Chapter One

 

The fog rolled in from the deep Pacific, and Garrett felt cold. Fog shrouded the bases of once-proud double-pillars of burnt-red steel that now were flash-blackened on their eastern sides, and eerily skewed. Fog crept blindly across a flat, unseen bay now unmarred by even the faintest trace of man-made wake. Fog slithered silent and sinister up hills wrecked and razed and rotting. Once it had seemed beautiful, but now the fog seemed to Garrett instead vaguely oppressive and sad, emblematic somehow of the encroachment of some nameless evil, some unstoppable decay, some malaise from which he could not dig himself out. But of course, these things did not approach-they were already here. Garrett shivered faintly.

But he could not be cold, he told himself contritely. Oh, yes, he did happen to be naked, his smooth-shaved bare penis already half erect in anticipation of a long, self-indulgent, completely meaningless and yet groaningly fulfilling day of utterly shameless masturbation... But that was not it. Mere nudity would not raise the goose pimples upon his arms and legs like that, or tighten the hairy little peaks of his chest into aching sensitivity, or make the hair at the back of his neck prickle. The chill was a mood, a mood only-and yet he told himself that it had no discernible cause.

No, for he was safe and snug and comfortable, as comfortable as could be. Wasn't he? Well, wasn't he? Why, of course-he had spent tens of millions to ensure it! After all, in his redoubt atop the Marin Headlands he was tunneled down into comfortingly solid rock, wrapped in ingeniously designed steel and concrete concussion buffers, and guarded by layer upon layer of lead radiation shielding. His air and his water were clean and pure, to be recycled endlessly, automatically, year after year after year after, and his great hydroponic gardens were self-tending, though they could tolerate, and adjust for, his occasional puttering. He was well stocked with medicines, with clothing for when he desired it, with workshops full of tools and parts and raw materials also, and with mountains of nonperishable nitrogen-packed foods in addition to what the hydroponic sublevels grew for him.

Yes, he possessed every object or comfort obtainable in the present situation, everything the mind and body might need or desire. Some things he had thought of himself, while others had been suggested on the obliquely solicited advice of engineers, physicians, psychologists. Always something of an old-fashioned bibliophile, he had great archives of actual print books. His long climate-controlled shelves were neatly organized and carefully labeled as was his wont, full of science and history, and literature from the "classics" and the old science fiction that he particularly enjoyed, to odds and ends he had picked up at used bookshops here and there. He had stocked countless very utilitarian books as well, whether the heavy texts in electrical and mechanical engineering with which he was already quite familiar, home-repair "how-to" books, guides on wilderness survival, jackleg medicine, or firearm repair.

Unlike, say, his great-grandparents, whose faintly creaking old wood-frame house had, he remembered dimly from his childhood, contained a stately leather-bound set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that at the time of purchase must have cost several months' salary, Garrett, of course, had been used to thinking of the accumulated knowledge of the entire history of the world as something always infinitely searchable and immediately available via the internet. To his generation, and the one before as well, information of literally every kind had been constantly updated, and easily accessible by laptop, pad, or handheld via the internet, not something engraved on dry wood-pulp whose stacked hoards might grow evocatively fragrant with age. Why, files had been rarely even downloaded and saved anymore, and of course, printed even less frequently-one could, after all, simply access them again after an instantaneous electronic search.

In preparing in his methodical way for even the remotest possibilities, Garrett had known it was ludicrous to imagine a world without its great interlinked informational infrastructure...but, just in case, prepare for it he did. There was a scene in a novel by Robert A. Heinlein from the absolute height of the Cold War, say 1962 or '64 or so, in which a man after a full-scale nuclear attack looks at the books he has stocked in his meticulously designed bomb shelter and realizes that there is nothing else left-only this comparative handful out of all the writings the human race has ever produced. In an almost painfully beautiful elegiac passage, the protagonist runs his eyes lingeringly over the spines of the texts in his survival library, and he lists to himself the titles, from military manuals and practical textbooks on farming and mechanical engineering and log cabins, through the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, to a one-volume Shakespeare, Burton's translation of A Thousand and One Nights, The Odyssey with N.C. Wyeth illustrations, Kipling, and canonical anthologies of poetry, among others.

Garrett had read that novel-as with all of Heinlein's works, from his rousing young-adult novels of the 1940s and '50s through the sprawling, sometimes self-indulgent books at the end of his career-a number of times, but he literally had chills whenever he revisited that particular scene, so somber and yet somehow doggedly ambitious, too, in its depiction of one solitary man attempting to create not just a technical library for himself but also a cultural storehouse for coming generations as well. There was something noble about that man trying to ride out a flood far worse than that which Noah could ever have faced, hoping to bring his family, and the cream of the knowledge of the Antediluvian world, into the unknowable post-nuclear future. Garrett could sympathize with this pragmatic yet quietly philosophical character on some deep, inarticulate level. He himself had always been something of a collector, and his interest in old print books happened to dovetail with his own survival strategy.

Yet Garrett had had to presume that his own self-contained sources of power would not fail, for that would be a whole different game, and a much grimmer and shorter one, so in addition to his books, he also kept video entertainment as well. In his digitized files were all the films and television programs he had ever enjoyed-and plenty that he had not yet but thought it even fractionally conceivable that he ever might, just in case his tastes changed or he wished to broaden his horizons over the long, long years-to play at his leisure. He had big-screen comedies and dramas, and television sitcoms and documentaries. If he desired, he could relive his childhood, wallowing in things warm and familiar. Or instead, if that grew too cloying and melancholy, he could spend the entire rest of his life sampling shows and movies from any genre, any time period, any nation.

Of course, Garrett also boasted entire libraries of the most deliciously titillating pornography imaginable, of wide and eclectic variety. And boasted was precisely the word for it, he thought in some naughty satisfaction-now, anyway. Before, it could be assumed that most people accessed porn from the internet at least occasionally, and sometimes kept a downloaded stash of their favorite things for repeated viewing as well. It was something one might joke about, perhaps a little self-deprecatingly, and yet still the details were always gravely secret. The private predilections and dirty sexual kinks that might happen to arouse coworkers, friends, distant relatives, even parents-they had always been discreetly hidden and unacknowledged, like, say, the anus and its act of defecation. Yet now Garrett had nothing to hide and no one to hide it from. He could be forthright and unashamed in his needs, and there was something pleasantly arousing, almost exhibitionistic, in the fact.

Everything he had was digitized, able to be pulled up on any computer node in the shelter and displayed on the screen there, or enlarged and projected on any wall if old-style two-dimensional, or at any desired point in mid-air if three-dimensional. And naturally every digital file was completely manipulatable in display or playback. One could zoom in tight and then magnify, for example, so that the ejaculation which some gargantuan actor aimed at a red-lipped mouth gaping invitingly open would fill an entire wall. The man himself might be unseen now, with only the very tip of his phallus left in the field of view, a thing bloated and purpled and big as a barrel, while his sweetly agonized urethra dilated as wide as Garrett's thigh, jetting, squirting, splashing in leering slow-motion, the tiniest pearly droplet a swollen gray gallon as it glopped and splatted upon a heaped-over tongue or perhaps rebounded, jiggling taut and glistening, from a bright-lipsticked mouth that even when opened wide smirked somehow and begged teasingly for more, ever more.

Yes, even as he planned for the time he never really believed would come, Garrett had chosen his erotica as meticulously as he did anything else that he enjoyed collecting. He possessed professional films of almost every kinky niche, and thousands upon thousands of amateur videos he had downloaded back in the days of the internet. Pictures had the same variety: everything from evocative photography from the coffee table books of the most reputable artists whose works nevertheless were guaranteed to set him achingly erect in a quickened heartbeat or two to a cell phone picture of some co-ed kissing her smirking best girlfriend right on the lips in the middle of a bar in a college town while all the guys in the room laughed and cheered. And in the next picture the girl might kneel flushed and drowsy-eyed and wickedly fulfilled in a midnight back alley with her tee-shirt pulled up and her lovely young face and her perky little stiff-tipped bosoms hung with the dangling semen of her grateful boyfriend...and also the bubbling squirts of half a dozen of his grinning buddies. And of course, the methodical entrepreneur-inventor had stockpiled everything in between, too-everything-and all of it was organized, indexed, and carefully cross-referenced.

Sometimes it pleased the man to spend hours teasing his poor body, masturbating endlessly and yet trying so, so hard not to come as he watched the classiest, most carefully coiffed and elegantly costumed lesbians make slow, languorous love to one another in opulently decorated sets. The actresses might be dressed in severe charcoal business suits, portraying the same type of coolly self-composed woman he might have seen across a boardroom table or in a teleconference any day of the week-that was always a particularly naughty thought. Or they might be elaborately gowned as Marie Antoinette and her most intimate retainers on the eve of the French Revolution, as flappers in a Prohibition-era speakeasy, or as slender, long-legged ballerinas in a backstage dressing room. Yet no matter what the time or the place, ah, the sight of those soft red lips kissing gently! Could anything else be as naturally beautiful, and as wickedly right?