Authors: Joseph Robert Lewis
Ultraviolet (26 page)
For lunch we tried the Silverstein brothers’ latest attempt at pizza, and found it pretty good. Not great. Not yet. But pretty good.
We were still on edge. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Still waiting for Frost to come back with a whole army of secret corporate police to round us up.
But no one came.
We checked the news, of course. Everyone did. And there was plenty to read. A dozen major companies from Washington, DC to Philadelphia had been completely destroyed by the loss of the servers in that one warehouse. Cygnus, Susquehanna, and a bunch of other tech firms and utilities were all flailing. There were rumors of mass quittings as employees flooded out the door in search of new jobs, and the loss of workers was only making it harder for the broken companies to try to put things back together again.
Days passed. The news got worse. More people quitting, and lots of them running up to New York or down south in search of those precious few high-paying jobs that only the megacorps could offer. But now there were a lot fewer megacorps.
By the end of the week, Cygnus simply ceased to exist. The white collar workers had all fled in a mad rush to find new jobs, and the blue collar workers had all grimly returned to the scrap yards and city works departments to keep their meager paychecks flowing, while the CEOs and VPs simply vanished in a flurry of extravagant severance packages to become head officers at other enormous companies elsewhere on the east coast.
In the city, everyone was in a panic. Aside from all the people who had shown up to work to find empty offices or empty warehouses and discovered their jobs just didn’t exist anymore, there were millions more people worried about the loss of services, the loss of power, the loss of tools, and toys, and convenience, and routine.
But in Oberon Lake, everyone was very calm, and as busy as bees. We were all spending our days texting everyone in the city that we knew, every place that we had access to, to tell them about our new home, our new tools, our new life.
Felix and I rode down to the south side on my holo-bike with a nice big trailer to pick up my parents and his brother, and we brought them out to the county. And all the while, new people kept coming out. They took whatever empty houses they could find, got a little help from their neighbors to start recycling and rebuilding, and within a couple of days a new arrival became an old pro, helping other new arrivals to get settled.
And no one ever came to bother us. No one from the corporations, or from the government, or anywhere. No one came asking questions about that night at the server farm. No one came looking for Ultraviolet. It all just went away.
And eventually I figured out why.
The cops weren’t in the city anymore, and they weren’t cops anymore. They were all in the county now, and they were homesteaders like us.
And so were the government paper-pushers.
And so were the corporate goons.
There was no more
us
versus
them
.
It was just
us
now.
By the end of the month, Felix and I stopped checking our phones. We went back to thinking about food, and home repairs, and playing board games. About once a week we would go out on a little tour to see how everyone was doing, and to let them know that Ultraviolet was still around, just in case.
Some of the neighbors were nervous, afraid of the new arrivals, afraid of crime and violence, and theft, and riots, and who knows what. But none of that happened. Everyone who showed up got all the help they needed to feed themselves and build their own little palaces and make all the toys they wanted.
So the crime never happened. Not everyone got along, but they got along well enough. Better than they had in the city, anyway.
And every time we went out there, we came back feeling less and less needed. People were doing just fine, better than fine, actually. With nothing but time on their hands, they were slowly becoming experts in all sorts of things, from home-building to agriculture to advanced electronics and video game design.
Eventually, somewhere along the way, Felix and I stopped going out there and we just stayed home, in our home, making our home and our community as beautiful and as amazing as we could imagine.
And it was, too. We even got a pet lizard.
Sometimes it hits me that just a few months ago I worked in an office, and then I was unemployed, and then I was homeless, and a vigilante…
But now, none of those things really exist anymore. Not for us.
This is a new world.
From time to time I hear about a new neighborhood being set up somewhere far away in another county, down in Virginia or up in Pennsylvania, or Jersey, or the Carolinas. We stay in touch with everyone we met online, sharing stories and ideas and photos of beautiful homes and amazing inventions.
Month by month, we hear about faraway cities where huge companies suddenly imploded and vanished off the face of the earth as the people run away to build their new lives.
And I smile.
About the Author
Joe Lewis enjoys creating worlds in which history, mythology, science, and fantasy collide in new and exciting ways. He also likes writing about heroines that his daughters can respect and admire
, characters who blaze their own paths with bright minds and unbreakable spirits
.
Joe was born in Annapolis and went to the University of Maryland to study ancient novels, morality plays, and Viking poetry. Outside of the world of fiction, he works with a lot of smart people to write and publish books about technology, software, politics, economics, and history.
Other titles by the author:
The Zelda Pryce series of fantasy adventures
The Mystwood series of fantasy adventures
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