Near the tables at a crowded park a man called out to me. I turned and he introduced himself, but his name slid right past me and continued on to the world behind me. He then introduced his dog, Apricot, a full size labradoodle. Apricot was presented as an acquaintance of my own dog.
My wife came up bearing a grilled cheese on a paper plate and a bowl of colorful and possibly edible flowers and she said hi. She knew Apricot and also the man. I stood there quiet and blank faced, hopefully unnoticed. Our son went beneath the tables and began petting Apricot and two other fluffy brown dogs of indeterminate types. I could tell my wife was still irritated with me, but she masked it with feigned warmth towards Apricot's man, and he in turn feigned ignorance of the friction between us.
My wife was anxious because we were in an unfamiliar neighborhood in a new city and if we were unable to procure a suitable lunch in time to eat it before our son's drums lesson then we would be either late or hungry or both and the day would spiral away from us from there. My plan had been to get food at an automat style restaurant run by adherents of an esoteric faith and musical style, but upon arrival at the address indicated on the phone the location turned out to be an upscale tapas restaurant that wouldn't open for another hour and would have been unlikely to admit us at any hour. Things changed fast in the city.
Thanks to my wife's quick thinking and persuasive powers, the new age juice bar inside the healing crystal shop yielded an acceptable lunch of grilled cheese and flowers. She set the lunch down and called our son up from below the table, her triumph quickly forgotten behind the press of more practical matters. Our son verbally declined to rise from his bed of fluffy dogs, but the dogs themselves forced the issue and emerged in hopes of catching a stray morsel, or perhaps the entire sandwich were it to slide off the plate.
---
On the short walk to drums we learned that civilization collapsed. I was in shock about it, and little much has changed in that regard, to the extent that I'm not sure exactly how we gathered the news. Perhaps it came on the phone or perhaps we learned it spoken aloud from people on the street in the way that we can only look a stranger in the eye and converse unguardedly in the face of an event wholly tragic and unexplainable. Nothing looked any different than before, but nevertheless we all immediately understood everything had changed.
We quickly decided our plan of action. We would attempt to acquire warm clothes, sleeping bags, water, rations, survival gear, and our Jeep from our old home outside the city. We didn't think the Jeep would be of long term value in the new world order, but at least it might be able to take us to the middle of nowhere, wherever that was.
---
It took the rest of the day and part of the night to walk to our old home. I don't remember any complaining or any conversation. We hiked in a fugue like three ants on a mission in a confused and uncaring world.
The old home was mostly as we left it and also foreign and unrecognizable. Flannel shirts, cargo pants, and camping supplies were located while some other desirable supplies remained stubbornly unfindable. Finding, or any higher reasoning requiring patience and a calm mind was then out of reach for us. At least the Jeep was there and it started right up. I drove it through the night, heedless of previous norms of motor vehicle operation, towards an old scouts camp I knew of in the hills.
Some distance from where I knew the camp to be, we parked and hid the Jeep under brush. We were unsure of our future plans for the Jeep, but we felt it best to approach our new home or at least our next waypoint on foot.
---
The scouts camp wasn't entirely empty. A dim light outside the barracks tried and mostly failed to cut through the fog and gloom. I was surprised there was electricity but maybe it was from a generator.
Inside the barracks there were two young men. Now too far removed from the singularity and once again sheathed in our social and emotional armor we were unable to connect with them on any meaningful level. My wife introduced us, but each and all of our names fell into dimensions unreachable. I felt mistrustful of the young men, perceiving them to be of a social class incompatible with our own, which ought to be a weird way to feel in a post society world. I could tell they felt the same way, and put upon by our presence as well, but coexistence still seemed achievable.
We went back out into the night to find the outhouses and any other items of note. I remembered from my own scouting past that a black widow bite to the scrotum or labia would likely be instant death and worse, but left this thought unspoken to my family; future possibilities felt entirely unknowable and regurgitating such warnings would seem doddering and out of touch with our new present.
Returning to wood paneling lined barracks that smelled of mold, dirty sheets, and cigarettes, we found one of the young men engaged with an inscrutable machine parked in the corner while the other lounged on a bed. The machine looked like something in between a home gym and a DDR arcade cabinet. A full dry bag like what's used on rafting trips suddenly spawned in between two posts on the machine. The young man yelped, jumped back, and retreated to the furthest bed from the machine.
My family and I stood dumbfounded in the barracks entryway, all of us having believed previously, and in hindsight, foolishly, that teleportation or whatever manifestation technology that was at work before our eyes to have been impossible, or at least non-existent. More dry bags appeared between the posts of the machine, dropped, and accumulated in a pile at the base of the machine. Finally, a letter fluttered to the ground.
We passed the letter amongst ourselves, unspeaking, patient while each person in turn read and digested its contents. The writing on the letter swam before my eyes, unreadable, incomprehensible, but I held it in front of my face for what I guessed was an appropriate time period. Our son can read as most eleven year olds can and we gave him a turn with the letter as well.
As parents of an only child, my wife and I were possessing of instincts to attempt to explain and contextualize everything in the world, worried that without our interventions some critical understanding might be missed, and heedless that by doing so we might stifle independence. Neither of us felt capable of contextualization in a world where dry bags and letters teleport into old scouts camp barracks and so we offered no comments on the contents of the letter.
---
With dry bags slung over our shoulders, swathed in flannels, and girded in cargo pants we walked out towards the clearing to await our ship. Other people, perhaps a few dozen, were emerging from the camp and the woods and converging on the meeting point. Still without words, the meaning of the letter was beginning to crystalize in my mind, or at least the barest of outlines.
As I understood it then, an automated process in the event of the failure of Earth had been triggered. We were being sent to a world called Lake, if we could make it there across a hostile and dangerous liminal space. A child next to me, apparently of the precocious type that understands stock markets from a young age, wondered aloud at the monetary value of a lost Earth. All of it, I thought bitterly to myself, all of everything that ever was.
The ship appeared in a flash of light and a rush of precipitation condensed from clear air. A door opened and we filed toward it.
---
My stomach tried to prolapse my esophagus and my vision sparked previously unimagined colors as our own ship dove beneath a hail of laser fire. Arrayed before us was a battlefield of enormous scale, with capital ships the size of continents locked in struggle like prehistoric beasts and small dogfighting crafts outnumbering the stars in the sky behind them.
The extent of my space faring experience up until this point, much less star fighting experience, was flying a simulation of the Space Shuttle when I was ten. I suspect the simulation was set to easy mode because I had no idea what I was doing and yet somehow we survived re-entry and landed at Kennedy Space Center.
I don't know how I ended up at the controls of our ship, but I intended to avoid getting blown up, as so many other ships were doing. The whole battle, or at least our time in it, felt like it lasted only ten seconds, but who knows how long it had been going on for or when it will ever end. We somehow blasted through the field of battle and slipped unscathed and unpursued through an unseen curtain at the far side.
---
Imagine Earth's moon, all white dust, except it's a planet, and it has just one big lake on it. That's Lake. That's why they call it Lake. That's all there is. I miss Earth and I feel a deep bottomless sorrow for losing it.
We have a base, which feels a bit tenuous, but I guess it beats being completely exposed on the surface of a bleak and inhospitable world.
We had a ceremony when we arrived on base for heroes of the battle. A guy named Jon was recognized for his heroic deeds; reportedly he blasted a ton of baddies on his way over. The base commander says he will be rewarded by being assigned a spouse, which I guess makes some sense given how humanity is as tenuous as our base. My family and I clapped. I wanted to stand there shell shocked the way I felt, the way I feel, but I clapped. I think Jon felt awkward about it too.
Tomorrow we will start with the terraforming. We will make a new home.