William Forstchen: The Final Day

This basement was Paul’s domain. John waited for a response from Paul, the young man who had designed and brought back to life the electrical system of the community, but Hawkins said nothing, obviously deferring.

Ernie peered inside the guts of the old Apple like a dentist poking around in the mouth of a victim in the chair, grunting with disapproval.

“Inexcusable,” Ernie whispered. “You educators never knew how to take care of a computer. Look at all this dust, and what the hell is this?”

He pointed down at the motherboard, and the three leaned forward to look over his shoulder.

“Looks like dog or cat hair! This is a mess. For now, leave it off; I’ll take it back home and blow it out.”

“What?” John asked.

“I’m taking it back with me. I still have some canned air.”

“Canned air?” Forrest asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Pressurized air in a can for cleaning computers.”

“Just blow on the damn thing,” John whispered.

Ernie did not even bother to reply to what he thought was such obvious stupidity. “Let’s wrap it up; I’ll take it with me.”

“No way,” John stated quietly and forcefully. “It stays here for now.”

Ernie braced himself back up, ready for a good argument, something he always took delight in.

“Look, Ernie, it stays here. This thing is pure gold. Transporting through a storm back to your place, that’s crazy. Just go get that canned air, whatever else you need, and come back here.”

“That will take at least a gallon of gas,” Ernie replied with a cagey smile. “Will the town provide it?”

John sighed. They were scraping the bottom of their gas supply, his dream of somehow going over to steam power for transportation and the running of precious farm machinery still at a cold start for now. But this was too important to argue about at the moment; the curiosity about this discovery and all that it implied was overwhelming.

“Give me the bill tomorrow; I’ll make good on it.”

“Sure.” And without further comment, the lid off the computer, he reached to the side and flicked it back on, and again the three standing around him gasped as the screen flickered to life.

“I thought you said it needed to be blown or something,” Forrest said, and there was a bit of a grin as he spoke, for Ernie was infamous at times for going into off-colored repartee. Paul cleared his throat and nodded back to the stairway where his wife, having tucked the twins in for their nap, was standing and watching the goings-on.

Ernie nodded, backing off, and continued to peer into the machine. “It’s okay for the moment,” he finally replied, continuing to examine the motherboard and other boards slotted in for the video and sound, chuckling with delight.

“Damn, I gotta admit, in its day, it really was something, even though it was a toy compared to what we were developing with IBM. A 64K machine for under three thousand bucks—and that was in 1980s money, no less. You know, I helped design the operating systems for the space shuttle. Five computers not much bigger than this thing ran that entire spacecraft. That’s when we had to squeeze out every byte of usage in the software. No gigs and terabytes around back then, even with the big Cray machines the military had. We were still storing data on ten-inch magnetic reel-to-reels when I first started.”

He sighed, and for a moment, John could sense the inner sadness of this man who had been viewed as a crazy Jeremiah by some when he would publicly warn about the fragility of the nation’s infrastructure. He had retired to these mountains with that exact thought in mind, that it was all about to come crashing down.

“Ernie, the question is how and why?” John asked, interrupting his musings.

“What?”

“How and why is this computer working?”

Ernie stepped back and looked around the semi-dark room, illuminated only by the single fluorescent light overhead and the softly glowing television screen.

“Easy enough. I bet this machine was dumped down here fifteen, maybe twenty years ago when you guys finally decided to leave Apple behind and upgrade to a Pentium. Someone stuck it in a corner, and—the key thing—it was totally off-line. The EMP pulse and its impact has a lot of variables. Intensity, line of sight from the weapon burst, how much shielding this basement provided.”

Ernie shined his flashlight around the room, chuckling sadly at the sight of all the piled-up magazines, books, and electrical tools that were once part of the business of teaching at a small college. He walked over to where several white and black boxes were stacked under the workbench.

“Now these babies,” he announced with delight, “those are mine; I helped write some of the software. IBM 8088s, our competition for the Apples, which you educators loved to cling to. Bet the administration at least had those; they always were smarter than professors when it came to this stuff.”

John bristled slightly at Ernie’s jab as he squatted down, wiping dust and mildew off the front of one of the boxes.

“Yup, a tower box model. We gotta take a look at this next.”

“Wait a minute,” John interjected, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Ernie, how, why, and what do we do with it?” As he spoke, he nodded back to the Apple.

“Like I said, it survived the EMP pop and then just sat here undamaged. Nothing unusual about that.”

“How come we didn’t know before?” Forrest asked.

“Well, because we just didn’t have the juice,” Paul replied. “Once we’ve got at least some electricity going, why, we just kind of…”

The question was so damned obvious, John realized. Why didn’t any of them come running down to this basement the day after they got a few kilowatts of electricity running and start trying to hook things back up?

“I never really thought about it,” Paul said woodenly. “Too busy with getting lighting, juice for the sterilizing autoclave and hot water in the hospital, high-intensity lighting for the surgery room, more juice for the chemistry lab, stuff like that. Any of the computers sitting in faculty offices and such were just dead hunks of toasted boards and wires and tossed into a basement or Dumpster after the Day, figuring they were all fried.”

“Because they were all wired in and got zapped by the full overload,” Ernie stated.

“Ernie, a question?” John asked.

“Sure, what?”

“You of all people, didn’t you think to stick a computer into your basement inside one of those faraday cages folks were later talking about?”

Ernie looked off, now obviously embarrassed and caught off guard, his silence answer enough.

John remembered how a few months before everything hit the fan, how Paul and others with the IT team for the school had finished remodeling the computer center because the school was creating a new major in cybersecurity. The old machines, in an age where a computer aged faster than Detroit-built cars of the 1980s, were just simply tossed into the Dumpster after the hard drives were downloaded for anything of value and then wiped clean.

Truly a throwaway world that now seemed a thousand years away.

The fluorescent light overhead began to hum and flicker.

Ernie quickly reached behind the Apple and pulled the plug, the screen going dark.

“This power supply isn’t clean at all,” he growled, glancing over at Paul.

“What do you mean, not clean?” Forrest asked.

“Just that.” Paul sighed. “Someone throws a switch on in the hospital, it sucks up a few kilowatts, the voltage to the rest of the grid fluctuates, and that can be death, especially for these older machines. It’s exactly the thing that can kill this computer while we’re gazing in wonder at it. I’ll bring some surge protectors along.”