JL: Humanitarian Daily Ration

Author’s Proof

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A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

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Dust Cover

With 39 years of faithful service to UPLINK, Auditor Matt is less than a year from retirement. The catch was, so was EARTH… the Mother of humanity was about to be retired as a technological human habitat. As the Colorado Regional Auditor tasked with decommissioning the last and final humanitarian mission on Earth, Matt, seated at his red oak coffee table before the picture window of Earth’s very last house, is assailed with guilt, haunted by doubt and faced with a crisis of faith. Matt’s spirit fell even further, as over the threshold of Wonderview Cabin, framed in the ancient stained beams, limped his new Conductor, the last of that busy kind, rendered as haggard as any of those poor earthbound souls to be fed by that wind-bitten hand one last time.

Extended Dust Cover

Conductor Ted did not remember the cities. He had seen their rubble expanses in his childhood, while they yet smoked, soon after the military had done their work. Other than that and the tormented nightmares of his orphaned youth, all Ted had known since age 15, was work, the long, hard, lonely work of a Conductor. He had been trained by Dave Billy, best of their kind, forty years ago up Wyoming way. Now he was the last of that transitory breed, transferred to Golden Colorado to feed some and Uplift others. He did not know his new Auditor, the last of so many—but he did smile when he saw for certain that Auditor Matt was human, and that he was younger than he, perhaps with still a smile left to go with that steaming cup of coffee.

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Inspiration

A conversation had with my Colorado host by phone while I waited for a broken train in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A notion of a world purposefully left fallow by the Newly Anointed Tech Oligarchs with their hearts set on the stars, was breathed gray life from the 18th floor of a Chicago hotel as the snow scoured deserted streets far below, and confirmed, two days later, when I was welcomed to Wonderview Cabin, above Coal Canyon, overlooking a wilderness designated so, and being invited to enjoy a:

HUMANITARIAN DAILY RATION

Food Gift From The People Of The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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Dedicated to Matt, who provided me the writing space of Wonderview Cabin for this project, as well as the nutriment mentioned above.

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Inspirational Quote

“I have more than I need to survive, too much stuff, really. But in a potential time of need, I would like to be able to feed and arm my neighbors.”

-Matt, 2/14/25

Time Line

2041: Ted, who never recalled having a last name, was born in Portland, Oregon.

2045: Matt Styer, was born in Decatur, Illinois.

2050: UPLINK, SOULINK, ILION DAWN and Pyreon were instituted as part of the ARK Project, intended to return earth to its natural state while humanity colonized the Solar System.

2051: Human birth was strictly regulated and limited to nuclear families of three committed [1] to UPLINK.

2052: UPLINK to the solar colonies initiated.

2053: Reduction of cities by the military initiated the Fallow Earth process.

2056: Ted, at age 15, was apprenticed as a Conductor to David Billy.

2057: Matt, at age 12, was hired by UPLINK to interface with Automated Population Management or APM.

2058: Ilion Meek, CEO of UPLINK, initiated Humanitarian Daily Ration

2059: AI Gun Ban enforced by drone.

2060: APM followed the reduction of population centers with the reduction of all housing, production, resource extraction, fencing, and any building not strictly monumental in nature and symbolic in function, to include the decommissioning of all none APM equipment. All agriculture, including stock breeding, eliminated. [2,3]

2081: All dams broken as the final military task before Armed Uplift.

2096: Matt is tasked with Final UPLINK and assigned Ted, the last active Conductor, to assist in the mission.

Timeline Notes

-1. Contracts were replaced by commitments once astrophysicists had determined for certain that a comet was going to pass close enough to earth in 2097 to cause world catastrophe. This fact was not disclosed to the public, ever, was kept as a humanitarian secret, and was not disclosed to to the auditor class until 2086.

-2. AI facility management of nuclear reactors, tasked with precontamiation has preserved the physical structures of these power sources. These have been forbidden zones since the damns were broken.

-3. Bridges were deemed to be short term structures with an obvious symbolic value, as well as a short term humanitarian purpose, as well as rode ways and rail ways. All vehicles, however, that were practicable to be gathered at urban centers for demolition, were wrecked and burned. Rural vehicles were impracticable to gather, with their purpose reimagined to be analogous to that of ships scuttled in mass to form the substructure for new barrier reefs.

Pyreon the Story

Each Scene is Preceded by a Briefing and Exceeded by a Debriefing

Scenes

#1: Humanitarian Daily Ration

#2: The Fence Line

#3: The Overhang

#4: Brie

#5: The Well

#6: The Kin

#7: The Roughneck

#8: The Cave

#9: Sally