Book of Lost Days

It was with a deep, almost preternatural sense of purpose – the kind that only surfaces a handful of times in our lives – that Mason decided to ride to the old Millford Hospital. He had been feeling cooped up in his small, basement apartment. The whining of the generator persisted inexorably, giving him headaches, while the meagre windows did little to bring in any substantial indication of the outside world. His footsteps back and forth through its modest rooms, only seemed to be retracing a journey increasingly pointed towards vacuity. In his head, he imagined them plotted out in a kind of cartesian timelapse – curving and overlapping ad infinitum, like the lines of a Jackson Pollock, stuck on repeat.

There was a developing sense of urgency in his life, despite the great space that now encircled it. Amid the liminal ether of the years since the pandemic, he had noticed a feeling of untraceable pressure squeezing down on him. It had started as an inkling, only a notion of something darker and more unsavory, but steadily, it had grown as consistent and noticeable as the electric churning coming from the back of his one-bedroom, or the winter gales, blowing through now mostly empty streets. There was no doubt that the pandemic had indicated, to stultifying effect, the limits of late-stage capitalism’s ability to sustain humanity’s needs. Never in his life, and certainly the several decades before it, had the fragility of our worlds been so clearly announced.

Perhaps it was this sense of imminent and beleaguered failure that had drawn him to urban exploring, he thought as he let out a jagged cough, mounting his bicycle, despite the growing cold.

The word urban, felt haphazard and devoid of meaning in the haze of this new world. Along with the thunderous crash of the stock market, the increased toxicity of human contact had shaped an infrastructural deficiency unlike any seen in modern history. Roadways had become overgrown, buildings sagging inwards in their atrophy, entire metro systems left for the bilious appetites of rats and other pests.

He remembered with wistful fondness, the period of flitting optimism when the vaccines had first been announced. A brief window of light had flooded the narratives of people’s timelines, filling their news streams with constantly changing information; pinging their phones with notifications of a glib hope, fueled by financial opportunism.

In the rush to develop a competitive product, the R&D departments of the major drug companies had incited a covert war amongst each other. Initially, EMdven had promised the first operable vaccine. This system of inoculation required massive hurdles for transportation and storage. Delays at their European production plant spurred extensive waits in rollout, with the bulk of vaccines going to global superpowers. Globivax promised an easily deliverable vaccine with little to no side effects. The compound utilized however, proved unstable, often expiring before it was delivered. As a result, it only worked for a fraction of the population, leading many who thought they were immunized to become unwitting carriers of the sickness, spiking infections rates worldwide.

Worst however, was the Zadiffan vaccine. Zadiffan had corralled a massive effort to become the exclusive supplier of vaccines globally. They did so by taking out massive loans, radically and rapidly expanding their production facilities, and poaching the research teams of their competitors through huge incentive bonuses, unprecedented in the industry.

The results had been hugely positive at first. In early testing, their drug promised the highest efficacy rate, yet required only moderate refrigeration and was so powerful, it needed only one dosage. Unlike the others, it operated through ingestion, meaning it could be shipped locally to people’s homes without the risk and logistical issues of providing vaccines at hospitals and clinics, already overwhelmed with their intake of sick patients.

With the recent delivery of a revamped Globivax vaccine, and the promise of a new Santech alternative about to hit the markets, Zadiffan took the disastrous gamble of pushing their production timeline twofold. Their massive cocktail of antibodies, thought to “suffocate” the virus’ ability to reproduce, had worked seamlessly on the first variants, but had not accounted for new variations, particularly what became identified as the b-27 and c-15 strains.

Horrifically, the new vaccine acted as an immunological steroid for these strains, catalyzing an irrevocable spike in infection and mortality rates, while making the virus highly adaptable and resilient.

The Millford Hospital had been one of the first distribution centers for people who had not been able to pre-order a Zadiffan delivery. These were mostly elderly and working folks, without the means to pay the upfront cost. All privately purchased vaccines were to be reimbursed through a federal program, but with the increase in unemployment and the need to pay rent, many individuals could not foot the initial, $350 that a dosage required.

Within a week, nearly half the staff had become infected. The hospital was ordered to shut its operations immediately however, it was much too late for most of the personnel, who succumbed to their anti-biotically supercharged illness within days. Mason’s mother had been one of them, a nurse on the frontlines. That seemed so long ago now.

The world that had taken shape in the wake of the catastrophe existed like a perverse fantasy, drafted from the pages of science fiction. The events of the pandemic had fueled people’s consumption of disaster narratives – realities that once seemed impossible, existed now, in the full ugliness of their banality. A series of loosely inspired spin-offs populated the remaining networks, while the semi-recent, Mad Max remake became Netflix’s most viewed film.

The reality on the ground was far more unsettling. Cleared of the haze of fiction, it offered no threshold between the imagination’s predilection for envisioning devastation, and its lived experience. It was a quiet apocalypse, not like those Mason had read and watched – a slow and articulated descent into the punishments of greed and emptiness. There were no hideous mutations proliferated by nuclear fallout, no chemical wars, no shortages of oxygen, or water – just a painful acquiescence to a feeling of nihilistic inevitability.

The outside world began to regenerate in quiet insistence, while humanity reduced itself further and further into its latest mirrors of interior dimension – the screens of cellphones, laptops, TVs, and tablets that had once appeared second nature, and at least partially optional, now contained the good part of human experience.

Under the threat of infection, the world relied upon an increasing reclusiveness that could only be sustained through remote interaction, necessitating computers in every aspect of economic, and social life.

Production of most non-essential goods decreased exponentially, as it became less safe to make them and there were fewer and fewer people to do the making. Young and working people like Mason, whose jobs could not transition to the virtual world, found themselves unemployed and struggling to subsist.

Unsurprisingly, the rich formed colonies, isolating themselves from the increasing disaster of the outside world; a chain reaction precipitated by the very system that had made them wealthy. They maintained their privilege by promising regular vaccinations for newly developing strains in return for labor. Consequently, the relationship of employer and employee began to more closely recall that of lord and serf. Pressed against a wall, many decided to move to these compounds to participate in the inequalities of a new world, barely distinguishable from the one they had left – selling their livelihoods for the right to survive.

As the workforce dwindled, increasingly unable to produce in face of contagion, the global economic landscape shifted massively. Borders slowly diminished in their pretense of meaning; nations were forced to cooperate due to the absolute scarcity of resources that had emerged. In this new landscape, power became the principal commodity – a world predicated on digitization required constant supplies of electricity.

A constellation of power companies hastily developed, seeking opportunity in the crisis. These companies would outfit people’s homes with power generating infrastructure, through a loan paid out in kilowatts generated. Groceries and necessities would be delivered to an individual, or family, based on their ability to meet a quota. Small, crypto bonuses would be deposited into the account of households that managed to surpass it.

Mason lived in a neighborhood that had neither received the brunt of the decimation, nor the organizing capacity of what he thought, had rather indelicately been called, “survivorburbs”. Those boroughs of resistance, he believed were the one light still burning on a planet emaciated by the currents of an unmatched disaster – one abetted by the rapacity of the political and economic systems surrounding it.

Many neighborhoods in cities across the world had established no-rent zones, enforced through upheaval and protest. These communities sustained themselves through the generation of their own power. This early spirit of communalism however, became harder to maintain as the virus mutated further, developing new strains at alarming speeds.

Initially, the power generated in these self-reliant enclaves was sold at market value to the newly founded power companies, but as conglomerates began to form, monopolization ensued, and larger corporations began to strangle them out by refusing to buy their power. With the inability to exchange the product of their labor, most of these initial communities collapsed.

Mason had elected what he felt to be the best compromise. He worked for a power co-op, a start-up with the express purpose of equipping people with the tools needed to survive. The power generated by an individual would be returned to a grid for the use of co-op members. Anything in excess of a bi-annual minimum, agreed upon through vote, would be left at the discretion of the generator themself, either as a credit for goods and services distributed through the co-op, or as additional income, deposited in crypto currency. Equipment was provided on a sliding-scale, for each member.

Mason had been able to secure himself a bicycle that could be hooked up to a home setup or utilized outdoors by storing the generated power in an auxiliary battery. This gave him a method of exploring the outside world, while maintaining enough electricity credits to save up a small crypto-cushion – roughly 20,000 units.

He had begun traveling to abandoned places as an informal route to meditation – a way of connecting with the spirit of what had been lost. It was an emotional experience – not a thrilling one – breaking into the various sites he visited. The shapes and textures of dereliction seemed, in his mind, to trace the exact patterns of our humbling finitude as a species.

He would bring a camera and a tripod, along with his little, black notebook, taking his time to setup, noting the locations and settings he used. He would then print his photos with the remaining cartridges of an old toner printer he had scavenged, plastering his bedroom wall in a pastiche of former worlds, lost now to the scrimmage of history and forgetting.

From the horizon, he could see the familiar angles of Millford’s brutalist construction. He dismounted and propped his bike against a gate, hesitating before deciding to leave it unlocked. Just as he leaned in to climb the frigid iron, he coughed, a small corona of blood appearing in the snow.

The reality dawned on him immediately. He had been experiencing symptoms that he had attributed to a winter cold from all his cycling. He now understood his miscalculation. Not having time to imagine how it happened, he took his notebook, quickly scribbling two, multidigit codes – access and retrieval information for his crypto wallet – the word survive underlined twice beneath them.

Gifted at least with the certainty of what waited before him, he lay down. In only minutes, his body would begin to convulse in a fit of spasmodic coughing so violent, his lungs would fill with blood as his vitals would fail, one by one, like in a tripped circuit.

He smiled quietly, the affairs of the world seemed to matter so little now, in face of the untraced blankness opening before him.