Utopia - Part 5 - The Great Meltdown

By general reckoning, Grandma Esther has somewhere between five hundred to a thousand grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren going back over eight or nine generations. You'll forgive her if she doesn't remember all of their names. It's not that her mind is going. She's still as sharp as a new pin. Just that usually her mind is on other things. She works on her projects and mostly keeps herself to herself, having little appetite for daily birthday parties. Once a year, she allows for a celebration in her honour down in the village, but mostly she stays up in her workshop, building computers from old parts.

Right now, Esther is trying to find a charger for an old Galaxy S3 smartphone. Not so easy as you might imagine, since the last one was made almost two centuries ago. Especially hard because of the built-in obsolescence phone chargers were designed with in those days.It sounds absurd and unbelievable, but in those days many products were designed to work for a certain period of use and then fail beyond repair. It was an economic necessity of the system. Don't ask me to explain.

Looking through shelves and shelves of ancient computer parts, Esther's mind wanders, as it often does, to a distant memory of a certain week in June a long time ago. She's thinking about obsolescence – if everything is bound to fail in the end and there's nothing anyone can do to change the fact. Mostly she wonders, as she often does, if she is the only living survivor of the Great Meltdown or if there may be others...

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as mentioned in part 1, the Great Meltdown of two centuries ago was a short period of time - around a week in June - when, in quick succession, everything that was predicted to go wrong, went wrong.

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One would have thought that with all the repeated warnings.. for years.. about climate change.. about the impending catastrophe that was unfolding at an ever faster and more alarming rate.. that humanity would have pulled together to avert what was being predicted.. what was already taking place..

The severe weather events.. floods, hurricanes, hailstorms of biblical proportion, droughts, desertification, soaring temperatures, ice melt, dead oceans, mass extinction not seen since the last days of the dinosaurs, but at an accelerated speed..

One would have hoped that at some point.. even at the point when it was clearly too late.. that humanity would have forgotten its petty, tribal, national, religious, class, race differences - which obviously, in the shadow of human extinction would seem less significant.. but sadly, it didn't happen.

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The undeniable fact that climate change was real and unstoppable was a big factor in the way human society was operating in the years leading upto the GM. Much of the world was suffering severe drought and such high temperatures that they became unlivable. Cities of millions of people became empty. Ghost cities. Survival in those places became impossible when there was no water and no food. Low lying coastal towns, cities and even countries became submerged as sea levels rose. Highways were crowded with refugees, marching from one place to the next, but finding a place to rest became more and more difficult.

Fences became higher, detention centers spawned into huge, overcrowded refugee camps - floodlit enclosures of misery.. (at least while there was still electricity. Most places grew dark towards the end).. cities of tents and cardboard and plastic.. of hunger, disease and abandonment.. grew and grew on the borders of every country, every city and town.. the fences grew into high concrete walls topped with electrified razor-wire.. police and soldiers guarding the borders became more ruthless, more careless, more trigger happy.. there was no place for compassion any more.. everybody knew that the dreamers were the first to be overrun. This was a matter of survival.

Everywhere was at war. At the time, there were three or four or maybe five superpowers in a complicated web of conflict which reached to a greater or lesser extent to every corner of the globe, and especially where there were valuable resources - oil, minerals, metals, water, trees..

Had things gone on that way, it was fairly inevitable that civilisation would have completely broken down before very long one way or another. Everyone knew deep down that this war could never be won. Agreement could never be reached. The situations were too complex, the solutions beyond comprehension. As it was, the solar flare brought an end to civilisation much quicker and more suddenly than it would have ended otherwise.

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Even though the solar flare wiped out 99% of the world's computer systems, that still left 1% more or less intact. That 1% was buried deep under the earth in concrete and lead encased strongrooms, secret military facilities in hollowed out mountains.. built over many years at enormous expense while much of the world starved. These were the computer systems designed to automatically respond to nuclear attack, in a worst case scenario. Doomsday systems, as they were called.

When the solar flare blew across the Earth, devastating computer systems as well as puncturing a large hole in the atmosphere, the automatic response of the doomsday systems was to launch a defensive response against what it logically thought was an enemy attack.

And so it was that 10,000 nuclear warheads rained down across the planet. For a short period of time night became day and day became night. And then civilisation, as it had been known, came to an end, one week in June, two hundred years ago.

On the bright side, the ensuing nuclear winter – the cloud of radioactive dust which encircled the Earth for two decades - had a cooling effect which did much to counterract the effects of global warming, even if much of the planet's human and non-human populations were wiped out in the blast and its aftermath and one million years of human evolution and learning had been suddenly, irreversibly erased in an instant.

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Old Esther, lost in memory (and in boxes full of memory boards) is brought back to the present by a ringing of the bell outside her door. It's Randell the plastic trader and a young lad called Barak, who's face reminds Esther of someone she used to know. Randell has a few computer parts to trade. Among them, what appears to be a charger for a Galaxy smartphone, by some miracle still in its original plastic box.

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Leave a comment and follow @stillgideon to receive an update when I publish part 6

If you missed the rest of the story so far, you can read it here:

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-an-adventure-story-part-1-old-saul

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-an-adventure-story-part-2-superheroes

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-an-adventure-story-part-3-the-house-of-the-four-mothers

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-part-4-echoes-of-the-internet

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Also I highly recommend you check out @ecotrain for all manner of thought provoking and inspiring new content on Steemit.