When she came to think of it later, everything that happened with Zhen had been prefigured by what happened with ArturoMegadog. Even guinea pigs want to connect with other guinea pigs. Humans are driven to reach out to each other. If something hasn’t gone terribly wrong with us, we let people into our houses and our lives and maybe even our beds, if we’re that way inclined. Despite the risks. The greatest risk, of course, is that you’ll like it. The greatest risk is that it’ll change you. Still. Drive across the castle drawbridge, Martha. Risk it.

  2. a million beautiful things

  extract from Name The Day survivalist forum

  sub-board: ntd/strategic

  ›› ArturoMegadog is at BunkerBorn status.

  I don’t even know why I’m posting this.

  It’s late at night and I’m drunk. I’ve set this to auto-delete in three hours.

  I tell you what I’ve realized. Most of you are idiots and those who aren’t idiots are monomaniacs and within that there’s a tiny group who care about anything worth caring about. And they’re not enough to turn the ship around. They’re not even enough to keep it from going more off course. I don’t even think I’m necessarily one of those people. There’s not much in my life that makes it worth it. So I’m done. With life.

  For the longest time I thought human beings were good, we were getting smarter, there was a progress—slow of course, sliding back too. But inch by inch, like a man pulling himself forward using only his tongue, we were moving toward the light. That’s why I got into prepper stuff. Because I thought humanity had good things that were worth saving. Art and literature, morality and kindness, scientific progress, understanding, a caterpillar inching toward the sun.

  ›› Semadon is at Shelf-Stable status.

  Is anyone else seeing this? I’m reposting this to NTD main. Does anyone know ArturoMegadog personally? Anyone know where he lives, how to find him?

  I said I was drunk.

  Anyway, I don’t think that anymore. The human race isn’t getting any better, we’re just getting different and more and faster and if you’re not getting better then more and faster is just the same as getting worse.

  I want to tell you about my husband. I’ll call him Ted. He made me believe in goodness. He was so virtuous it made you sick. He worked for a car company—started on the shop floor, ended up running the team in San Francisco. He pressured them to put more investment into electric cars, and he spent every weekend doing beach cleanup, he volunteered as a Big Brother. Disgusting. I fly a private plane. I wanted to go flying and watch TV on the weekend and he was sending me photos of an urban garden he’d planted at 5 a.m.

  ›› Semadon is at Shelf-Stable status.

  OK. I’ve scraped everything I can from ArturoMegadog’s info, which is nothing. Male. 50s. Bay Area. Usually on at erratic times of day—suggests he doesn’t have a job with fixed hours. Can anyone wake an admin and get more? I’ve called emergency services in the Bay Area but they can’t do anything unless we give them an address or at least a name.

  Ted was crazy hopeful. I know how it sounds now. But I remember there was that blip in 2020 when the Saudi oil prices went negative—you couldn’t pay someone to take oil off your hands and I thought: Fuck maybe Ted’s right. This is it. The start of something.

  We’ve spent the past century hiding under our blankets while the red notices piled up in the hallway, ARREARS: Habitat Destruction and Extinction, DO NOT IGNORE: Social Inequality, PAY NOW OR FACE CONSEQUENCES: Climate Change. And us going “Hey if we shuffle things around, move that balance onto this card, work out how to frack shale and ignore the flammable water coming out of the taps then we can buy a new car and brim it with gasoline and things will be OK for another month.”

  And I thought, with this pandemic we’re gonna realize we just have to be sensible. Unlike the dinosaurs, we don’t need to get hit by an asteroid. I know it’s a joke now. “Nature is healing.” Believing things could get better is just a joke, right?

  Ted and I were living in an apartment on the waterfront and I was holding a cup of coffee in my hand, when I started to believe it could be OK. I think about that all the time now. The mist on the surface of the bay like something solid, like you could put your hand out and pick it up. The smell of the coffee, the hum of the refrigerator. The blank blue chalk of the sky with no planes. I thought, it’s really going to be OK.

  I sat on the couch and started crying. Ted came running through, he thought my uncle Benny must have gotten the virus and I said: Ted, we should have a child. We’d talked about it a million times.

  ›› Wipsy is at FriendInNeed status.

  I know we’re not supposed to say, but I’m friends IRL with Daggoo who set up the board. I’m calling him now. Hope everyone agrees this is a good reason to break our usual protocol.

  This post has received 271 thumbs-up. Congratulations! You made a gold-star post!

  Look it doesn’t matter really. None of it matters. One day the stars are going to wink out one by one like in that Arthur C. Clarke story, and before that the sun will go supernova and boil the seas and we’re just one stinking species and species live and die, that’s what we do. There’ll be no audience and no final judgment and no redeemer is going to liveth and no one will come along at the end of the show and tell us our score and what we could have won. No one will remember the human race or the USA or San Francisco or the apartment or me or Ted or how when I dropped that yellow mug a few months later he turned it into a mosaic of the sun. No one remembers that now but me.

  Ted was older than me, he’d worked for the same company for thirty-eight years. He had these plans for his retirement and his pension. We were going to travel to one of the protected FutureSafe islands and work there with wildlife and ecosystem preservation. And after that, when Ted’s niece Gracie was done with her PhD she wanted to carry a child for us. My child. From my frozen jizz, and Ted’s family genes. We were going to support Gracie through her postdoc years and we were going to be a beautiful San Francisco logical family.

  ›› Daggoo is at God status. Daggoo has turned off thumbs-up.

  Hi everyone. I’m in contact with first responders in the Bay Area. ArturoMegadog has been very cautious so we don’t have much to go on. He did not lodge a real name, home address, or phone number with us. He uses a proxy server. I have pinged the email address used to register with the site, but it looks like it was a throwaway. If anyone is a friend of ArturoMegadog, please speak up urgently.

  Then Ted’s company got bought up by Fantail. They got a special fire-sale deal because it was an old company and hadn’t turned a great profit for a decade, so they didn’t have to honor the pensions. Everyone thought Lenk Sketlish was kind of a great guy for taking that company on. He wanted it for his Hertha electric cars; he wanted the stuff that Ted had made, basically.

  The thing I have to say here is that I’m rich, OK? I’m stinking goddamn rich and we didn’t need the goddamn pension money. I told Ted that. He knew. We would be fine living on my money for the rest of our lives. We’d still have our home, our plans, we’d still have our child.

  But it broke Ted’s heart. All those years with that same company, old school, the loyalty. And the staff he’d convinced to stay on, they weren’t getting pensions either and most of them were laid off with nothing. I have enough to protect us but I couldn’t solve everything for sixteen hundred people. I said we’d help them fight, we’d do something. But eight days after the announcement, when he was driving out to the wetland project, he had a heart attack behind the wheel and he died. He was fifty-nine.

  Maybe I should mention I’ve taken a bunch of pills. There’s stuff in the cabinets from when Ted fucked his back up and my root canal and some of our sedatives from when we had our colonoscopies because we wanted to be so careful, we were going to be parents. I just took everything.

  ›› Wipsy is at FriendInNeed status.

  I’m looking through ArturoMegadog’s posts. Four weeks ago he said a store “literally eight paces” from his door carries shelf-stable kimchi, “Firepit” brand. It’s only stocked in seven stores in the Bay Area.

  That gives us seven map dots to work on.

  It’s two years now since he died.

  I don’t know if this is a cry for help. Probably? I guess if it wasn’t I’d have set this to post in like, two days, when whatever I’ve taken will have done whatever it’s going to do. But the way you guys talk, it’s like you think your lives are worth saving and let me tell you, if Ted wasn’t worth saving then no one is. The species is going to die. Just let it.

  Life will try something different and maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s smart enough to read and write and release greenhouse gases. There’ll be fish and birds and glittering insects, there’ll be a million beautiful things crawling over one another striving toward the sun.

  ›› ClarkeKent is at One Can O’Beans status.

  OK nothing in the Concord dot is residential. He’d have to be sleeping in Bed Bath and Beyond.

  We haven’t invented a single thing, you know. We’ve come up with busywork for ourselves and the plants and animals, more and more ideas of new ways to be comfortable and to have things at hand.

  But all the important things were here before us and they’ll be here after us. The animals love each other. They strive and they have pleasure, they relax in the sun and they take comfort in one another, they hate and they take revenge. Animals love their children.

  ›› SandysDad is at Stockpiled status.

  He said he’s stinking rich. Therefore rule out the store in Redwood City.

  If you think you want more than that you’re just kidding yourselves. We have terminal arrogance and the sooner we’re wiped out the better it’ll be. So I’m starting with myself.

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status.

  ArturoMegadog and I are friends on the board. Never met in person, no address or real name. But I know he lives near water, in San Francisco. Three of your dots would match that.

  And if the rest of you could stop trying so hard to survive and encourage all the other humans to do the same, then that’d be better for the planet. But in the end it doesn’t matter because the planet will sort its shit out, it’s survived more than us. And we’re all going to be stardust before long anyway, and then the universe will die and there never was much worth hoping for.

  I think I’m starting to feel it now. My feet and my fingertips are tingling. I’m going to lie down. I’m going to look at photos of Ted until I fall asleep. I don’t think I’ll be with him or any of that bullcrap. But I won’t be here anymore. Bye.

  ›› Wipsy is at FriendInNeed status.

  I’m nowhere near the Bay Area. Is anyone there who could walk around, see if they can see or hear anything?

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status.

  We’re running out of time. I’m going to try something.

  3. a broken world

  Every extreme contains its opposite. Martha had seen this again and again. A forum full of sovereign individuals who’ve never even met in person can, by that fact, feel free to become a deeply interconnected community. Meanwhile a backwoods cult of conformity turns people inward, to the secret thoughts and the inner strengths they cannot share with others. The more Enoch wanted Martha to become an unalienable part of his kingdom, the more he had driven her to rely only and always on herself. He never understood this; that was part of his tragedy.

  There had been a day when Martha was fourteen when her father, Enoch, had driven her in the jeep out past the green acres across wild country. He’d spoken in his low, insistent, constant voice about his theory of “pieces.” As they rolled through the open country—miles of forest and grassland, creeks tumbling down the hillside, dense tangles of thicket—Martha had noted each landscape and each wild creature she saw, and she kept a note in her own mind of his sermon too, knowing she might be called on to remember and recite the texts her father mentioned or to recall a flicker seen on the wing between the trees and tell which way it was heading.

  The theory of pieces was the center of Enoch’s thinking—gleaned from wide reading, for Enoch was nothing if not a learned man—that the world had fallen from a beautiful and united whole into mere shards. He saw evidence of his theory in the Bible and the story of the tower of Babel and the one language cast into many. He saw it, too, in the breaking up of the great forests of Europe and the Americas, in the dissolving of the great faiths into one splintered faction after another, in the division of the states of the union against each other. Martha knew the proof texts and the verses, but she knew, too, that Enoch would have some new text to teach—in this case the sephirot of the Kabbalah, the broken shards of light that have entered the world.

  “The world we live in,” Enoch said, “is made to be whole and it is we who divide and subdivide it. Turning the great lands into fields, turning the earth into countries, naming and renaming, subdividing down to the microbe—why, we even split the atom, and didn’t that terrible force teach us what was wrong there, weren’t we warned off? Do you have an answer for me, Martha, why weren’t we warned?”

  His face was red-raw under his sparse beard. Martha knew that there was no answer and the best thing to do was to shake her head. She had heard this speech before but she was always impressed by it. He had shown her photographs of the devastating effects of the atomic bomb and explained to her that this had come about because of mankind’s obsessive journey away from God and toward fragmentation. The righteous, he said, were shown by their need to come together, to build communities, to act against entropy as life always does if it is lived correctly.

  “You need to pee?” he said. Martha nodded. It had been more than two hours of driving on broken roads, and her soda bottle was clattering, empty, between her feet.

  Enoch pulled into the gravel on the side of the road. He waited at the wheel and she took herself modestly fifty paces from the jeep, made sure she was well hidden behind a line of trees, pulled down her jeans and her underwear, and let her stream of piss go, steaming and almost pleasantly fragrant, a smell of baking to it.

  The first she knew was Enoch shouting: “You’re a good kid, Martha,” and before he’d even finished his sentence, she understood what he was planning.

  She called out, “Dad!” and tried to look around the tree, to meet his eyes, but she just toppled over and landed hard on her hands.

  Enoch called out, “You’re not a fragment. You’ll find your way.”

  As Martha watched, he kicked the jeep into motion and drove away, the tires wailing on the blacktop.

  At first Martha tried to chase him. Pulled her underwear and her jeans half up. Stumbled, piss still streaming down her thigh, out onto the blacktop and shouted, “Wait! Stop!”

  She cried, without intending to cry. In desolation and sudden stabbing fear like a wire in her throat. She had nothing with her. Not her knife, not her ball of twine. On her feet she wore sneakers, not boots. She had a jacket but not a warm one. It was past two in the afternoon and a chilly October day.

  After a few minutes of crying she stopped herself, because she knew what this was. Enoch had talked about it often. People had to be tested as the potter tests a vessel in the kiln. Those who were driven to fragment would spin off, but those who were made to be part of the wholeness of things would find their way to their right place. He’d said it to the Enochites in prayer meeting and at study time and in the long sermons that lasted through the night. This wasn’t hard, Martha, not really hard. She was a constituent of the world, not a broken piece, and she would find her way home.

  So. They had driven for two hours but not in a straight line. They had looped and turned back on themselves. She didn’t know this road, but the sun was ahead, so that was west. There were four and a half hours of daylight left. She was fat but her body was strong and she could cover a mile in fourteen minutes at a loping jog. Enoch would not have set her an impossible task and he would not have left her here to die. She spooled the journey out in her mind. She knew the mountains to the east, she knew the lay of the ridge, she knew the redwood grove to the south, and she knew, yes, she absolutely knew, which way was home. It was through the woods to the north. It was no more than twenty miles at the outside. She would be home for dinner. She set off at an easy pace, the fallen leaves crisp under her feet.

  She’d gone seven miles before she knew that the bear had caught her scent.

  Martha knew bears. At the compound they shot and ate a bear most years, bear-grease-fried potatoes tasting mushroomy and woody, acorns and musk. Once she’d watched three cubs playing on the far side of the creek for three hours, tumbling over one another, splashing and showing their sharp little teeth. She knew how to tell that a bear was busy with its nose. On the ridge ahead of her and to the right, maybe a quarter-mile distant, a skinny black bear was tasting the air with its raised nose. Head tipped to one side, it was considering her.

  The bears around their compound never gave the Enochites any trouble. Enochites never fed bears, never left garbage in open cans. The bears knew who was boss and knew that they’d find better and easier food in the river than in Enochite trash. But this was a thin bear in October. A thin bear that, as she looked, she saw was favoring its front right foot. It was hungry. It was getting close to hibernation time and it had no layer of fat to get through the winter. A desperate bear. And this wasn’t the Enochites’ fifteen thousand green acres; this was land owned by the people of the Babble. Who knew what this bear had gotten a taste for?