One skeletal version of a nearly complete short story I keep fiddling with, with an eye to turning it into a graphic novel or comic book.
What follows are selected documents
and diary entries belonging to André D’yak,
a man living in Russia’s Far East
when the outside world went dark.
The last entry contains,
according to our records,
the last words ever written
by a human — written longhand
on the backside of printed
half-century-old chat logs.
This version is as much teaser as experience. The initial concept features a lot of supporting multi-media material, from chat-logs and scribbled journal entries to sketches of the makeshift cryo-lab André put together at his grandparent’s homestead and various headlines and in-universe references to some of the world events that lead to the world he lives in. Other materials establish D’yak’s proficiency with machining and engineering small-scale, and a certain fondness for solitude and a quiet place to relax in the afternoon.
But you can’t have everything in this world, not when…
BEGIN DRAFT
The world is pretty clearly past the brink. Once coastal regions have become positively Atlantean. There’s not much to be done. Governments, private businesses, and information bounty hunters begin selling off top-secret tech to the highest bidder.
Specifically cryogenic storage tech (used mostly for keeping food and medicines fresh for indeterminate lengths of time; but also by the wealthy and the desperate to sleep through till things got better)
André Fyodorovič D’yak, former-computer-systems-engineer- turned-hermit, wakes up one day to a message from a friend. Several years have passed since the last messages. Everyone else had gone to sleep.
He pings the address included in the message header: no response. André begins sending out a ping each day — a heartbeat — along with an automated message: Is anybody out there?
A couple of short episodes follow: one day he goes foraging, another hunting, another he takes the snowmobile into town to pick over what supplies remain to be bartered over (sugar, flour, batteries).
He repairs a solar panel array that works alright when the clouds aren’t too thick.
Miniature Goodyear-blimp-style drones are a common sight, running indefinitely off of solar panels on their backs. Some are communication drones, one of which he shoots down for parts. Others are pest and wildlife control. They were built to monitor and control populations of apex predators and large prey animals; these ones sometimes try to shoot at him.
He’s got the solar array hooked up to his shack (mostly underground, dug below what used to be tundra, where it’s warmer) and it powers his cryo-fridge, radio and little computer.
Between deep-cell batteries (hoarded from stranded fishing boats), the solar panels and a fidgety wind turbine, power’s not a problem just now. André’s had a steak of luck until now, but the seeds aren’t breeding true. Large game has been over-hunted, and too many ecological niches destroyed.
It’ll be at least another decade before the newly unfrozen Northern slopes restabilise, and maybe half that before the soil along the Southern coast would have time to regenerate from centuries of overuse.
André D’yak starts taking cryo-naps to conserve resources. A few days or a week or two. No more than a month at first. Then longer. He builds greenhouses and scavenges lights to grow plants and food in the cave-shack.
He wakes up less often now, staying awake long enough to tend his plants, to hunt, to send a heartbeat via radio or by bouncing a tightbeam/WiFi/cellular signal off through any nearby communications drones.
Another morning. Mid-winter. Deer are hunkered down under evergreens. A pack of wolves is not far away preparing for a hunt. Miles away, the hum of drone propellers and the accompanying whine of a projectile weapon spinning up.
All of in one moment, forest is ablaze with movement. Redbirds and black take to the sky with a loud ruffling pop. Wolf snouts push through deep snow, almost panting as they heave warm breaths. Deer ears prick and the flock moves as one, jumping and weaving through the young trees, towards older forest.
Behind a tree breathing carefully and slowly to avoid his breath being seen, André watches from across a meadow. The short younger growth at the edge of the meadow hides him much as it had the deer.
Short yips signal the faster, older wolves to move around to the right. They push the deer toward the clearing where it is easier to divide them and the pickings are easier for the first-year hunters.
Crack. A doe stumbles and loses her footing.
Crack, crack. A red spray blossoms from the belly of an older wolf and sprays the first-year running beside him.
‘Damn.’ He grimaces, looking up at the drone floating overhead at speed. The popcon-drones weren’t supposed to be down this low so soon before a storm.
A week or three later, heavy rains begin to clear some of the snow in patches.
The same drone, with it’s characteristic prickly face and shiny back, is dead centre of the cross-hairs. André squeezes the trigger. Twice more, he sights and fires. He destroys the drone’s short range navigation equipment, and puts a big crack across one solar panel.
He smiles to himself before walking back to his shack.
The spring planting won’t start for another month or two, and the summer after that. Fishing will be good in a few weeks.
He looks over at the fading pictures of his grandparents on the wall, and types out a message that will be sent as soon as the weather is clear enough for signal to reach a repeater tower or a comm-drone.
‘Я в лес, Дед, Баба.1.’
He settles down into the cryo-chamber for a long nap. Maybe he’ll dream again this time, like the first time. Of family, of the friend he’s never seen who may no longer be alive.
He lets the door close and breathes out as much as he can, fogging up the enclosure. Then he flips a switch and breathes in the cryo-gas, counting backwards.
19. 18. 17. 16…
He’s out almost before the refrigerant starts to flow through the tubes that line his chest, arms, and legs, tracing veins and muscles to quickly cool the body.
15. 14. 13.
Power failure.
System shutdown eminent.
The popcon-drone ДКП-1138 slows in the sky as it’s propellers spin slower and slower. The helium that has kept it afloat these many decades has been leaking for two weeks, and most the lubricant has long since drained from rotting hoses and worn bushings.
Three props function for another half-hour, the fourth having fallen off long ago. Pieces of the no. 4 prop stick out of 1138’s fore like a mangy beard.
The repeating radio signal that is André’s message is picked up by 1138’s AM repeater and passed on just before the drone falls too low behind the coast’s high hills for the signal to find another node.
Water moves under the drone, cresting into white webs before falling away into the dark, almost purple, blue of the sea at sunset. And the wind sweeps it out to sea.
Since morning 1138’s lower antennæ drag a little into the swell, and they scrape the rocks an the shore now as the noon wind pushes it back to land.
A small hill pushes the wind up and up again, but the drone is too heavy now and not buoyant enough to follow, it drags on treetops and taller bushes, and at the top of the hill, crashes headlong into a bank of solar panels. Sparks fly from the drone and the panels, frying circuits in both. A minute later, the drone explodes destroying much of the hillside and blowing fragments of green and black glass solar panels the thirty yards to the seashore. Drone and ground array are no more.
END DRAFT
- <I’m going into the woods, Gramps, Gramma.> [^ back]