Daniel Conderman 
SYNOPSIS
In the spring of 2025, a catastrophic 9.1 earthquake devastates Taiwan, collapsing the world’s most critical semiconductor factories and severing humanity’s digital lifeline. Dan Conderman, a 50-year-old developer from Wisconsin, begins journaling as the disaster’s ripple effects spread quietly around the globe. At first subtle—a delayed shipment, unavailable repairs—these disruptions steadily deepen into widespread technological paralysis. By 2026, the world starts shrinking, reverting to simpler forms of communication, trade, and community. Through decades, Dan documents humanity’s gentle unraveling and slow rediscovery of a pre-digital life. By 2030, the digital age slips into myth, its stories fading into folklore. On his 100th birthday in 2075, blind but clear-minded, Dan records one final message for future generations, urging them to remember the lessons of a civilization built too fast and forgotten too quickly. The world, he says, did not end—it simply rebooted.
April 12, 2025
I woke up around six-thirty this morning, the gentle April sunlight peeking through the curtains, promising another mild Wisconsin spring day. Neo, my tortoise, was already shuffling quietly in his enclosure, probably sensing my movements. I took my time, made coffee, and was about to settle into my morning routine when my phone buzzed insistently—a flurry of breaking news alerts.
At first glance, it seemed like just another tragic headline from across the world: “Massive 9.1 Earthquake Devastates Taiwan.” My heart sank immediately; the human cost alone would be enormous. But as I scrolled through the alerts, sipping my coffee, something deeper began to gnaw at me.
I clicked through to live footage streaming from Taiwan, drone shots of Taipei barely recognizable, its familiar skyline warped and shattered like a scene from a dystopian film. My jaw tightened when the feed moved to TSMC—the world’s silicon heartland—now a pile of twisted metal and broken concrete. I saw vast fires raging unchecked, plumes of black smoke climbing high enough to blot out the sun. Another video showed harbors flooded from tsunami waves, wreckage floating alongside overturned ships and cars.
A chill ran down my spine. I’d been half-joking—half-warning—my wife for weeks about Taiwan being the linchpin of modern civilization, always met with an eye-roll and the classic “Dan, calm down.” Yet now, seeing the very epicenter of global tech manufacturing reduced to rubble, my dark speculations didn’t seem so silly anymore.
For decades, we’ve outsourced our brains, our culture, and our very lives onto microchips—most of them manufactured in these Taiwanese fabs now reduced to rubble. With the island shattered, the domino effect would be colossal. I wasn’t panicking yet, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t merely a distant tragedy—it was a warning shot echoing loudly through our digital age.
Something told me to start writing all of this down. If this was the start of something bigger, it would be valuable later, a firsthand account of how it felt here, safe in my cozy Wisconsin home, just before the ripples started reaching our shores.
By noon, I was glued to the news, flipping from stream to stream. Experts were already discussing the implications: global chip shortages, supply chain collapse, economic upheaval—phrases that sounded abstract, even dry, against the horrifying reality playing out on screen. The reporters kept using words like “unprecedented” and “historic,” but it felt deeper to me, a fissure opening beneath the fragile surface of our comfortable, connected world.
I paused for a moment, staring out my window at the calm suburban street. Cars drifted lazily past. Kids rode bikes. Neighbors waved casually, walking their dogs. It felt surreal, a moment suspended in normalcy. But beneath that quiet everyday scene, my mind raced through the looming consequences. Would the endless supply of electronics we took for granted dry up overnight? How long until the consequences became tangible here, thousands of miles away?
My unease grew, slowly shifting toward apprehension. As the evening news rolled around, broadcasters started discussing emergency meetings among world leaders, ominous stock market fluctuations, and whispers of long-term global disruptions. I wasn’t sure exactly what we were headed into, but one thing was becoming clearer by the hour: this wasn’t just about Taiwan.
This was about us—all of us.
I’ve decided to keep writing each day, documenting whatever comes next. If this is the beginning of something larger, I want a clear record—my own voice preserved amid the uncertainty.
Tonight, I looked at Neo as he chewed his lettuce, utterly oblivious to the storm on the horizon. For a moment, I envied him.
Tomorrow will tell us more.
“It’s a cautionary ghost story for the digital age—except the ghost is our own forgotten past.”
—Audrey Lin, Reviews Quarterly
May 15, 2025
It’s been a little over a month since Taiwan’s earthquake, and at first glance, life here in Wisconsin looks reassuringly normal. Spring has turned warmer, and our town hums along—kids ride bikes, neighbors chat about summer plans, and Neo’s contentedly grazing on dandelions in the yard. It would almost feel as if that catastrophic earthquake never happened, except I keep noticing little things—tiny disruptions at first, but steadily growing.
I started jotting down notes each evening, just quick observations, but the pages in my notebook are filling fast.
It began subtly—my wife ordered a new pair of Bluetooth earbuds, and they were backordered indefinitely. “Supply chain issues,” the seller emailed apologetically. Then a coworker’s laptop died, and the repair shop said they couldn’t get replacement motherboards—no timeline for new inventory. The excuses always sound minor, plausible enough to ignore: “shipping delays,” “temporary shortages,” and vague reassurances of “working to resolve the issue.”
But as days pass, the frequency and scope have expanded. It’s no longer just random items online. The local dealership has half-empty lots, shiny sedans replaced by older used models. Auto parts stores hang signs warning customers about delays, and just this week the Ford plant in Michigan paused production, citing chip shortages. The manager at Best Buy told me they’re rationing smartphones, with no idea when—or if—restocks will come.
I finally did what I’d been putting off. I walked through my house, room by room, and took inventory. The results startled me:
- Home Office: Laptop, monitors, printers—all chip-driven.
- Kitchen: Microwave, fridge, coffeemaker, dishwasher—each a mini-computer.
- Garage: Our Ford Escape, of course. But also the lawnmower’s ignition system, the smart battery charger, even the cheap power drill—all have tiny brains inside.
- Personal: Phones, tablets, watches—even my digital weather station depends on Taiwanese semiconductors.
It hit me hard—our entire existence has become reliant on these microscopic bits of silicon.
Then yesterday, the evening news finally echoed what I’ve quietly feared: hospitals reporting shortages of specialized medical devices—pacemakers, insulin pumps, diagnostic machines—critical equipment dependent on specialized chips. The anchor sounded calm, reassuring viewers this was “temporary,” but the underlying anxiety was palpable.
Late last night, scrolling through forums, I stumbled onto communities cataloging the shortages: high-end graphics cards vanished overnight, appliances on permanent backorder, security cameras unavailable, industrial machinery unable to find replacement control modules. A creeping realization settled over me, darker and more permanent than before:
This isn’t going to fix itself anytime soon.
It’s strange, standing on the edge of something so big, yet seeing it unfold in slow motion. The world hasn’t ended—it feels more like erosion, tiny grains slipping away unnoticed until suddenly you find the ground has vanished beneath you.
I catch myself watching Neo with envy again—chewing on fresh greens in blissful ignorance. But for the rest of us, especially those of us aware enough to connect the dots, ignorance isn’t an option.
I’ve decided to stockpile essentials, just a few basics, nothing too paranoid: spare batteries, emergency radios, manual tools—things I might need if the wave continues to swell. I’ve quietly started asking myself harder questions, questions I don’t have comforting answers for:
How long before the shortages reach critical mass?
How long will our existing electronics last without new replacements?
And how fragile, really, is the civilization we’ve built around these tiny, irreplaceable chips?
I’m still not panicked—not yet. But the quiet fear grows louder, settling deeper into my thoughts. All I can do is watch, wait, and keep writing it all down.
I suspect someday, these pages might be valuable—not as idle worries, but as a map, drawn while still navigating through the dark.
“Dan Conderman’s story will haunt me for years. I found myself looking at my smartphone as if it were already an artifact.”
—Michael O’Connor, technology critic and author of Silicon Dreams
September 23, 2025
Fall has come to Wisconsin, bringing that familiar crispness in the air, a comforting cycle of seasons unchanged. Yet, nothing feels familiar anymore. Five months since Taiwan shattered beneath our feet, and the world we knew is slowly unraveling, thread by thread.
A couple weeks ago, the President stood on national TV announcing billions in emergency funding—promises of domestic semiconductor factories, high-tech American jobs, a new future built from scratch. They spoke confidently about “restoring independence” and “rebuilding the tech chain,” assuring us that this crisis would pass.
But as someone who’s been in development and tech for decades, I know how empty those promises are. Chip fabrication isn’t something you whip up overnight. It’s intricate, precise, and painstakingly slow. Intel, Micron, IBM—all their press releases are thick with promises but thin on substance. The reality is, we don’t have enough skilled technicians, let alone the specialized equipment like EUV lithography machines, most of which were lost in Taiwan. Reports suggest it could be five to ten years before the U.S. even gets close to matching what we lost overnight.
The shortages have now seeped deeply into daily life. My work is feeling the pain—clients are postponing contracts, sometimes indefinitely, because they simply can’t get the hardware. Last week, my biggest client put their entire expansion plan on hold, shelving our carefully developed software suite, not because it was flawed, but because they couldn’t source enough servers to run it. Each pause hurts financially, but worse, it feels like watching the slow death of innovation itself.
I started calling it a second pandemic—not a virus this time, but a pandemic of parts. Just as we saw toilet paper vanish from shelves during COVID, now it’s laptops, smartphones, hard drives, and even home security cameras disappearing. Tech stores look barren, stripped clean by anxious customers desperate to get their hands on anything electronic. Friends and neighbors casually mention hoarding spare laptops or tablets, “just in case.”
Black markets sprang up faster than I ever imagined. Online forums whisper about deals behind closed doors—selling “used” smartphones at quadruple their original price, vintage CPUs, salvaged motherboards, old graphics cards suddenly worth their weight in gold. It feels surreal, a quiet desperation humming beneath our daily lives.
Even at home, I’m taking inventory again, wondering how long each device might last. My laptop’s battery life is shortening, and the thought of replacing it feels ominous. My phone has a cracked screen, but repair shops have stopped taking appointments—they simply can’t get replacement parts. I’ve begun gently urging my wife to take extra care with everything electronic we own, knowing each breakage might mean going without entirely.
It’s strange and disturbing to see society’s grip loosening, all because of something invisible to most people until recently—a microscopic grid of transistors. We built our world on these tiny silicon wafers, and now, their scarcity threatens to tear it down.
Still, I find myself searching for silver linings. People are learning to repair again, resurrecting old devices, rediscovering skills forgotten in the ease of constant upgrades. Communities are forming around salvage operations, bartering, and trading knowledge. I wonder if, amid this unraveling, we might find ourselves forced back into a simpler, slower—but perhaps stronger—version of community.
Yet optimism is hard to sustain. Every day feels like walking a razor’s edge between hope and dread. Neo is blissfully unaware, lumbering through his daily routine as I envy his simple contentment more deeply than ever.
I’ve continued documenting all of this, a diary of our slow-motion collapse, wondering who might read these words someday—perhaps someone looking back at the point where we stood on the edge, helplessly watching the world we’d built begin to crumble, piece by precious piece.
“A chillingly believable tale of quiet collapse, told with warmth, wisdom, and surprising tenderness.”
—Elias Grant, Literary Journal of the Midwest
April 18, 2026
The quiet is the first thing you notice these days. Wisconsin spring mornings always had a gentle hush—but now it’s different. The drone of distant cars, that familiar electronic hum we once barely noticed, is fading like a radio station slipping beyond range. My street feels sleepy, even at mid-morning; fewer commuters, fewer deliveries. The subtle soundtrack of a connected world is slowly falling silent.
The last few months have brought profound changes—not just in the things we have, but how we live. My weekly Whatnot broadcasts dried up around Christmas, after it became impossible to find inventory or even spare parts for streaming gear. No new phones have hit the shelves in almost a year. Stores that once gleamed with electronics have shuttered or transformed into barter hubs for salvaged devices.
And yet, life hasn’t collapsed—it’s just quietly reshaped itself. Neo still ambles slowly around the yard, grazing peacefully, blissfully ignorant of how much our world has shrunk. Our neighbors talk more now. People gather at the library again—something I haven’t seen since I was a kid. Books, atlases, and encyclopedias, once quaint curiosities, have become precious commodities. A librarian recently told me that typewriters and slide rules—once forgotten relics—now fly off shelves. People who once bragged about sleek new tech now proudly show off mechanical watches, fountain pens, and manual sewing machines.
I’ve noticed familiar, unexpected changes in my own life too. My ham radio setup—something I’d nearly abandoned—has become central again. The airwaves crackle nightly with voices from neighbors, hobbyists, even official announcements. Frequencies long silent have sprung to life, driven by a desire for connection as our digital world slowly starves.
Last month, I finally managed to trade for something I’d coveted for months—a tube-powered CB radio from the late 1960s. It glows softly when turned on, and its warm hum is oddly reassuring. Turning the dial, hearing the gentle static give way to clear voices from truckers or distant operators, feels like rediscovering a forgotten art. Vacuum tubes, suddenly prized again after decades as nostalgic curiosities, are being salvaged, traded, and repurposed. It strikes me as ironic that Soviet-era stockpiles of tubes are now one of our greatest technological lifelines.
Every day, informal networks grow stronger—repair clubs meet weekly, trading knowledge on soldering circuit boards, fixing broken screens, reviving old computers. Salvage markets are the new town squares, where people trade reclaimed electronics, spare parts, and old-world mechanical devices. Without realizing it, we’ve quietly returned to the thrift, patience, and ingenuity our grandparents knew by heart.
Yet, as reassuring as our adaptability might be, I still wonder if this is what the Romans felt like watching their empire slowly shrink around them—each year a little smaller, a little quieter. Not a collapse, exactly, but a retreat to something simpler and closer to home.
This evening, sitting quietly with my CB humming, watching the warm orange glow of tubes reflecting softly off Neo’s shell, I found comfort in this simpler rhythm. Maybe the world we knew wasn’t sustainable anyway. Maybe we’re rediscovering a slower, more human pace. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing what we’ve lost.
Either way, I’ll keep writing. One day these notes might mean something, a record of how quietly a great empire faded—not with screams, but whispers.
“Years from now, this may be the book people turn to when they ask, ‘How did we get here?’ Remarkable, thoughtful, and unforgettable.”
—Samuel T. Myers, historian and author of The Slow Unraveling
May 3, 2030
I’m writing by candlelight tonight, carefully, deliberately—my hand steadier now than it was when I first switched back to pen and paper. My handwriting has improved over these past few years; funny how necessity revives forgotten skills.
Five years ago, I’d never have imagined living in a world that now feels comfortably familiar. Our community in Wisconsin has shrunk to a manageable scale. Neighbors rely on each other again, sharing produce, tools, stories, and skills. My radios still work, cobbled together from old parts and carefully preserved tubes. Some nights, voices drift in through the static like whispers from distant fires. The reassuring warmth of vacuum tubes seems timeless now, a comforting glow against our strange, post-silicon night.
Children born after the Collapse—after 2026—run barefoot through our streets, happily ignorant of apps, screens, and constant connectivity. Teenagers, the last generation to remember smartphones as childhood toys, occasionally ask us older folks about the “glass slabs” everyone used to stare into. To them, those sleek rectangles—dark, lifeless, broken beyond repair—are relics of some forgotten magic.
Last week, while sitting around a fire with my neighbors, Hank started telling the kids the story he calls “The Island That Held Lightning.” He spoke of an enchanted place across the great ocean, where lightning was captured, molded into chips of pure knowledge, and sent out to make machines come alive. The children listened, eyes wide with wonder, giggling softly at what they believed was merely a bedtime tale. Hank winked at me, and we both knew he was describing Taiwan, now passed into legend. I said nothing, content to watch history quietly slide into myth.
Today, a traveler named Alice passed through town, trading seeds, fabrics, and small handmade goods. She brought with her an odd tale that stirred my memory. She claimed she’d recently met a man far north, who could still “speak to the old machines.” According to Alice, this mysterious figure could revive the lifeless glass slabs—make them glow again, make them whisper their old secrets. The younger villagers were fascinated, but skeptical. To them, such power was sorcery, or simply a lie.
I listened closely, jotting Alice’s story carefully into my notebook. I recognized it for what it was: the first seeds of folklore, sprouting around technology we once took for granted. How quickly a decade transforms our present into their distant past.
Tonight, as I sit here beside my radios, I feel a gentle, bittersweet awe. Without fully realizing it, I’ve become an observer at the edge of history—living through the beginnings of what will someday be called “ancient times.” My journals—stacked carefully in the cupboard—are slowly becoming archives, chronicles from an age when we stopped knowing how to speak the language of silicon.
Sometimes, when I’m alone with the static, I still vividly remember the morning it all began—an ordinary April day, back in 2025. I see myself standing in my kitchen, sipping coffee, watching the news of Taiwan’s devastating quake, feeling that first shiver of realization. The moment our fragile world cracked open, the day we lost our grip on the lightning.
And quietly, by candlelight, I write it down once more.
Spring Time 2075
Dictated by Daniel Conderman, age 100, recorded by Samuel, age 19.
(The soft whirring of a wind-up recorder begins.)
This is probably the last time I’ll do this. My name is Dan Conderman. I was born exactly one hundred years ago today and though I can no longer see your faces, I still hear your voices clearly. Samuel, who sits patiently beside me now, has kindly offered his hands and his careful pen. He knows only the world after the Collapse. He tells me our village is safe, that the apple trees bloomed early this spring. He says Neo’s descendants still wander through our gardens, oblivious to history, as all good tortoises should be.
Samuel asks me what the old world was like—before everything shrank down into villages, before the barter networks and handmade radios. He calls me a “time traveler,” and maybe I am. I was born in a different age, when the earth seemed vast and bright and fast-moving. I watched the world grow smaller through screens that glowed brighter each year. I was there at the birth of a new universe—a world built on silicon, on invisible pulses of electricity—tamed lightning. And I was there when it unraveled, slowly, carefully, and almost gently.
I still recall that day, April of 2025, when Taiwan shook and fell silent, and with it, the world lost its voice. At first, we believed it was simply tragic—until we learned how fragile our great digital tower was. You, Samuel, you’ve never held a smartphone—imagine holding a magic mirror in your palm, a mirror that could summon pictures and voices from across oceans instantly. People used these mirrors all day. They stopped seeing the sky, stopped looking into each other’s eyes. They lived on screens, connected by an invisible web, a sky road of thought we called the Internet.
Samuel smiles and nods, imagining carefully, trying to understand. He asks what Wi-Fi felt like. How can I describe it? It was as if the very air around us was full of silent whispers, little voices passing through walls and trees, a cloud of conversation we breathed but never felt.
Samuel asks about emojis, and I laugh. They were little pictures we used to express emotion, tiny faces or hearts or tears. It sounds silly now—like hieroglyphics from another age—but we lived our lives through them, forgetting sometimes how to speak plainly, face-to-face.
When the collapse began, we didn’t know it would never end—not really. First the phones disappeared, then vehicles stopped running as their computerized hearts died. Governments weakened, unable to speak across distances, and slowly, cities emptied and shrank into towns, towns into villages, and finally, into quiet places like ours. It was not sudden destruction. It was an unraveling, like pulling thread from an old sweater.
I remember how afraid we were at first, how we thought losing our screens and instant comforts meant the end of all things. But the world did not end, Samuel. It rebooted. It became smaller again, more careful, more thoughtful. We relearned how to fix broken things. We relearned how to grow food, how to barter, how to write carefully by candlelight, how to listen to each other across radio waves at night.
Samuel, your generation will never truly know the glittering convenience of that old world, nor the peril of how quickly we forgot how it all worked. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe some things should be remembered only in stories.
And so, here at the end of my life, I want to tell you something important, something to keep close as you continue to rebuild: nothing made by man lasts forever—not our greatest cities, nor our cleverest inventions. The pyramids crumble, and our shining mirrors turn dark.
But some things endure—stories, lessons, and the endless curiosity that keeps us going. Keep that curiosity. Ask questions, take nothing for granted, and build carefully—one brick, one lesson, one story at a time.
Because the world didn’t end, my friends.
It simply began again.
(Recorder clicks off, tape whirring softly to silence.)
“Hauntingly beautiful. Conderman’s journey feels like a collective memory we’ve somehow lost—one we desperately need to reclaim.”
—Rachel Denison, author of Echoes in the Static
July 7th, 2115
On the road south, between Kingston and the old steel ruins
My beloved Sarah,
If this letter reaches you, it means the riders still run, the roads still hold, and that somewhere in the distance between you and me — the world still turns.
I miss you. I miss the way the kettle sings over our stove, the way the chickens complain when you call them late, the way the air smells just before the night crickets start. Tell the boys I am proud. Tell Elin I’ve started stitching the patchwork on my jacket from that old concert cloth she dyed — it brings me luck.
But I write to tell you why I’m gone, and why I cannot rush home.
There was a man, long ago, who saw the world end slowly.
His name was Dan Conderman.
He was born in 1975 — that’s Year -50 now, as we keep time since the Fall. He was a child when screens became windows, when people could speak across the sky, and when machines began to think. He watched it rise. He watched it hum. And then, in April of the last golden year — 2025 — he watched it tremble.
And Dan did something no one else did:
He wrote it all down.
He didn’t just write what happened — he wrote how it felt.
And when the world went dark, and the towers stopped singing, and the screens went still, he kept writing. When he could no longer see, he spoke. When he could no longer hold a pen, he remembered.
And when I was just a boy — only ten winters tall — I met him.
He was old, thin, eyes white with cloud, sitting in a rocking chair that creaked like it remembered the Internet. He told me about “Google,” which was a god of answers, and “Amazon,” which sent anything anywhere in days. I thought he was joking. I laughed.
He didn’t.
I’ve carried his journals ever since. I read them each spring. I read them each fall. I’ve copied them by hand five times. I’ve wrapped them in waxed leather and buried a set in the northern cairns, sealed beneath a map made of oiled birch. Another set is kept in the Library Cellar at Marion’s Hollow. And now I carry the originals south — to the Crescent Collective, who say they have a working press.
Sarah — they want to print it.
Real pages. Ink. Mass copies. Like the Old Books in the upper shelves. If they succeed, Dan’s voice will be a hundred voices. Maybe a thousand. People will know again. Not just the fall — but the world before. How fast it moved. How foolish we became. And how it slipped.
This isn’t about nostalgia.
It’s not about clinging to the past.
It’s about context.
We raise our children in a world of scavenged truths and half-remembered myths.
They don’t know that screens once glowed with faces.
That songs used to fly wirelessly through air.
That we didn’t always wait for the postal horse to bring us news of a birth, a death, or a flood.
Dan saw it all. He left it to us.
And I feel — with every step I take — that this is what I was born to do.
I will be home before the frost hits hard. I promise.
I’ll bring stories. And, God willing, I’ll bring books.
All my heart,
Samuel
Told by Cara, Harvest Night, Year 2205
“I only read it once. I was thirteen.”
That’s how she begins.
“There was a box. Heavy. Waxed. Buried beneath the north cairn by the wild pines where the deer-path curves. Grandpa Samuel left it there. Said it was important. But he never came back to finish what he started.”
“Me and my brother Jonas dug it up the summer after the flood took the mill. We were just kids, bored, hoping it was treasure. Inside were books. Not the holy kind. Not law-books or almanacs. These were bound with twine and thick with ink. They smelled like dust and time and something sharp — like the inside of an old radio.”
She pauses here, eyes distant.
“We read them over three weeks, laying belly-down in the hayloft. It was hard going — the words were dense, technical, full of strange names. But we could feel the man who wrote them. His name was Dan. He lived before the Fall. Not before a fall — the Fall.”
“He was born in the Age of Lightning — 1975, back when machines could speak and think and glow. He watched it all rise. The towers. The talking mirrors. The sky-signals that carried voices and dreams across the world.”
“And he saw it all go quiet.”
“He said it didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like someone had slowly turned the world’s volume down… until one day, there was only the wind again.”
Cara clears her throat, lifting her eyes to the younger faces at the table.
“He talked about a land called Tye-Wahn. An island where the spark was made. He said that spark lived in everything — carriages that drove themselves, books with no pages, even lights that came on when you spoke to them.”
“And when that island cracked in two and fell into the sea, the spark died. Not all at once. But it bled out — slow. Quiet. Numb.”
“He wrote every day until he couldn’t see anymore. Then he spoke, and Samuel, our grandfather, carried his words. Tried to bring them to people who still had presses. But he never came back.”
She lowers her voice, like sharing a ghost story now.
“We put the journals back in the box. Buried it. And we… moved on. We were young. Harvests were lean. The wilds were dangerous. We didn’t think the words would matter.”
“But now I sit here, and you all look like I did once, and I know it does matter. Not for the facts. Not for the technology. But for the warning.”
“That we had a world so powerful it forgot how it worked.”
“That we trusted things we never truly understood.”
“That we thought magic was normal.”
“And that when the spark went out, we were surprised to find ourselves… alone.”
She looks at each child in turn — her children’s children’s children — now quiet in the flickering light.
“So that’s the story. There was a man. He remembered. And another man who tried to carry it. And two kids who read it only once… and now speak it from memory.”
“I might not have the pages anymore. But I remember how it felt.”
“Like someone was whispering from the other side of time:
‘This is how it went. Don’t let it go this way again.’”
Tomas Tells a Tale by Firelight
Camp, outskirts of Pine Ridge Commune – Year ~2230
The canvas flaps gently. A low fire crackles. Tomas, covered in dust and old grease, leans back on a stump, eyes fixed on the stars. His wife, Lila, spoons lentils into a dented tin bowl, pausing now and then to glance at him.
TOMAS (slowly):
“I don’t think I’ll ever forget that man’s voice.”
LILA (looks up):
“The repair guy?”
TOMAS (nods):
“Micah Bennett. Shop’s full of motors and tube rigs and boards so old they’ve grown rust whiskers. But he runs it like a temple. Not like a hoarder. Like a guardian.”
LILA:
“What happened?”
TOMAS (leans forward, voice low):
“Kid of his — maybe thirteen — threw out a half-used cell. One of those green-tops with life left in ’em. Micah snapped. Not mad. Just… sharp.”
“He said, ‘That cell’s still got breath. You throw it out, you might as well piss on the ashes of the world that came before.’”
LILA (frowns):
“That’s dramatic.”
TOMAS (serious now):
“Not the way he said it.”
He runs a finger along the edge of his mug.
“Then he told them the story. Not sweet, not gentle — raw. A man named Dan. Born back when sparks ran free and nothing ever broke without someone else fixing it for you. Dan saw it all rise. And he watched it fall. Slowly. Quietly. Because people got comfortable. Lazy. Wasteful.”
LILA (softly):
“We all get lazy sometimes.”
TOMAS (shakes his head):
“Not in Micah’s eyes. Not anymore. He said the old world died not because the tech failed — but because the people did.”
“’They threw away things that worked. They bought new instead of fixing. They let machines think for them. And when the island cracked — when the chips stopped flowing — they didn’t know how to survive. They just stood there… surrounded by garbage they’d once called treasure.’”
LILA (quiet now):
“That’s bleak.”
TOMAS:
“It wasn’t meant to be hopeful. It was a warning. Micah said he read Dan’s journals once, from his grandma’s hands. Said Dan didn’t write it as history — he wrote it as a final slap in the face.”
“’This is what happens when you forget how things work.’”
‘This is what happens when you think easy is normal.‘
‘No lazy. No waste. No forget.’”
LILA (sits back):
“So what… we just work ourselves dead so it doesn’t happen again?”
TOMAS (softly):
“No. We work smart. We work aware. Every bolt matters. Every brush. Every cell that still turns. We build so that the next ones don’t end up writing our story like some slow deathbed confession.”
He looks at the fire — not as a comfort, but a symbol.
“That’s what I think Dan wanted us to learn.
Not how amazing the world used to be.
But how stupid we were to treat it like it would last forever.”
LILA (after a long pause):
“And that alternator?”
TOMAS (grins faintly):
“Still hums.”
The Reading Room, Lamplight Consortium, New Albion City – Year 2330
Two scholars, Aveline and Derrit, sit across from each other in a brass-trimmed observatory-library. High-backed chairs. Dusty green glass lamps. Gears tick in the walls. An automaton brings them tea, whistling quietly through bellows.
Between them: a bound reprint of Dan Conderman’s Journals — recently uncovered in the mountain archives, long mislabeled as fiction.
AVELINE (flipping through pages):
“He calls it a ‘phone.’ Describes it as a… glass rectangle that ‘glowed with images and spoke with voices from afar.’”
DERRIT (squinting, amused):
“A mirror? A remote broadcast screen?”
AVELINE (shaking her head):
“No, it was two-way. Personal. Portable. He says people carried them in their pockets. Billions of them. All connected.”
DERRIT (laughs softly):
“Come now. That’s allegory. ‘Voices flying through sky-roads’? Mythmaking.”
AVELINE (more serious):
“It might sound like myth… but it’s consistent. He talks about entire markets that existed only through these devices. People falling in love through them. Waging wars. Becoming… addicted to them.”
DERRIT (leans in):
“If they were real… how did they work?”
AVELINE (quietly):
“That’s the thing. He calls it ‘the spark.’ Or sometimes ‘the chip.’ He never explains how it worked — just that nobody really knew. Not even then.”
DERRIT (softly, almost reverently):
“So you’re saying… they built a world on top of something they didn’t understand.”
AVELINE:
“And then it failed. And they were helpless.”
Long pause.
DERRIT (thumbing the brittle page):
“Listen to this — ‘People stared at rectangles for ten hours a day. Not for data. For meaning. They stopped going outside. Stopped talking. Even meals were eaten while gazing into the glow.’”
AVELINE (murmuring):
“And we thought the coilcasters were dangerous…”
DERRIT (smirking):
“We outlawed night broadcasts because they made children restless. This man’s saying the entire world ran on… what? Invisible logic? Tiny thought-engines?”
AVELINE (reading further):
“He mentions a place called ‘Taiwan.’ Says it held the world’s supply of these… ‘chips.’ When it collapsed, everything slowed. Died. The world didn’t burn — it blinked out.”
DERRIT:
“So that’s why he writes like this is a confession.”
AVELINE:
“It is. He’s not just chronicling a fall. He’s begging someone — us — not to repeat it.”
⚠️ OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
National Grid Integrity Notice
Issued by the Department of Civic Systems Maintenance and Continuity
Year: 2500 • Reference Code: GRID-BREAK-777
To All Citizens and Communal Cooperatives,
After 175 years of post-Reconstruction stewardship, the National Vacuum Tube Relay System, the Civic Waterworks Grid, the Regional Steam Current Lines, and the Beacon Power Array have each suffered irreparable multi-point failures within the past thirty cycles.
These are not isolated outages. These are systemic collapses.
Technicians, patch-teams, pipe runners, and tube lighters across all six zones have reported that ongoing repair attempts are now unsustainable, due to:
- Diminishing inventories of replacement vacuum tubes and transducer glass
- Breakage rates in pipe mains exceeding capacity to weld or fuse
- Power surges in long-disconnected loop systems
- Permanent loss of access to archived schematics predating the Cascade Fire of 2439
- Lack of living knowledge on the original designs, sequence, or logic of the full grid
In short:
We no longer understand how the system truly worked.
And we no longer have the capacity to keep it alive.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
- Local autonomous systems may continue to operate for a time.
- Water rations will continue via pump-rotation and storm collection in Regions 2–5.
- Power coils will remain active where self-winding is possible.
- Tube mail and vacuumgram services are suspended in all zones except Capital Belt and South Ironwood.
IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING:
This is a sincere plea from the Department:
If you or your family retain any information, instructions, schematics, journals, or diagrams that may pertain to:
- Core relay logic
- Legacy pump harmonics
- Beacon-mirror alignment systems
- Grid-sequencing keys
- Or anything related to micro-logics, glass-brain switching, or chip-based control
Please send your knowledge via vacuumgram to:
Office of Salvage & System Memory
Main Tower Hall — Capital Belt
Marked: “FOR THE NEXT ONES”
These will be collected and stored indefinitely.
Not for immediate repair — but for someday.
FINAL WORD:
The grid held longer than anyone expected.
But no fire burns forever.
From this point on, local resilience is the path forward.
Care for your community. Record everything you can.
And if you must start over — start small, start smart, and never let the recipe go forgotten again.
For the Light that Remains,
— Office of Civic Systems, Year 2500
