This is the first chapter of my upcoming book, Project Chrysalis, written as Willard Joyce and published by Permuted Press. It depicts a post-plague world a generation after the world is depopulated, and explores the ramifications of an Artificial Intelligence of indeterminate power and influence. Learn more and order here.
Chapter One
Peering into the jagged innards of broken machines, Mykol Krusos wondered what was left to save and why it was even worth saving. You could fix a device, but the person who had once used it succumbed, along with billions of others, during the Grip that began twenty-five years ago. The promises of a new day coming felt hollow, and Mykol found himself increasingly wondering what was the point of it all.
You think too much. Mykol’s father had told him this ever since he was a young boy—even when his dad said it fondly, it still triggered spirals of anxiety and doubt. Mykol had a mind that churned with too many possibilities.
“There’s no need for solving problems anymore,” Mykol’s father said, years ago. “There’s so little left. Relax and live your life and just deal with what’s in front of you.”
Mykol knew that it took approximately eight minutes for the light from the sun’s effectively eternal nuclear explosion to reach the grime-smeared windows of the Ellison Machine Shop. It seemed a lot of bother to travel that far and barely light up a dim and dusty room.
The little light that made it through that front glass illuminated shelves of broken things, musical instruments without power jacks, and handhelds and laptops that no longer provided any kind of service in an analog world.
Mykol rubbed his eyes until he heard a squish; he opened them and watched the room pulsate with blurs and stars. None of these machines served the function for which they were built, not since the internet and the power grid crashed twenty-three years ago, six months after he was born. He took some of the machines home to play with, the ones with no appeal to anyone, and wired them to calculate and communicate with one another.
There were stories in nearly all of them. He collected these useless data storage lockers for the Provisional Authority, a monotonous job that caused time to flatten as though tethered by lead weights.
The gewgaw plugged into his cluttered workstation was somebody’s old smart phone. It wasn’t very smart now. Nearly everyone had possessed one of these and depended on it for just about every aspect of life. That was a fairytale fantasy now. It hadn’t been that long ago—there were literally millions of people in the world who were still alive and remembered those times. His own father was one of them. Mykol and his father were all that remained of an extended family that once numbered in the dozens, gone with the other billions. Whatever genetic oddity of random chance that had spared Mykol had also spared his father, who now mostly went days on end without speaking, leaving his room, or acknowledging anyone’s existence.
The smart phone had a badly cracked screen, but it fired up its white semisphere logo against a black backdrop when Mykol plugged it into an adapter and gave it juice. Within a minute or so, it popped up that classic operating system with a grid of colorful squares against a customized backdrop—in this case, a photo of two small children smiling on a patch of grass in the sun.
Those children hadn’t grown to adulthood; it was almost certain. Numbers were numbers. Ninety-seven out of a hundred died. It had taken less than three years from start to finish. Sometimes Mykol would pull out some of the history caches from school, to reflect on those months and think about what it had been like before. When his mother was still alive.
He plugged the phone into his station’s storage drive and hit the upload—photos, messages, emails, videos, contacts, everything personal and unique to this device. It took about thirty seconds. Mykol opened the photo application and took a quick scan through its contents. Sometimes there were nudes and other personal images such as scantily dressed women who seemed to be promoting exotic places he’d never seen and products whose use he barely understood, but more often it was stuff like he was seeing now as he flipped through dozens of files and absorbed as much as he could take. Men and women, children, dogs. Older people. Landscapes he’d never seen. Group settings: work, holiday parties, maybe Friday night get-togethers (people still clung to the tradition of the weekend these days, although it was rare to see a watch. Schedules tended to be fluid and based on the position of the sun).
He’d seen as much of the past as he could bear. Mykol unplugged the phone and, with a practiced twist, cracked it open with a slim, metal tool. He knew the insides of this model well. He put on his magnifying lens and quickly stripped out the battery, depositing it into a tray by his workstation that was bathed in a beam of golden light. He’d soon have enough to meet his daily quota, but he wasn’t particularly eager to go anyplace else.
The shop door opened with a grinding creak. There used to be an electronic chime to signal visitors, then an old bell after that broke down. After that died, no one bothered to replace it.
A loud, rattling throat clearing in the back of the store signaled that Grigori had stirred from his nest of electrodes and circuit boards. This was rare enough to make Mykol swivel and lower the magnifying lens strapped to his forehead.
Mykol went to the front counter. He blinked in a ray of sunlight. The visitor was a dark silhouette; outside the window, a tattered sign over an empty storefront fluttered in the breeze.
“Hello?” said a young woman’s voice. “You. You work here. Can you help me?”
Mykol blinked. Grigori’s music blipped and farted in back, electronic sounds from a party that had long since shut down. For such a dour character, he had a taste for relentlessly upbeat tunes.
Mykol stiffened with shock. His visitor was probably about his age. But she was dressed in the intimidating uniform of an officer of the Provisional Authority—the starched blue, patches and insignia below her right clavicle, her hair pulled back tight from her forehead and tucked into a gray cap.
“You’re presumably not mute?” she said, her breezy arrogance tinged with humor.
“I work here, yeah.” He felt as though she was an unflattering mirror, revealing his stubbled face, his worn and faded clothes, the fact that he had just been trawling through someone’s memories.
“I need help with this.” Her tone implied she was accustomed to being obeyed. She reached into her shoulder bag and produced a plastic data stick.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
Her gaze froze as she caught a reflected glimpse of light in one of the mirrors.
“How many of you work here?” she asked.
“Four,” Mykol replied. “Only two of us are here at the moment.”
“Precious metal and battery extraction along with memory archival?” she said.
Mykol nodded. “And some repairs, when we’re done with Authority business for the day.” He turned the data stick over in his palm. It was an old one, with a logo he didn’t recognize. These things had once been ubiquitous. They were limited in capacity, and were also once an excellent means of transmitting pernicious computer viruses.
It had been almost a quarter century since the collapse of the internet. According to Provisional Authority Chairman Thomas Gibson, its restoration was imminent. But he had been saying that for almost as long as it had been gone. With his black turtlenecks, trimmed goatee, and placid gaze, Gibson’s was a familiar and seemingly ageless face on the televisions that broadcast Provisional Authority messages—though his commitment to the lives of ordinary people was suspect at best.
“Can you read what’s in there?” she asked. “And transfer it for me?”
“That won’t be a major problem.” Mykol thought for a moment. “This is old PC stuff. It’s definitely an antique. I’ll have to find a compatible jack, then link that up to the main system.”
He felt confused—and worried. This woman was Provisional Authority. She had access to technology that people who lived outside those walls—such as Mykol—could only dream about. Not only that, her uniform marked her as an officer—Authority staff at the compound took orders from her; she had incalculable clout. So what was she doing at Ellison’s?
“Here’s the thing,” she said. He looked into her eyes and saw the flicker of parallel lines that marked her retinal implant. She seemed to be monitoring data input in the lower right quarter of her visual field, judging from the way her gaze flickered. It was well known that Provisional Authority officers and staff also wore complicated biometric monitors—supposedly for their own good, but Mykol was chilled by the idea.
She snapped back to focus on him. “The data on this device is entirely personal. It’s of no value to anyone but me. I’m hoping you can have it converted and copied manually to my wallet.”
“Is this an Authority request?” A wave of anxiety came in hard and tightened its grip around his throat. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in Authority secrets. People sometimes disappeared, the way many vanished during the Consolidation when the Provisional Authority took power after the Grip led to governments collapsing and institutions imploding. The Authority took over operation of civil utilities and started printing its own money; there were nominal governments in capitols throughout the world, but their status was primarily symbolic. The Authority owned the major cities of the world and was accountable only to itself. No matter how soothing Thomas Gibson made his public pronouncements, ordinary people had plenty of reason to fear the Provisional Authority.
Sometimes people still used the term “provisional.” More and more they didn’t.
“No, this is not an official request. Think of it as a favor.”
She looked him over. Her eyes were light brown and would have been luminous even without the sparkle from the implant. Mykol felt like an unwashed mutt as he took in her effortless poise. Then he reminded himself of the danger she represented.
“OK, I can look at it that way,” he told her. “It’s just there’s paperwork—”
“I’d like to avoid official channels, if you don’t mind.” She glanced out at the street; a couple was walking past, pushing a baby stroller, carefully maneuvering around the holes in the sidewalk.
He laid the stick on the counter. “Can I please ask—”
“This was a bad idea,” she said, momentarily distracted as her eyes flicked left to right. She radiated purpose and intelligence. “I’ll just leave now. Thank you for your time.”
He didn’t want her to go. The prospect made his insides lurch. “Wait, wait. Nothing official,” he said. “I can do that for you. Got it.”
She turned and seemed to notice him for the first time. For a suspended moment they were ordinary people, a young man and a young woman. It was thrilling. Then she was all business again.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said in a neutral tone. “Just so you know, you won’t be dealing with anything sensitive. It’s primarily photos and letters and personal messages. It belonged to a family member who’s long deceased.”
Everyone had plenty of those. Mykol had his own mother, his two siblings, his aunts and uncles, his grandparents—all still alive when he was born but who succumbed during the pandemic.
“It’ll just take me a day or so. It’s nothing too difficult, but I have to fit it into my work quota,” Mykol told her. He paused. “Look. If you want to keep this private and accessible only to your wallet, you should come back and I’ll transfer it manually. I can do that without uploading into the system.”
She gave him a wonderful smile. He was almost certain she was about his age, although that would be all they had in common. He had heard that the younger officers were the talented elite employed on massive undertakings Gibson alluded to in public pronouncements but never really explained.
In his way, he was working on one, too: the Chrysalis Project, which he had been told was going to unlock a new future. He extracted batteries, metals, and memories—though he had no real idea why.
He wished he could ask her about Provisional Authority tech, not to mention the work Gibson said was underway to restore the internet. But asking questions of the Authority wasn’t a winning strategy.
“I would be so grateful,” she said. “What do I owe you?”
He thought about it. If she came back, seeing her again would be enough.
“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be a fun challenge,” he said. “Let me make sure I can read everything first. Sometimes data can be pretty fragged on these old devices.”
“I have faith in you,” she said. “And we can keep this entirely between us? I promise I’m not putting you in any danger. It’s…just important to me.”
“Then I guess I’ll have faith in you as well.” Mykol attempted a smile that, he sensed from her uneasy reaction, came across more like a grimace.
What a clown. Granted, he had never been particularly accomplished when it came to women, but this one had managed to obliterate all but his most rudimentary social skills.
“I’m Jenn,” she said and held out her hand. When she was gone, he stared for a long time at the pool of hazy sunlight where she had been, watching dust motes dance.