperwork
when the power goes out. This is the only place open.''

He'd been too astounded by the first part of her statement to pay
much attention to the rest. ``Your recycling plant? You own a
recycling plant?''

``Well, I own a controlling share in a niche recycling plant.''
she replied. ``Why are you so surprised?''

``I...'' Grant paused. ``It's not so much that I'm surprised you
own your own business, I expected that. I'm surprised to see you
around here at all, I guess. Figured you'd end up out east, or
out west. Unless,'' he added with a smile, ``this is but one of
the many holdings of your business empire and you're merely
checking in.''

A shadow came over her face long enough for Grant to realize he'd
said the wrong thing, and then it vanished. ``I'll tell you
later.'' she said. ``For now, I have a business to attend to.''

``Later?'' he asked.

She'd been digging in her purse and after a pause produced a
business card, proceeding then to hastily scribble something on
the back. She handed it to him.

Sandys Hardware Recycling
Rosetta Sandys, Proprietor.
(651)-555-8192
1024 West 16th
``For all your computer recycling needs''

M-F, 8:00am - 6:30pm

On the back:

(651)-555-4096
Hours: Anytime not on the front.
And remember, it's Sandys, not Stone!

He read both sides while she watched him, clearly amused.
Finally, he spoke up with ``So you recycle computers?''

She nodded. ``That is why I had the card printed, after all.''

``It just so happens that I had one of mine die today. Power
surge.''

``Funny coincidence, that.'' she replied. ``You don't have to
make up an excuse to visit me at work, you know. You can just
stop in.''

``No, I actually have a busted machine.'' he insisted, before
realizing she had been putting him on. She'd brushed past him by
this point.

``I'll see you again soon, then.'' she replied, and was gone.

He stood there mutely for a few moments, then glanced over his
shoulder and watched her continue to walk away. He glanced back
at the card. Rosetta Sandys, the girl he'd nicknamed 'Stone'
because he'd had a crush on her and it annoyed her, his slightly
more polite equivalent of pulling her pigtails. His Rose. The
woman he'd dated in high school for three years, the woman he
knew he was saying goodbye to when she went to the ivy league,
the woman he'd known in his heart of hearts he'd never see agian,
was back. Had been, moments ago, standing in front of him,
talking as though no time had intervened, as though her leaving
hadn't hit him like a ton of bricks.

Silently, he made his way down the aisle and found the noodles.
He even, somehow, had the presense of mind to remember that there
was a power outage elsewhere and he would need the kind of
instant food that only required hot water. You thought of the
strangest things, he thought, while you were shellshocked.

He didn't see her in the line when he checked out, though his
efforts not to appear as though he were looking impeded his
search somewhat. He didn't see her as he walked back to his car.
He certainly didn't see her while he drove, almost entirely
absent-mindedly, to work. But it didn't matter. He had a card
with her number on it. He even had a legitimate excuse to see her
at work. He'd see her again.

He pulled in to the garage owned by the paper and wandered toward
the building. Anders, his editor, was standing by the door.

``Let me guess,'' Anders began as soon as he was reasonably sure
Grant was close enough to hear him. ``You want to cover the
outage, and you braved the terrible conditions to do so because
you're just that fired up about your stories, right?''

``I-'' Grant began. Anders was obviously not expecting nor even
waiting for a reply.

``I'll tell you what I told the half-dozen other papermen who've
come by today.'' he said. It was a rant. Grant could always tell
when his boss was getting into a good rant. ``You're an idiot. A
moron. I am, frankly, amazed that you are literate, let alone
competent enough to drive a car.'' He said this without rancor -
Anders had an old fasioned drill-instructor attitude, but Grant
had known him long enough to know he didn't mean any of it. ``
Clearly, you should have your license revoked and your press pass
torn up, for pulling such a dumb stunt as to drive into the city
during an outage.''

``Are you going anywhere with this?'' Grant said sedately. Anders
said pretty much the same thing whether you reacted to him or
not, and Grant always found himself completely unable to resist
the urge to be a smartass. ``I'll warn you, I almost pushed down
an old girlfriend at the store today, I'm way over my beratement
quota.''

``Why didn't you say so?'' Anders asked sincerely. ``If I'd known
that I would have greeted you with something a little less
scathing. More supportive, like 'watch where you're going'.''

``I take it you've got plenty of volunteers to cover the outage?''

Anders nodded. ``You and half the damn department. I saw Sara,
you know, head of classified ads, and even she wanted to try her
hand at writing something up. I don't know what the hell she was
thinking.''

``It's a big story.'' Grant pointed out.

``Of course it is. And when it's safe for you all to come back
here and work on it, I'll give everyone their due. Though I won't
forget who came out here and risked their necks. `` It was
impossible to tell from his tone whether this was a good thing or
a bad thing. ``Now go home.''

``See you soon'' Grant started back to his car. It looked like
the knowledge of the general outage had spread more quickly than
Grant had hoped. If he hadn't stopped by the store, he might have
arrived before anyone else and at least assured himself a spot.
Then, remembering what had happened at the store, he smiled.
Completely, entirely, worth it.

---

Previous - Next

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