In the years following the collapse the rumors became wilder and more impossible as to its cause. The papers and magazines had folded years before the collapse and without electricity, digital memory evaporated in a flash. As a result, there was nothing written down on paper that explained what had happened. Sure, the papers had done their best to survive. Even the New York Times, the last daily and the Wall Street Journal, succumbed to any number of tricks such as printing shocking pornographic pictures in every issue. At least the Times kept the photos of Big Bouncy Breasts below the fold. But it was not to be. People could get more titillating stimulation online and in real time.

In the end it was like building a civilization on a spark. When the attackers took town the power grid with powerful computer viruses, people thought it would be hours, then days, then just a few weeks before power was fully restored. But it takes a long, long time to repair and restore a power generation facility to online status and those that did come online also came under increasingly desperate political pressure to power this or that politician’s district. They would overload and shut down again.

Without electricity it was increasingly hard to produce nationwide news alerts. There was no more internet, no facebook, no LinkedIn, no more news alerts. There was no more TV programming, no more radio shows. No one was really sure what was going on. Without electricity the cell phone network was hard pressed, not only to provide service, but even to charge the tiny devices. There was no more twitter, no more Angry Birds. Purchase of private generators skyrocketed in price until price became meaningless and people took to the roads in search of things they could take from others.

At first the Government worked to keep the trucks moving to the grocery stores so people would have food and that worked for awhile but when the oil imports stopped coming in and a few refineries blew up, well, food started getting scarce and even the private generators started shutting down for lack of fuel. People started to stream out of the cities. The more foolish ones hunkered down in their high rise condos, hoping normalcy would return. They would last, at most, three weeks. People started to learn to eat wildlife again…coyote meat, beloved pets, even rats. People began to remember that the German army survived Stalingrad by eating their horses and oftentimes the tracheas of the enemies. That would happen again.

The definition of “good” and “bad” shifted, whether it was of a man who murdered to feed his family or if it was a recipe for softening rat tail for consumption. The word “murder” lost its meaning. The farms became battlefields as wars raged over the fertile soil and were lost and won over and over by people who knew nothing about farming or that the genetically modified “seeds” that had been in use in recent years no longer produced offspring for the next generation of crop — that had been bred out of them to insure Monsanto and Dupont profits by requiring farmers to buy replacement seeds year after year. Unfortunately, these companies were no longer in a position to produce seeds at a level that would support a nation.

The government struggled to maintain nationwide communications and response. Air travel was halted for lack of fuel. Citizens cursed the failure of the rail system years earlier…now the rusting tracks were the only reliable means of nationwide transit and there were few locomotives that could make the trip and less fuel to run them. And with the failure of electrical power and communication the borders became more porous causing ablur in the lines of “us” and “them”. Finally, three hundred million firearms in the hands of private citizens resulted in butchery, vigilantism, local civil wars, armed enclaves and private armies battling for the supplies hoarded in local Walmarts and Costcos. Fire engines could no longer move for lack of fuel. Ambulances had been long ago abandoned as useless. Army tanks became immobile rusting fortresses.

It was a bad time for the very young and the very old. Sympathy was an incredibly expensive commodity; compassion even more so. Infants and children would die in huge numbers. The old would starve with at least the memory that they lived through the last of the best the world had to offer. The infirm never had a chance, neither did the mentally  or physically handicapped. Women also came under increasing attack and it would from now on be impossible for a female to ever wander outdoors alone. Without power or modern pharmaceuticals the hospitals became nothing more than morgues. Bodies piled up outside crematoriums. Diseases spread to the water supply from the rotting flesh and engorged maggots.

The age of man was in decline.