A Bolt from the Blue
my first entry for the Lunar Awards, season six
As a kid I was a big fan of the 70s show That’s Incredible!, which did a segment on park ranger Roy Sullivan, who had survived seven lightning strikes at that time. He later shot himself in 1983.
Lightning kills about 250,000 people worldwide every year. It used to be even more dangerous. Inventing the lightning rod was the thing that catapulted Ben Franklin to scientific rock-star status in the 1750s.
This little story (2200 words) is set in the same universe / timeline as “Peppy the Cyber-Skunk Goes Trick-or-Treating,” but does not involve the School of Science, Mathematics, & Local Languages, or any individual SM&LLers.
And the American Climate Corps is (almost) a real thing, set to open its job board and start recruiting this spring. As a little boost to them and their billion-dollar budget, I include a link to The Sample, an AI-driven newsletter recommendation service.
But First!
UNCG’s Digital Fiction Jam is a day-long event in which a community of game designers, fiction writers, or anyone curious about either will write, design, and publish an interactive, narrative-based video game using Twine, an easy-to-use, secure, and free app for creating digital fiction. In addition to sharing your interactive story at the UNCG Digital Fiction Jam, which will take place on May 11, 2024 from 1-5pm, participants are asked to attend one of three two-hour workshops held at UNCG’s Jackson Library (April 4 from 6-8pm, April 9 from 6-8pm, and April 13 from 1-3pm).
Learn more using the QR code or this link!
As faculty, I can not compete, but I intend to lurk through one of the workshops and see what I can learn about Twine. You may remember that I was a fan of 50 Years of Text Games.
StellarCon
I feel like the first effort went pretty well. I may have more to say about that in coming weeks, but What do you all think?
And Now, Without Further Delay
A Bolt from the Blue
by Randall Hayes
Clarence Dullard huddled, shivering, in the driver’s seat while his WildLifers waited out a violent thunderstorm. He had stood outside as they were piling into the van, so he was the most thoroughly soaked. While he fiddled with the heater, they were passing around a bag of gummies laced with God Knows What?, which was some sort of synthetic toad venom. There was no smoking in federally owned vehicles. Otherwise most drugs had been legal for decades, even during working hours. They just had to monitor their biometrics and keep them inside the green zone of medical consensus and departmental policy. Out here, during field school, as long as they got their work done, pretty much anything went.
Dullard’s long history of almost entirely responsible drug use made him a highly sought-after mentor among the interns and apprentices. Ironically, it also made him the most qualified mentor in the eyes of his superiors. He had the highest level of certification a psychedelic guide could get, most of it on the Department’s dime, in addition to all his creds in first aid, wilderness medicine, outdoor survival, and armed / unarmed / nonlethal combat. Underwater basket weaving had started out as a joke, but he had that one, too.
The twin storm spirits, Thunder and Lightning, were really going at it out there. Fortunately the field school had the budget for vehicles made almost entirely of metal. They were pretty safe in here unless a twister touched down, or a dam burst somewhere. The spongy ground of the pocosin they were monitoring would soak up anything this little cloudburst could drop on them.
Pocosin was probably an Algonquian word meaning ‘wetland’. The fact that parts of the southeast coast of the United States was liberally dotted with peat bogs was not something one could find in any state’s curriculum, even now. The tribal schools all covered that fact extensively. While the states were busy disintegrating into feuding religious and ethnic fiefdoms, the tribes had stepped up to partner with the feds, leveraging their sovereignty (and their gambling money) into buying land and restoring it to ecological health. Those pilot projects were then picked up by the Civilian Climate Corps.
Peat bogs could store a hell of a lot of carbon — if they were kept from drying out. Unfortunately, decades of ditching had done exactly that, and now a single fire could undo thousands of years worth of natural soil building in one afternoon.
While the wind howled outside the rain-sheeted windows of the van, and the hail piled up white on the ground, Dullard told the kids that old meandering joke about the truck full of rednecks who where on their way to beat up a black man named Clarence for interfering with one of ‘their’ women.
As they were about to pass under a bridge, Pappy looked up at the writing on it and shouted, “Turn the truck around! It says, ‘CLARENCE THIRTEEN FEET SIX INCHES’!”
The kids laughed politely. They had heard that one before.
In the real world, the rednecks would have all been carrying guns. Or these days, grenades. Maybe even a rocket launcher. There was a healthy black market for weapons, sourced by ‘leaks’ from military bases. There were those who wanted the state to take command of those federal installations, and making them look insecure served multiple purposes.
They chatted and verbally groomed one another (in the primate sense, not the molester sense) for another ten or fifteen minutes while the storm blew on through. When the sun came out again the van heated up quickly, and they got restless. It wasn’t much better outside, with the humidity so high from the rain.
As they left the van, a small flock of sun conures settled into a patch of cockle burrs to feast on the sticky, hook-covered seeds (toxic to humans). Relatives of the extinct Carolina parakeet from South America, they had been released on tribal lands as part of a rewilding project. They seemed to be doing well, spreading. Dullard didn’t know what they (the tribes) called the little birds. Busy, chattering, bright-eyed, they reminded him of his students.
He called them ‘students’ for simplicity, because there were multiple GS categories, but this was in no way a classroom. These kids were working. Everything they did was data for some scientist or other.
Dullard was just setting up the metal soil core tube to pull a plug when lightning struck it from the clear blue sky. It must have been a positive strike, a horizontal bolt from the top of one of the rapidly receding clouds to the east, miles away. The wet ground literally exploded as a billion volts of electricity flash-boiled the water around the coring tube, and Dullard was thrown backwards by the expanding cloud of steam. It was like a scene from an action movie.
He convulsed as he flew through the air, his muscles contracting all at once from the electricity. His felt his bad shoulder dislocate from the strain, and cracked at least one molar as his jaw muscles spasmed and ground them together. At least my tongue wasn’t sticking out, he thought, slowly, as though he was thinking through molasses. Landing is going to hurt.
Oddly, it did not. Dullard did not feel himself bouncing across the soggy landscape, or coming to rest in a crumpled heap on the saturated ground. By that time he seemed to be outside his body, floating above it, and he felt nothing — no pain, no burns, not even tingling or pins and needles from blood flow disruptions.
He was relatively undisturbed by this. Given his drug history, he had been “outside his body” numerous times, and recent research had shown how easy it was to trigger that particular sensory experience in the laboratory, with even the cheapest of VR equipment. It seemed almost a preset of the nervous system.
Dullard was vaguely concerned that he might die, since he couldn’t feel his heart beating, but honestly, in that strangely calm moment, he was more interested in observing how his students would react. Some of them were close enough to feel the lightning strike spreading out in a circle through the wet ground, and all of them were stunned by the thunderclap, but only momentarily. Already the furthest away were staggering back to help their partners to their feet. Dullard wondered how long it would take them to notice his absence.
About two minutes, it turned out. There was a quick and empathetic gathering around Shawain Franklin, who was bleeding out of one ear — probably a ruptured eardrum — but things got serious when Damien Mruk found him (Dullard), and he didn’t respond. Damien started CPR himself, and shouted to the others to start a timer and spell him so he didn’t exhaust himself. Breathing for two was hard work, and it was easy to hyperventilate and pass out by blowing off too much CO2.
Some of the others started systematically checking phones for damage and signal coverage, and one went to the open door of the van to check the citizen’s band radio, and look for the defibrillator. Both were fried, it seemed.
But the drones had been farther away, in the hands of the youngest members of the group, the gamer girls, Yuliya and Sonya Hetrick, only fourteen and fifteen. They could be difficult at times — argumentative, with each other especially, but closing ranks if criticized. However, there they were, back to back, with the drones already up in the air, one headed for the closest fire station and the other for the tribal cops’ favorite speed trap on the road to the beach. The drones had speakers to discourage birds from attacking them, but they didn’t have voice transmission capabilities. It looked like the girls had duct-taped their precious matching bone conduction ear-clips to the drones before sending them off, though.
Aaawwww, thought Dullard, surprised that that detail was what put him over the edge.
“Why is he crying?” asked Damien, who was resting near Dullard’s head while another, newer intern (whose name he couldn’t quite recall at the moment) pumped away at Dullard’s sternum.
“I might have popped a rib loose,” the new kid said. “How long are we doing this?”
“Until he wakes the fuck up and tells us to stop,” Damien said.
They continued for thirty-nine minutes, with every one of the kids taking at least one turn, even those who hadn’t been formally trained in CPR. At that point a tribal cop pulled up in a gray SUV with a working defibrillator. They had started clearing a space big enough for the medevac drone to land, with hatchets and loppers and in one case their gloved hands, but it turned out to be one of the newer ones that just hovered and dropped a gurney on cables. Fifty-one minutes after the lightning strike, Dullard was in the air, on the way to the hospital.
He came to in a hospital room, staring at a stuffed conure. Not taxidermy, but a cute little plushie with green-and-blue wings, an orange face, and a shiny gold lame’ body. Black plastic eyes. No feet. Words, he thought. Words seem OK.
A projection appeared at the foot of his bed. “You’re awake!” it said. It was a human. “I had a notification set off your EEG.” It sounded female, but Dullard could not make sense of its facial features. Oh, shit, do I have prosopagnosia? he thought.
“Grabble, grabble,” he said. The projection made a worried face. Aphasia? How the hell am I going to work with aphasia?
“You sound like that guy who steals hamburgers,” said the projection. “Maybe you should go back to sleep while I call your doctor.”
“RUANORSE?” No, he wasn’t aphasic; his tongue was just burned to shit around the piercing. He was probably high on pain meds. And then there must have been some kind of auto-injection into his IV, because he was out again, like a light had been turned off.
Rehab was awful. They’d redone his knee implant, where the lightning had sparked off the titanium and melted the plastic parts. He had cataracts now, which sucked. They wouldn’t remove them until he was almost ready to go back to work. Some risk of retinal detachment because his immune system was out of whack.
So his students were mostly voices. But they were there, by hologram or in person, one after another, every day, word spreading through the network of alumni like ripples through a pond. He had been a little obsessive about keeping in touch with them, a habit that developed over time, as he became more and more convinced that no woman wanted his grizzled balding ass, and he began to regard them as the only children he would ever have.
He called them “lifers” for a reason. A large proportion of them went into civil service. Even the ones who went into the corporate hurricane, or became entrepreneurs, or joined the growing co-op world, stayed friendly with the feds, because they understood the system, knew how to make it work for them and theirs. Because they got it; they understood E Pluribus Unum. Because he had made them understand it. They experienced it, out in the field. The joy of pulling your weight. The joy of the well-oiled machine. The joy of the finished wall, the built bridge, the joy of stone piled upon stone, together. He hadn’t always been an old man, pulling soil plugs from the pocosins. He had built things, with them.
Dullard wondered about the pyramids, sometimes. Was it slavery? Or was it skillful social engineering? People would work themselves to exhaustion for a good cause, and feel good about it. Dullard had studied cults, after his older sister got involved in some group that had split from the Presbyterian church over an argument about the Super Bowl. By the time Oakley hooked up with them, their ‘prophet’ had been a AI copy of their dead founder. Really creepy.
Still, Dullard could admit to himself that he had borrowed some cultish tricks for making unwanted kids feel wanted. They weren’t full-on love bombing, because there were no lies involved, but there was research, and targeted messaging. And unlike most training programs, Dullard turned away the over-achievers, the resume hunters and the badge gatherers, in favor of the lonely and the disengaged.
Congress had passed the Apprenticeship Act, which required every federal employee to have at least one trainee at all times. Many half-assed this responsibility, this opportunity, taking on the children of their friends or people they knew from church or Rotary or whatever — or ignored it entirely and dared the sclerotic bureaucracy to fire them. But Clarence Dullard embraced it. He took on as many kids as his supervisors would allow (sometimes more, on the down-low, if their families could afford for them to work unpaid). He understood that if he let them, and supported them, they would train each other.
The day they un-bandaged his eyes, he couldn’t count the faces in windows on VRoom. Though his cataracts were gone, he still couldn’t see for the tears.
This short story is dedicated to UNC Pembroke professor and Comic Culture broadcaster Terence Dollard, whose name I co-opted and corrupted, and to my father-in-law, high school teacher and cross-country coach extraordinaire Bob Reall.
REFERENCES
https://blog.therainforestsite.greatergood.com/carolina-parakeet/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-carolina-parakeet-go-extinct-180968740/
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/winter-2017/we-now-know-real-range-extinct-carolina-parakeet
https://www.audubon.org/news/possible-ivory-billed-woodpecker-footage-breathes-life-extinction-debate
https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/
https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/xanthium-strumarium/
https://www.ncwildlife.org/Connect-With-Us/the-legendary-cat-of-the-mountains-and-the-swamps-is-just-that-a-legend-2
https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2017/10/story-of-wampus-cat.html
https://www.wral.com/story/abandoned-town-monster-beneath-nc-lake-6-eerie-legends-with-real-historic-roots-in-nc/19351942/
https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata/infographic.html
https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-lightning-strikes-survived
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/do-surgical-implants-attract-lightning
https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20205100
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/are-religion-and-artificial-intelligence-compatible/
https://www.ranker.com/list/active-cults/mike-rothschild
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/roody2shoes/2012/mar/10/beyond-cult-controversy-the-mate-peddlers-of-the-t/#
https://www.whitehouse.gov/climatecorps/
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/03/you-can-start-applying-for-the-american-climate-corps-next-month/
https://www.noemamag.com/becoming-universal/
Relevant science on near-death experiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/02/new-science-of-death-brain-activity-consciousness-near-death-experience
As a totally unintended coincidence, Annie Jacobsen includes a 'Bolt Out of the Blue' attack on Washington, DC, in her latest book, NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO. That is apparently the standard insider's phrase for the concept.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/748264/nuclear-war-by-annie-jacobsen/