Chapter 6

Life upon the Inca Trail was boring and Jeremy couldn't be happier. The two men he interacted with most were his bunkmate and the cook. Ng, his bunkmate, was a man of few words and many grunts. He claimed to be pure Vietnamese but he was big and broad, not slight like the Southeast Asians Jeremy had seen in his digital studies. Abasi would give Jeremy an order and then leave him alone until the next order. Haul, wash, slice, and scrub. The job was straightforward.

When he wasn't working for Abasi, Jeremy was plugged into one of the digital setups, reading. While the available material wasn't as extensive as the library in Sao Paulo, the choices were broad and more was available through satellite download. Jeremy instinctively avoided all downloads, except for a few porn stories. The porn stories were his cover for when curiosity seekers came by to read over his shoulder. He saved all the porn in an open file that many a crewmember perused while he was peeling potatoes below. The one starring a Shetland pony was one of the most popular.

Jeremy hid the time he spent on his new obsessions — chemistry and chemical engineering. He also loved math and its logic. His other new obsession was the Global Collapse, which had come to an official close about twenty years ago.

The world's population had been seven billion when the great catastrophe began. No single event or circumstance had caused it and the collapse hadn't occurred all at once. It took forty years. By the end six out of every seven human beings was gone from the face of the earth; only a billion remained.

Everything that happened across the globe was predictable; no event came as a great surprise. But it turned out that every prophet, futurist, economist, military analyst, political strategist, and meteorologist had been wrong.

Global warming hadn't caused "Mother Nature's Revenge" as one historian had recently labeled it. The climate change was one necessary element. Economic greed was another as was poverty, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and regional wars. The only nuclear event had been a leak at the nuclear reactor outside of Marseilles, which poisoned a couple of million people and created the first metropolitan ghost town. The cause had been human error.

The great die-off had been a long series of human errors, of fear and blind opportunism complicated by the predictable disasters of the day. Theoretical ideologies had been translated into absurd laws and policies in some nations, while fundamentalism took control of military hardware in other places. There were no surprises, just lots of dead bodies from unchecked diseases, militias and armies run amuck, destroyed crops and ruined land. Crop zones shifted. Cities were swallowed by rising oceans as the caps melted, which was actually a blessing for the clean-up of Marseilles. Discipline broke down and economic systems collapsed. Religions died out. Political partisans were executed frequently.

A moderate earthquake hit Southern California. Nothing unusual for the area nor was the quake itself devastating by any stretch of the imagination. It was the inability to respond to the damage afterward that had caused wide-spread suffering. In the past when people and resources had been more readily available, a broken water main was a day's repair using extra pipe brought in from some yard where it had been stored for just such an emergency. In the midst of a global collapse, repairs could take months or years, if they ever got done. The weather in Southern California was still great though.

As more people and vulnerable species died off, the rainforests returned and the Sahara shrank. The great plains of North America along the Mississippi River became giant swamps. No one was surprised when the West Nile virus sickened people on both sides of the river, as well as wiping out the swallow and crow populations.

The Three Gorges Dam collapsed and flushed a half-century's worth of filth down to the China coast. No one tallied the loss of human life. Countries dissolved. The Aswan Dam was sabotaged and its waters were sent towards Cairo. The local newspaper celebrated the flood as the first bath the city had experienced in a century and a half. Two years later Egyptian fertilizer factories went out of business because the annual flooding of the Nile was refortifying the fields. Unfortunately the teeming waters also brought the return of the Nile worm, a microscopic creature that had eaten mammalian brains since the time of the pharaohs.

A significant element of these decades was low birthrates. A generation was lost, more or less. Yet life went on. Since everyone was a survivor, the word and the concept disappeared from the culture. Life went on.

For the new generation, the energies of the day were directed at dismantling the great civilization that had immolated itself. Reclamation and recycling of all of the detritus was an economic boom. Science and industry had continued forward in fits and starts through the decades, and solutions proposed fifty to seventy years ago came to fruition, just a few decades too late for most of the population. The end result was a world government, a planetary language called Uni-verse, no great religions, and a lot fewer people.

Jeremy sat back in his chair night after night with a sense of incredulity. Everybody knew this but him. His world had been completely two-dimensional. He had had no clue that the sugarcane fields where he had awakened were controversial, being so far inland and retarding the rain forest. The library where he had learned to read again was a historical depository for the indigenous cultures of the continent, and its artifacts were priceless.

"Blind," Jeremy mumbled under his breath as he relived his days in Sao Paulo. At times he was so shaken that he dropped pots or sprayed the entire kitchen with water. The cook would rap him on the head, usually with his favorite wooden spoon, and remind him to pay attention. Jeremy would paste a goofy smile in his face and apologize.

The voyage to Lagos lasted three weeks. For the first two Jeremy was able to successfully duck the nightly card game, but he was being pursued. One of the seamen was a European named Thomas MacPhearson III, and he had a sideline business running the game. It was a lucrative business if the rumors were true. Thomas had taken a fancy to "Enrique," believing that he was an easy mark. Jeremy was willing to admit that he probably was gullible.