The Shape of Knowing

The Shape of Knowing

The lights went out on a Wednesday in October, which was an inconvenient day for the end of the world. Don Anderson was in the shop behind his home on Route 210, cutting a section of angle iron with a hacksaw. He'd had that hacksaw for damn near fifty years and saw no reason to use anything else.

He stopped when the booms happened. Not familiar booms. They weren’t gunshots or errant outputs from teenage mufflers. They were the kind that come when everything blows at once.

Don stood still and listened. He walked inside and tried the radio. Every station was unified in static. Realizing this was going to cause a ruckus he didn’t want any part of, he filled the percolator with coffee and water, and waited for the neighbors to arrive.

Everything still worked inside the house, as he expected. Even if what he'd heard was the demise of all forty-three of the county’s transformers, his ranch was wired to a bank of two hundred and thirty-five recycled car batteries in one of his outbuildings, all of which were charged by solar panels and small windmills he'd installed through the years. People thought he was crazy, but he suspected those were the same people who’d be knocking on his door soon.

He tried the radio twice over the next two days. Same static. Which told him something, not everything. A local outage would have left at least one station standing. Certainly the stations in Enterprise, Huntsville, and Mobile – all of which had powerful transmission ranges – would’ve been functioning. They weren’t.

This was bigger than local. How much bigger, he couldn't say, and there was no way to find out. His cellphone showed an error screen he'd never seen before. The internet was simply gone. Not slow, not buffering, just gone. The way a road is gone when the bridge washes out.

He set the radio back on the shelf between a can of WD-40 and an electrical code book from 1978, and accepted that he was going to have to work with what he could see.

By Friday evening, even strangers were showing up at Don's ranch house, all of them demanding to know why his lights were still on.

* * *

The town of Myrtle, Alabama had a population of eight hundred and twelve, over six hundred of whom were remote workers who'd moved there to take advantage of rock-bottom real estate prices and the County Supervisors' decision in 2031 to install an AI infrastructure that rivaled most larger towns in the state. The county had built the fiber and wireless backbone to support it, and for four years the connectivity had been as good as anywhere.

The other two-hundred were old-timers. People whose families had been on the land for centuries before the only jobs available were for people who could program artificial intelligence platforms.

Myrtle had a post office, a grain elevator, a feed store, and until forty-eight hours ago, a reliable connection to all of it. AI managed the water treatment plant, the volunteer fire department's dispatch system, the inventory at the feed store, and the emergency response protocols for exactly this kind of event.

Great for the new work-from-home crowd. Not so great for the old-timers.

But Don didn't pay attention to all that. It wasn't his fight to have.

What he did pay attention to, by the third day, was the collective anxiety of the not-knowing. Nobody in Myrtle knew what had happened. Nobody could find out. Cell towers were dark. The internet was dark. The gas pumps at Tillman's Sunoco sat inert, their little screens blank. The three cars that had tried to drive the forty minutes to Enterprise for information had come back with reports that the city was dark too. The drivers had burned a half tank getting there and back and weren’t eager to try again.

The nearest place that might have answers was Birmingham, two hours away, and nobody was confident they had enough gas for a round trip or the good sense to make it worth the risk.

Nobody except Don, who kept a two-hundred gallon drum of unleaded near the equipment shed for his tractors. He could have driven to Birmingham and back sixteen times on what he had. He didn't, because Birmingham wasn't going to tell him anything that changed what needed doing at the ranch.

Word about Don’s electricity got around the way any gossip does in a town of eight hundred. Everyone understood what it meant: Don was the only one with power and the only one who could give them hope. Within a week, three neighbors had quietly moved their vehicles closer to the equipment shed, just in case. Don didn't say anything. He wasn't the kind of man who controlled things for their own sake. Plus, he had the only key to the lock on the nozzle.

What nobody said aloud, but everyone understood by day ten, was that they might be on their own for a long time. Maybe weeks. The uncertainty was its own kind of weight, separate from hunger or cold, and in some ways harder to manage.

Don found it clarifying. When you don't know the scope of a problem, you work the part of it you can see. That had always been his method.

* * *

He was seventy-two years old and had never graduated high school, a fact he mentioned without embarrassment whenever it came up, the way you mention that you've never been to Florida. It simply hadn't happened, and Florida had turned out to be unnecessary.

He'd spent three years at Coffee County High School in the 1960s, learning some things and resisting others, and then had stopped going because there had been work available and work had felt more real than school, which it was.

From there, his education proceeded on its own terms: Harlan, the eighty-something electrician, had explained circuits by comparing them to water moving through pipes until the abstraction became physical and the physical became intuitive. Three decades of construction, where the consequences of misunderstanding load paths were structural and immediate. A lifetime of problems that never came with instructions.

Friends marveled when he’d moved a baby grand piano to a second-story loft by himself using nylon straps and a hand-powered winch. All of them asked why Don hadn’t called them for help and he wondered why he would.

When a neighbor had chosen to sell their hundred year-old farmhouse to the work-from-home crowd, Don lifted one corner of the settling house four inches using hydraulic car jacks, working in quarter-inch increments over the course of two weeks, calculating load distribution on a yellow legal pad with a No. 2 pencil. Home inspectors never noticed and the sale went through without a hitch.

Another time, he suspended himself in a backhoe bucket sixty feet above a valley floor to bolt and seal a crumbling rock face, directing the operator by hand signal, working the basalt seam with a modified hydraulic pump while the county engineer who had declared the job impossible stood at the cliff edge and watched in silence.

That engineer – a University of Alabama man, PE licensed, sharp as a tack – had walked up afterward, shaken Don's hand, and asked him where he'd studied geotechnical work.

"Didn't," Don said plainly. “Engineers don’t get things done. They just tell you all the reasons why you can’t.”

The man scoffed, kicked the dirt, got back into his shiny new truck, and drove away without more words.

* * *

By the following Monday, twelve people were living at Don's place, sleeping on cots in outbuildings and the finished basement. By Thursday it was thirty, mostly older folks and women with babies. His makeshift electricity meant warmth, which meant safety, which meant – in the specific terror of a world whose nervous system had just been removed – the possibility that someone knew what to do.

The power setup had taken him six years to build, starting around 2028 when electric bills had started climbing and he'd decided, in his own methodical way, that dependency was a form of debt he didn't want to carry. He'd sourced decommissioned car batteries. First from junkyards, then from EV recyclers who were pulling packs from first-generation vehicles. From there, he built his own battery management system from components, wiring the cells while thinking back to everything Harlan had taught him.

He did what made sense to him physically. The solar panels on the barn roof came from an auction in Mobile. The wind turbines were kits he'd modified, replacing the proprietary controllers with ones he'd built himself because the originals required firmware updates and he didn't want anything on his property that required permission to work.

The system wasn't elegant by any measure. But it had run his ranch continuously for four years. And as the outage continued, it was the only thing in the County that mattered.

* * *

As days wore on, more people gravitated to the ranch. Don put them to work, which was the only thing he figured would keep the fear from rising.

The water situation was first. The town's treatment plant ran on grid power and was offline. Don walked the system with Max Mobley, who ran the feed store and had a practical mind. Together, they identified six old hand-pump wells on nearby properties, all sealed since the 1990s, that could be restored in a day's work. Don had the fittings. He always had the fittings.

Heat was second. October in southern Alabama was not February in Minnesota, but the cold was coming, and the houses in Myrtle were mostly electric. He organized the wood supply, assigned the willing-and-able to a wood-chopping crew, and drew up a neighborhood map of heat-sharing on a piece of cardboard with a black marker. Old people and families with young children were always the highest priority. He assigned each one a host house within walking distance. It wasn’t complicated. It just required someone to think about it.

Food was third. Both for humans and animals. The AI inventory system at the feed store was offline, which meant nobody knew exactly what was in the back storeroom. Don had Max spend an afternoon in there with a flashlight and a clipboard doing what the system had been doing automatically for years: counting things. There was more than people feared. There always was.

"How do we ration it?" asked Constance Helms, who had been the county's emergency management coordinator before the county had outsourced most of her functions to the regional AI system in 2033. She had a graduate degree in public administration and had spent two years feeling professionally redundant. She didn’t feel redundant now, standing in a dim storeroom next to a seventy-two-year-old man who hadn't finished high school, watching him do arithmetic in his head.

"You take the total calories, divide by the number of people, divide by thirty days," Don said. "That gives you your daily number. Then you back out the stuff that won't keep and eat that first. The rest you store cold." He gestured toward the unheated back storeroom. "It's forty-four degrees in here. That's a refrigerator."

Constance looked at him. "You just did that math in your head."

"How else would you do it under the circumstances?" he asked.

Before they were done, Don had assigned the local butcher and her cousins to the task of assessing livestock and husbandry plans for a long-term meat supply. Several of the newcomers – almost all of whom had side-yard chicken coops – were charged with counting roosters and collecting eggs. Don told them to work in coordination with the butcher, and they did.

Children over twelve were tasked with checking neighborhood gardens and harvesting remaining crops, all under the supervision of the middle-school principal.

Nobody was particularly happy with their given chores, but as days went by they settled in. They really didn’t have a choice.

* * *

After two months, people had stopped staring at their phones. The last of the batteries had died just days after the outage, and nobody had marked the occasion, which was its own kind of occasion. Don was willing to share his electricity for a lot of things, but not for charging devices that no longer served any purpose.

Phones, computers, and tablets all disappeared into pockets and drawers and eventually stopped coming out at all by December. Children, who had never known a world without screens, surprised everyone, including themselves, by inventing one. They organized foot races down Route 210. They built a basketball court from a plywood backboard and a hoop salvaged from somebody's garage. They argued about rules and settled the arguments and played until dark, which came earlier every day now.

Most of the newcomers had arrived in Myrtle with money – real money, by the old measures. Savings accounts. Crypto wallets. Stock portfolios that had been doing well right up until the moment they became inaccessible and then irrelevant in the same instant. When they’d first arrived, they expected that this would count for something. It didn't. The feed store didn't take Venmo. The butcher didn't accept wire transfers. What the butcher accepted was help, and labor, and the occasional side of something you'd grown yourself. The newcomers learned this the way people learned most important things: by necessity.

Cash still had some value, for those who had it. Don had it. He kept it in coffee cans in the storm cellar – not because he'd anticipated this particular catastrophe, but because he'd always believed that a thing you couldn't hold in your hand wasn't entirely yours.

In January, he dispatched eight of the hybrid vehicles. He fueled them from the drum, figuring they’d go the farthest on one tank. Then he armed each driver with an envelope of cash and a handwritten list: seed packets, canned goods, anything that would keep. Get answers if you can. Turn back at half a tank.

Seven of them drove until they ran out of road or reason and never came back. The eighth was Cyndi Pruitt, twenty-nine years old, a UX designer from Chicago who had moved to Myrtle one year earlier for the cheap rent. She stayed because she'd surprised herself by liking it.

She had followed Don's instructions to the letter, which was what saved her. At the halfway point on her tank she turned around, even though the highway ahead of her was empty and silent and she still hadn't found anyone who knew anything – or anyone at all, really. She drove back through three dark towns and one dark city and arrived at the ranch just after nightfall, her Prius loaded to the ceiling with seed packets and canned goods pulled from shelves that nobody had been left to tend.

The old-timers gathered around her in the barn. Someone put a blanket over her shoulders. Someone else produced a jar of whiskey with hot water and honey, which was exactly right for the occasion. Cyndi sat with her hands around the jar and told them what she'd seen, which wasn't much, and what she hadn't seen, which was everything: people, lights, open businesses, moving vehicles, any sign that somewhere beyond Coffee County the world was gathering itself back together.

When she finished, the barn was quiet.

Don stood up from the hay bale he'd been sitting on. He looked at Cyndi for a moment with the particular expression he reserved for problems that had just revealed their actual size. Then he looked at the rest of them.

"We best get to work," he said.

He was already outside before anyone stood up.

* * *

By February, people noticed that Don had gotten quieter. Not unfriendly, never unfriendly. Just economical in a new way, as if he'd decided that every word needed to earn its place. He spent more time with the people who'd been paying the closest attention: Max at the battery bank, Constance over her supply ledgers, the Cannady boy who still asked better questions than most adults. He watched them work and corrected them less than he used to, which they understood, without being told, meant they were getting it right.

He gave Cyndi the coffee cans from the storm cellar, what was left in them, and the combination to the lockbox where he kept the rest. He told her what the ranch would need come spring and what it wouldn't and how to tell the difference. She wrote it all down in a spiral notebook she kept in her jacket pocket. She didn't ask him why he was telling her instead of someone else but had sense enough to know that the question didn't matter. Don was a guy who always had the answers but rarely spoke them out loud.

On a Sunday morning in March, Don wasn't at the stove watching the percolator when folks straggled in from the outbuildings. That had never happened before. Later, they found him outside the equipment shed, sitting against a wall with his legs straight out in front of him and his hands open in his lap, the way a man sits when he's finally run out of things to do. Someone said he looked like he'd just figured something out.

They buried him on the south slope, where the ground was softest. Max said a few words, and Cyndi didn't say anything because she couldn't. Others stood very straight the whole time, which felt like their own kind of words.

That afternoon, without anyone calling a meeting or making a plan, people went back to work. Seeds went into the ground. Wells were checked. The wood crew split what was left of the pile. Somewhere on Route 210, the children were playing, the sound of them carrying up through the slash pines to where the adults were working, which was exactly where Don would have wanted everyone to be.

Nobody asked AI what to do next. They just carried on.