“Annie Q&A: The Second Outage,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey

Coming in 2013

A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.

At age ninety-two, Annie Roth Serles held a final series of interviews with Jesse Theodore, her biographer. This is a transcript of the recorded interview segment, edited for clarity, that took place in Miss Annie’s home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in February 2114. The noted location is the sun room, which Miss Annie called her garden.

Question: So what caused the famous Second Outage?

Answer: I forget how young you are. You weren’t even born until, what, a decade after?

Q: Fifteen years.

A: I guess you’re lucky. That, and what came after triggered the end of many nations, and almost this one. But that’s not what you asked. You want to know who to blame for the Second Outage.

Q: Right. The first one, back in thirty-seven, was sunspots.

A: Coronal mass ejection, actually.

Q: Yes, and the second one lasted twice as long but had no natural cause.

A: I suppose that’s true, if you don’t consider human activity natural, and it sure seems to go irrational a lot. Okay, so after the First Outage, the United States, led by the first Democratic majority in both house and the executive office for the first time since, I don’t know, Clinton, maybe. Anyway, they nationalized the electrical grid and all its generators. Though it can’t be said the Republicans didn’t have a hand in it. All the utility companies and suppliers really leaned on a Republican bailout like Bush did for his banker buddies just before the first black president took office. So more than outright nationalization, it was a forced buyout at double or triple true asset costs. Biggest financial buyout in history, I think. Trillions in debt, financed by, like everything else, the Chinese, instead of taxes.

Q: So that meant all the generation and transmission stations, and all the power lines and poles to hold them up and such, suddenly all that was owned and managed by the federal government.

A: Exactly. And it was impressive at first. They restored power to Washington, D.C., in three weeks, before they could even start the political process again. My father loved it. “Socrates was right,” he liked to say. A benevolent dictator is probably the best and fairest way to run a complex society. The problem lies in ensuring the benevolent and balanced part. That takes wisdom, and humans dislike being dictated to by the merely wise. Unless they’re rich or famous, of course.

Q: So the Democratic president, Jennifer Palin, whose aunt was the Republican governor from Alaska and ran as vice president to follow the Bush administration.

A: That’s right.

Q: So President Palin ran the country like a benevolent dictator to bring us out of the First Outage.

A: Exactly.

Q: So how did that lead to the Second Outage.

A: Therein lies the enduring story of humankind, I think. Palin spent huge sums of money, especially pointed because the world’s financial exchanges crashed along with the power grid. But she made power restoration the number-one priority with the directives that would have been genius had they been carried out. One: Get power back on. Two: Make it run more efficiently. And three: Make it work without burning fossil carbon.

Q: If they’d done that last item, you think the Second Outage would not have happened?

A: Yes. Well, maybe. It’s complex. If they’d made the transition to zero carbon, then at least it would have required a very distributed electrical system, rather than a centralized one, which is far more susceptible to failure by mismanagement and attack.

Q: So what exactly caused the Second Outage.

A: Greed more than terrorism. The America First party blossomed during that time, between outages, and with its bunker, old-style mentality. If people wanted to buy solar panels for their roves, they said, let them. But don’t do it for them. Don’t make them. And they wanted to stimulate business growth at all costs, plus update the military, strengthen our border fences, and build massive public-private water projects to stop flooding in the East and to bring Canadian water to the Southwest. A disastrous set of programs in the long run. But people voted them in. So I guess that’s what they wanted. To crash and burn.

Q: So it’s the voters’ fault that the Second Outage happened?

A: In a democracy, everything that happens is the fault of the voting majority, isn’t it? By definition? So the electrical grid, just barely in the “get it working” part of President Palin’s plan, stopped being a national priority. After all, it worked. Barely. Dozens of coal-fired electricity plants were hastily build. Enormous ones, and not particularly efficient. Not at all. Worse than back in the twentieth century. And they stopped stockpiling spare parts. And because unemployment was so high, the industry squeezed worker pay to the minimum—some electrical workers earned only ten dollars a day. Can you believe that? When some CEOs made more than a billion a year. Anyway, they tried to unionize, and it failed the first few times, then it finally took root. Even the government started firing unionized workers, harking back to President Ronald Reagan. He apparently fired a bunch of unionized federal aviation employees. So, the inevitable happened.

Q: Strike.

A: Yes, and a really bloody fight it was. Just as the Chinese started calling their loans to the U.S. Treasury, selling t-notes instead of buying for the first time in living memory, which led to the worst financial crisis in history. Twice as deep as the Great Depression.

Q: And that’s when it happened. The ghost of Osama bin Laden.

A: Perfect timing, it was. In martial arts, you find your center balance and relax into it while you watch and wait. When your opponent is vulnerable, you attack with everything you’ve got.

Q: How many coordinated attacks that day? Forty-seven?

A: That’s the official number in government reports. There’s good reason to suspect most of the other of hundreds of failures were caused by lower-level attacks as well. Most carried out by angry workers on strike.

Q: So, what, several hundred?

A: About a hundred, maybe. The rest fell like dominoes.

Q: And no benevolent dictator emerged after that.

A: No. The U.S. almost came apart at the wheels. The old South threatened to secede, and that’s when Reagan Newcastle and 2G Inc. rose to a kind of religious-based power. The remaining eastern and western sections battled over funding for water projects. And the southwest literally dried up and blew away.

Q: Do you think the terrorists won?

A: For a while, they did, that’s for sure. Those planes flying into the twin towers in New York turned us into an angry, but afraid, country, and that made us more like our enemy than like ourselves. Armed retribution can reverberate across generations.

Q: But Reagan Newcastle almost rallied everyone against the terrorists, of which he labeled you a leader.

A: That’s right. They key word you said is “almost.” That’s how close I came to not being here today.

 

Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of the short story, Girl on a Rock.

Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.