Chapter 1

My name is Josh Whitney. When and where I am writing this 'story' for your amusement and edification aren't actually all that important at the moment, as you'll learn those details in a bit. At that point, you'll either put this memoir down in disgust, keep reading it as a silly fiction, or maybe, just maybe you'll get more interested than that. If so, I have a few words for you at the end of my tale. More important is that this story begins just after New Years in 2010.

By profession I am a computer programmer, systems analyst, and network designer. At the time that this story of mine starts, I was fifty three years of age. I'm a five foot eleven, pale skinned, a fairly typical 'Silicon Valley' engineer. I weighed about two hundred and forty pounds, and I was pretty darned out of shape.

I'd been doing consulting for an outfit called Tempe, a contract-hire firm that specialized in higher-priced and older systems guys. Given that I was a long term veteran of start-ups and shut-downs in the valley, I'd picked contracting as a decent compromise versus getting hired and fired out of yet another set of companies every couple of years.

I'd been doing this for a while, so I had a bit of money put away, I had a house in a local bay-area commuter bedroom community named Fremont and an ex-wife named Gloria. Gloria and I weren't on the best of terms, given that I'd cheated on her with a co-worker, and I'd had the bad taste to admit it and ask for the divorce. We'd been married for something approaching thirteen years, and while I loved her, I'd not been 'in love' with her for years, and our sex life had left a lot to be desired.

So, there I was on a very wet and rainy January Monday morning, on my way to a new contracting gig. I'd completed the last contract a couple of weeks before, had taken a few days off, and went in to get a new slot last Friday when Tempe's recruiter called me. The job was out at a small place off of highway 17, a start up, and they needed a few weeks of my time to build a network, deploy a web server farm, and set up a nightly build server (those are the machines that compile code into alpha and beta test versions for the quality assurance or test procedure folks to test against).

The location was up a newly paved hill road in the Santa Cruz hills. The road was rain slicked, as I said, so I was driving slowly in my newly purchased Toyota FJ when something odd happened. First, as I came around a sharp turn that was damn near a blind corner, I had a massive heart attack. A whole lot of years of bad food, lots of fat, and being lazy came crashing in on me all at once. My left side felt like someone had hit me with a fifteen pound maul, and I couldn't breathe. So, I did what a lot of people in that situation might have done. I lost control of the FJ. The car then proceeded to smash into the side of the hill. This set off a small mud slide. My driver side window and front windshield caved in, and buried me and the front of the truck in multiple tons of fresh mud.

I scrambled to get my phone out of its hands-free cradle and call 911, but there was too much mud in the passenger compartment, I couldn't move well because of the pain, and I couldn't get to it. I'll spare you the blow by blow details, but the hillside gave way on top of my car, the compartment filled completely with mud, and I slowly drowned in mud, trapped in the driver's seat. Luckily, I'm pretty sure that the heart attack knocked me out before the worst of the drowning kicked in. I remain glad for small mercies. I remember wondering, quite oddly, how long it would take to dig my buried truck out of the mud, and what would become of my body. Then things went dark.

I woke up naked in an all white room.

It was sterile, hospital white. I was lying on a very lightly padded table, a couple of feet off the floor. The pad was white, the table was white. The ceiling overhead was a uniform glowing soft white providing illumination. In this room around me were a white desk, a white chair, and some stuff on the desk. That was all - no door or anything else, just lots and lots of stark white. I turned and sat up. What I immediately noticed was that I wasn't dead, I wasn't trapped in a truck, and I wasn't having a heart attack. In fact, I felt pretty good. After a long moment or two I stood up. The moment I did so, the ceiling in the room rose like magic several feet higher and the padded table I'd been laying on slid down into the floor and vanished. The ceiling and the table both moved like movie special effects, seamlessly and almost like a fluid. It was more than a little odd looking. My knees didn't hurt very much, my back wasn't all that sore, unlike most mornings. Given the oddness of my situation, I was pretty damned calm. Looking back on it, I was almost certainly somehow being kept artificially calm. The top of the table was illuminated from within, like a very high quality flat screen monitor, and as I looked at it, words formed. There was also what looked like a generic but stark white laptop rising seamlessly out of the table top. Here's what the words on the table monitor said to the best of my ability to recall:

Greetings and congratulations, you have been selected to participate in a long term experiment. This experiment will occupy the remainder of your life. As a subject in such an experiment, it is important that you remain unaware of the purpose of the experiment itself. Where you find yourself at this moment, how you got here, why you are functioning, and other similar questions will not be answered, and are not important to the experiment. Here is what you need to know. First, if you do not cooperate in initial planning stages of the experiment, your life will be terminated here. You may choose to indicate your desire not to participate by placing your head in the blue ring you now see glowing on the far wall.

( At that moment, a section of the far wall across from me lit up with a baby blue ring, about fifteen inches or so across. )

Upon placing your head against the wall in the ring, your life functions will be painlessly terminated. If you do not participate in the experiment, and also refuse to voluntarily terminate your life functions, at an unspecified point in time in the future, your life functions will be terminated for you. Should you choose to participate in the experiment, please use the computing device constructed for you to create a list of supplies that you will choose to have with you during the experiment. Until such time as you create the list of supplies required for the experiment, you will not be provided with food or water. Should you decide to participate in the experiment, you will be provided with minimal sustenance. You may indicate your choice to participate in the experiment by placing your head in the green ring you now see glowing on the far wall. ( Again, just at that moment, a green glowing ring lit up on the wall ) Here are some details of the experiment that are germane to your choice of supplies. You will be relocated to a primitive environment, roughly equivalent in historical context to a period approximately 40,000 years before your common era. The location you will be relocated to will be relatively near areas suitable for hunting and cultivation. You have only one opportunity to select the supplies that will be provided for you. You may select any type of supply or material that you find available in the computing device. You can design special materials using the facilities on the device in the table. You are permitted to select or design a total volume of supplies not to exceed six meters by four meters by four meters. You are not permitted to select supplies that utilize sterling cycle, otto cycle, internal combustion or similar engines. You may not select supplies that directly generate electricity. Once you have completed the selection of supplies, indicate this status by placing your head in the white ring you now see glowing on the far wall. ( A glowing white ring lit up in the far wall )

At this point in my story, I'm going to jump over a lot of yelling at the walls, and doing other odd stuff to be able to talk to someone. No one ever responded to anything I did; nothing I did generated any kind of response at all. Since you're reading this, you can guess that at a certain point I walked over and, after reading the message a couple of times to make sure I had the colors right, stuck my head up against the wall inside the green ring. Once I did that, the blue ring disappeared, and the laptop came on. Where my sleeping pad had been, the wall opened up and the pad folded down from it. Across the room from the sleeping pad, a very generic looking white porcelain water spigot appeared. The water ran continuously out of the spigot in a small fountain and disappeared again through a tiny white grate. Next to the water fountain a stark white bowl stuck out of the wall, full of warm unsalted oatmeal with a soft white plastic spoon in it. That was all I got to eat during my stay, warm and unsalted oatmeal. When I ate, I had to bend down and eat out of the bowl with the spoon, as it sure wasn't moving.

Next to the food tray and the water fountain, a perfectly normal white porcelain flush toilet appeared out of the floor. And that was it.

After my bout of yelling and sticking my head in the ring, I played with the laptop. It looked and acted for all I could tell like a perfectly normal laptop, except for being very fast. There was no power cord. On the laptop was a browser, a couple of CAD design programs, and many, many web based catalogs. Every single year of the Sears and Roebuck catalog from 1893 onwards, lots of old English agriculture catalogs, you name it. Interestingly enough, there were also a lot of firearms catalogs including some military arms.

Now, I was no expert in survival. I didn't know karate, I wasn't a good marksman. I couldn't have told you one end of a plow from another, and I'd never spent much time around animals. I've never been a cowboy either. What I did have going for me was that I have read a lot. I've read all kinds of stuff, and I'm handy with tools. My dad was a plumber, and one thing he left me with is an understanding that you can do pretty much anything you need to if you slow down, read the manual, and use the tools right. That got me through rebuilding lots of my old house, and fueled my curiosity to mess around with tools and building stuff all my life. It would have to do.

So, what did I select to go with me? Well, the very first thing I did was spend a long time using the cad program to design a 5.998 meter by 3.998 meter by 3.998 meter mild steel cube. This cube included nifty little additions like front and side doors with gun slits, removable hinge panels, and firing ports. I knew that the thing I wanted most was a place to be safe. If I was going to be living in 40,000BC, there were going to be a lot of hungry predators around. Parts of the cube I designed in titanium, and other parts in mild steel, because I planned on being able to weld the steel or cut it. Titanium working was going to be beyond me pretty much, I knew. How big is that? It's roughly eighteen feet by twelve feet by twelve feet. That's pretty close to the size of a small one car garage, or if you've used one of those big portable storage pod delivery services, it's about the size of two of the big ones.

Once I got my panic room designed, I started to fill it up, using a nifty little space planning program on the laptop. I selected saws, hammers, shovels, rakes, hoes, scythes, a couple of small anvils, French irons, lots and lots of barbed wire and 12 gauge copper wire in stranded and solid. I added old fashioned gasoline welding torches and a couple of 500 gallon gas tanks and 'vaporless' hand pumps. Post hole diggers, two man lumber saws, a pair of massive 1910 multi-mills based on rotating bands and not electricity, a lathe from the same period, and other wood working tools all rounded out the lumber and steel stuff. I tossed in a couple of water pump wind mills, and just to see if I could get away with it, I added in several hundred Neodymium magnets and fifty gallons of epoxy resins and glassing.

I added some iron and steel pipe, but not a whole lot, as it took up a lot of space in the box. What piping I did add, I made nesting. Each section's outside diameter just a tiny bit smaller than the bigger one's inside diameter. Then I added a bunch of screw down rubber pressure couplings and flex fittings.

Horse collars, saddles, hobbles, a plow with a replaceable steel blade, and a bunch of other horse drawn stuff I didn't have any idea how to use went into the list. I added a couple of specialty books on braiding, working horses, and how to domesticate animals. Just for grins, I added a couple of small grain mills run by hand.

A hundred days of military MREs, a large stainless cook set, bags of flour, rice, and other staples went into their own titanium boxes with locking doors. I added spices and salt, and a lot of it, but not too much dried meat. I added books too, an old agricultural and farm encyclopedia from 1910, and a whole lot of how to books.

Next was medicine. This was important to get right, and I knew it. Most important of all was going to be the antibiotics and pain killers. It turns out that most of what I was looking for came in pill form, or in powders, and could be ordered in long-term sealed packets designed for use in the 'third world'. Between the antibiotics, anti-fungals, pain meds, and other basics, I added almost five hundred pounds in medical kits and supplies. I designed a super-insulated freezer box several feet square that was lined with six inches of Aerogel insulation. It ran on tiny sips of propane, and I put the perishable meds in there. I also designed a few micro refrigerant solid-state couplers into the walls of the box, just in case electricity ever became available. It turns out that I could run that chest freezer for about 25 watt hours a day as long as I kept it mostly closed and only used it at fridge temps, not as a freezer. Cold air descends, so it stays in place in a chest freezer. Just to give you a sense of how efficient that is, 25 watt hours a day is just slightly over a steady draw of one watt. That's about the amount of electricity used to power one dim 'reminder' light on your typical DVD player in standby mode. The burner would only have to run for about five minutes a day to keep the interior at zero degrees Centigrade.

I got all that mostly finished off, and then added in clothes, a lot of camouflage stuff, long johns, and polypropylene and other materials to keep me warm when I was wet. I added a few sewing kits, a bunch of thread and needles, and a farm wife's dream, a set of pedal powered sewing machines that folded down into a box. I was real happy to find those. Lots of boots, sleeping bags, backpacks, a couple of tents, and other stuff went into the boxes too.

Finally I got around to the survival stuff. I picked a few guns I knew about, basically a mess of Browning .300-Win rifles, and Ruger KP944 model .40 cal pistols. I got a lot of both, and I put in thousands of rounds of ammo for both types. I added several reloading kits, lots of primers, and lots of modern powder. I didn't know how to reload, but I could learn. I added lots of small high grade knives, and a few dozen combat style big knives. I scared myself a little, thinking about trying to fight with a knife. I resolved not to have to. I added in a few dozen hunting bows and lots of arrows of various types. I also added in a few sets of 'ghillie' suits. I'll write more on that last item later. For about half the rifles I added in some decent Pentax scopes. Because I scared myself, I added in some industrial chainmail, and man, am I glad I did that. Industrial chainmail is the stuff that meat cutters and shark-suit divers wear. It's a mesh fabric made of incredibly strong micro-rings all woven together into the modern version of a medieval footman's armor.

I've left a lot of stuff off this list. 3400 cubic feet may seem like a lot of room for supplies, but it filled up super fast. I'll tell you one thing. I am damned glad I played a lot of 'California Trail' style computer games years back. It saved my ass.

When I was all done, I took a really deep breath and put my forehead up against the white circle. Everything turned a brilliant white and I lost consciousness...

I woke up naked again on top of my big storage box. From the beads of dew on the storage box it appeared to be early morning. The air smelled clean, really clean. It smelled like forest. I stood up and looked around.

My box and I had been set up in a small clearing in some kind of massive and dense oak wood. There wasn't much to see from the clearing. Standing on the box put my line of sight up at about eighteen feet, and all the trees around me were taller than that. My knees went weak and I had to sit down pretty fast. I was breathing hard, and I could feel my heart hammering in my chest.

Somewhere off in the distance I could hear the cry of a large cat. My very overactive mind reminded me that it was probably a Smilodon, a sabre-toothed tiger ambushing prey out there in the deep woods. Looking around the edges of the box for signs of wild life first, and seeing none I crawled over the edge and dropped off after hanging by my fingers for a moment. It was still a slightly jarring drop, and I rolled to my feet as quick as I could.

As I fumbled with the combination lock on the front of my supply box, it felt like a million pairs of hostile eyes were boring holes in my back. I didn't stop sweating until I'd gotten the door thrown open and grabbed the backpack, pistols, and long rifle I'd put in the front. I turned and faced the clearing as I got my clothes out of the backpack and dressed. Strapping on the pistols, one in a shoulder draw and the other in a belt draw made me feel a lot better. I checked to make sure they were loaded, and then sat down on my heels for a moment to just breathe. I had noticed that everything in the supply box was new. There were stickers on everything, from Wal-Mart and a few places I'd never heard of. Some stuff looked like it was still in the shipping crates. Guess I couldn't complain about my gear being used.

The reality of my situation began to slam down on me. Up until now it had all been an academic exercise, just like playing California Trail, but a lot more detailed. Now, squatting in a forest clearing, listening to the sounds of the world around me, I had time to be afraid.

I don't know if you've ever really looked at trees or a forest. I know that prior to this event in my life I'd done plenty of hiking, but I'd taken a lot of things for granted. For example, when I went out hiking, I was 'getting back to nature'. I had never understood that no where I'd ever been in my life was 'natural'. Anywhere you go, most likely anywhere at all ... the trees you see have all been harvested for lumber, probably multiple times. If you've been to Europe, unless you go to Siberia, you're looking at third, fourth, tenth, twentieth growth trees. Trees that have been harvested by man again and again. This place wasn't like that. The trees around me were massive and old. These trees had never been cut, had never seen the blows of a woodsman's axe or a chainsaw. When they aged, they fell where they stood, or they burned from fire. These oaks and hardwoods stood giant and tall, many stretching upwards well over a hundred feet, and the canopy covering maybe a hundred and fifty feet across. Underneath the dense and dark canopy were lesser shrubs that could grow in the twilight provided. It wasn't a cleared out forest, but instead the remnants of fallen tress lay across others in a tangle of limbs and mossy brackens. From everywhere were the sounds of dense forest life. This was the kind of black, dark, and impenetrable forest that the Romans had talked about when they stopped following the Germans out of their fear of the vast, trackless primeval woods. Animals were one thing. Bears can chase you, get kinda stuck on getting to you. Lions and cats could decide to hunt you, but mostly animals steer clear of what they don't know. Humans though, humans are very cunning, and if I pissed off some hunter, he could probably just sneak up on me and stick a spear in me as I blundered around being loud and stupid. That's what I was really afraid of. Nature had gifted the people of this time with tens of thousands of years of inherited hunting and fighting skills. I had none. Without friends it would only be a matter of time until someone or something got to me.

What I needed was friends, and a long term shelter. With that in mind, I stood up and closed the door to the box. I locked it again. Looking around from the top of my box in the clearing, I could see a hill nearby, and my compass told me it was nearly due north. I walked around the clearing and gathered some loose deadfall and piled it up for a fire. I made some tinder from leaf detritus and lit it from my Zippo. Once the fire was well caught, I added some wood to it and headed out north toward the hills. Why did I light an unattended fire and walk away? Because I was scared to death that I'd never find my way back without being able to see or smell smoke.