UTOPIA - An adventure story - Part 7 - Old Esther

When old Esther was still young, before the Great Meltdown of two centuries ago (when everything that was predicted to go wrong all went wrong at the same time – one week in June), she was an electronics engineer at one of the big computer companies in Silicone Valley on the western coast of what, at the time, was called the United States of America.

She was one of the few people who really knew and understood how computers actually worked. She was part of a team of designers who created the first of the second generation smartphones – the really smart ones. As I described in part 6, the first generation were found to cause 'smartphone blindness' and so the second generation were created without screens but were designed to be implanted directly into the brain. This also made them much more difficult to steal or lose, which was a big selling point.

Unfortunately for Esther, it was too late for her to avoid the onset of smartphone blindness – an unstoppable deteriorating condition which began with the loss of colours and ended in complete pixellation of vision. The implant of the new device went some way to replace the loss of sight, although it was really a shadow of actual seeing , even with all of the filters and special effects which could be applied at the blink of an eye.

To relax and unwind from the stresses of life in the heart of Silicon Valley, Esther would go long-distance cross country running. She could run all day without getting tired. Once her body got into the rhythm of the run, her mind would wander in its own direction.. so far and so deep, that sometimes she would cross whole wide canyons without even noticing. It was on one of these runs that Esther, being unable to see the colour green, had tripped over a small bush on a grassy path and hit her knee on a rock, causing quite serious damage.

Fortunately for Esther, she had an excellent medical insurance package which came as a perk of her highly paid job, so she received the very best treatment available. Her knee was examined by several of the most expert experts. They all consulted and agreed. She was faced with a choice: Either, a complicated knee restructuring surgery, which had a low chance of success and a high chance of leaving her unable to walk at all, let alone run. Or, a new and untested stem-cell based treatment which had shown remarkably positive results in all kinds of animals – most famously, the chimpanzee which had regrown a thumb (though unfortunately not the rest of its fingers which had been cut off in previous tests).

And so as it was with Old Saul (read about him in part1) the unexpected side effect of the treatment, which was highly successful in completely healing Esther's knee, was that it caused her to age at a very much slower rate. Unfortunately, even this miraculous treatment didn't cure her of her smartphone blindness. Her natural vision is still colourless and pixellated to this very day – two hundred years later.

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Of course, when the Great Meltdown happened, civilisation came abruptly to an end. Those who survived had to get used to a life without mass production, or any production at all. They learned to scavenge, to repair, to modify things they could find to suit new uses in this new reality.

The battery soon began to run out on the second generation smartphone she had implanted in her head. To find replacement wasn't easy. She collected as many as she could find, knowing that the supply might not last forever, and that without them she'd be practically blind. Getting electricity to charge them was even harder – especially in the darkness of the long winter which followed the Great Meltdown. Solar panels were almost useless, unless you had lots of them. Keeping them clean was also next to impossible in the seemingly endless dust storms of those cold, dark decades.

As time wore on, and working parts became ever more scarce, Esther found all sorts of ways to bind together different pieces of salvaged technology from different eras and for two hundred years after the end of civilisation, keep her implant functioning. If you ever saw the headgear she wears, you would think it's the most outrageous piece of conceptual art you've ever seen.

It was not the sight of Old Esther's headgear, or the bundle of coloured wires spilling from it and into her frontal lobe that caused the orphan boy to scream as she opened the door to him and Randel. Rather it was the large white dog that came bounding up to him and jumped up to greet him. Barak's entire family had been eaten by wolves only a few long days earlier, (see part2) and he was naturally quite terrified in his traumatised state.

Over the course of the next few years, Barak and the dog would become the very best of friends and the dog would come to save the boy's life on many occasions.

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It was a long journey which brought Esther from what had once been called the United States of America to the place where she now lived, in what was once Afghanistan. All in all, it took her about one hundred years, with many stops along the way, many unexpected adventures and many a brush with death. It would take too long to even begin to write down half of her adventures. She has never attempted it, and I'm not going to either. Maybe some other time.

With all of her children (she gave birth 40 times), grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they made quite a formidable tribe as they travelled from place to place, in search of clean water, hospitable climate and uncontaminated, arable land. Eventually they settled on the green valley of the caves (described in Part 3) where they have lived quite peacefully for the past one hundred years.

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Seeing something in the orphan boy's features which reminded her strongly of a man she had once loved, many years ago, she took special care of him as he grew up to be a teenager. He was always welcome to visit her in her workshop.. something few people did these days as she had a reputation for being an eccentric and often bad tempered recluse (the truth was really that she had no patience for small talk, and that her mind tended to wander) but she was always friendly to Barak and he was always helpful to her and interested in listening to her stories and ramblings, though they often skipped confusingly between time frames and locations without any apparent connection.

Barak had inherited his great great great grandmother's gift for long-distance running. He was at first tasked with delivering messages throughout the valley of the caves and later on to settlements many miles distant. By the time he was fifteen years old, he knew every path, every hill, forest, valley, river, stream and cave within a radius of around two hundred miles. His stamina was unparalleled – if a message was urgent and if the moon was full, he could run all night and all day with barely a pause. His speed was astonishing. He could outrun wolves and wild cats. The dog, 'Captain' accompanied Barak everywhere and was as faithful and loyal a companion as anyone could be.

It was one day, when Barak was about fifteen years old, that he went to visit Grandma up on the hill and found her with an old map spread out on the table. It was covered in red lines, which, he supposed represented ancient borders (he'd heard of such things from Old Esther's stories, but still found the idea hard to grasp) and names of places which had echoes of the sound of long forgotten, mythical lands. Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan.. Countries where millions had died, defending their flags and the name of their nation, who's names sounded so similar and were now similarly forgotten. She was plotting a line westward, from the place called Afghanistan.. through Iran, Iraq, Syria, to a tiny little spot marked 'Israel' and crossed all over with red lines.

'I need you to deliver a message for me', she said turning to him with a distant look in her eye. 'It's quite a long way away. Would you do that for me?'

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These links will help you catch up on parts 1 to 6:

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-an-adventure-story-part-1-old-saul

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-an-adventure-story-part-2-superheroes

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-an-adventure-story-part-3-the-house-of-the-four-mothers

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-part-4-echoes-of-the-internet

https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/utopia-part-5-the-great-meltdown

https://steemit.com/science/@stillgideon/utopia-part-6-smartphone-blindness