Sunday
There were indeed trains that went most of the way to Monterey California.
You took an Ethan Allen from Rutland toward Castleton. You traded that in for a Lake Shore Limited in Schenectady and you were off.
You could have never imagined the beauty and richness of America.
You saw a country so very different from Vermont–good and bad.
You passed boring and battered mill towns and huge industrial wastelands. You saw food growing as far as the eye could see. You saw the equipment to process food and energy on an industrial scale for the first time.
There was a tremendous bustle of people compared to your little state. It felt exhilarating to see so many people. And it felt good to see that America was still a thriving engine of diversity.
You realized we have so much wealth with so many different people all living and working together.
You had never been a sucker–you knew we had a lot, but you hadn’t seen it yourself.
For your Vermont provisions, you got to shop from your grandmother’s store. You took with you one gallon maple syrup, six pints jam, four pints apple butter, two pints honey. For pickles, you took two dill, two bread and butter and one pint cowboy candy. You knew America didn’t have what your grandma had.
You grabbed your brother’s Nintendo and his favorite N64 game. Your mom loaded you with bottles of sunscreen. Most of your attire wasn’t going to fly in California anyway, so you planned to hit the second hand store with the money from scrapping your old Subaru Legacy.
In Chicago, you caught a California Zephyr toward the incredible majesty of The Rockies that you had dreamed of descending with your split board. Deserts and grasslands; great forests and rivers.
America was huge.
Sacramento to San Jose, then a bus from the airport to Monterey.
Professor Carl had put you in touch with the lead researcher Kristof, over Telegram. You were given the address of a luxury building that was, indeed, directly on the beach. You picked up a key from the doorman and found an ancient looking long board waiting for you on the coffee table with a hand written note:
Hello Jody, Had this lying around. ‘ thought you might use it. Wear sunglasses to protect those special “pan”oculars. - Carl ;)
On the counter were a box of manuals, a usb stick, a fingerprint key fob, and a sophisticated looking mechanical key on a lanyard.
There was a short page of instructions to access the institute basement computer lab in room B005, which would be your office for the summer. As well as instructions for using the usb and key to access a remote server already running the simulation.
The grant included a provision for food that would be stocked for you. It took you a couple minutes looking for a refrigerator before you opened one of the full length cabinets to reveal what looked like the take away wall at the coop you could never afford to shop at. There was no way you’d eat this much food, but you could select what would be stocked in the app.
The whole Institute was closed for the summer, but you accessed your lab from a basement side door with the key, so that didn’t matter to you. The hallway had a large locked door on the left with an illuminated [5] above it, which was a little confusing. But Kristof directed you back to a computer lab you passed with an non-illuminated B005 sign outside.
The computer setup was fairly simple. You had a dumb linux computer. You ran a script from the usb, together with the fob, to connect to your computing cluster at empart-blue.us-chi-hiput-1.clouds.
For two months, you ran a system called EMPART. It was fairly straightforward to explain it by walking through the letters.
An Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) is a wave of magnetism, like from a toy magnet or motor magnet, but much stronger.
Similar to water waves, there are different sizes. There are small ones that lap the edge of a lake, and waves that lap an ocean. There are tsunamis and walls of flash boiling water from meteorite impacts. But unlike water, strong magnet waves really only hurt electronics. (They pass through plants and animals without harm.)
In electronics, however, the waves induce current, which causes extreme voltages and catastrophic failure when the magnetic field hits. That’s an EMP.
EMPs can be created in many ways. The system you were looking at was only concerned with major EMPs caused by nuclear reactions in the upper atmosphere. A payload on a satellite that could strike with little or no warning.
Next, the Analysis (A), the EMPART system was designed to continuously evaluate both the human and financial cost of one of these EMPs going off. The analysis calculated how many people would die from the event and how much money would be lost in things destroyed. Those cost numbers were updated every few seconds and shown live in a table.
There were about a dozen of these satellites “of interest” that were mostly all Russian in origin, but China had a few suspects up there as well.
Kosmos 2553 had been one of the key satellites of interest. It was launched right before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, on November 5th 2024 it began an orbit shift to a higher elevation. On January 31 2025, it appeared to suffer a catastrophic control failure. It now just spins out of control flashing randomly as it spins on three axis. It’s still tracked, but most believe it got fried by radiation in its higher orbit.
The total human and financial analysis was done for each satellite, and you could see the cost breakdown per satellite and per line item of the cost components.
The system used little “sims” or simulated entities to represent humans in air traffic, cars, trains and for anyone on critical medical equipment. It would show little hearts for individual sims with pacemakers. It simulated ongoing surgeries, including by type. It estimated bed counts in intensive care units on life-support at every hospital in the US. Then anyone on oxygen or a respirator outside of a hospital too.
At any given time, the simulation would have roughly sixty thousand people up in-the-air, plus or minus twenty thousand. There were roughly eight million simulated individuals that used an electronic device to regulate their heart rate.
The non-human financial cost was much less interesting to look at. That part only looked at major infrastructure. Electronic equipment didn’t move nearly as much as the tiny sims. The financial analysis was just a picture map of how much the stuff on that square pixel would cost if they broke. Most of it, at this point were AI chips, which were likely inflated assets anyhow. The system just had to sum everything on the image based on where the EMP would be at any moment to find the cost.
The simulation ran around the clock. It wasn’t one of those boring jobs where you had to hit run and wait for the results.
So, if it all ran by itself, what did they need you for?
You spent the first few days learning the system and how to modify the code behind it in a sandbox. Then Kristof would give new simulated data feeds to integrate. You’d have to add the data source, then spot check the financial calculations were being done correctly. And then program the visuals to display the new data. It was all fairly easy once you did one because most of the feeds were similar.
There were a couple of statistical functions that would detect anomalies in the data on a day over day or week over week basis.
Looking at the source code of the script to connect one terminal, you worked out how to chain several terminals together as if they were one display. After a few weeks, when you realized nobody else was using the lab whatsoever, you built a jumbo-tron.
You set your own hours. You had no coworkers, no boss looking over your shoulder. The best part of the job was that you enjoyed staring at maps and watching data change. The professor found a good fit.
Your quality of life was fairly high.
You could walk to the beach at dawn, catch a few waves, take a shower, program for a few hours then head out if the waves were up. Your work schedule ended up being tightly inversely correlated to ocean wave height. When your feeds were done and you got bored flying around the country on a super computer, you’d play video games.
There were a lot of levels in the video game GoldenEye, and it had a sufficient amount of reading and puzzle to justify your interest.
The only problem for your summer was, you basically had zero dollars and zero cents to your name after the train ticket. But since all your material needs were satisfied, that wasn’t really a problem for you. It would only be a problem if you made friends that wanted to “go out”, so you just didn’t.
Your mom still sent you twenty dollars a week, but that didn’t really buy gum in 2026.
So you spent the summer reading, staring into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, catching waves, working or just staring into the simulator.
Now, you are not an unreliable narrator. You are still very much a pacifist, but the trip, the vastness of the data displayed, your new linux and coding chops, the video game, and the fact that you were essentially setting off all the EMPs all the time, made you feel a bit drunk on power, like you were lording over the world as some kind of Bond villain in a private geostationary command center.
But, but, but… you weren’t bombing anything, you were just doing the math to find out what would happen if you did. And just doing the math didn’t hurt anyone.
You had started on June 2nd. The contract went until Sunday August 2nd.
The apartment was provided through August. The apartment building was always deserted as Petra.
You had stopped getting new feed integration assignments to add in the middle of July. You spent the closing weeks double checking your own work and documenting your code.
You went in for your last day with a pizza and some kombucha to watch the simulation you helped augment one last time. You had some housekeeping to put all the terminals in your jumbo-tron back to individual terminals.
You had also started to notice an interesting anomaly on the year over year human cost around Chicago with your “lemming” sims beginning around July 30th.
Sims with pacemakers were allowed to roam anywhere in the country, or even off the board, and you noticed a sharp drop in risk around Chicago compared to the previous year.
Normally there would be about seven thousand sims with pacemakers, today there were only 4,324.
You suspected there could be a problem with the feed, but the total number of sims nationally hadn’t changed. So you go knocking on doors. You filter to show only pacemakers and then only those based in Chicagoland. The distribution had spread farther out and you start clicking their current locations, Mackinaw Island, Grand Haven, Traverse City, Madeline Island, Wisconsin Dells, Brandon Missouri–these seem like resorts. They’re all on vacation, just more so than last year apparently. And more than other cities. It must have been a good year for sims in Chicago.
Out of the corner of your left eye, you think you see a flicker. The other room five is now a room two.
Looking back to the simulator you realize, there’s no air traffic on the radar. You look at both human and financial for air traffic and it’s zero! Did all the planes near Chicago land and get diverted, or did the feed just go down?
You were looking at pacemakers.
Kosmos 2553 began to sweep in almost perfectly over the high cost central business district.
Dead. Still spinning out of control. A speck of sequin. A disco ball without a spot light.
You were looking at Kosmos 2553 as it passed over a park next to Lake Michigan when your feeds froze.
You check your internet connection:
ssh kristof@empart-blue.us-chi-hiput-1.clouds
...
ssh: connect to host empart-blue.us-chi-hiput-1.clouds timeout
kristof@lab5.monterey#> ping 8.8.8.8
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=12ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=13ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=114 time=11ms
Your connection to the internet is fine.
You ping other places but only your cluster seems down.
’ guess they were serious about ending on time.
It’s still light out. You see some evening weather coming in. You see the tops of palm trees swaying about through the basement window.
You can put the lab back tomorrow. You’re going surfing. We already knew this.
As you grab the pizza box and go to head out, you notice a sliver of light in the hallway. You follow it to see the giant bank vault door is cracked open.
Kristof was pretty adamant about not ever entering other rooms in the basement.
And you see it’s now room one.
The door was on some kind of a timer.
You look in and see dim florescent lighting, but would have to push the door to see more.
“Stay within the lines Jody. Don’t do it.”
You take your empty pizza box and head for the beach blasting Adele through your conductive headphones.
After sunset, you stare into the ocean with your bare feet on the railing of the balcony, just looking out, feeling the warm ocean breeze for an hour.
Your Sunday sanctuary is disturbed by a racket on the kitchen table.
There’s a flurry of notifications on your phone. It’s all crypto apps. It looks like you still had four of them installed from before the collapse in 2022.
They’re all different erratic price above and below notifications (you never signed up to get) for the core currencies: BTC, ETH, SOL, & XRP.
These effing idiot crypto scammers are using the same price feed across four exchanges. What a joke.
It would be cool if one day decentralized finance were like, you know, more decentralized, as promised. It all just seems so rigged.
You don’t even want to bother any more.
After checking your balances are still zero, as they have been for years, you just delete, delete, delete.
No more of that BS.
You stare into the ocean with your song on repeat.
When it crumbles
We will stand tall
Face it all together …
EMPART is done.
Now what?
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