Part II is missing at the moment somewhere in a pile of papers or lost in a computer.

Years have moved ahead and the struggle for survival has become the norm. Perhaps is has always been this way, each generation believes that it’s time is the most challenging…she wondered if there was ever, since the beginning of time ,an era that was not challenging or interesting.

Clair watched as she lived her life, she watched the star patterns begin to change. the slow creeping of sand farther into the towns, the fewer familiar birds and insects.

The crops that were being grown in the farmed grow areas were all sheltered from the elements, the cowl covering were now part of everyday life…and many underground passages were dug deep into the earth.  They had air channels that allowed air to be filtered in without the use of any energy other than the force of the air itself shifting through the many thin tubes made of a fibre from another type of cactus.  The lighting was also channelled in through openings above that were made of the cowl material allowing in light in a soft pattern along the tunnelled walls.  These underground channels were connections to many communities.  Each community was started by a  group of friends or family that had contained their creative and learned knowledge of a particular form.  The food growers had each developed ony one or two specialties, this allowed for many people to access their needs by trading.

The re-training of many young people took many years, as most of the skills that had been taken for granted a generation before were lost during the surge of artificial intelligence and technology.  This was the reason for it’s being here in the first place.  Humanity being so absorbed in its own belief that humans were really capable of developing this mass technology on our own, really not ever questioning the validity of human accomplishment, never thinking once that it was from somewhere else that this sudden impact so quickly taken on as if it were always here.  Taking to it all too easily like breathing, and that too, breathing, we took credit for as our own.

As technology for communication became more and more available for everyone, and other means of communication became  tiresom, too complicated, too exhausting, the abbreviated forms of texting became the mode for each new generation.  Speech became lessened, writing slowly vanished along with the ability to actually read full ideas.  If it was sung into the ears through little inserts with musical vibrations tat was all the was going on.

When it all stopped, when the plug was pulled the planet was at the mercy of our captors…

Martha Klein Henrickson  sometime between 1999 and 2012

cactus and glacier…