The Middle of Now—

It was an apocalyptic break-up. A scorched-earth end to a relationship that had been heading toward forever, with the first stop a two-step down the aisle. Everything in Eleanor’s world was on fire. Singed beyond ash. Ever since she had found Lucien with her… never mind. Doesn’t matter. Didn’t matter. Yes it did! It mattered. The whom he had chosen to cheat on her with (her bff! her maid of honor! her bestie who wore the other half of a broken-heart necklace), and the place they’d been in (her bed!), and the fact that every last one of her friends seemed to know about it but hadn’t told her—all of that mattered.

Even the robot doorman had known, and he had kept his metal lips sealed shut. Oil wouldn’t heat on his tongue.

At first, she couldn’t even see straight. The rage was so white-hot it obliterated common sense. If she’d had powers—special powers, secret powers—she would have blown him to bits with her mind. Instead, she seethed. She stewed.

She was a CUP (customer unification proxy), the flesh-and-blood person on the end of the line you reached if none of the robots in a row could help. The one you landed on after screaming “representative” and “operator” and “care specialist” at the top of your lungs into your phone, and the service she gave in the few days after Lucien moved out was epic. Too epic. She’d received a warning from her supervisor, a second warning, was put on leave.

She’d implored her supervisor to listen to the recordings of the calls. These people were impossible, Eleanor had explained, and her supervisor had agreed and still said she should have handled the situations better. That’s what happened when your boss was AI. There wasn’t even anyone to say goodbye to in the office. All of the other cubicles contained computers. Eleanor was the last human on the floor.

The first wave of AI counterparts had been humanoid. To make the living coworkers feel more at ease. But as the cities were taken up more and more by robots, there had been less of a need for softening that blow. No more skin-like textures. No more “ums” and “uhs” in the programming. They were sleek, shiny, and decidedly both un-human and inhuman.

Which was why falling in love with a person had been so unique.

What to do next?

She didn’t know.

She and her fiancé had been planning a wedding for 5 of their closest. Their nearest and their dearest. She’d used all of her savings to buy the dress with the antique lace imported from Jupiter. A dress that was now dip-dyed and tattered. She’d shredded the lace with a razor. And the two people she would have, could have, gone to in the past—her fiancé and her best friend—were in Hawaii together. Real and true Hawaii. Not Hawaii on a big screen. Not Hawaii in a movie theater with the scent of sand and sunscreen piped in.

How was that fair?

All the gifts would have to be returned. Or they would have had to be returned if she had not broken every single one of them. Some with a hammer. Others by dropping them off her balcony. The satisfaction of hearing the gravy boat explode had taken a bit of the edge off.

Since she didn’t have to go to work, and was most likely going to lose her job, she decided to leave town.

A week without her phone. She could do it. If anyone could do it, Eleanor could do it.

She couldn’t do it. How could she think she was going to be able to do this? 24 hours x 7 days without any type of communication. Just her, a tent, her little campfire, a book. On paper. Like the old days. She’d recently read that the average person spent 14 hours a day on their phones. Most people only needed a tiny portion of their brains to flip the levers, if they were machine monitors. Or they didn’t work at all, and in that case, their phone hours were often even higher.

It was going to be good for her. That’s what she told herself on her rage-filled hike out to the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere! Who went to the middle of nowhere? She definitely didn’t. But she’d reached a point in which she decided that doing scary things had to be better than doing either nothing or the same thing, and neither of those were working well for her at the moment.

Her family hadn’t camped. She’d grown up in the era of changing the screens on the walls to look like Niagara Falls or the Grand Teton National Park. No reason to ever explore, get grit under your nails, get your sneakers dirty. Why white water raft when you could dry water raft from the comfort of your own living quarters?

But she’d been with her fiancé once on one of those “experience” vacations. Ex. Ex. She had to get used to that. So she knew a little bit… she knew nothing. But she’d bought a backpack, and a sleeping bag, and she’d studied the route, and she’d practiced building a fire (using matches of course, she was not a two-twigs type of chick), and she brought along that thick paperback she’d always meant to read, and she had food for the journey, and two bottles of whiskey in case. Just in case. She wouldn’t have to. But just in case.

Also, she had a deeper purpose for going. For setting fire. She had all of the photos she’d printed of him. And all of the special ephemera. The little love notes. The candy wrappers. The remnants of good times.

She was going before the main season, and she found a place she thought would be unattended, unadorned, off the path. She wanted solitude. She got enough ’tude doing customer service five days a week. She wanted quiet, or if there was chatter, she wanted birds and chipmunks. Real live ones. Not the animatronics that habited the local “parks” now. The wilderness where she was going had been preserved almost by accident. Almost all of nature was behind glass now, but this particular park had been difficult to corral due to wily topographical features (read fault lines), and until the scientists plus developers had figured out a containment strategy, it was wild.

After she’d found the perfect spot to bed down, she set up camp as well as she could. Which turned out wasn’t very well at all. The robot saleschick—built of metal, but wearing lipstick, because the developers thought that was cute—had made tent-setting-up look easy. Anyone could do it. If a robot could…

But she struggled. First night, she’d slept in her sleeping bag on top of the tent.

Second night, she’d gotten the hang of the campfire, and she’d torched the photos she’d brought of Lucien as well as the other half of her bestie necklace and done a little made up dance around the fire, gilded sparks shooting into the air as she murmured an incantation she made up on the spot. She daubed herself with ebony soot. She ripped off all her clothes. She asked the universe for guidance. She begged mother earth for a man who would love only her.

Then she felt better. After, she felt as if a weight had been removed from the pit of her stomach. Her hair was loose down her back in ropy curls. Her body ached, but in a good way. She was cleansed. The fireflies seemed to glimmer messages to her in the night sky and the very stars spelled out her name.

For a whole day, she basked in the new sensation.

The next night was when everything changed. The next night was when a stranger entered the grove. She was aware that there wasn’t anyone else nearby, but she didn’t feel worried at first. People were allowed to walk around. She was there. It was a park. He came closer, and he said, “Are you okay?”

Why wouldn’t she be. Sure, she hadn’t gotten the tent up exactly right although it was definitely upright, and the fire kept going out, and it had turned out that she hadn’t read the book because it was boring, but the whiskey had been a very good idea. Should she tell him she had bear spray? Because she didn’t. Mace? Ditto to the no.

She assessed him. He didn’t appear crazy. She knew crazy. She dealt with crazy 9-5. He was tall, about her age, longish hair, plaid shirt, khakis. He had a backpack. He looked like every other wayward wanderer.

He put his hands up in a way that she took to mean he wasn’t dangerous, but is that the way a dangerous man would behave?

“Are you okay?” he asked again.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

He took a step closer. She realized then that she hadn’t heard another noise for hours. No planes over head. No radio in the distance from a far off campsite.

She eyed him carefully. He was a little too close to the altar she’d built, trying to appease the gods or goddesses of love, asking for them to send a man who wasn’t a faker. A cheater. Who knew how to take of himself. Not a mama’s boy. Not a…

“Do you not know?”

“Know?”

“You don’t know.” He looked at her and was there envy in his eyes for a moment? “There was an event,” he said, finally.

“Like a wedding?” Was he the groom? Was this a run-away groom situation? Had he discovered at the very last minute that…

“No…”

He wasn’t dressed like a groom, anyhow. Whiskey brain, whiskey brain.

“I’m not entirely sure how to tell you this.” He sat down. About ten feet away from her. She wished she had drunk a little bit less. He didn’t appear dangerous, but again, was that his trick? Here she was, on her own, in the middle of now—

“I’m just so glad to see someone, anyone,” he said. “It’s going to take me a minute…”

He took a deep breath, and then he took out his phone and held it up to her. “Can I show you something?”

She had a knife. That’s what she had. For cutting her fruit into pieces. She reached for it surreptitiously, slid it under her pillow, and nodded.

He came forward with his phone and showed her. “There was an attack,” he said. “They took out SF. NY. LA. Paris. London.”

“What kind of an attack? Like a nuke? Wouldn’t we be dead? Who’s the ‘they?’”

“No, this was new. The cities are erased. There were a few photos at first, a few video feeds.” He swiped to show her. “And now there’s apparently no electricity. My battery’s almost dead. There’s nothing, as far as I can tell, out there. At least, nothing in the cities. There was a rumor it was the robots. But who knows? Aliens is another possibility. I haven’t seen anyone in two days.”

“I’ve been here for four,” she said. “I think.”

“I was overnighting,” he told her, “and I was mostly without service, but as I got closer I had a few panicked texts with those photos and that one video, and I came back to the parking lot was empty. The visitor center was gone.

“Gone?”

“Like, just not there.”

She wished again she was less tipsy. Although she was feeling more sober by the second.

“Can you prove this to me?”

Truth was she’d wondered why she had seen nobody. When she’d gone camping with Lucien, there was always the odd backpacker, the lovers, the arguing couple. And she had heard nothing except bird song. Not since her campfire.

He thought for a moment, and then he said, “If we walk up to the ridge, what do you expect to see?”

She could imagine in her mind. The little twinkling lights. The way the other side of the bay looked. The bridge.

“Before all the lines went down, one of the news sites broadcasted that this had to be a new weapon. All buildings, all vehicles, everything just poof. Gone. As if it had never been there. No rubble. No destruction. An empty slate. No poison. No gas. Just…”

He made a gesture. A gesture of nothingness.

“Show me,” she said.

They walked up the path by the moonlight. It wasn’t a difficult terrain, but when she stumbled slightly, he righted her, and then took his hands immediately away if she’d given him a spark. She shot him a look over her shoulder, and she thought he was looking back. It was difficult to tell what she felt. Was this some creepy lunatic who was going to push her off a cliff? Was she dreaming? Hallucinating?

They reached the crest and she saw that he was right. There was… nothing.

“Could be a power out?” she tried.

“But you know it’s not.”

She did.

“Are we the only people left?”

“I don’t know.” he said. There was a silence as they both acknowledged that there weren’t that many people left anyway. Not since the robots.

“So what do we do now?”

He didn’t say it and she didn’t say it, but she heard the answer clearly.

Then he said, “Stick together.” And she was elated by the answer. Yeah. Sticking together sounded good. But on the way back down, she started to cry. Because the weight hit her. And he led her to a rock, and they leaned against it together, and she was aware once more of the silence. No sounds that weren’t nature. Even when she’d been deep in the wood, there had been planes. A rumble. A vibration.

He said, “We really don’t know what happened yet. Maybe…”

But she thought she knew. Maybe she knew. Although she didn’t want to believe. A campfire. An altar. A wish. An incantation. An imploring to the gods...

They were quiet again, and then they made their way to her campsite. He fixed the fire so that it burned in golds and purples. He helped her right her tent. So that it looked like the tent on the picture on the box and not a heap on a stick.

He said, “Whatever happened, we’ll get through this together.” And he tilted her face to look at his, and she saw kindness in his eyes, and then she saw something else.

He stirred the fire and then he plucked one of the incinerated photos, a corner of a photo, from the embers.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Ancient history.”

“And this?” and he pulled out the charred remains of her best-friends-forever necklace.

“A relic,” she said.

“And that?”

“An altar.”

“There’s whiskey on it.”

“You can have some if you want…”

They sat by the campfire and he took a swig and she took a swig, and he moved closer to her, and she felt a connection to him. A throb. A pulse.

And he pulled him to her, and they kissed.

The embers of the fire crackled and glowed. Hissed and spit. And that was the only other sound, aside from chitters of chipmunks and the low moans of two humans making love by a fire. In the middle of the woods. In the middle of the night. In the middle of now—