“The Yukon. What about the Yukon?”
“You are kidding me, right?”
“No, you lived in the wilds; you trapped and hunted. You
know how to skin a buffalo.”
“There are no buffaloes in the Yukon; be serious.”
“John, that was just to illustrate the point. We can go
off-grid. Choose who and what we want to become. Choose who we tell of where we
are. And maybe to find out what the ‘Powers in Paris’ are up to, we tell people
we are unsure that we are moving elsewhere and ‘spies in our midst’ will out
themselves.”
“That is an idea. But why the Yukon?”
“Because it will be a big change from here in Recife or
our last place in California. Maybe a dancehall in Whitehorse or Dawson, or we
could have a crematorium on Lake Labarge.”
“I love you, Evie, but you are bananas.”
Whitehorse was the capital of the Yukon Territory. The city was
about thirty kilometres south of Lake Labarge, which was fifty kilometres long.
Richthofen Island was about one-third of the way northward on the western side
of the lake. On the eastern shore, they bought or arranged a long-term land
lease opposite the island.
Jonathan brought with him three float planes, and they ran a
flight service for government, Native, and tourist uses. The homes and offices,
including homes for the pilots and their partners, were built near the shore.
They had a floating dock for the planes and a motorized barge that, in the
ice-free time, would offer tours to tourists and pick up supplies and equipment
‘up lake’ at Upper Labarge.
Two years later, they had a thriving business with only one
other Devi, Abigail O’Leary, who had chosen to join them, much to their
satisfaction.
Satellite phones, television and communications kept them
anonymously connected with the outside world.
Robert Allen Stewart and his wife Rose, whom they had first
met in Australia, were their main conduit to that world. The Stewarts had only a
generic email address for John and Evie, which bounced and relayed through
random servers worldwide. They were in Arizona and had told them that Lucy
Boudreau, who had been an outspoken advocate of the progressive faction of the
Devi, had been found murdered in Bangkok. The murder had been exceptional as it
appeared that she was confined, tied and wounded to the point that she had
slowly bled out and died, a slow drift death.
It appeared to many to be a warning.
The Scotts also did not know where John and Evie were. They lived on the other side of Canada in St John, Newfoundland.
Ten years after moving to the Yukon, they relocated to rural
Eastern Ontario for three years, where they both took short-term college
employment. At the end of that time, they moved back to Lake Labarge after all
the pilots had been swapped out and replaced.
The schism between the two parties reached a breaking point
when Traditionists assassinated two Standard politicians who were pushing the
agendas of the Progressives.
There were retaliatory attacks and counterattacks. Each may have killed only one or two Devi, but the concerns about the Standards' body count were irrelevant.
Unlike when a Devi is in proximity to a young Standard when they die and release unfulfilled life energies, when a Devi dies, the result is the opposite. Suppose a Devi is near a Devi when they die, and the dying Devi has lived well beyond seventy or eighty years. In that case, a life energy vacuum is created, and a Devi can lose some of their ‘accumulated’ life energy. Thus, Devi wars have always been avoided.
After another ten years in the Yukon and 3 years out, another five years in, three years out, and five back in, the century was approaching the two-thirds point.
Throughout all the years in or out of the Yukon, the barge
hauling tourists and supplies provided a cover for their private project.
It was not uncommon for any business outside of any town to
have heavy equipment such as backhoes or bulldozers. ‘The Four Gold Dots’
flight and lodge was no exception. The barge was ferrying food, fuel and tons
of building supplies. Many of the tourists were specialized tradespersons or
labourers. They were recruited in Alaska, southern Alberta, or British Colombia
and very well paid for a season's work and to stay quiet.
By 2040, they had what they called a ‘Love Nest.’ It was a three-story, 25-bed partial underground habitat supported by solar power, easily raised wind turbines and water treatment equipment. It was installed
with low-voltage refrigerators and stoves, a communications centre with
satellite up and downlinks, a fitness and recreation area, several all-terrain
vehicles, and two two-person ultralights.
In this case, two dozen people, or Devi, could easily ride
out at least fifty years of chaos, but an entire century would be
possible.
By 2060, it was too late for the Progressive Devi's ideas to affect world events, and if the Traditionalists had seen the error of their ways, it was too late for them to switch sides.
The chaos started with water wars and freshwater rights over allocations and usage of lakes and rivers in multiple jurisdictions. Then, the droughts came and got worse by the year. There was another dustbowl in the Nebraska area of the breadbasket of America.
The Sonora desert in Southern Arizona moved north into Utah
and Colorado, far enough north to border Wyoming. It was no longer a sand
desert but a heated desert. Killing millions of trees in the Rocky Mountains,
and with no winter snowpack, the forest died of thirst or in miles-wide fires.
National food stockpiles and reserves gathered over the past
decades were rapidly exhausted if the governments kept control. If the
governments were negligent, they would have been overrun and ransacked.
Droughts also affected the farmland of Ukraine and Argentina. It was not
climate change as much as climate collapse.
In other areas, the Monsoons of Southeast Asia were either
catastrophic or failed to materialize.
The great rivers of Asia, from the Euphrates to the Yangtze, were reduced in flow by eighty percent because the glaciers of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush and Pamirs had disappeared.
Without foliage on trees, soil erosion became an issue. And
that became many more problems, from washing away the topsoil to filling rivers
with silt, and the soil with fertilizers, minerals, and salts began to kill the
oceans.
If you had arable land, fish stocks or access to clean
water, your neighbouring country or the following country wanted it.
The reduced water in the rivers had a serious crisis point:
The waters lacked enough flow to produce hydroelectricity for society to
continue to function. Water wars soon became power wars and then blood wars.
Oil was no longer a commodity of war, and democracies fell as a compassionate
government was no longer an effective government. If there were any extra
resources, they went directly into a nation's defence or offensive
capabilities.
There were great migrations, and anyone in the tropics faced multiple threats—reduced food production due to increased heat. The increased heat killed the trees and vegetation, creating new deserts and more heat.
Hundreds of millions of refugees fled by whatever means they
could to cooler countries, not being aware that nowhere was getting cooler. The
tropics were becoming unlivable.
In the coastal areas, the sea level was rising, and the more
significant threat was salt water moving inland and displacing fresh water in
underground aquifers.
For example, in North America, the parts of Florida that
were not flooded, the remaining arable land became barren. People in the tropics
moved towards the United States and Canada. Millions on the Eastern seaboard were
moving inland, and the inland was becoming desert.
In Europe, tens of millions of Africans crossed the
Mediterranean, only to find Spain and most of southern France in a desert.
Great rivers like the Rhone, Rhine, and Danube were streams, and the Alps lacked
snow.
If militaries were not deployed against fighting other
nations, they were fighting the nationals of those nations.
A few rogue states that had developed nuclear weapons used
them until those nations were convinced not to by economic, social or military
force. Biological and chemical agents were used in some conflicts. Still, many nations
used these weapons on their people, both as riot or crowd control and
indirectly as a tool to reduce population.
People in the scientific community had long feared that a
nuclear war would cause a ‘nuclear winter, a cooling of the planet. The
opposite was true. The smoke, ash and particulates that travelled to the polar
regions darkened the ice and, where the whiteness of the ice had in the past
reflected light and heat, in what was known as the Albedo Effect, now absorbed
the heat, and the ice melted quicker.
The bunker they had built was low-tech. Media, literature, and popular culture all said that the newest and latest technology would be of great value in the end times. But knowing how to cut a tree was much more valuable than understanding AI or being able to code.
The Scotts and Stewarts were invited to join them. The start
of the end was not unexpected; it was ‘telegraphed’ by a few natural and
societal events. Massive fires, involving tens of thousands of hectares in
Central Siberia, two seasons in which the flooding of the lower Nile in Egypt
was far below the previous minimum, and a corn blight on the crops of the
American Midwest.
Panic had reached an epidemic level.
The social events were more dramatic than the natural ones. The fragmentation of the European Union and the emergence of old rivalries. Isolationist policies and a “me first” attitude by some leading industrial nations. Polarization toward one of two political systems. Embracing the Authoritarian model of a strong leader and a strong nation. Or an overly active “one for all” model of egalitarian socialism. Neither worked well.
Nine other progressive couples, primarily from Western Canada or the American Pacific Northwest, were also in the bunker.
The low-tech approach toward technology kept them in contact
with other Devi havens. After the fall of visual communications, cell and
satellite phones, and the end of the Internet, their primary communication was
with old ham radios and low-frequency, long-wavelength communications.
The Internet was designed to maintain communication by switching instantly from one route to another if the first one failed. Still, without a standard and widespread electrical power network, everything failed.
The collapse of the world's cities was broadcast live.
Hoards of people were flocking out of London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles
with the same misguided thought: “We need food, and farmers have food.”
In these land-rich areas, the regional governments resisted
the swarms of refugees until they ran out of bullets. People just tried to
escape from lands with high population densities, like Bangladesh and Japan. In
the former case, by foot and in the latter instance by boat. The second group
either drowned in mishaps or were deliberately sunk as they approached foreign
shores.
Plagues of rats and lice and unknown biological or viral epidemics
swept across the remnants of society.
The strength of the Devi among these people grew more potent
in the first years as millions died daily. But that addition of ‘unused life
potential’ was of little consequence as the Devi were human and needed food.
They did not need to eat as often as humans, but food was essential.