Mercator

“Technology is a wonderful thing.  Until it isn’t.”

                Articles of the Faith, Chapter of Acceptance, Verse 17

It was said the old man knew things.  That’s why I went to see him.

His shack was just past the end of the village, just this side of the brambles.  As usual, he was sitting in an unvarnished rocking chair on the front porch.  Likewise, all the wood that made up the shack had long ago been weathered of its last bit of paint.  Not that any of our houses had much paint left on them.  It’d been many years since traders had passed through with cans of varnish or paint, and nowadays that’d be considered a foolish purchase even if someone with cans of the stuff did show up.  “Shit long gone bad,” is what my dad would say, whether the labels were still there or still readable.           

The old man wasn’t known for friendliness, but he wasn’t a hermit either.  I’d talked to him before, a few times, briefly; my Uncle Jarvis, as well as his friend Petor, spoke regularly with him.  They said that the old man knew things.

I walked up to him, told him my name was Jovan, and quickly pointed to a large metal object off to the side of his house, about a third of which peeked out from a tangle of blackberry vines and high grass, asking him what this thing was called. 

I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or not by my question.  He did pause in his rocking, though.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked.       

I explained that I’d hiked over to the abandoned village on the other side of the neighboring abandoned village, and found a weird stone structure full of things that looked like the one in his yard, only these weren’t all covered up by weeds and vines.   

He motioned for me to sit in the other chair on the porch, and he started rocking again.  This other chair only had legs, so I couldn’t rock, but I didn’t care.  He then asked me, “Why did you go there?”

I hadn’t thought about why I went.  My father was angry that I’d wasted a full day getting there and back, and “hadn’t the sense to bring back anything of value,” to quote him.  Despite that, I was glad I went.  I felt I’d…accomplished something. 

The old man’s question made me realize why I’d gone, a reason my father would’ve found foolish.  I told the old man, “I wanted to see what was there, in a place I hadn’t been to before.”  He didn’t indicate in any way that he found this an unsatisfactory answer or that it required elaboration.      

He pointed over to the thing I’d asked about and said, “That is called a car.  The one there is probably rusty as hell under all that growth.” 

“What were they used for?” I asked.

A brief far-off look crossed his face, like something taken for granted was at last realized to be of great importance.  Then he said, “These moved people around…pretty much anywhere they wanted to go.  Like a horse and wagon, only faster, farther, and much more conveniently.  Cars gave us an incredible amount of…freedom.”

He must’ve noticed the puzzled look on my face and found it funny, because he let out a chuckle and continued.  “People actually sat inside and drove those things.  That is until they wouldn’t let us drive the cars ourselves anymore—instead, the cars drove themselves.  When that decree came down, most people didn’t care.  It gave them more time to bury their faces in things called devices.”

“Devices?” I asked.

“Lordy, that’s a talk for another day.  Let’s stick to cars.”

I was okay with that and said so.  I asked him how these things did what they did—I hadn’t seen any obvious means to hitch them up to a horse or mule.

“No horse or mule was necessary, though they did measure the energy output of the car engines by something called horsepower.  The engines inside the car provided the power to move them.  The car engines ran on a liquid called gasoline—that stuff packed a lot of punch in a small amount of material.  Depending on the car’s gas mileage, a gallon of gasoline might get you twenty, thirty, maybe even forty miles of travel—do you know what a mile is?”

I didn’t.

“The place where you saw the other cars is called a parking garage in a place called Millersburg, which is about ten miles from here.  There and back is twenty miles.”

The thing in the yard and those that I’d seen in the parking garage seemed so…so big…and heavy.  “It’s hard to imagine a gallon of anything would get something as big as a car there and back,” I said.   

“Gasoline was an amazing substance.  Important as hell to the point that wars were fought over it.  Yet it was taken for granted by most folks, railed against by some folks, missed like hell by all folks, when we couldn’t get any more of it.”

“But how did it work?” I asked.

“Gas is sort of like a food.  Our bodies—and horses, too—are like an engine.  We eat food for energy…and power…the power to move from one place to another.  Horses eat grass and oats for power.  Cars ate gasoline in a way, though they weren’t a living thing.  Both processes are a form of combustion.  Combustion releases energy, which can be used to perform work.  For example, with cars, we used this energy to get to places far and near—drive there or drive to they called it—using a vast network of paved roads and freeways that connected the entire country.  I know you’ve seen remnants of these roads here and there, like the old overpass just past the Thompson farm or the old run-up near Stillman Cairn.” 

I didn’t know what an overpass or a run-up was, but I’d seen what were called “henges” where folks gathered twice a year for their rituals.  And “black paths” that peeked up from the earth here and there.  I told him that I’d seen these, and asked, “Where would people drive to?”      

He started rocking again, leaned his head back, and looked off toward the distance that must’ve held for him visions of the past.  “We went to many places,” he said.  “We went shopping at things call stores, we went to things called movies, to our jobs, to see family and friends, on things called vacations; heck, just to get in and drive aimlessly to clear one’s mind.  My father told me he used to take girls up on Norton’s Lookout and neck with them—he never did say if my mother was one of them.  The incredible thing is you could, if you wanted, get in your car, drive a thousand miles, and start a new life, and nobody could stop you.” 

That last thing surprised me.  “There were no Elders or Grand Council?” I asked.

He stopped rocking again.  Didn’t shake his head or nod an answer.  He turned back toward me and said, “Back then, we had unbelievable freedom…and then pissed it all away.”

My math was okay.  I’d gotten through the third grade—and now knew what a mile was.  A thousand miles was 100 times farther than the parking garage.  Unless you were exiled, I couldn’t imagine someone getting the opportunity to travel a thousand miles.  “What happened?” I asked.

Now a cloud of resigned sadness set hard about the old man’s face.  After a few moments he answered: “We became meek and lost our self-reliance, hand-in-hand with tremendous advances in technology—maybe because of the technology.  For many generations, we drove the cars ourselves.  Then technology advanced to where the cars became automatic, able to drive themselves; like sleeping in the back of a wagon and the horse gets you where you want to go—I’ve seen a smart enough horse or two that might actually be able to pull it off.  Doesn’t mean I want horses running the world.”

The Davis horse could do it.  I was sure of it.   

“We should have seen it coming.  The politicians—the Elders of those times—told us it was too dangerous for us to drive ourselves, so they outlawed human-operated vehicles—made the self-driving ones mandatory and outlawed the others.  The amount of deaths and injuries from car accidents decreased, a lot, no doubt about it, but at what cost?  Next, they eliminated street and highway signs.  These would tell you when you got to Millersburg, for example.  ‘Why do we need the expense of those,’ they said, ‘when the car knows where to take you?  It’s a waste of money putting up signs to note boundaries, distances yet to go, freeway off-ramps, and such.’          

“The people didn’t complain because they’d long since relied entirely on the car’s brain getting them to their destinations, even when driving themselves.  Before the Teck Days, we used things called maps to get us places.  These were pieces of paper that showed towns and cities and the roads that connected them.  We used these to plan trips or figure out how to get to places we hadn’t been to before.      

“By the time the road signs came down, real paper maps were hard to find; the Internet (that’s another thing we’ll talk about at a later time if you like) contained these, along with all the other knowledge mankind had spent tens of thousands of years accumulating.  Then they forbade us to own paper maps, not that many folks used or had them anymore, and took down the ones posted on the Internet.  They said the computer chip that drove the car would get you anywhere you wanted to go, the maps were in there, buried in the chips.  That is until the chips stopped listening to us.  Banning maps should have been the final warning that we’d surrendered too much to our technocrat overlords.  But nary a peep was raised.”

He paused, looked right at me.  Hard.

I was frightened by this look, but I rustled up the courage to ask, “What happened next?”

“The chips started running the show—or, more accurately, those who controlled the chips did.  The cars stopped taking us anywhere we wanted to go.  A rally that didn’t conform to an approved political agenda—the car wouldn’t take you there…and it would report that you’d asked.  If you gave it a destination that our overlords didn’t approve of, the car said no—and reported you.  You could try lying to it, saying you were going to the store for example, but if your refrigerator had enough food (there was a chip there also) and you lied to the chip, the car wouldn’t take you to the store—and, of course, it would report that you were up to something.”

Computer chip?  Internet?  Refrigerator?  Rally?  I could see many visits to the old man would be necessary to learn about words I hadn’t heard before.

“A friend of my dad’s got careless.  Told the chip he wanted to go to the store for a gallon of milk.  Fool already had two gallons in his refrigerator, neither of them anywhere near the expiration date.  Got himself the camp.  The damn camps…”

Expiration date?  Camps?          

“Then the Imp came and we became marooned in a sea of ignorance of our own damn making.  We had no way of knowing where we were or how to get somewhere else.  Ask yourself this question: If you had to instruct someone else to get to Millersburg without you personally taking them there, how would you do it?”

I found the question oddly frightening.  How would I do it?  Follow the creek until you arrive at the reddish rock.  Turn right up a faint deer trail and follow it until you get to a leaning maple tree.  Then head up and over the hill behind the tree and you’ll come to an abandoned village.  Go around this village until you come to a green pond.  Go round the pond and follow the steel giants until you get to another abandoned village—Millersburg…

“Do you know what’s beyond Millersburg?”

I shook my head.

“A map would tell you.  Maps were the first thing to tie it all together, show the extent of our knowledge, how big this world is—and how small.  It defined goals and limits, the extent of our freedom.  Freedom to go anywhere you wanted, which many people did.  Now we have this.  He nodded toward something behind me, in a way that meant the world at large rather than literally something behind me.  So, I didn’t turn around and look.  “We’re like ignorant savages from thousands of years ago.  Christ we’ve got to unlearn the ignorance again.  Step by painful step.  Fools up in the mountains are doing human sacrifices.  Some in our village are talking the same nonsense.”

I shuddered.  I’d heard that rumor.

“And it wasn’t’ just cars we had.  We had ships used by us to sail the seas, which were large blue expanses shown on the maps, much larger than a lake.  These were steered by sailors.  Good charts, a sextant and an accurate timepiece were all you needed, along with a sailor’s luck, of course, to cross the seas.”

Charts?  Sextant?  Timepiece?

“The ships became like the cars, driven by the chips.  The Navy tried for a while to steer its ships without training its sailors in the old ways, the sextants and such, but eventually had enough sense to bring them back because they knew the risk if the chips went down.  Of course, the ships ran on a fuel similar to gasoline, so they’re also gone; sunk or left rusting away somewhere.  I hope that somebody somewhere has a sextant and a timepiece and knows how to use them, and passes that hard-won knowledge down or we’re gonna someday need to reinvent it.  That is, if we ever get our damn sense back.”

The old man stood up from his rocking chair, but motioned for me to remained seated. 

“Our smug reliance of technology and our meek acquiescence to our betters led us here…now we have to learn it all over again.  Wait here.”

He went into his shack and came back outside a few minutes later. 

“I want you to have this.  Keep it safe and guard it with your life.  It’s that important.  I’ll teach you how to read it.”

I studied the thing he handed me.  It was large…a book, I think it was called…obviously very old, its cover was brown, leather-like but not actually leather.  Stamped on its front were faded, but still readable words that he later taught me: Rand McNally Road Atlas.

I felt as if I’d been handed a holy document.

And I was right.