From the Journals of Jonathan Hemingway
October the 16th, 2071
My name is Jonathan Hemingway, and I have decided in this, my seventy-ninth year, to write this account of my life, here in the town of Prospect, Montana. I write these words, not to educate, or entertain, or even enlighten, but to create some small record of our passing: proof to anyone who cares, that we existed, that we mattered.
I will apologize this one time in advance, for the style and content of my writing.
I am a farmer by trade, and putting pen to paper is foreign to me, so I will try and make up in sincerity, what I lack in expertise.
I was born right here in Prospect, in 1992, the fourth generation of a Montana farming family, and until the year 2016, the year of the Great Event, I worked the family farm, went to agriculture school, and prepared to take my place as caretaker of the family land.
I guess you're probably interested in this great event I talked about. Before I get to that, let me tell you a little more about myself. My father's name was also Jonathan, and my mother's, Wilamena, Dolly, they called her. My grandfather Joseph also lived with us. There were three of us children in the family, myself, my brother William, who was two years older than me, and my sister, Helen, who was a year younger.
The town of Prospect itself had about six thousand people, mostly farmers, a few merchants, and two churches, the Presbyterian, which almost everyone attended, and the Catholic, which had maybe two hundred parishioners.
By anyone's definition, northern Montana is a cold place. From September through April bitter Canadian winds constantly blow down from the north. Little did we know, it was these same bitter winds which were to be our salvation.
Now to the Great Event.
Please remember as you read these journals, that describing the events of the past fifty five years is a little like the blind men describing the elephant. I only know firsthand how Prospect and the surrounding countryside were affected. Sure, there have been thousands of scholarly historical accounts written, and the media has told the story often enough, but none of us who survived those terrible six days in December, 2016, place much stock in these accounts. Most start and end with one person or group trying to explain why they were not involved, and at the same time, pointing the finger at someone else. I guess I wouldn't take credit for killing 98% of the people on Earth either.
Near as I can piece together, from all the different accounts and stories, the truth of what happened went something like this.
A group of microbiologists from Stanford University, in conjunction with the pharmaceutical conglomerate Glaxo-Welcome, developed an AIDS vaccine which could be administered via a nasal spray. Apparently, this vaccine was virtually 100% effective, even at 10% of the recommended dosage. As I understood it, the vaccine was some kind of benign super virus, which fed on the HIV cells.
Apparently, at about the same time, the brains at Merck Drugs developed a method of delivering these aerosol drugs to vast geographical areas, using the Earth's naturally occurring air systems, like the Gulfstream, or the Jetstream; I guess basically the idea was to inoculate whole continents almost overnight. That way, the cost per dose would be drastically reduced, but the drug companies could essentially send one bill for everyone in the world.
This is where the story gets kind of cloudy, depending on whose account you read.
One version has it that terrorists stole the technology and attempted to wipe out the British Isles. Another says the Pentagon tested a particularly virulent strain of the Ebola virus as a weapon by having the Sahara desert winds carry an aerosol version over Kenya. Project Gossamer, they called it, although it was later to be known as project Icarus. One story even has an 18 year old lab assistant at Stanford getting drunk and trying to kill her ex boyfriend by releasing the virus over his house.
At this point, I'll let you choose whichever version sounds most plausible, or if you wish, choose from the dozens of other versions the historians have offered.
The end result of this folly, however, has never been in dispute.
Within six days, the same time the Lord took to create the Earth, 99.9% of all human life had been destroyed.
In the United States, which fared better than most of the globe, 330 million, out of 333 million people perished, all in six days.
Now, back to those bitter Canadian winds. Seems that because virtually no people lived north of us in Canada, and maybe because the virus couldn't live for more than a few hours in the sub zero cold, the winds brought only pure, virus free air to northern Montana. And for better or worse, I was left to tell the tale.
--Jonathan
October the 28th, 2071
When I last wrote, I tried to relate, as best I understood it, the causes of the Great Event.
Now I will begin to relate what life was like in the days, months, years, and decades following.
In some ways, because there had been no war or natural catastrophe, life for the remaining few survivors became at first simpler and less laborious than before the Event. Remember, the United States had at that time some three hundred million automobiles, now available to three million drivers. So the prospects of ever not having a car and fuel available became nonexistent. One just picked one off the street and drove away. The same went for food, clothing, houses, ( as I understood, there were 150 houses available for every person in the country ).
To this day, I am amazed at how quickly we in the heartland recovered. The urban areas were a completely different story, however, with millions of bodies left unburied, because there was no one left alive to do so. But on Prospect, in Montana, it really wasn't all that catastrophic. I mean, sure it was tragic, but we did like we always did, I guess. We picked up the pieces and got on with it.
And because the infrastructure had been left intact, life eventually returned to normal, only on a much smaller, and decidedly local scale.
It was in the third year after the Event that the first subtle changes began to occur, changes which were to alter this post-Event society, in some ways even more profoundly than the Event itself had.
But maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. I've neglected to mention the most obvious and perhaps significant difference between pre- and post-Event society.
No one has ever adequately explained why, maybe biology, maybe the distribution of the sexes between businesses and homes when the Event happened, or maybe just random chance, but for whatever the reason, two men survived for every woman. Later on, I'll begin to tell you what this means in terms of day to day living, but for now, suffice it to say that overnight woman became the most precious commodity on earth, and polygamy became the norm. Families with a wife and two or even three husbands are now commonplace. It wasn't always like this.
But like I said, I'm getting ahead of myself. In the years preceding the Event, multinational corporations continued to merge and assimilate one another at an ever increasing pace, to the point that by 2016, they say that the entire world economy was controlled by about seven or eight multinational conglomerates; a media company, a drug company, an agri-business conglomerate, two oil companies, two automobile companies, a financial services monopoly, and a technology enterprise so large that its soft and hardware were in virtually every home on earth.
In the United States, government had expanded it's size and scope to the extent that one of every five Americans worked for the federal, state, or local government.
That gives you some idea of the way America looked in the years before the Event. Now as I was saying, around the year 2020, only about four years after the apocalypse, and just when a lot of us were beginning to believe that our country and our planet just might pull through, we Americans, with our propensity for grouping together to hate our neighbors, split into essentially four groups.
The first among us to draw a line in the sand and declare themselves different were the university faculties, artists, and the literati. Academics they called themselves. We called them Dems, although there was hardly anything democratic about them.
I suppose as a reaction to the Dems, or in a desperate attempt to preserve the bureaucracy they had served for so many years, the former government workers united to form a union of federal employees. Govs, they proudly called themselves, and their avowed mission was to once again control every facet of the lives of the remaining 80% of the populace.
Far fewer in numbers, but with infinitely greater resources were the remaining members of America's corporate elite, the boards of directors, the CEO's, the wealthy shareholders, all determined to reclaim what was left of poor planet Earth. Although they prided themselves on secrecy, it was pretty much common knowledge who and what they were. After a time they came to be known as Corps.
And that brings me to the rest of us. The working stiffs, just trying to be left alone to rebuild our lives as best we could. Citizens we called ourselves.
It has been this polarization that has led to the almost constant violence which now threatens to destroy what little hope we managed to salvage from the remnants of our former society, and which has caused me to undertake this journal in the hope that someone, someday will understand that we were not all given to the most base of instincts and motives.
--Jonathan
