Original Scifi: The Anarchist's Almanac, Episode 2

In today's episode, we get a picture of dweller life and some troubling news from the outside world, plus a piece of the "Covenant of Consensus" the laws our story world is run by

If you haven't read the first episode, get it here!

The Covenant of Consensus

It is with the knowledge that one world consensus is the only way to peace, and with the belief that this consensus can only be reached through a mutual purging of our regional, religious, political, national and individual ideologies, that we set our hands to this covenant on this The Fourth day of July, in the year of our enlightenment, Two Thousand and Seventy-Six.

We do solemnly pledge to strive for consensus throughout our communities, our nations and our world.

To this end, we do hereby institute the Covenant Council, to lead and govern in this search for consensus, and to aid them, we do hereby decree that we, every man, woman and child of the human race, now living and yet to be known, shall be governed by these Twelve Laws.

The First Law
The Consensus of humanity is the source of life, and should be respected as such. Anyone found to be acting against consensus, will be immediately placed in biological suspension and kept in stasis, until such time as it is determined that said individual, or individuals, are no longer a threat to consensus.

They crossed the yard of the small farm toward the barn. A white truck rolled silently into the yard, a gift one of the foraging teams had managed to borrow from the consensus. They had nearly gotten caught before disarming the Consensus installed nano tracker in the vehicle’s GPS.

It was the first fully electric vehicle their tribe had Appropriated and it was a huge step up from the diesel beasts they normally drove. The silence and lack of heat signature made the vehicle nearly impossible to track. Eugene, the resident engineer was working to duplicate the drive system on a larger truck left over from the fossil fuels' era and was getting close.

Several people came from the back door of the farmhouse to help unload the groceries and produce the supply team had traded for with surrounding dweller “tribes” as they often referred to themselves. Dax and Joshua pitched in and soon bags of potatoes, canned goods, dried meat and freshly baked bread were all safely stored in the Pantry.

The run crew was three young men who all climbed from the truck and took their place in the supply chain, handing bags and boxes of goods from hand to hand up to the kitchen door.

Sally, who had once been a gourmet chef, before the Abdication, ran their mess crew and dinner was always delicious. It was the unlucky dweller who ever dared to ask what was for dinner, however, since Sally expected trust.

The poor soul that dared to question could be found scouring pots, or peeling potatoes for hours in good-natured punishment for the faux pas.

Darian, the young, bearded driver joined Joshua and Dax at the rear of the truck. “Good run today Josh, but we saw a lot of drone activity on the western front, mostly dropping off."

"We saw smoke around Holdenville too. Not sure what was going on there, but I figured I’d add it to the Almanac boards after dinner. So, Dax, you ready for this? I hear you’re coming out with us in a couple days!”

Dax grinned, “I am, but my dad’s acting like an old lady. He doesn’t think I can handle it."

"But we’ve all heard his stories about how he got dropped in the Outlands in his diaper, with nothing but a binky and a single bottle of milk at six months old, and lived to tell about it!” Dax good naturedly punched his father on the shoulder.

“Holdenville? That’s supposed to be our next Settling. We’d better get over there tonight and see what’s going on.” Joshua chose to ignore his son’s teasing. After the visit from the Reaper today, he wasn’t in the mood to consider letting his son out of his site, even for a moment.

Sally appeared at the back door. “Lunch is served.”

The dwellers helped carry trays of sandwiches and a big soup pot out to the yard, where they set up on a long picnic table. To the outside observer, the dwellers' meals must have seemed like something other than the brief respite from a very hard life that they were.

There was always plenty of food, and the group talked, joked and played with each other. They were more like a family than a group that had been strangers until the end of the world had thrown them together.

The newest members of the tribe were a young couple in their teens, not that age mattered much anymore. Thad and Jennifer had joined them just a few weeks back, after a foraging team discovered them trying to scavenge from a small grocery store in a town about twenty miles away.

They had left their Caucus two days before and were lucky not to have been picked up by Reaper patrols along the roads. Joshua was always cautious of newcomers. More than once they had turned out to be Consensus spies, sent to convince dwellers to join the consensus.

When that happened the dwellers had been forced to pull up camp without notice and abandon them, meaning another Settling stop was removed from the rotation.

Their current circuit of safe camps took them over what used to be a two-state area. They were having to spread out further and further all the time, to avoid the Reapers and stay out of the way of other nomadic dweller groups that they shared the Outlands with. If they stuck to their current pattern, Holdenville would have been next.

It remained to be seen if that was still possible.

After the Abdication had started, the dwellers had moved randomly, no tribes, no organization. However, one too many surprises, with entire groups of dwellers being taken by Reapers, and too many nights sleeping in open fields due to finding your destination was already occupied, had forced them to band together.

Now they had quarterly council meetings to compare notes and help each other. That’s where the idea of the rotations had come from. They chose towns that had been completely evacuated, but were far enough from Caucus cities to be difficult for the Consensus to keep track of.

Then each group selected a circuit that took them to a different “Settling” on a regular schedule, staying about three weeks, leaving each Settling empty during its next Reaper scan.

The system was far from perfect, but with farms and small manufacturing coming online in a few “Steads”, the dwellers' lives were beginning to find a sense of normalcy. The Steads were more permanent situations that piggy-backed onto Consensus installations of various kinds for power and communications.

They tapped into the mini-grids that the Consensus set up wherever they needed an outpost and ran their various concerns in abandoned buildings, basements and barns. It was dangerous, but since the Consensus representative at each of these outposts was part of the dweller movement, it had worked out pretty well so far.

In the dweller network Joshua’s tribe was part of; there were three hydroponics farms, two warehouse fish hatcheries -using barrels to raise the fish- and at least five fairly large scale 3d printers that could make a variety of goods and parts to order.

“Here’s to the creator and his abundance,” Adam, a sort of defacto spiritual leader, and lay priest said.

He stood at the head of one of the picnic tables that were spread across the lawn in the shade of an ancient oak tree. There was a murmur of agreement, and the dwellers dug in.

Each dweller tribe had a different flavor and members often traded from one to another until they found the right fit. Joshua’s tribe wasn’t “religious” per se, but being grateful and recognizing something bigger than them in the universe had become a central theme. Joshua was an avid student of the metaphysical and welcomed spiritual expression that was loving and voluntary.

The day’s lunch was a thick potato chowder and grilled cheese sandwiches with cheese made on one of the dweller farms, Joshua had no idea how. Between that and the fresh bread, it made for a heck of a grilled cheese sandwich. Between the good food and the laughter, everyone gradually forgot about the Reaper incident that morning.

Everyone was alive and safe for the moment and in dweller philosophy, that was enough cause to celebrate.

It was a simple life.

“So, Dax was asking me about a training run this afternoon. You good with that?” Darian stood behind Joshua.

The question was asked with respect. As Dax well knew, he was considered a full member of the tribe, and didn’t need his father’s permission for any of this.

Joshua looked up and sighed, “Sure, let me finish my soup, and we’ll head on over.”

Be sure to follow my blog to catch episode 3 tomorrow, Dax's training. Will he be ready for the run, or will Joshua decide the danger is too great?

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