Footprint Pyreon
A Narrative Map of the MRE Battlespace: 10/23/25
The Uplift Initiative employed marooners, people socially or aptitudely unqualified for High Colony life, to dismantle rural human hardware. The military had imploded and fallowed the cities, towns, burbs and bridges. The railroads had been dismantled by gangs of tweaker scum worked under population management forces. In case the comet streaking towards earth did not erase the human trace and provide a fresh Eden for the returning Technarchs, automated systems had been left behind.
APM, Automated Population Management, consisted of surveillance and drone assets tasked with suppressing marooner technology. Any high powered, automatic or semi automatic weapon fire will bring a drone swarm. These drones were designed to self repair and cannibalize parts from un-functioned devices. Satellites monitored population. Any concentration of more than ten individuals would be attacked by a drone swarm. Nuclear facilities were being cooled by automated systems in anticipation of the near passage of the comet.
The motivation to dismantle fence lines, oil wells, natural gas systems, was based on being fed with HDR’s. See the previous novel, Humanitarian Daily Ration, for particulars. On walking a section, and a box canyon, of the remote plateau of Laguna Seca, observing the many steel and iron fixtures, often painted, and considering the low morale of the marooners, the author found it doubtful that the utility and resource extraction equipment would all be processed out. Many old abandoned tractors and back hoes decorate the west, often over grown with vinery. Here, in the high desert of New Mexico, the dry environment preserves even wood for hundreds of years.
The pasture is like a bowl, crowned on all sides by stone banks, wooded boulders yawning down from slight rises of earth, as if giant once built their own stony fence line. This house, would of course, have been dismantled as the last act of the hardware clearance. The fence lines would be gone, as they were marked as a removal priority and can be easily traced from orbit.
To the east are deep aroyos, then a clay pan road leading down a canyon walled to the east by fur tiers of stone battlements, as if some giant race built a fort. Each bench is covered with pinion, juniper and ponderosa. To the north are two 50 foot high rock outcroppings, house-size stones, topped by clay and pine duff, topped be great boulders larger than trucks. Trees, mostly juniper and ponderosa grow from these rocks and the racks between. The third tree, especially in the shady lees on the west of each outcropping, is scrub oak, small trees not topping 12 feet, shaded by the ponderosa. The smell of cedar, or rather juniper, is thick in these shaded paths, winding between giant boulders.
The small, one acre outcropping has shallow caves on the south side. On the top is a collection of shattered heavy pottery of ancient make, and also brass shell casings. The clay pan road separates this island of rock from the next, directly north. The road has re-bar and pipe embedded, steel is everywhere. That stand of boulders tipped with ponderosa is the forward jut of two horseshoe shaped canyons, each containing a pasture. The pastures here are level, but broken with many prairie dog mounds, severe tripping and leg breaking hazards, many disguised by the lush plant life. The most common plant is the bluish sage brush, about knee high. The second most common, and most lush plant is rabbit brush, great clumps of green stalked yellow flowers, some as big as box elder, ranging from knee to shoulder height. The third plant is the chest high bull thistle, its roots medicinal. The lesser plants are prickly pear and grass, in small twenty stalk clumps. The ways between are soft, sandy, and in the rain, sticky mud making of shoes wet bricks.
One boulder, standing twenty feet, being forty feet long and fifteen feet wide, is shaped like a box turtle, with a face carved, perhaps, by wind. A game trail treads along the west up and over and around the west pasture. Fifty feet down the western slope is a circle of three massive boulders, each the size of a dump truck. Within the ring of stone, with four gaps about five feet wide, is a grassy space shaded by stone and tree, one gap leading into the pasture. The beige rodents scurry from hole to hole, some times standing high to observe human progress, then ducking into their tunnels like WWI soldiers warned of a bombardment.
Back up the outcropping, between the yawning gaps of the boulders, one may access demi-caves where once women huddled and made pottery. Some small stone walls have been built in the stony lees. Potshards are found on all of the east face clay washes, which, when dry, form nice access paths. Crystal scraping stones, formed to fit some ancient thumb, are found at one to every ten potshards. As one climbs north along the forward arm, the outcroppings form horseshoe canyons, then box canyons, of increasing height, stalked by many mountain lions. These rocks are prowled by, in order of prominence: cougars, coyotes, bobcats and black bear. The game animals are: mule deer, elk, prairie dog, jack rabbit, and if you are a big cat, coyote, one of which I saw liver-eaten by what the Major told me was a bobcat.
Furthest to the north are the ancient Anisazi ruins, carved and stone bricked into a cliff face striated by ages, only accessible by climbing or repelling. To the west, the boulders and benches of stone lower, and lesson in severity. From the southwest most wind and rain comes. In that vector stand two horn like mountains, perhaps 300 feet, walled and crowned with great stones that seem to have been intelligently cut by some over-sized mason.
East of the Horns is a lagoon, a high meadow pond, clay pan bottomed and sprung with tiny willows awaiting the big rain. The rocky ridgeline hills to north and south are faced with gentle grassy slopes, loved by the elk. These are mostly easily passed, as the face presents an ominous twenty foot stone wall, but one may walk around to east and west and come up behind, and then have the advantage.
A few acres southwest of the Horns, rises an earthy ridge chock full of delicious pinion, topped my majestic ponderosa, the greatest of which have been shattered by lightning strikes. One tops this rise and looks down into a yawning 400 foot deep crescent of monolithic stone and sloping clay. At the base are clay washes colored gray, blue, red and yellow among willow, juniper and scrub oak. This crescent canyon is cut by some clay chasms, which would be dangerous to deadly in a heavy rain. The canyon has a sister canyon to the west, also a high dead end. Both drain in an increasingly wide southward wash to a meadow where cattle are now grazed, but elk would in a Fallow Earth feed.
…
Protagonist Character Development
The lady of the homestead has given me a book to read, a distillation sermon on my favorite Bible book, Job. Job is the perfect guide to survivors of a cataclysmic age. For a protagonist, to insert into this novel of Infotech mogul god complex nerds of Mars sending their most masculine men back to Earth as punishment, I chose Sean Glass. This man, who I coach, and is a remarkable leader of other men who gather volunteering to train in combat, is a strong Christian. In the science-fiction, premise I decided that the Gods of Mars, the Pantheon of Infotech rulers of a humanity seeking refuge from an oncoming comet on Mars, are our current world leaders who have succeeded in life extension ambitions. Their names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Their generations of human sacrifice and experimentation inflicted upon us, their herd, their debt chattel, have resulted in their ability to clone interesting people. To spice the boredom of long lived perfection, the last generation of really cool action movie stars and football players from the 1960s and 70s have been reproduced. Likewise, an advisor, in the form of a clone of Henry Kissinger, and a chaplain, in the guise of Charles Khurch, clone of a Christian activist murdered in September of 2025, are created as conscientious objectors. The doctrine of the cloned Christian would be difficult for the Infotech atheists, ascendant gods themselves, to formulate. So, I here postulate that a book, written by a highly respected pastor before “everything got fake and gay,” could serve as this cloned Khurch, Minister of the Solar Church of Christ, would espouse a doctrine based on a secondary work, based on a sermon as it was. Clones, being saddled with a lack of imagination, which has, does and would inhibit biblical interpretation makes secondary doctrine key to the faith. Charles Khurch’s guide in counseling his very own Crusader, Sergeant Sean Glass, will be, because it is the Christian commentary book I am traveling with:
Let GOD Be GOD: life-changing truths from the book of Job, Ray C. Stedman, Discovery House, 2007.
The protagonist, Glass is a man I know. Drexler is a man I coached for briefly—a character! The other supporting Characters are movie actors and NFL players I admired as a boy and youth, whose clones have only been imparted with the history of their own movie and NFL roles. Ilion Meek is a man who I have seen interviewed for some ten hours. The only character I have invented for this tale is Bobby, the Cyborg.
Thank you Major Wolf and Lady Mo, for granting me a stage for the muse that Golden Matt planted in this addled mind.
Laguna Seca, MN, Thursday, 10/23/25
