| Volume 1: Issue 4: Summer | |
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About Old Sage Mike Moses "Wolfy" Wildermuth During the Long Night, early in the times of the Shadow Years, I learned of the gift bestowed upon me by the unholy blasts that I had witnessed on the Last of Days. Its' true nature would take much longer to comprehend. I could not die. The world then was in perpetual twilight and generally cold. Although some of the weather satellite network had been destroyed on that Last Day, the remaining were still attempting to perform their duties. Their robotic brains had not been programmed to operate under such harsh conditions, so their attempts at controlling the weather was a mixed blessing. On one hand, their presence probably prevented a global ice age and saved many lives; on the other hand, the rain and snow they brought was nearly always laced with poisons and radioactive dust. After saying farewell to Gus in his hover truck and Alex and his family in their sub-hover-van, I loaded the back of my hover-vette with supplies that we had salvaged from the other now unused vehicles along the side of the road, and a good supply of the corn-matos, then headed south. All communications, including World Net, were still out, so we had to assume all major cities had been hit. Using this logic, we plotted our courses using a map found in the glove compartment of an old hover-wagon with a broken shield generator. Its' former occupants, without benefit of the shield, were dead within hours of the blasts. We picked the smallest towns we could find on the map and headed for them. Cutting across the fields of corn-matos, I began to see agro-bots working the fields as normal. I stopped and looked for their human supervisors' hover truck, but did not see one. Continuing on, I found the farmhouse, but after approaching, the humanoid figure in the headlights was one of the ghouls that had attacked us two days earlier. Others were coming out of the house and barn as I slammed the turbines into low gear and floored the accelerator. Civilization has many definitions. After the scare at the farm, I avoided other isolated homesteads and I saw no other drivers on the roads. I proceeded as planned to the town I had chosen - Springfield. I had never been there before, but the map showed it to have a population of under 50,000. Surely it would not have been a target. Arriving at the outskirts of Springfield within a few hours, I encountered a barricade of yellow striped saw horses with battery powered flashing lights. I stopped the vette and reached for my net-phone to contact the others, when I heard a voice, "Phones still don't work." Looking up and out of the window, I saw a man in a brown law enforcement officer uniform accompanied by two police bots. The man was carrying an old style shotgun and a stun rifle in his four arms. The extra two arms were protruding from ripped seams in his khaki shirt. A number of his lower ribs had fused and formed an extra set of shoulders giving Sheriff George a barrel like appearance. After a brief exchange with the 4 armed human officer, while his robotic partners scanned and searched my vette, I was allowed to enter the city. The officer told me of a boarding house, incidentally owned by his cousin, that may still have rooms for rent, while eating one of my freshly picked corn-matos, so I headed across town. Establishing myself finally, I moved my supplies to my one room/shared bath apartment and assessed what I had learned from the sheriff and my new landlords. Although Springfield was not hit by any of the nuclear exchange, much of the city's water was still supplied by above ground sources. When the purification plant upstream was destroyed, the town was nearly instantaneously toxified. A third of the town's people died and were still being buried. Very few were unaffected; most were changed somehow. The local doctors were merely treating the effects and marveling at the transformations. As for details on what actually happened on the Last Day, they were as baffled as I. The World Net had suddenly gone dead, right in the middle of the morning news. As it seemed I had little choice, I decided to stay in Springfield. The World Net never did recover, and I could only hope Alex and his family and the big hover trucker, Gus, had managed to find suitable places to resettle. Money became worthless almost immediately. This really did not matter much to me as I had carried little hard cash with me in those days. To pay for my room and board, I became my landlord, Jim's, assistant. It was then I realized how little I really knew about work. Without the flow of goods and replacement parts from the big cities, common items started becoming scarce. The people, always innovative, found ways around most problems, and we all shared and made do with what we had. Many people now also had new abilities that naturally made all of our lives easier. Though still dark and colder than normal and lacking some of our old high tech forms of entertainment, our lives seemed almost to return to a normal pace. In some ways, we even seemed better off. Until one day after about four years, I volunteered to take my hover-vette over to the nearby town of Webston to see how they fared and to try to establish some sort of trade. Although at that time, I still counted myself among the few who did not change, many in Springfield marveled at how I had appeared not to show my age or even to catch the common cold, year after year. But long life, slowed aging and good health were common in my time, and I had been wealthy and privy to the finest medical care. On this trip to Webston, however, I learned I could not be killed. The short drive to Webston was both reassuringly and strangely uneventful. I could see the robots still working the fields in the twilight, unattended, and I wondered where the food stuffs were going after all this time. I made a mental note of that question, as my personal data assistant had lost its hard drive control chip some months earlier. A few small unidentifiable creatures were seen scurrying across the roads, and a small group of diminutive deer with large glowing eyes, lifted their heads toward the vette as I passed. Approaching the town, I had been expecting a roadblock and a generally friendly greeting similar to the sheriff's back in Springfield. Instead, the main road into town appeared deserted. As I drove around the unfamiliar small town, I saw no one clearly, but I thought I saw shadows move within one of the old store fronts. Fearing another pack of ghouls, I turned the vette around and thought about how to break the bad news to them back in Springfield. Suddenly I heard a "POW!" , and the back window of my vette shattered, sending chunks of tinted safety duraglass everywhere. My head hit the steering controls as my shoulder and back was assaulted by a massive force. Someone had fired a blaster. It penetrated the car's shielding, disintegrated the shoulder rest of my seat and nearly took my head off. The Shadow Wars had already begun and the Reign of the Gamma Knights was soon to follow. My heart racing a mile a minute and blood covering my seat, I once again dropped my tortured electric turbines into low gear and raced through the shadowy streets out of town. My vision was blurred at first, but improved as I calmed down, and despite the pain in my chest and back I reached Springfield safely. When I arrived the sheriff ushered me right in. I drove myself straight to the local medical center. The medibot and android nurses who were on duty gave me doses of trimorphedrine and accelera, while taking my vitals and holoray scans of my badly damaged torso. They immediately sent runners to awaken the chief surgeon and head nurse. The robotic anesthesiologist was also being brought online. My right lung, part of my ribcage and part of my heart had been obliterated. Their programming indicated that I should already be deceased. When the chief surgeon arrived, several hours later, he was sure the holoray scans must be mistaken and ordered another set. The second set of holorays showed massive lung tissue loss, but no damage to my heart. This was a great relief to me as I was being prepped for surgery. After I awoke, I was told that the surgeon had decided not to operate, as my lung and bone tissue was apparently rebuilding itself, all I really needed was bed-rest, plenty of fluids, and calcium supplements. It was true. My gift was also to become my curse. I could not be killed, nor, as time would tell, could I age or die a normal death. (read more about Old Sage Mike in Issue #3) |
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