Matt monitored Ted, whose location was marked in red, along with the other three Uplinked people in Coal Canyon, Ben, marked in green with a red halo, and Sally and himself, marked in green. The other 32 people in the Golden Sector, including Sally’s extensive brood, who were unlinked, all lit the screen with small white lights. He merely monitored the display, The Uplift Steward, the orbital spies, artificial micro-moons above, they made the observations. He was granted but a view in the form of an abstraction.

White meant unlinked human life, green uplinked human life, yellow uncertain or distressed status, and red for conduction. If more then ten unlinked people congregated, they aggregate congregation would be highlighted in red and linked with red lines, something Matt had not seen since he audited the Granby Conduction three years past.

‘I never want to see a dozen white lights circled in red and then blink out again!’ he mused, burning cold over the reptilian morality of his supervisors.

It was a keening moment in his mind when he had seen Ted’s red dot meet Brei’s green dot, and than hers turned white, indicating life for her.

This morning, within the hour, Ben’s green dot, haloed in red, was extinguished on contact with Ted, and, as if joined, like they held hands as Ben passed away, Ted’s dot became haloed with a nimbus of yellow. This meant his interfacing had been compromised. He had suffered brain damage or had lost an optic, etc.

‘Buddy, come on, get up! If there were any humanity left above, they would provide me with a real time video feed so I knew what Ted needed, what to bring. Damn it, I’m a hoarder—have so much stuff, useful as it is, I can’t sort it fast enough.’

Ted just stayed there. Matt’s color dot matrix was only a rough representation of what Uplift Stewardship had on visual feed above, projected on life-size screens in the station board room, which he had only been blessed with viewing remotely a few times, while that oh so sensual Stewardess visited him here, at his modest station, never yet, setting foot up there himself.

Sally, marked in green, seemed to be making her weekly run past Ben’s cabin to Brie’s, where they exchanged wares and presumably cares. Sally stopped by Ted, who was presumably prone by Ben’s corpse, and it seemed transported Ted back to her tunnel home. Sally then left Ted with her children and headed up the canyon trail past Ben’s, Matt knew, coming to him for first aid. Ted’s light went mostly yellow, just a nimbus of red at its center, indicating that he was nearly dead, in terms of conduction capacity, and his use to the Company.

“Buddy, Ted, you are the last conductor, my last chance to see the planets! Hold on, buddy.”

It was snowing hard, thunderheads rolling in, the great mountain in the foreground barely visible, his three conical peers in the distance lost behind thick, roiling cloud.

Matt was also worried about Sally, about Brie, about those kids down there, one especially.

‘If Ted dies I have one hour to vacate the cabin. That is the guideline, I have read hundreds of time, stipulating the evacuation time guaranteed as compromised auditor. I still have a hard time believing they will send an earth probe to pick me up, as much as that would cost. One hour before I’m screwed though, and cut loose, that is believable, not enough time to loot, but enough time to remove survival supplies. I suppose Uplink is cold, but not cruel.’

Matt suited up in his favorite Soviet Era Russian Winter gear, including the brown great coat and the unequaled fur cap. One good thing about post-national APM service, was that antique gear from the times before everything got queer could be worn. Any functional provision that did not require manufacturing was a go.

He wanted dearly to take his Mauser 1898 with the bayonet from above the fireplace. But, firing that would bring the orbital drones. He opted for his boar lance, and his own customized 0.50 caliber hand-made flintlock pistol and a 0.75 caliber rifle. Grizz were back and feral cattle were starting to get as nasty as bison. His favorite Kabar and a Sykes-Fairbane commando dagger, Vietnam Era U.S. Army tomahawk… Powder horn and shot, high top boots and snow shoes, completed the kit. He was hauling his medical ruck, which held the last supplies of antibiotics known to exist on Earth—with a few bottles of rye and Canadian whiskey for topical use and pain killing. Behind him he dragged a wicker sled of his prepacked bug-out food stores.

‘Coffee?’ he paused at the door, looking at the last three pounds of that savory bean above the Rio Grande in the tin on his counter, and was taken by urgency, ‘Nah, later. Sally and I will haul it out later.’

Matt hiked down the hill carefully, having no desire to break a leg or turn an ankle while his new found friend and last hope of Uplift was apparently dying among Sally’s children below.

She met him a mile down the mountain, halfway to Brei’s cabin. She had wide eyes for him, and was fatter than ever. He could not believe that the petite beauty he bedded a decade ago had expanded to thrice her size!

‘How is that even possible?’

‘But she can hike!’

She looked him in the eyes and grinned, “I know, Matt, I’m FATT!”

He grinned. Then he frowned when he saw the worry in her eyes.

“Matt, its bad enough that your Uplift people brought this little man in to rub out our men, on his last leg yet. But he’s about to go himself—I’ve seen too many men die, and he is damned close. His nose is not even in the middle of his face.”

“Oh, the nose was from the Kin. You could have given me a heads up that those savages were back. I can’t fix that nose. Let’s go see what we can do.”

“Oh, My, God!” Sally gasped, covering the back of her wide mouth full of big white teeth with the back of a chubby paw of a hand that had once been halfway to dainty, looking up and away past him, over his left shoulder, towards Wonderview Cabin…

“Matt!”

He turned and looked back up the canyon, over the trees and saw a wide red beam burning a hole through the clouds which cooked off in steamy billows along the tunnel of heat beaming through them. The explosion of the propane tanks and the acrid stench of the lithium batteries igniting above was the first and last sign that he had been judged to have deserted his post by his superiors. Judgment and punishment seemed to require fifteen minutes. That was such an absurd interval that Matt knew he had been slated for termination, and that the only reason for his cryptic orders, that might have set less honest men as he and Ted against each other, was probably a desire for Ted to cut his throat when he tried to screw his only friend, so that the Company could save the energy expenditure of wrecking what Ted could torch with a stone age device.

“Criminals! Creeps!” he yelled into the sky as the cabin crackled and his secondary fossil fuel supplies went up along with the powder store he was hoping to leave for the marooners.

“Matt?”

“What?” he looked down into her soccer-ball sized face.

“I’m glad you weren’t there, glad you are here.”

“Yeah,” came his conscience to refocus him, “me too, Sally.”

…

This is the final open posting of Humanitarian Daily Ration.

The three concluding chapters will be published in the complete novel, to appear in the 2026 e-book Graphomaniac Archives #2.