Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Thirty

In the early days of Those Who Came’s settlement of the Quarter, after the banishment of Those Who Went Away from these parts, everyone kept dozens of horses to pull the various implements they used to plow the fields, seed and harvest. These were workhorses – Percherons, Clydesdales, and Belgians – massive things that once knights had rode into battle and now they were tied to yokes and made to pull with all their strength. As the threshing machines and the like grew larger and larger, it became necessary to have more and more horses to pull them. Tractors were available, but they were prohibitively expensive, especially compared to the horses. Just getting them to these parts would have cost a fortune.

When winter came there was no feeding that many horses. Any grain they had was sold, milled for flour or kept for seed. The little hay people cut was reserved for the milk cow and the couple of horses needed to pull the sledge into town or over to the neighbours, the one thread that connected the settlers to each other. The rest would be let loose for the winter to make their way through it as best they could.

The horses would gather into herds wandering the countryside. Much of the land was still unbroken in those days so there was grass beneath the snow that they could dig down to. There were trees and bushes in sloughs and other low lying areas where water gathered that they could huddle in for shelter. It was hard living, especially if the winter was cold and the snow deep. Not all of them saw the spring come, when they would be rounded up to plant the fields.

This was before electricity came, before telephone wires and transformers, when the roads were for wagons and buggies and not vehicles. In those days you could step out on winter’s day and hear the cold moving in the air. The frost cracking, they would call it. You can’t hear it now, no matter how hard you try, there is too much ambient noise, except in the most remote places far from any habitation. Then you would scurry to the outhouse, not wanting to linger, and you could hear the frost crack and the stamping of horses hooves as they galloped far away through the snow.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Twenty Eight

It has been cold for nearly a week now, each day more frigid than the last. There is no end in sight, not with it being February. A cold snap can turn into a cold month without warning. Our ongoing battles against the grippe reborn has everyone’s patience frayed, and that will only grow more so as the weather forces us indoors and the only indoors allowed us is our homes or our workplaces. For so many of us that is the same place.

In other years there is something pleasurable about miserable weather – cold and snow and rain – forcing us to stay indoors. It is a respite from the usual obligations of seeing people and doing things. Now we have spent a year excusing ourselves from seeing people and frankly could do with some obligations to break the monotony. Though I suppose it would only take one party filled with tedious conversation to put an end to that desire.

There are those who talk about how we shouldn’t let the cold stop us from getting outdoors and enjoying ourselves. They talk of layering with the fervency of an evangelist looking to convert the heathen. If you dress appropriately you will be warm. And having spent long hours out working on the coldest of days in the Lost Quarter I can confirm this is true. If you dress in full winter gear you will be warm, at least for a few hours.

That doesn’t make the experience pleasant, however. The air still burns in your lungs and the snot freezes in your nose. Any moisture from your breath stings your cheeks. You have to remain moving constantly or the cold will begin to seep in, and because you are so bundled up movement is more challenging. The simplest of tasks become difficult. You dare not take your gloves off, yet how do you clasp a hammer or a wrench without doing so?

No, I do not miss those days. It would take an hour after you came inside for your hands and feet to feel normal again. Your cheeks would burn as the heat came into them. There was some satisfaction at a job well done, and a hope that you wouldn’t have to do it all again the next morning.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Twenty Six

It is over a month now since the attempted coup south of the border and a couple of weeks since the new president was sworn in, relieving the planet of the delusions of grandeur of the man who believed he was king. There have been countless news stories about the speed with which the new administration is moving to undo all the harm the previous one did, as well as to enact an agenda to actually confront the grippe reborn as Trump never did.

Uttering his name before was enough to make a person wince. It was to immediately conjure into the mind his sneer and grimace, his oddly coloured tan, and that droning voice that never ceased sputtering. What is so surprising about the last weeks is how quickly all that has disappeared. He is no longer upon the news, his consigliere’s are no longer invited to speak for him, and his banning from social media means neither his followers nor his detractors need whip themselves into a frenzy at his latest missives.

His absence is palpable, a relief. Even with his impeachment trial approaching, the story is more about how the various factions of his party will respond than about him. He is a void, a punctured balloon with the air let out. His only power was the office he found himself in, but he didn’t truly understand the nature of that power or how to use it effectively. Had he, he might still be there, lawfully or unlawfully.

How long through his four year reign did I wait for this moment when whatever spell he cast would fail and people would see him for what he was. So many of his followers still look in his direction, but the vulnerability he has demonstrated in the aftermath of his failed coup and the investiture of a new president means that they will gradually drift away to other causes, though a few will still be casting about for someone who will take up his fallen mantle. Will they find someone?

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Twenty Three

A cold day again, which can hardly be a surprise given the month, February being generally the coldest in these parts. March tends to be the snowiest as winter coughs and sputters into spring. This week has been cold and snowy both, light dustings of flakes falling throughout the days, which have gotten progressively colder.

This morning my love and I ventured out into the darkness to buy some breakfast. It was calm and quiet, hardly anyone about on the streets. The wind, when it came, was biting, cutting through our many layers. There was frost in my beard by the time we returned home, the whiskers stiff. Returning inside to the warmth of our home was invigorating as always. That is the joy of winter, those first moments of warmth coming back through your body.

There is a lot of winter still to come – apparently we are entering a polar vortex next week, which sounds ominous – just as we still have a long way to go in our battle with the grippe reborn. The numbers here have come down from their terrible highs in December and the hospitals are no longer filled with those suffering from the dread lord’s powers. Next week we shall have a loosening of the quarantine protocols, which I admit does make me somewhat uneasy even as it is welcome. The fear is that we shall end up right back where we were in December and have to enact more strictures just as the weather, hopefully, begins to warm.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Twenty One

He came to the central places of the Lost Quarter from overseas, a northern country, so he was thought to be well-suited to living in the new world being created there after the banishment of Those Who Went Away. By the time he arrived there was already a rail line and a growing town. There were roads, of a sort, mostly wagon trails, but they served their purpose.

He was one of hundreds who arrived in that era, coming to try their luck on the land. It was assumed that he had been a farmer in his home country, but he never said one way or the other. He spoke little of his past, of what he had left behind to come make himself anew. Not entirely, for his accent immediately identified him, as everyone’s accents did in those days. There were plenty of others from other nations overseas and as many more from the Eastern Dominions.

The first years were hard, of course, and he was alone. He broke the tall grasses the bison herds and Those Who Went Away had once traversed, breaking for all time that link with the past on that piece of soil. A quarter section, north of town, with the promise of another if he could last five years. He lived in a sod shack those first years, as so many of them did, a rather grim habitation, but it kept the cold and wind out.

After a good crop in his third year he had enough money to buy lumber for a small house, which he built with the help of his neighbours. They all enjoyed his company. Those whose quarters were farther north would stop by at his place on their way into town. His closest neighbours would come by on those long summer evenings and they would play cards and talk while the sun set.

The crops were all good in those first years and he quickly made decent money, using some of it to buy a few cattle. The calves he would sell in the fall, keeping one to feed himself over the winter. After five years the government signed over the second quarter and he made plans to buy some larger equipment to make the work easier.

One fall he was in town after selling his calves, having stopped off at the hotel for a drink with a few locals before heading home. His friends asked about how the sale had gone and he told them he had made a tidy profit, well-pleased with himself. He was home before sundown, though the air had already begun to turn cold.

The next day one of the neighbours spotted smoke in the air coming from near his place. He raced over with his son, fearing that a field or some grass had caught fire and it would be spreading fast, for it had been a dry couple of weeks. When they arrived they saw the small house had been burnt to the ground, though miraculously the flames hadn’t spread, and they worked furiously to stamp out any dying embers. There was no sign of the man who had lived there within the burnt ruins. The horse he used to ride into town was still tied up in the shed out back. The police were called in and they conducted a perfunctory investigation when they finally arrived several days later. He was declared officially dead after a time, and as he had no will or known heirs, the land was given back to the government. Some years later someone else came to the Quarter to try their luck on it again.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Nineteen

One of the strange things about our struggles with the grippe reborn in these parts is that the dread lord is mostly an unseen foe. Though the numbers of those he touched was rising precipitously in December, it was still a small part of the total population of the Quarter. Many, including myself and my love, know no one here directly who has suffered from his dread powers. Those who do suffer do so hidden away, isolated in their homes or secure wings of hospitals where no one can see them.

That has, naturally, made it harder for many to see the need to maintain their vigilance in the face of the dread lord’s depredations. If you know no one who has been affected, then it is a simple thing to pretend that there is nothing to fear. For me it increases the sense of dread, for the dread lord is out there, operating unseen. If there was tangible evidence of his works it would be a strange kind of comfort. Then I could see what he has wrought and put a face and a name to it. Though it would change nothing about the nature of his power, it would make it explicable in a way.

My love has friends and family the world over, some in the Eastern Dominions, some in the United States, some far overseas and a number have them have suffered from the dread lord’s touch. A daughter of a friend had a fever, but otherwise was fine and the rest of the family did not fall ill. A friend, early on in the ordeal, was so ill she had to be hospitalized. Another friend lost a sibling and a sister in law to the dread lord. She too was touched and though her case was deemed mild she still, two months later, suffers from pain in her chest and shortness of breath.

It is easy to grow inured to the mounting numbers that come out each day. A thousand more touched by the dread lord, hundreds in the hospital and hundreds more fallen. They are just numbers with no context. How do we make ourselves realize that each of them represents a life. That their suffering was uniquely theirs, different from any others, regardless of the outcome, each of them a story worth telling. It is a hard thing to do. Much easier to keep our distance and let them stay empty numbers.  

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Sixteen

I returned to my office for the first time since last March when it became clear the grippe reborn had arrived in these parts and was beyond our control. The weeks leading up to that moment had made what occurred seem an inevitability. It was only a matter of when we too would be forced to adopt quarantine protocols. We speculated on the matter constantly in those days – it was hard to focus and get any work done when the whole world seemed to be sliding off its axis.

I recall that one of my coworkers was in the process of moving to Europe with his family. They had to move up their plans by weeks to ensure they could get out of the Greater Dominion and into Europe before everything was shut down and ended up leaving on one of the last flights out as if they were fleeing a war zone. The quarantine protocols had already been enacted here – I was spending my first week working from home – and we never got a chance to say our goodbyes. They were simply gone.

Returning to the office brought back those memories. I was there because I had been drawn for a gift for participating in a charity drive in November. Before I picked it up  I went to my office to grab the few things I had left behind in my hurried packing last March. Shoes, a baseball cap I kept there in case I went for a walk in the summer sun at lunch. The rest – notebooks and pens, a mug and a French press, a water bottle – I left for whenever it is I return.

Everything was more or less as I remember it being. It felt as though I could sit down and start my work as I always did. It was as though the place had been frozen, out of step with time and all that had happened, a well-preserved insect in amber. I found it strange and eerie walking these familiar hallways, my senses heightened, noticing everything. They were largely empty, as they never were when I was at work before, and there were signs warning about the dread lord everywhere.

As I was gathering my things in my office I heard the card reader beep, announcing that someone else was entering our area. The door opened and someone started down the corridor. I was bent over with my back to the door and by the time I looked up the person was already past the doorway, so I only caught a glimpse of their form. A ghostly blur. By the time I made it to the doorway they had turned down the next corridor and were gone.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Fourteen

The winter cold has arrived in full force this week, the temperature dropping well below zero for the first time this season. I was out for a walk this morning and passed by the river. Already the ice has begun to spread its domain, leaving only a sliver of passage along one shore where the water is free. In some places the water almost looks as though it is slowing, the current ceasing, the streetlights glimmering oddly off it as ice begins to form on the surface.

Yesterday the trees were all clothed in hoar frost, shimmering robes of white that glistened in the sun. Even the sidewalks and other bare spots were coated. It seemed, for a few hours, as though we had entered another world, or some enchantment had been cast upon us all. The sun was bright though and by afternoon the frost had been burned away returning us to the ordinary.

It is snowing now, little specks of flakes appearing, almost as if the cold had conjured them from the air. I watch them hurrying to the ground while the air from the surrounding buildings escapes in rising plumes, dancing in the cold as though it is shivering.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred Twelve

The weather has turned colder after two and half weeks of warm days. But the days are still sunny and bright, the temperature mild for winter. We could not have asked for a more pleasant winter to help us endure the dark, shut-in days of the grippe reborn. There is still a great deal of winter left unfortunately and I am sure that colder days are still to come.

Last week we went into the mountains to spend a few nights in a swanky old hotel, a remnant from the first days when Those Who Came were claiming this country. A strange experience in the midst of the dread lord’s march. The hotel, a vast castle of a place, was largely empty. We had our corner to ourselves and saw only a handful of people the few times we ventured out. Mostly we stayed inside our room, ordering room service and enjoying the glorious mountain views. We sat by a fire outside and drank hot chocolate, wandered the grounds under starlight, and did not have to look at the same walls and views we have had for these last long months.

It was a nice break from what has become a tiring routine. My love, especially was feeling exhausted by work and being trapped by this endless moment. Cabin fever really, a malady that is certainly real in these parts. Among Those Who Came in the early days, after the bitter exile of Those Who Went Away, there were many lone trappers and settlers who went a little mad over those long and lonely winters when the light died and the snow and cold did not relent. It is decidedly not a malady of Those Who Went Away, not then and not now, for they understood what was necessary to survive in these parts and that was a community. Those of us Who Came are still learning that lesson.

We watched the sunrise together, coming over the mountains, the peaks moving from shadow to light, bathed in red and yellow hues, and for a moment we were held still, apart from all the dreariness of the world. Only for a moment, but that was enough.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Three Hundred and Nine

It is odd to be living in a future you read about, or saw in movies. People often complain about the fact that the wondrous future – flying cars, robots, etc. – predicted in the Jetsons and other golden age science fiction has not come to pass. And it is true that future has not arrived. Progress capitalized has fallen. After this terrible year we know now that there are no guarantees of progress and better lives awaiting us sometime in the future.

But that was never the future of my childhood. I read Gibson, Sterling, Effinger and others, watched Blade Runner. Those are the futures we have received, whether we wanted them or not. Corporations with the power of states, doing what they please for unclear purposes. Cabals of criminals, politicians and businessman barely operating in the shadows, with tentacles seemingly everywhere. Endemic corruption making a mockery of the rule of law.

From the Forever Wars of the United States, fuelled by mercenaries at every level, to Russian and Saudi Arabian assassination squads, to drug cartels and Hollywood executives looking to stifle their secrets, we find ourselves in the time of the covert agent for hire. Our movies and fictions are filled with them, just as spies and government agents populated so much of Cold War art.

Every month seems to bring a new story of some facial recognition tech being piloted by police forces somewhere to further public surveillance of individual citizens. Through the Forever Wars it has become evident that all our communication is swallowed up by some entity, sitting on some server stack somewhere, likely never to be looked at. Hacking has become commonplace, an integral part of warfare, spying and politics. As are drones, which it seems will become ubiquitous soon in our everyday lives.  Artificial intelligence runs finance now and, if one believes the claims of its makers, it will soon be colonize other fields of business.

Information technology and the internet are such fundamental pieces of our lives that we don’t even notice them anymore. Whether it is social media, virtual reality, online meetings, smart phones, etc., etc. the online is just a part of ecosystem, the habitat we live in. We are all cyborgs now, forever connected to computers and machines that we rely on for our existence. Perhaps they aren’t integrated directly into our flesh at the moment, but it seems only a matter of time.

It is not just a cyberpunk now, though. I think of the inoculations that are slowly trickling out into the world to combat the dread lord. His presence in the world, and his obscure origins, are the future too, one constantly imagined. The inoculations, developed using technology that would have seemed fantastical thirty, even twenty years ago, is also the future. In Star Trek it takes an episode to develop a cure for a disease, for us it was not much longer really. A few days in one case. The time has been testing the efficacy of the cures.

Science fiction is never about prediction, it is a way to look at the here and now through a different lens. If those futures have been realized in some way it is only because those writers noticed what was present and possible in the world. The future has always been here. It is up to us whether we choose to see it that way.