This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

I had forgotten how confusing Boston could be. None of the streets seemed to lead where I wanted to go. For fucks’s sake, all I wanted to do was find someplace to lie down and die. I stumbled and shambled in no particular direction, moving for the sake of being in motion. I looked up when I felt a warm breeze.

“That’s interesting, I wonder what are all those cables are holding up.”

“How did I end up like this?”

“Why am I on this bridge, and why do I smell so bad?”

“Huh, what did you say?”

“What?”

“I said, what did you say?”

“Am I going crazy? I said ‘why do I smell so bad.’”

“I don’t know but you ain’t fuckin lying.”

Had it really come to this? Was I having an argument with myself? I lifted my head once again to try and see the side of the bridge. If I could just get to the edge I could get this over with.

“Just a little further.”

“Where you going?”

“If you must know, and I don’t see how you can’t know already as you are me, I am going to toss myself off this bridge, now will you stop asking questions and let me get on with it?”

That seemed to silence the voice. The exhaustion gripped me, just lifting my leg to the first railing was a struggle. With a pathetic grunt I managed to mount the railing. Visions of the future danced through my head, it was all going to be so horrible, all so depressing. I just wanted it to stop, I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to care. Any second now, I would get tired fall forward and gravity would take care of the rest.

The world started to climb the edges of my vision as I slowly tilted forward. The whole place started to close in like the aperture of a camera, this was the end. I didn’t feel a thing. The darkness engulfed me, and I fell.

“Hey man don’t fuckin die on my couch.”

“Wha…” I creaked. Was I dead? Was this hell? If you are bad and die do you get berated for all eternity?

“You better not die on my couch, not after I hauled your ass all the way here, for a skinny little shit you sure get heavy after a couple blocks.”

That didn’t sound like me, even in my head I never swore that much, and it was a decidedly female voice. I opened my eyes only to be greeted with a searing pain as light from a nearby lamp assaulted my sensitive retinas.

“Could you turn that light off, it is really hurting my eyes.” I pleaded.

I heard the clicking and the pain slowly drained away, to be replaced by a dull all-over ache. It took a second before my eyes adjusted to the dimness. I was in someone’s home. A small efficiency, the kind of place that has the kitchen in the living room, that also happens to be the bedroom, a shit hole for poor people. Exactly the kind of place I had been evicted from recently. I tried to raise my head to get a better look around, but felt dizzy and let it fall back down.

“You need to eat you’re fuckin skin and bones man.”

I tilted my head toward the sound of the voice.

Slowly raising my eyes I saw a pair of old army boots unlaced at the top, fishnet leggings under a checkered skirt, and the bottom of a men dress shirt unbuttoned at the base, to reveal a stomach covered in tattoos. A catholic school girl from punk rock college.

I slouched into a seated position. After the head rush wore off, I could see the rest of her. The dress shirt was also unbuttoned at the top revealing more tattoos, and a head of dirty blond hair barely kept under control by one of those hats Amelia Earhart used to wear. Not your usual attire, but who was I to judge? I smelled like a dead animal and had been wearing the same cloths for weeks.

“Why aren’t I dead?”

“Dead? You fuckin should be, you were climbing over a guard rail at the entrance to the bridge foot path and then fell backwards into traffic. You’re lucky I saw you end pulled your ass onto the sidewalk before someone ran you over.”

“Oh…”

What do you say to someone who saved your life, when maybe you didn’t really want them to?

“Thanks…I’m Quentin.” I said, unable even to hold my hand out for fear that I would fall over from exhaustion.

“I’m Rain, nice to meet you. Why don’t I make you some ramen noodles, and then you can tell me what you meant back there.” Rain said, bending down to take a closer look at me. She had green eyes.

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t remember saying anything.

“You said that I was going to help you save the world.”

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

Newton said that objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Life is kind of like that. Economic and ecological catastrophes shouldn’t be any reason to stop living the American dream. Just because the world was ending didn’t mean anyone had to notice, at least not right away.

I noticed, in fact I more than noticed, I knew. Something inside me had changed after the sub-arctic methane release event (people on the net started calling it the Canadian Gas Chamber). Almost every living thing for 50 miles of the event died during the gas venting, because this was mostly fish and a couple birds, it was quickly pushed off the front page of Google News by the next massive suicide bombing in Iraq.

I knew this and a lot more, because it was now my job to know these things. “My job” might be a generous description of what was happening to me. I couldn’t help but know about what was going on. It was like some giant unforeseen hand was forcing me forward. I spent days surfing the web, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep. The city outside my doors a distant memory.

I sold my car for rent money. The kindly old lady in the apartment above me would bring me food from her meals on wheels cart once a week telling me that I should get out more. The person I saw in the mirror had lost 20 pounds, not an insignificant feat for someone as skinny as I was.

My hair was greasy, my apartment was filthy, and my cloths were stained with sweat. My eyes burned so red I looked like a monster. Through it all I continued to absorb data. Reading, looking, hunting for more, always more. Not just facts but patterns.

Was this madness? Was I going insane? I knew something was happening. I started to see pictures, started to know things before they happened. I can’t tell you how I did it, just that I did it. I wasn’t telling the future, I was reading patterns.

Stuff happened, weird stuff. Winter never came that year for most of North America. I knew it was going to be like that. I predicted things like the burning of Detroit, the rebellion in France, the resurgence of small pox in Africa. If you held a gun to my head and demanded to know how, I couldn’t even start to tell you how I was doing it.

I started to post my “guesses” to an obscure message board set up for a five year old cat food recall. I don’t know why I did it, I just did, something inside me told me it was the right thing to do. This was what I did; this was my life, a sad pathetic little man raving to no one in particular.

What a life it was, glued to the computer 24 hours a day. I couldn’t feel, couldn’t sleep, as the world died outside, I died slowly inside. For an entire year I managed to survive like this. My skin started to turn translucent from lack of sunlight, and my teeth loosened from malnutrition. I was dieing, slowly, but it didn’t matter. Only the data mattered. Only the patterns, the reading, the knowing. If I could just learn enough, maybe I could do something…maybe I could stop it.

Eventually even the love of a mother couldn’t sustain me, and she stopped sending me money. I was quickly evicted, the landlord kept my computer as a down payment on the cleaning bill for the place. I remember him saying, “You’re the weirdest little freak to ever dirty up my place, get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”

I found myself on the streets, with nothing but the clothes on my back. A ratty pair of jeans, Airwalks, black t-shirt, and an army jacket I had gotten at a thrift store because it had a lot of pockets. My mom wanted me to come home, but she lived half way across the country, and I was in no shape to travel. I tried the library computers a couple of times. They wouldn’t let me sit there for more than a couple of hours. Besides they wouldn’t let you visit all the sites, the data stream was limited, I couldn’t see the patterns.

Drunks will talk about a moment of clarity, a brief window of understanding that changes everything for them. I woke up from one of the few naps I was able to take and realized that I was on a park bench. I hadn’t eaten in days and was on the edge of delirium. The world was falling apart; no one had time to worry about a skinny kid. I hardly had the strength to stand up, but I began walking.

I figured this was the end. I would find a nice back alley some place, lay down under a cardboard box and quietly die. That was before I met her.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

It’s hard to see the forest through the trees; it’s even harder to see that forest when you’re a microbe living on the root of one of those trees. That was the problem, the world was so big, and we were so small. We tried, we really did. Scientists, when they could get the funding, studied the skies, the oceans, and earth. It was like taking microscopic pictures of a whale, take enough and you might understand what you are looking at, but it is going to take some time. Time we didn’t have.

We had the basic ideas down. Global warming, ocean acidification, the hole in the ozone. We could see the wounds; we even had a good idea of the weapons that caused them. Our SUV’s, our coal power plants, our sparkling lights, our fields full of industrially grown food. All the things that made our lives wonderful, happy, and free.

The dollar had been falling for weeks, as oil prices climbed skyward. For the first time in my life, one Canadian dollar was worth one US greenback. We joked that the Looney had suddenly become “real money.” Here in America we were busy pouring our tax dollars and children into the black hole that was Iraq. The sub-prime mortgage debacle had banks on the edge, and the markets went up and down hundreds of points for no apparent reason. I remember the temperature was in the mid 90’s in the last week of September.

The scene was set for a great performance. Saudi Arabia decided to switch to the Euro, throwing the world oil markets into a whirlwind. The rest of OPEC quickly followed. Ironically the markets in the US went up that day, it was the calm before the storm. When the markets opened the next day the stock market plummeted over 85%, dragging most of the worlds markets down with it. There was no real reason for any of it, people just got spooked. No one would lend anyone money, banks closed their doors to prevent runs. They even hauled Alan Greenspan out of retirement to try and calm people down. Nothing worked. It was chaos.

Trillions of dollars were suddenly gone. Peoples 401k’s, there nest eggs, their vision of a happy suburban future, vanished in a cloud of monetary magic. No one threw themselves out of windows 1920’s style, Wall Street no longer cared enough to kill themselves over something like this. Hell it wasn’t even their money they had lost, most of them still got outrageous bonuses that year.

Being young and poor I really didn’t lose much in the stock market. It wasn’t till the a couple months latter that I got laid off from my non-profit job. The financial market was taking a shit, and they certainly weren’t going to be giving us money to help inner city kids learn how to use computers. The great American financial dragon had suffered a mortal wound and was thrashing out of control as it died.

October in Boston was just as hot as September. It was not unusual to hit 80 degrees by 9 am. People were temperamental and depressed, their life savings were gone, and it cost too much to run the AC. People were being laid off left and right, the price of milk went through the roof. Murder rates started to go up.

I remember seeing websites, begging for money. Paypal donate buttons sprang up like weeds on every Facebook profile. It was the digital version of selling pencils on the corner. I had made a fair amount of money from Google, displaying ads on my blogs, but no one had any money to buy shit, and advertising budgets dried up. The internet suddenly seemed empty without the dancing shadows of mortgage ads, and banners urging you to find your lost high school friends.

I responded to all this by throwing myself head long into the data, the digital version of sticking your head in the sand. Spending all day reading feeds, checking message boards, listening to NPR. I had given up on finding a new job, no one was hiring, and how was I going to compete with the guy with the PhD vying for the job at Burger King. Somehow knowing more about what was going on, made it less real. I plunged into the net, and tried my best to ignore the world outside my window.

America was reeling from a financial left hook. The fiscal punishment had us dizzy, so dizzy in fact that we didn’t see mother nature’s winding up for a haymaker until it smashed into our face.