This is one of the elements of fiction that draws me in and keeps me from getting anything written. Creating a believable environment in which the characters live and breathe is one of my pet peeves. The world has to exist as fully as the personalities of the people who populate it. I’m churning out pages of random notes and details, asking questions and answering those with more questions, there are characters doing the same, from their point of view, and slowly it’s becoming something solid. It’s still very rough, but it has some substance that can be held and felt. Please feel free to throw an opinion on this, I would like to know what you think.

From A.’s Journal

I need it written down. Not for myself, but for those that will come later. That was the problem, we didn’t write things down anymore. Everything went into the wire, and that which we all thought was forever, disappeared in an explosive flash.

The world was the same everywhere, glass, concrete, steel and wire. We all existed in it, complacent, docile, blissfully unaware of decisions that corporation and county made. It didn’t effect us, it didn’t stop the flow, but what id did was to control the flow, keeping the world in the dark until it was too late. An enlightened age, where even the night was no different from day, the glow of the cities had long ago blurred the night sky from vision, it was the twilight haze that filled our nights.

It wasn’t until the bombs fell, shattering the illusion that we had all held as truth. The light was blinding, and it burned away everything that we knew, leaving behind ruptured cities bleeding molten glass and asphalt. The wire went silent, there was no one in charge, there was no one to go to for help, we had to relearn how to live.

Crawling out of the debris, we blamed the corporations and the governments, but when it was found that they were no longer, we turned on each other, striking out and continuing the blaze that was started by the push of a button, but we carried it out in the streets. Those that stood in the way of what we wanted or thought we needed were broken and cast aside. We struggled as people do, looking for each other, hoping to find some connection and hiding in the newfound dark of the night while those that had gone mad in the aftermath ruled the streets, scavenging for those too weak to defend themselves, searching for a fix to replace the wire, something to sooth the rage that welled up with no outlet. There were no jacks, no wire, no virtual release, there was only the here and now.

There were those that used the fear we had to pull us in and lead us into a place of hope, or that was what they wanted us to believe. Man had destroyed himself because he thought that he was greater than God. The words were whispered into ears that were eager for some kind of salvation from the despair they felt. Family, led by the manipulators of the word, they traveled and scoured what they viewed as remnants of the great wrongs that man had done.

Information had been our life’s blood. It flowed through the wire, it was also what had brought us to the now, so much of it was lost. The storage facilities had been prime targets, and the power plants that kept the flow active were brought to a standstill. There was no way to restart, no switch to fix the world. We had to relearn to think for ourselves, we had our individual skills, but they had become obsolete, what good is an accountant with nothing to tally, or a corp president with no meetings to attend. Those that were willing to rebuild were the new leaders, those that had been invisible in the eyes of the great were now the saviors of us all.

Reason, and the drive for survival changed the way we thought. God did not answer prayers the way that we thought. No miracles materialized, no great event happened, but little by little we found those that knew the music of the mechanical, and the wire that had once fed us and thought for us had other uses. Cogs, springs, levers, everything was stripped back to basics, we relearned how to live. Rational thought brought about change. Gods do not magically appear to make things better, but we are given the tools to repair things ourselves, to learn and to adapt. Nature provides. We have fire for warmth and water to drink, and to bring us back into the light of what was, we have steam.