The Book of Knowledge
This is the first chapter of a new manuscript I am working on. If you like it and want more I will post Chapter 2 later...
The Book of Answers – A Novel
© 2023
By Jack Trammell
Chapter 1
The aliens were easily defeated. In fact, it seems cliché writing about it now and bothering to describe it. They came in peace, were susceptible to human guile (and bacteria), and when war came about their weapons were designed for an alien anatomy and had no effect on humans, and when they were dead their remains decomposed so quickly in the oxygen-laden atmosphere that no one had thought to try and preserve any. Now it was almost as if it hadn’t happened it all.
It was the humans that were not so easily defeated. After the Russo-Sino Pact of 2043, the center of power had irrevocably turned to the East and combined with the remnants of America’s nuclear defeat at the hands of terrorists, a strange kind of postmodern dual monarchy arose with the Premier of China and the President of Russia wielding absolute power with totalitarian regimes to back them. Europe was still clinging to a fragile and facile alliance that exists to this day but feels as if it could collapse at any moment (or immediately upon Germany removing itself). But the “Pact Powers” in fact go wherever they want to, and do whatever they want to. The parts of the earth they have no care about would be easily within their grasp should they so choose.
The Western Hemisphere—especially North America—returned to the middle ages. The wealthiest Americans migrated to a gloomy European mainland, where they prayed that their fragile fortunes (based on an unstable unified currency) would sustain them until they died, careless of coming generations. Those without means remained, stagnant, and returned to the simple ways of survival, using everything in the wrecked infrastructure from interstate highway medians to grow strips of grain to collapsing baseball stadiums for disorganized anarchist forums.
If any of this sounds strange to you, it shouldn’t. The writing was on the wall in 2016.
“Aaron! Get over here!”
Aaron turned around but kept his eyes looking forward. He held what some would recognize as an antique AR-15 semi-automatic rifle which he had intentionally left unmodified. Ammo was so precious only a fool would have a fully automatic rifle. The black metal on the barrel and stock was mottled with bright scratches and an occasional dent. If guns could tell stories, this one would no doubt compose a long novel.
“They’re still in front of us—be quieter!” he said.
His companion was younger, perhaps fifteen if such things as years counted any more, and did not carry any firearm but an edged knife that appeared to be home-made from some kind of ancient wood-working tool, like a file or rasp. He seemed nervous, and his wild curly hairy gave him the appearance of a feral human.
“Aaron!”
“Hush, Ki!”
Aaron moved further into the brush and raised his rifle, deliberately squinting one eye and gazing down the open sites. “Damn coyotes,” he said to himself, “you are never gonna take one of my chickens again.” He placed his finger on the trigger and started to pull gently, when suddenly there was a strange smell—a mixture of sulfur and hide. And just as he pulled the trigger, pandemonium broke out.
He was tumbling. He heard Ki screaming. There were sharp fangs and claws. The AR-15 was gone. More tumbling and grunting and growling. And a dark, musky odor.
Finally he was able to grab his opponent by the throat and push upward and a pair of red eyes bored straight into him. A snarling, frothing mouth revealed fangs the size of fingers. In the moment’s flash he saw Ki coming from behind with his crude knife.
“No!” Aaron tried to scream. “No, Ki!”
But it was too late. Ki jumped on the wolf’s back and before Aaron could react, Ki was plunging the knife over and over again into the side of the wolf’s thick neck. Blood, fur, and humans were in a confused, bloody jumble. Finally, with a convulsive shudder, the wolf started to go limp. An audible sigh of death came from within its throat like a strange growling groan.
For a few minutes they both lay still, panting, in small pools of blood.
“You okay?” Aaron asked, slowly coming up on his knees, his hands trembling in spite of himself. He was the strong one; he protected Ki; wolves didn’t take him out.
Ki smiled. “I get the fangs. You can have the tail.”
Ki was short for Malachi. Malachi had been mostly anonymous in the Bible, prophesying about his time and place, but also foretelling the savior. Ki was the normally soft-spoken younger brother who never questioned his older brother’s authority, but also was not fearful of becoming involved in things. He didn’t share his opinions unless asked to, although people in the family increasingly did ask him to.
Aaron over-protected Ki. There was nothing else he felt he could do. This life was too hard and too short not to look out for the kin who were weaker through no fault of their own. None-the-less, even this attack—paired with other events recently—to show that their roles were shifting, and that he couldn’t protect Ki from things he couldn’t defeat himself.
“I don’t have to Google frontier recipes for wolf meat to know what to do with it.” Mother scolded Ki openly, as she would anyone. “Predator been eating predator for many an eon, and you can Google that word, too. You take care of the hide.”
Ki obediently left to separate the hide from the meat. Aaron lingered only a moment.
“Ma,” he said, hesitating. “I missed the wolf.”
“What do you mean? I see a dead wolf out there on the table.”
He looked down. “I mean it came up behind me and I didn’t smell it, hear it, see it—I might be dead if not for Ki.”
She set her knife—another home-made utensil—down on a well-worn white oak slab cutting board and wiped her hands on a calico apron. “I know you can’t protect him forever. Hell, the militia will probably get him pretty soon if they see what he is. But he’s growing up. He is grown up. Be grateful he was there with you.”
Aaron’s gaze remained downward. “Yes, Ma’am.”
No one was sure how Google continued to function on the web since Mountainview, California had been an inadvertent casualty of the war. One of the Russian missiles had missed its mark. Or maybe it was on purpose. None-the-less, people continued to rely on it, even without knowing a damn thing about who controlled it or made its algorithms function post-war. The rumor was that it wasn’t even humans that controlled it anymore; that it was just sort of running automatically on backup systems and generators hid in other places. Perhaps some sort of thing like AI.
No one was sorry that Facebook and Twitter and such had gone away. On the contrary, after the war people didn’t want to connect with people on the other side of the globe. They wanted to do everything possible to avoid them, and not arouse their attention. Whether you DM’d your neighbor next door, or someone thousands of miles away, the Chinese hackers were always watching. Social media was physical death if you weren’t careful.
Aaron thought a lot about these things, meaning that he wanted to know why social media had been such a big deal before, and why America had been so great before, but now there were only small bands of rebels hiding from Russian and Chinese satellites. He wanted to know why his uncle George kept going to Morehead City, North Carolina (Uncle George claimed that it was because a secret railroad and ocean port formerly run by the government were in operation there now under the control of rebels), but never came home with anything; he wanted to know why his father had left home with a local militia to fight some invaders from central America who thought it was better here (imagine that!) and never come back. That was who he was—he wanted to know things.
Ki, on the other hand, he just wanted to “do.” Give him a task and he was on it. Give him a tool and he would figure out how to use it. History was lost on him.
Aaron busied himself checking the settlement alarms. They had to be checked every night before dark, even though it was a foregone conclusion that a big white-tail buck, a raccoon, or someone would set one off in the middle of the night. He also checked the solar chargers. Since the war they were nothing short of pure gold—people could and would kill over them. The IR sensors were cannibalized from old television remotes.
Aaron had Googled about electric cars, but he had never seen one in operating condition. Distilling was also big business to run ramshackle but functional combustion vehicles. That was the main thing for long trips. His Uncle Werner had an old Ford 150 that still somehow ran.
Occasionally, they all three went to Cumberland, Maryland, which was the new, unofficial frontier capital. A city that had once had the potential to be the new Pittsburgh, instead became an early 21st century corpse of a city, with the infrastructure of a place much bigger, but the heart and soul of small town in Appalachia. The opioid epidemic destroyed what was left. The trains and steel mills were gone. Then the war came.
Ironically, it was because it was geographically secluded from the major cities on the East Coast, and because it had that hardened infrastructure (outdated as it was), that it became the ideal place for people to quietly congregate and organize, while Chinese and Russian satellites still showed it as what it had always been before. The trees and mountains did not talk. They were careful not repair main roads; there were blackouts at night. Aaron liked some of the old brick buildings, some of which were up to ten stories high, with rusting fire escapes on their sides. He often wondered what it would have been like to live there one-hundred years or more ago in its heyday.
“Aaron! It’s time to eat!”
“Instead of taking away our guns, they took away our government, and look at how great that turned out!”
Uncle Werner stood with one foot up on a cedar stump and surveyed the motley gathering. Unlike his more fragile sister (Ki’s and Aaron’s mother), he was a lumberjack of a man in his early fifties with a shock of thick black hair that looked as wild as the New River. It sometimes looked like his buttons on his plaid shirt were going to pop and fly off like bullets. It was his week to address the neighborhood council, and informal news gathering session that was a highlight of an otherwise hard but sometimes boring life.
“I’d rather have a government!” he continued.
“We’re here for news!” a heckler in the background shouted. “Not political speeches!”
“Well the news in Squirrel Hollow is the same as last week. Jerusalem artichokes, wild carrots, only this week the stew had wolf meat.”
A little cheer went up amongst a few people. Killing a wolf was an all-too common occurrence; eating it was an ancient symbolic gesture of dominance.
“And I don’t know about all of you, but we are running short on salt again. And the last time we went to Big Bone Lick there were well-armed outsiders. I plan to go to Cumberland this time.”
Ki, Aaron, and their mother were in the crowd. Aaron listened obediently as other neighbors recited their news and needs, but Ki’s mind was adrift. He wanted to go to Cumberland with Uncle Werner. His mother would probably say it was too dangerous. But hadn’t he just killed the most dangerous animal around?