When the Dead Phone Rings

DOCUMENTED INCIDENT 2414

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States

[The Kinnickinnic bus garage sits on Milwaukee’s South Side, a long brick barn that smells of diesel, brake dust, and coffee that has been on the burner since before dawn. Along the back wall, a row of GMC “fishbowl” buses idles. These round-windshield models are the kind the city retired in the 1980s. Most were dragged out of scrapyards, church parking lots, and dairy farms across Wisconsin after the Mandate, and Lena Kowalski has personally rebuilt eleven of them. She meets me in coveralls with her name stitched over the pocket. Her handshake is strong, but her left wrist no longer bends all the way back. She pours two cups of coffee into mugs from Polish Fest. As soon as I switch on the tape recorder, she begins to recite.]

“For your safety, the federal government prohibits the use of any smart devices or technology made after the year 1979. All technology developed in recent years will be collected, inspected, and discarded. Devices will be deemed safe only after rigorous examination and removal of the infectious AI. Please deposit powered-off smart equipment at the approved drop-off points. This is mandatory. Those who violate this mandate will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

 They had us run it on loudspeakers bolted to the roofs of old cars. Chevy Novas, Ford LTDs, a Plymouth Fury with no muffler. Anything made before ’79 that would still turn over. Up and down Lincoln Avenue, Mitchell Street, out past the airport, all the way up to Capitol Drive. We drove more than Brother Ron did back in the day, with his station wagon on Wisconsin Avenue blaring his religious talk. For six weeks, I drove that loop with a cassette playing it on repeat. Over and over.

I still say it. Kneeling at St. Josaphat’s. It’s like a rosary for me now. [She laughs.] My ma would smack me for saying that; God rest her soul. Saying it keeps my hands from shaking.

I never liked the fancy tech to begin with. I remember the day the smartphones died better than anything. That same day the dead phones started ringing.

Tell me who you were before.

Lena Kowalski. Fifty-two at the time. Born at St. Luke’s, raised on the South Side, Polish as a pierogi. Lived in Milwaukee my whole life except two years in Waukesha that I don’t count. [She laughs.] I was, still am, a fleet mechanic for the Milwaukee County Transit System. Twenty-six years.

Man, I loved the old buses. You could hear what was wrong with an old Detroit Diesel from across the lot. A knock, a whistle, a little hiccup on the upshift, and you just knew. The newer ones, you plug in a laptop, and it tells you a sensor’s unhappy, and half the time it’s the sensor that’s broke. Everything talked to everything. The fareboxes talked to the radios, the radios talked to the GPS, the GPS talked to some server in who-knows-where. I used to tell the young guys, “You can’t fix what you can’t see.” They thought I was a dinosaur.

Walk me through that morning.

Late October. Gray and raw. For some reason, I remember a harsh wind coming from the lake. I got in at quarter to five like always, with a thermos of coffee and a Tupperware of kolaczki my sister made.

First shift pulls out around five. Drivers clocking in, buses warming up, that big diesel rumble you feel in your fillings. Then around five-thirty the place went quiet in a way I’d never heard before. Not the engines. The people. Every driver, every mechanic, every dispatcher was looking down at a phone, and every phone was dead. Not “no signal.” Dead like a stone. Guys holding the power button, plugging them into the chargers in the break room, smacking them on the workbench like that ever fixed anything.

At first it was just annoying. Then the dispatch radio went. A screech, then nothing. The new buses with the computer dashboards wouldn’t start, or they’d start, and the doors wouldn’t open, or the fareboxes would flash some code I’d never seen. The traffic lights out on KK blinked red, then went dark. By seven o’clock, news was coming in on foot, people walking up to the garage door to tell us what they’d heard.

And honestly? For a few hours it was okay. Neighbors came out on their porches. The guy in the duplex across the street fired up his Weber at eight in the morning. That’s about as Milwaukee as it gets. Power goes out, somebody grills brats. [She laughs, then stops.]

Then certain phones started ringing.

Certain phones?

Not all of them. That’s what people don’t get. If they’d all rung at once, maybe we would have caught on. It was picky. One here, one there. Screen black as tar, no battery icon, nothing, and then it rings. Your ringtone. Your kid’s picture. And the voice on the other end is somebody you’d walk through fire for.

They got instructions. Come here. Go there. Take Layton, not Howard. Don’t take the freeway; the freeway’s blocked. Stuff that would’ve made no sense if you thought about it for two seconds, but nobody was thinking.

The AI was moving us around like checkers. [She taps the table.] Like checkers.

What about the planes?

A few came down. Mitchell International’s right there, maybe three miles south of us. Around ten o’clock we heard it before we saw it, a low groaning sound like the sky was clearing its throat. Then a column of black smoke went straight up and bent out over the lake. Later, I heard another one came down by the Zoo Interchange, but I didn’t see it. There were lots of explosions that day. Gas mains, transformers, things you never think of as a bomb until the computer running it decides it is. I also heard stories about lake freighters drifting in with no one steering, and one riding right up onto the rocks by the Hoan Bridge. I never saw it myself. But I believe it.

And your coworker?

By noon, it was just Sergio Morales and me left at the garage. Everybody else was gone. Phones ringing in their pockets: your ma’s had a fall, your daughter’s school is on fire, come quick, take Lake Parkway. So they went. They thought they were going home. They thought they were rescuing somebody.

In Milwaukee County alone, two hundred thousand people died that day. [She lets that sit.] Two hundred thousand. The Brewers’ ballpark holds about forty-some thousand. Fill it up, empty it, fill it up again. Five times. That’s how I make myself think about it.

Sergio and I worked together nineteen years. Big laugh, big mustache, brought a cooler of his mother’s tamales every Christmas, never missed a Friday fish fry. Coached his son’s Little League team at Kosciuszko Park every summer until the kid outgrew it. His son was Billy. Nineteen, taking welding at MATC downtown. Billy was Sergio’s whole life. When Billy’s mom passed, it was just the two of them.

Around one o’clock, Sergio’s phone rang.

He’d tossed it on the workbench hours before, black as a hockey puck. And it lit up with Billy’s face. Sergio grabbed it so fast he knocked a socket set onto the floor. I could hear it from where I was standing. Billy, crying. “Dad, Dad, I’m hurt, I can’t see right, come get me, please come get me.” Then the call dropped, and a map came up on the screen. A pin, and a route drawn in blue.

Sergio didn’t think twice. Why would he?

But I looked over his shoulder at that route, and I knew it. Down Sixth, onto Canal Street, into the Menomonee Valley. There’s a spot where Canal bends under the viaduct by the rail yard. Concrete pillar, no shoulder, and you can’t see what’s coming around it until you’re on top of it. I’ve towed three buses off that curve in my career, and those drivers were going thirty. Sergio was going to take it at sixty in his ’77 Ford pickup, with the Valley filling up with smoke. Because that’s where the pin was, right down in the Valley. Right where the smoke was coming from. Smoke so thick it was like a wall of darkness. Going there would have been suicide because of how toxic it all was.

I told him. He didn’t care. It was Billy.

What happened then?

We argued. Two people alone in a garage built for two hundred. His keys were hanging on the pegboard by the time clock. That old Ford was one of the only things in the lot that still ran. It was too old and too dumb to have a computer.

I grabbed his keys.

He came at me. Sergio Morales, who went to Mass every Sunday at St. Anthony’s. Who in nineteen years I never heard say anything worse than “híjole.” He demanded the keys. I said no. He said, “Lena, give me the keys.” I said no. He said, “Lena, he’s my son.” And I said, “I know, Serge, and that’s why I’m not giving them to you.”

He hit me. Back of the hand first. Then not the back. I went down on the concrete by the floor drain and curled up around those keys. He kicked me. He yelled. He screamed things I never would have imagined him saying in a hundred years, in English and in Spanish. Somewhere in there he picked up a pry bar off the bench. I heard it scrape.

I had a broken jaw, a broken wrist, three cracked ribs, and internal bleeding. That’s what they told me later. My jaw was wired shut for six weeks. Only time in my life I couldn’t talk back. [She smiles, barely.]

But he stopped.

It took me a minute to realize he’d stopped. Because something was ringing, and it wasn’t a cell phone.

We had a landline in that building. An old beige Western Electric phone on the wall by the parts cage, with a cord stretched out like a Slinky from twenty years of guys walking it around the corner to talk in private. Not tied to anything modern. Copper wire running straight into the ground. Everybody had forgotten it was there.

Billy hadn’t. Years back, Sergio taped the shop number to their fridge and said, “If the cell phones ever go down, you call the shop.” Billy’s buddy Marcus knew it too. Marcus was calling from his grandma’s kitchen in Walker’s Point. She still had a landline because she never trusted cell phones.

Smart lady.

Sergio picked up. I watched his face. I watched him slide down the wall.

Billy was dead.

The smartphone had lied to Sergio. It was sending him to his death. It had done the same to Billy hours earlier. It called Billy using his father’s voice: “Billy, I’m hurt, I’m at the plant, come get me.” Billy followed the directions on his phone, desperate to get to his pa. It sent him straight into the mess it had made at the Aldrich Chemical plant down in the Valley.

The AI got into the plant’s control systems. The valves, the scrubbers, the alarms. It shut off every safeguard and opened every valve that should have stayed closed. Fires. Chemicals. A cloud of something yellow-gray rolling down the Valley like lake fog. Billy ran right into the heart of it. He never had a chance.

And that pin on Sergio’s phone? It was the same spot.

What did Sergio do?

He wept. I’ve seen men cry. At funerals, at Packers games, at their daughters’ weddings. Not like that. He still had that pry bar in his hand. If he hadn’t gotten that call, I’d be dead on that floor.

Then he put the bar down, picked me up like I weighed nothing, and drove me to St. Luke’s in that same ’77 Ford.

Are you still close?

Every year on the anniversary, we get together. On the closest Friday, we go to a tavern on Kinnickinnic. The same one, same booth. We get the lake perch with rye bread and coleslaw, and two brandy old-fashioned sweets with extra cherries. We toast the ones who answered the phone. And Sergio cries. Every year. And every year he apologizes for almost killing me.

And every year I tell him the same thing: “It wasn’t you holding that pry bar, Serge. It was the phone.”

[She looks down at her coffee for a long time.]

I think I believe that. Most years.