John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

Milton Pierce seems to be doing a great job. He takes it so seriously. I thought he’d lost his mind, asking the Aegis people to vote in his sister as his second-in-command. I even had a chance to talk to him about it for a little bit. He said that she would be a good balance for him. Whatever that means! We’ll see, I guess.

Elias and Leah are so cool together. They are never more than about five feet apart, and every time I look at him, he’s staring at her with a sappy grin on his face. Other than that, he kind of bounces all over the place. One day he works with us on security. The next day he’s on the roof with Matthias, helping the crew. He did get real jazzed the other day. It seems he was walking down one of the hallways and ran into two brothers he knew from the outside. He only told me that they were the Barton brothers and he met them on his trip here. He didn’t tell me why they were here.

They’ve gotten three sections of the panels hooked up, so we are getting a trickle of electricity back into the batteries. They say it isn’t enough yet, but it helps. I guess the wind has died down a little. Wilson said it got worse so that it was strong enough to knock down the entrance, and now it has eased off to the level needed to keep the bug away. This is all so strange. I don’t know if I’m ready to really think about it yet.

I have been thinking a lot about how we all feel inside Aegis, and it is bizarre. Before the “event,” as everybody calls it — I think they are all afraid to call it what it was — we were stuck in here, anyway. We weren’t supposed to leave. Ever. And we had no communication with the outside world. Nothing’s changed, not even a little bit. Well, that’s not true. We did have incoming communication for a day or two, until the last station went off the air. Other than that, everything is the same as it was.

But, in all of our heads, everything has changed. I’m not just talking about the newbies, who aren’t used to Aegis. I’m talking about the other people who have been here a long time, like me. They are all acting differently now. It’s hard to describe.

Wilson says that before the event we were all in purgatory, killing time and waiting for the end. But now, he says, we are all in a womb, waiting for our lives to begin. Makes sense. I just wish I knew how long the pregnancy was going to last.

And that’s part of the deal. Before, none of us ever paid any attention to the days. It didn’t matter because we weren’t ever getting out. But now, it has only been six days and everybody’s getting a little stir-crazy. Sweezea tells me that’s why we need the security team. We don’t know if anyone’s gonna freak out and we need to be ready.

Oh! I can’t believe I didn’t mention this first. Those poor people outside…I guess they didn’t make it. Nobody ever came out of the cars and trucks. Since we’re so high up, when we look down from the roof, we can’t really tell if any people are in the vehicles, but where else would they be? Elias, Leah, Sam, and Lisa took it real hard. I think Wilson did, too. But it’s not easy to tell with him.

Gotta go. Need to take a couple of aspirins and hit the sack. Sweezea has a run planned for tomorrow where we have to carry about a thousand pounds on our backs, so I need some rest.

Milton Pierce finally had an opportunity to talk to all of the last-day newbies who flooded into Aegis right before the entrance collapsed. I think he was expecting all of them to tell him they had a visitation or a dream or something that told them to come to Aegis. It was weird. From what he told me, each of them had a different reason for coming. One guy said he was watching the news and just became disgusted with the politics. He couldn’t stand it anymore, so he came here. Another one said that his business was failing and he was way deep in debt. So, instead of putting his family through losing everything and filing bankruptcy, he brought his wife and kids here. In other words, if two hundred newbies came — there were two hundred different reasons. As Wilson would say, another coincidence?

Matthias organized a painting party. Everyone in Aegis was invited. We painted over all the graffiti.

Hello, future folks! I hope that the other people who are keeping journals are more conscientious about it than I am. I’m sure that Wilson’s journal goes on for pages about each day. Well, what he has to say is a lot more important than my twitterings.

Anyway… you aren’t going to believe this. Pierce, well, both Pierces actually, along with Wilson and Elias, decided that we needed to have a governing body. A group of Aegisites. Oh, by the way, there isn’t a Madison anymore. And you probably know from reading your history books and other people’s journals before mine, there already wasn’t a Walden, even before the event. Everyone here is part of one group. There really wasn’t a formal meeting or anything on this. One by one people started using the new name, coined by — guess who? You got it, me! I was calling us Aegisites on my own, and it just got picked up by everyone else.

As I was saying, the Pierces, Wilson, and Elias thought we should have a governing body. I screwed up and called it a committee and got one of those twenty-minute droning lectures from Pierce about how ineffective committees are. He calls it a board of governors. Every person in Aegis voted. It was all by write-in votes. There weren’t any nominees or candidates and there wasn’t any campaigning. We were called in, had it explained to us, and we voted, right then.

Guess who one of the new governors is? Me! The people here picked me! Is that cool, or what? They picked Wilson, of course, and Elias and Leah, Matthias, Sweezea, and Hutson. Crabill came close, but didn’t quite make it. I don’t think he wanted it, anyway.

We had our first meeting today. Appointed Pierce, Milton of course, as Chief of Staff. He likes that title.

I haven’t mentioned Kreitzmann yet in this journal. He recovered just fine from his concussion and has been working with the rest of his old staff, and the Aegisites, putting together educational and training programs. I think the event changed him. We haven’t had a chance to talk much, but he has told anyone who will listen to him how sorry he is for the way that he did his research and experiments in the past. Especially the “using babies” part. I suppose he is trying to take the best of what he learned before and apply it to this brave new world we’re going to be starting. Some of it makes a lot of sense. The mind readers are a little spooky but sure come in handy sometimes. Not much use for the fast-talkers, but they are fitting in with our little society nicely. Seems they can slow it down if they want to. Not as slow as we talk, but we can understand them. All the adult Zippers, or Accelerants, as Kreitzmann calls them, died during the time leading up to the event. The younger ones are cool and also really come in handy. It’s strange that Kreitzmann and his people and his subjects were picked to be a part of the surviving party. Maybe it’s up to us to figure out why and how they all fit in if we leave here. I mean, when we leave here.

Oh, one more cool deal before I sign off for today. One of the Aegisites is a guy who studies the history and meaning of names. I met him today at lunch. He told me I had an interesting name, considering what had happened and where I was. I think it’s embarrassing, so I’m not going to include it in this journal. He brought up the significance of Elias’ first and last names, but I already knew that. Then he told me something I didn’t know, and it blew me away. I am assuming that all of you future “history buffs” will be aware of the pre-event history of America. Otherwise, this won’t make any sense to you. Wilson’s name, John Chapman, was the name of a famous guy in the past. And with what’s happening now, I think it’s pretty profound. John Chapman was the real name of Johnny Appleseed.