The Maze of Madison: Chapter Seven - An Aftermath of Cinders, Soot and FroststeemCreated with Sketch.

in #writing5 years ago

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Chapter One: So it Begins
Chapter Two: Into the Dark
Chapter Three: Confounded by a Lock of Stone
Chapter Four: The Ponderous Path Home
Chapter Five: Fleeing the Immolation
Chapter Six: Weathering the Firestorm

Chapter Seven: An Aftermath of Exhaustion and Cinders

The next few days were a smoky haze of glowing cinders, emergency responses and even and complete exhausted collapse. People would simply lay down and fall asleep. In some cases, they fell down exhausted. In other cases, they were slumped over in place and it took a moment for others to notice. In some cases, people were feared to be dead, because no one could find them. A frantic search was sparked each time and eventually they were found. Most of the time they were found my their booster transponder. In a couple cases, their boosters, even with the modern technologies simply ran out of power and turned off. Those searches were by far the most frantic.

Tobias lasted two days before he became delirious with a lack of sleep. I had him shepherded to his home, with adult permission, for a few hour nap. Teenagers need more sleep than average, ironically. In a few years, we would need far less. Puberty was like being a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Or beetle. Or ...well... some never stopped being maggots. Sorry, but it's true.

When a person collapsed, someone or something - a bot, really - would place a heater and a fire proof, smart blanket over the person and double checked the person's respirator. Madison was going through a regional, if not continental, firestorm. That didn't mean the entire place was going to be incredibly hot. It was at first, but soon, who knew how soon, it was going was going to get cold. VERY cold. The last thing the colony needed was for people to freeze to death after nearly being consumed by fire.

Why would it get cold? First of all, Madison was a cold, cold planet to begin with. True, it was not as cold as Utpala or Rudra or even Othrys, but it was far, far colder than Caerus, Nuwa, Ile Ife or infinitely colder than Suryaloka. Though Caerus had a winter every night. But then, it's day-night cycle took 624 hours! Our day-night cycle was far, far more Earth-normal.

The second reason the colony was going to get so cold was because the soot from the fires were going to block out the Sun. Temperatures were going to fall below freezing for a long time, much like the Year Without a Summer back on Earth. Except, instead of a volcano causing the problem, it was going to be the massive conflagration beyond the cleared zone around the colony as the root source of the obnoxiousness. It could last more than a year. It could last longer.

All of our crops were in danger.

All of our lives were in danger.

The very existence of the colony was in danger.

Not from the fire! We'd survived that well as we had planned for it, but from the bitter cold and blackness coming after the flames.

That first evening, the sky looked like it was on fire and everyone scrambled to make sure the lands we had were safe. The crops. The buildings. The animals. The people. Everyone scrambled. However, the first day made it look really, really bad. It looked like it was sunset all day the first day. Blood red and angry, as though Mother Madison was telling us she was angry with her intrusive new self-adopted children.

The second day, the sunrise wasn't noticed and full noon was only as bright as morning on a cloudy day.

The third day, there was no day. It was pitch black. There was a picture from long ago of the Earther America city of Pittsburgh at 3 PM with the sky as black as midnight. We had the same thing here on Madison and it was noon. The temperatures began to plummet. Hard.

As bots consumed the water lines we had them lay out from the pumping stations at the river, another scramble was underway. No longer we feared fire. Now we feared ice. Over our entire fields, bots extruded a lattice work raising up a good 18 meters while others printed glass. Drones snagged the plates of glass and flew them up to attach to the latticework. Beetlebots, benign relatives of the banned biomimetic biomass ingesting repticulates, then screwed them in place. However, not everything was perfect and people had to intervene. A beetlebot might have its screw feed get jammed and needed to be fixed. A few errored out and started breaking panes of glass. A few of them seemed to get into a fight. One even started building what looked like a bowerbird house and dancing. That one I thought had someone hack it. Or so I hoped.

And that was where I was. I was chasing down beetlebots and drones and extruders to make sure they performed as they were supposed to. And that was when I passed out. In the midst of brussel sprouts. I hate brussel sprouts. And yet, I slept. Tobias found me and even took my place after fixing my respirator and placing a smart blanket on me. he might have been stronger, but I endured longer.

He guarded me. Protected me. And continued my job.

He also got the unenviable task of making sure the bots properly extruded, installed and turned on the heaters and light emitting panels. He'd only had three hours of sleep and he lasted six. I woke up to find him laying next to me, asleep. he hadn't snuggled - that'd have been weirder than weird - but he was there. He'd killed some more brussel sprouts, so he endeared himself even more to me. I got up and began to supervise the next step.

We were turning our fields into an enormous greenhouse. We were going to lose some of our crops. When I had awoken, there was frost near me. Very light, but there all the same. Some plants survived. Some were going to be dead. Some would just lose the fruit they had. Oh, the poor tomatoes! No spaghetti for a while!

By the time Tobias woke up, we had the fields enclosed. However, we were still not done. By protecting our crops, by making it warm, by enclosing the entire field like we had, we were creating the single largest, undisturbed source of food in the region. Madlife and Earthlife were not 100% compatible, but they were close enough a surviving and starving Madlife herbivore or omnivore would have given its left eye for the food we had. That meant the outer shell of the greenhouse was going to have to be tougher than the inner thermal glass. It needed to be armored glass, as in as stronger than what used to be called bullet proof glass.

Once the extruders were done with enclosing the crops to protect them from cold, they switched over to created spinel. Transparent as glass and very, very strong, spinel is very tough. The American military had first started producing it 100 years before, but others had followed suit quite quickly once the trick was learned.

Everyone and everything had moved outside to plate the other, outer side of the lattice frame. The extruders chuffed and excreted the spinel. The drones then had to work as a team to lift the heavier panes. The beetlebots had to use heavier bolts. etc. Many of the adults and some of the teenagers were armed with rifles at this point. It wasn't likely anything was going to get over the walls to us and our giant greenhouse, but it was better safe than sorry. When Tobias joined me, he brought a rifle. He would have to check it back in when he was done: anyone under eighteen was only probationally allowed to carry firearms on Madison.

There were no incidents. Nothing was large enough or could smell our crops well enough yet by the time were done - go team technology! yeah. I was too tired to be actually thrilled, honestly. I didn't last until the next step our mayor ordered: she wanted the homes to have their windows reinforced with spinel. Just for the time being. After our crops, we were the largest source of food in the area. And there were assuredly hungry predators out there, too.

I had already shambled back to home.

And bed.

And blissful, dreamless oblivion.

as a foot note: I just lost 14k RC for no reason. I hadn't interacted with steemit for 10 hours at this point and the RC had been completely regenerated since then. Looks like HF20 still has problems.

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