The Old Man

The novel reads quickly for three reasons: it’s suspenseful (a bit of a thriller), the reader is captivated by the characters and its lean. A number of things impress me about Laura Pritchett’s story. Let’s start with Ben, one of the protagonists.

Ben wouldn't be a man you’d notice on the street. He's not somebody that would stand out. But because of the attentive focus of the narrative, the old man gets inside your heart and emerges as a hero, becomes somebody you wish you could know, have as a mentor.

Ben is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He has some important things to do before his diseased mind makes the mission impossible. So he’s fighting a superhuman battle. You find yourself pulling for him, against impossible odds. You want him to succeed, and the story draws it out of you, empathy for this old guy.

But here’s the kicker: the two things he is determined to accomplish are illicit. His objectives are firmly categorized as "bad" in our culture’s moral and legal codes. Some would say evil. Yet we pull for him to succeed.

That is a story!

The other protagonist is Ben’s wife, Renny. I should mention that the narrative is told from two points of view, Renny’s and Ben’s. We alternate chapters between them. This technique catalyzes two effects: the suspense of the thriller and the profound relationship the reader develops with each character.

Renny is not somebody most of us would like if we met her. She is as cold as the winter setting of this novel and cruel. Her motivation to be so shuttered is rooted in the past. Stars Go Blue is the third book in a trilogy. In a previous story Ben and Renny lost their daughter, and that tragedy drove the couple apart.

I found myself wishing something for Renny: that she’d let her guard down and just accept and love herself. To her, everything is stupid, which is her favorite word. Renny’s contempt for herself drives her to pour the same emotion into everyone she loves. It’s heart breaking.

Yet Pritchett manages to turn the table on the reader by putting Renny’s life in danger, by making her vulnerable, and suddenly we’re pulling for her, too.

There’s a third point of view from which we get to watch these people, the granddaughter's. Jess is a great character. We’re introduced to her early on. We’re teased in a way, because she’s an instant favorite, but the lens is always a mile away from her. And we’re always wanting more.

You get the sense that Pritchett knew this about us when, in the end, she gives the reader some time with Jess. The novel closes with a satisfying chapter from her point of view.

There are some rich themes Pritchett addresses in this story. It would be impossible to discuss them without introducing spoilers, which are present below.

The setting is a ranch in Colorado. It’s winter. Icy and cold. And the climax takes place in a blizzard. Stars Go Blue is a bold end-of-life narrative. Pritchett does not flinch. Her directness, I think, will make readers squeamish. From the earliest pages, we are witnesses to ranch life. To birthing and killing. We see animals nurtured and we see them compassionately put down.

There is a juxtaposition which serves to compare the compassion with which the rancher offers the suffering animal at the end of its life to the lack of compassion with which we treat our own kind. It’s taboo to put down a suffering human being.

There are scenes presented in the narrative that most Americans have never contemplated. Scenes detailing where our food comes from. What it means to be alive and to eat and to be near the land. The book reveals the consequences of our appetites, of our lives, to the animals which feed us, which is not a commentary on food in this story, but on life itself.

There are wild things living on the ranch: the bald eagle, the owl, the aspens, the willows and the water. Wildness which the old man loves.

The old rancher is protective of the earth around him. It is his dying wish the that land be preserved, healed. It is a subtext, but it is there, like an accusation. There is something amiss in our civilization: that without protection the very thing that sustains us, the land, is in jeopardy.

The old man is no liberal, no environmentalist. The reader gets the sense that he wouldn’t be able to relate with that urban ethic. He’s a rancher who understands where life comes from. The balance necessary to sustain his family. He understands health in a way no one divorced from the land could.

The main thrust of the story is the damaged family. So the old man's desire to heal the land also serves as a metaphor for another type of healing. There are a lifetime of scars accumulated in this book. Neither Ben nor Renny are very good at intimacy. That is evident in their relationships with their children and grandchildren. They are human beings, as flawed and as afraid as any of us. We get to see the consequences of their lack of development, the fruit it bears over a lifespan.

The theme of self-acceptance is played out through the female characters. Renny is loaded with self-contempt. It is the lens with which she views everyone around her. She sees fault first and protects her heart from further loss by believing that no one will come to a good end. This is played out in her expressed certainty that her granddaughter, Jess, will wind up addicted to drugs and pregnant. Which is ironic because Jess is the character in the story who has learned to love herself. Because she is comfortable with herself, she also loves her grandmother, accepts Renny for who she is.

The resolution to this tale about death (which is to say life), about the land, about family, about love–takes place in the spring, at Ben’s burial. The old man has accomplished his mission. He is a hero.

Ben's heroism means that he has committed acts thought to be reprehensible by our society. However, the reader was with him when he committed those acts, wanted him to succeeded. In other words, the context of the old man’s life, our empathy for him, changed us, grew our own understanding of what it means to be human. Our own understanding of life and of death.

Jess walks us through all of that in the last chapter. We learn that, just as we suspected, she was protecting her grandfather all along. By being clandestine about it, she gave him his dignity. Jess is the embodiment of grace, of forgiveness and of self-acceptance.

The story is going to make the reader sad. That's just the way it is. But it would be a mistake to avoid it because of sorrow. Ben, knowing his mind is almost gone, writes a letter to his future self. It's the most touching scene in the book. An act of compassion, of self-love that brought me to tears.

"You have been a good man. You have Alzheimer's...Be brave. It's been a good life...Everyone has to die, Ben. No life without death. And your time is now, and it's OK."

We've got to put our hearts in order. Stars Go Blue is a good story for that.

A 150 yard shot with a handgun would be a remarkable accomplishment. So much so that one would be justified to be skeptical about such claims.

There's a scene in Patriarch Run in which the sheriff unloads a few cylinders from his Colt Python service revolver into a paper plate at 150 yards.

I thought it'd be worthwhile to describe how it is I came to write such a scene. Many, many moons ago I was reading "Hitting At 200 Yards With A Handgun", an article written by a couple handloaders, Dan Keisey and Bill McConnell, and posted in the Tech Notes at Beartoothbullets.com.

The quick summary of their achievement is that Dan shoots a 5.25" five-shot group at 200 yards, a 3.62" five-shot group at 150 yards and a 1.97" three-shot group at 100 yards. Dan's revolver was topped with a 2.5X8 Leopold scope. That type of shooting is extraordinary. However, Bill took a more difficult path. He used iron sights to shoot an 8" group at 200 yards and a 3.5" group at 100 yards.  Details about the loads and guns they used are available in their article.

I should point out a couple key differences between the article and my story. First, both shooters in the article used the .44 Magnum cartridge; whereas, the sheriff in my story uses the .357 Magnum cartridge. In terms of accuracy, the difference in cartridges is not very significant. Both cartridges are very accurate, especially when handloaded. Furthermore, the shooters in the article used longer barrels than the sheriff, which aids in accuracy. That being said, Bill states that the long-range groups from his 5.5" barrel were just as good as the groups from his 7.5" barrel, "With practice though the group fell into roughly the same size as with the longer barrel."

What's remarkable is that with a 5.5" barrel and iron sights, Bill was able to shoot 8" groups at 200 yards and 3.5" groups at 100 yards.

Bill's accomplishment inspired the scene in my story in which the sheriff uses a 4" Colt Python (a revolver renowned for its accuracy) to shoot a paper plate, which would be about 9" in diameter, at 150 yards.  An easier task, in my estimation, than what Bill was able to accomplish.

The scene serves, among other things, to establish the sheriff as an authority with his firearm.

Here's the Scene:

Billy, at ten years old, wanted to shoot that Winchester 1894 more than he wanted anything else in the world. He set five cans on five fence posts a full hour before the sheriff was due back. Paced off fifty yards, marked the spot with a line drawn by his boot heel and waited on the porch for the rest of the afternoon, until the sheriff’s car finally came up the drive.

“I take it you want to show me some shootin’.” 

Billy loaded five cartridges into the magazine of the .22. “You reckon that’s fifty yards?”

The sheriff thought it was closer to sixty. “Looks like it to me.”

Billy shouldered the rifle and shot the first can off the fence. He levered in another round and did it four more times.

The sheriff put his hand on Billy’s shoulder. “I’d say that settles it.”

The next day he brought him a thousand .30-30 handloads. “This is a starter load. Shoot four cans out of five at seventy-five yards and I’ll heat it up a little.”

A month later, Billy shot another five cans off the fence.

“You think you’re ready for squirrels?”

“If you think so.”

The sheriff gave him a box of another thousand handloads. “This is a good load for squirrels. Just keep it away from the house. And it’s probably best not to talk about it with your mother.”

“Alright.”

“And you leave an Abert’s squirrel alone. He has a right to do as he pleases. Shoot the fox squirrels.”

They walked together behind the house.

“You’ll find, as you get older, people aren’t all that different than squirrels. There are those who sustain their habitat and those whose sole purpose is to destroy it.”

Billy had no idea what the sheriff meant by that, but he remembered the words.

By the time the boy harvested his first mule deer, he was shooting paper plates at a hundred and fifty yards with iron sights. The sheriff would watch his trigger pull, his jaw muscles, his eye lids.

“That’s it. Nice and smooth.”

Billy’d hit the plate with every round in the magazine. And the sheriff would pat him on the shoulder and say it again, “That’s the evidence of a disciplined mind.” Then he’d draw his service revolver, take Billy’s place on the bench and empty a few cylinders into the same paper plate.

Amazon is running a sale on my literary thriller PATRIARCH RUN. It's only $0.99! We're running a campaign to boost the book's ranking. Would you please consider purchasing the story? That would go a long way in supporting me as an author. Thank you.

Here's a review:

 This World Is Hard On People, June 25, 2014

I did an interview recently with Colleen O'Grady. Colleen has over 20 years experience as a licensed marriage and family therapist. She is also a mom in the trenches with her own teenage daughter. In order to help other parents, Colleen created the Power Your Parenting program, blog and book: a guide to help parents foster healthy relationships with their teens.

Being a mother of a teenage daughter can be difficult. Colleen and I work with teenagers professionally. On the other hand, many parents are confronting, for the first time, issues we see every day. Which is why it takes a village. Those of us who work with adolescents have a lot to offer parents.

Our conversation focuses on the pervasive issue of sexting. The behavior starts earlier than most parents want to believe, and it involves many more kids than most people imagine. If you're the parent of a teenager, you'll want to listen to the podcast: Could Your Teenager be Sexting?

The issues we discuss in the podcast can be explored more fully in my article Sexting at School and in Colleen's work. If you need help building honest and open communication with your teen go to poweryourparenting.com and sign up for Colleen's free ebook, 7 Ways to Help Your Relationship with Your Teenage Daughter (and Yourself).

A friend just informed me that Dan Brown borrowed my idea for a story then published his a year before me. I guess I'll forgive him and however many million books he's sold.

For the record, though, I finished the first draft of PATRIARCH RUN in 2010.

Truth be told, the two stories have very little in common. Where they do intersect is at the premise that we are approaching an avoidable apocalypse.

There are simply too many people.

That fact must be the most underrated crisis of our time. I can't think of an environmental dilemma that is not a symptom of that simple truth.

Let's take a quick look at the math. It is estimated that the human population is growing at a relatively low rate: 1.14% per year. But as long as the population is growing, it doesn't matter how low the rate is. The math tells us that a growing population will eventually double.

At the current growth rate, that will take about 61 years.

That's not a liberal statement. It's not a conservative statement. It's a statement of fact.

Is there anyone who believes that 14 billion is a good number of people to have? What would it take to feed that many people?

Some might argue that through technology it will eventually become possible to feed 14 billion people, but I've yet to hear someone lead the cheer for that size of population.

Today there are about 1 million new people added to the ecosystem every five days. What would be the consequence of 14 billion people to the non-human members of that ecosystem?

It’s true that the growth rate of the human population is declining in some parts of Europe. Some people cite that fact as a dismissal of the overall problem. But it’s the overall problem that we have to face. In other words, it’s the planet-wide growth rate that matters–not a localized subset.

Right now, the planet-wide growth rate of the human population is pretty low: 1.14%. And that, by any scientific measure, is a crisis for just about every species on the planet, including our own.

There are plenty of good scientific studies that discuss the consequences of the growing human population on the ecosystem and how that unfolding catastrophe will eventually wind its way back to us. So I won't dive into those details.

I'd like to get into this mind bender instead. The human population in 1900 was about 1.6 billion. In 2000 it was about 6 billion. And at the rate we're growing right now, it'll be 14 billion in 2075.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. What get's me is that the growth rates were low during the last century. The growth rate peaked in the 1960s at 2.2%.

Although the recent rates of growth seem low, they took us from 1.6 to 7 billion people quite quickly.

The takeaway for me is that a growing population always doubles. And that doubling happens a lot faster than people think.

One of my characters takes this math to heart, and his actions are extreme enough to warrant a story.

I talk to a lot of people about Cormac McCarthy. It's a rare person who is familiar with his 1973 novel Child of God. Not exactly easy reading–not on the mind nor on the spirit. The story is about Lester Ballard: a Tennessee pariah, a serial-killing necrophiliac–or put another way, a child of God.

The people who have actually read the book talk about themes of cruelty, isolation and moral degradation. Others talk about survival, as Ballard is on the run. He is quite cunning and willing to endure great sacrifice.

As an English teacher, I pay attention to books. Child of God is dark. So dark that Kaleb Tierce, an English teacher in Tuscola, Texas, was placed on administrative leave for allowing the story to enter into his curriculum. The guy eventually lost his job.

There's a pantheon of dark characters in the McCarthy anthology, Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men and Judge Holden from Blood Meridian being the most well known. The evil McCarthy conjures through his characters is mythical, and that narrative power has real-world consequences. It got Mr. Tierce fired.

The trailer for Child of God is out, but I doubt I'll see the movie. For me, the story is best experienced once. You can check the trailer out for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdVzOQLbPJU

Ed Wilson was a ghost among spies. He served in the Special Operations Division of the CIA setting up front companies, which were used to ship arms and other supplies around the world.

What's interesting about Ed Wilson is that the details of his career at the CIA are so secretive that there are only a few people alive who really know the truth about his identity. And they're not talking. Wilson officially retired from the CIA in 1971, but after his "retirement" he amassed a fortune running the front companies he had originally established for the Agency, which meant he also owned strategic properties all over the globe. Wilson was known for his opulent lifestyle, swanky parties and extravagant gifts. When the Arms for Libya program was exposed in the early 1980s, Wilson's secret identity was used against him.

Ed Wilson claimed he was working for the CIA, the Agency denied this, and he went to prison for over two decades.

I was introduced to the controversial figure of Ed Wilson in Billy Waugh's 

autobiography Hunting the Jackal: in which Waugh details his own life-long exploits in covert operations. Waugh, a legendary badass, retired from the military in 1972. He was working for the United States Postal Service in 1977 when Ed Wilson, on behalf of the CIA, recruited him to help train a Libyan special forces unit.  

Billy Waugh writes with specific detail about the tradecraft Ed Wilson employed to arrange their clandestine meeting. In that meeting, Wilson protected the CIA by hiding behind a front company: Consultants International.

In my story Patriarch Run, Ed Wilson used similar tradecraft in his attempt to recruit Jack in the struggle against the leftist Sandinista government, a project on which the historical Wilson worked.

During the fictional meeting, Jack was frustrated that "American power was so busy creating tomorrow’s crisis with today’s intervention."

One of the units trained by Ed Wilson's historical operatives in Libya was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which was led by Ahmad Jibril, the suspect behind the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. 

Ed Wilson was eventually convicted for selling weapons to Muammar Qaddafi. Among other crimes, Wilson offered the dictator plans for making a nuclear bomb. Wilson claimed he was working for the CIA, gathering intelligence about Libya's nuclear weapon's program.

Jack, in Patriarch Run, is sent to Tehran to keep Qaddafi from acquiring a nuclear device.

One of the details that makes Ed Wilson a sympathetic character is that most of his twenty-two years in prison were spent in solitary confinement. Wilson's multiple convictions were overturned in 2003, after it came out that the United States Department of Justice  and the CIA had covered up evidence.

The Judge wrote: “Because the government knowingly used false evidence against him and suppressed favorable evidence, his conviction will be vacated. America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time informal government agent.”

Ed Wilson was freed in 2004 to live on a monthly $1,080 social security check. He died on 10 September 2012. He was eighty-four years old.

Sexting at School is a must-read for mothers of teenage daughters.

Being a mother in the age of smartphones can be an unsettling experience. Sexting at School is about a teenage girl who got in trouble with the law for sexting at school. The ordeal precipitated an identity crisis for the mother, through which she learned to trust herself and to guide her daughter.

The complete ebook is available as a free download on GoodReads.com. Here's an excerpt:

*****

The police called it child pornography. So I understood Nicole’s concern: she wanted to talk to me about her daughter. Jessica was fourteen and three years younger than her boyfriend. He had been distributing images of Jessica through his phone. Nicole was worried; she was scared, and understandably so. 

Jessica still thought she was in love. 

“He calls her a bitch,” Nicole told me. “I read the texts. He says horrible things to her.”

“And she still wants to be with him,” the pain I felt for her was communicated in my voice. As a teacher, I see the scenario every year, but Nicole was experiencing this for the first time. Jessica was her daughter. Not long ago she was her baby. I could only begin to imagine the suffering the situation provoked.

Nicole was in no position to hear how common this was. Why do girls throw themselves at boys who treat them badly?

In Jessica’s circumstance there was a tremendous amount of grief. She had barely processed the loss of her dad. He was killed in an accident over the summer.

“I can’t stop her from being with him. I’ve tried. I took away her phone. I grounded her. She sneaks out of the house. I drop her off at school, and she ditches to be with him.” The mascara was now running beneath Nicole’s cheekbones, “Last night, she told me that she wished it was me who was dead. He was waiting for her out front. I saw her get into his car.”

“I can’t imagine what that’s like,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

“Unless I physically restrain her, she will find a way to get back to him.”

I allowed for a long silence, as I thought there might be more Nicole needed to say.

“What did I do? What did I do wrong?”

I didn’t answer her question. And I didn’t dismiss it. I sat with her in it.

*****

My role with Nicole is not all that different than my role with Jessica. It doesn’t matter whether you’re fourteen or forty, what you need is for someone to listen. What you need is for someone to understand.

Jessica and I talked later the same day.

“She went through my phone,” Jessica was angry. “She read my texts.”

I let her know that I understood her frustration.

“She won’t let me leave the house.”

“Why?”

“She’s trying to keep me from him.”

“Have you told her that you love him?”

“Yes.”

“And...?”

“She hates him. She doesn’t want me to see him.”

“Why does she hate him?”

At this Jessica paused. We had already talked about the pictures. She had told me stories about the boy. The way he had flaunted his sexual conquests. He was in my English class, and I had seen it firsthand: there were countless other girls.

After a long silence, she answered my question, “She thinks he’s not good for me.”

“Is he?”

It was ground we had already covered. In past conversations Jessica told me that she respects her mom for trying to protect her.

I handed Jessica a box of tissues. She wiped the tears and told me, “No. He’s really, really mean.”

I listened to her cry for several minutes. I was thinking about her father. I knew the man well. I liked him. I was thinking about her mother. I was thinking about my own daughter.

It was true for all of us. What we need is empathy.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

She questioned me with her eyes.

So I answered it, “I’m sorry you’re so alone.”

Jessica’s whole body shook when she sobbed.

*****

The last time Nicole was in my office she asked me if she should return Jessica’s phone. We had a similar conversation the day she asked me if she should call the police.

“What do you think?”

“I think Jessica needs to figure this out for herself. I’ve tried to protect her, but I can’t. I just can’t protect her from everything.”

“Does that mean you’ll give it back?”

“No. She’s not ready for that.”

“I don’t know the answers to the particulars,” I told Nicole, “but I know this. You’re a good mom. Jessica needs you right now. She needs you to be confident in your role.”

I saw the tears washing through the mascara, gave Nicole the box of tissues and kept on going.

“Jessica loves you, and she knows that you love her. This is universal: the teenager wants desperately to have her independence, and she is terrified of it. Jessica is not aware of the fact that she is conflicted about this. She’s just a kid. As much as she pushes you away, she wants you to be strong, to love her.” 

*****

I talked to Jessica again a week later.

“Do you still see him?” I asked.

She was embarrassed, “Yeah.”

“Is he good to you?”

“Sometimes.”

“How about last night?”

She hesitated then said, “Last night he left me in a parking lot. I had to borrow a phone and call my mom to come pick me up.”

“Why’d he leave you?”

“To hookup with someone else.”

“Will you see him again?”

“Probably.”

“I have a vision for you,” I said.

Jessica smiled, like she had heard lines like that from me before. 

But that didn’t deter me. I have an advantage over most parents of teenagers: I’ve made a career out of the adolescent. Their behavior can be alarming, infuriating and even demoralizing, but after seventeen years of guiding teenagers as they come of age, I have established proven routines.

I have a pretty good idea of how many repetitions it will take, of how many times I’ll have to say it before Jessica can even make sense of the words, of how many more times I’ll have to repeat it before she begins to adopt the language as her own.

So I told her again, “In my vision of your future, you will love yourself too much to let a boy treat you badly.”

*****

Download the complete ebook for free: GoodReads.com

In a previous post, I wrote about the idea of the technological singularity: the concept that once computers start thinking for themselves, everything will change. In that post I explored what might happen if the singularity took a dark turn.

I first started thinking about the singularity in June 2010. I was doing research for my novel Patriarch Run and ran across Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology.

At the time, I knew the villain in my story wanted to wipe out humanity. I got the idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) as a weapon from Kurzweil's book. What made my story difficult to write was that I didn't want it to be easy on the reader's conscience: I wanted the reader to be compelled to sympathize with the villain. More on that in a later post.

So here's what I had: I knew that the villain wanted to kill us, and I knew that he was going to use AI to do it. All that was left was to figure out the gory details: what would happen to America once the lights went out.

Would you believe that a government report published in April 2008 answered that question? The report detailed what would happen in a technical language so precise there was no shying away from its conclusion. It was a rigorous and punctilious vision of the apocalypse.

Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack was about the scariest thing I ever read. To get the information to my reader I summarized the 208 page report in a conversation between two characters: the Colonel and Jack.

Jack looked out the cabin window. He could see the Patriarch Run marking the location of his ranch. “Explain to me just how it is that your grandmother survived the first half of her life without electricity.”

“I’ll get to that. Did you know there are three main constituents of the power system? I didn’t either. Not until I was briefed on it by a skinny kid in glasses. That was two days ago. Generation, transmission and distribution. The part of that briefing that kept me up the last two nights was transmission. How long do you think it takes to replace a fried transformer?”

“A week.”

“Two years. That’s without a crisis, when you’re only replacing one. They don’t make them in this country anymore.”

“How many transformers are we talking about?”

“Thousands. They make them to order. Then you got these SCADA systems. Little electronic control boxes spread all over the nation’s power grid and other critical infrastructure. In the wake of a competent attack, at minimum, these devices will have to be rebooted or repaired. Many of them will have to be replaced. You know how many guys in the country know how to do that? They scour all fifty states for skilled workers when there’s a snowstorm in Buffalo.

“Those are just the rural components. Then you have these digital control systems and programmable logic controllers.”

“Sounds like a real goat-fuck.”

“We’re talking about the mother of all goat-fucks. Your typical power outage doesn’t hurt the power plants themselves. But an attack like the one we’re predicting is going to bring down a percentage of the generators. Power generators are sensitive. If the control system fails and the power plant shuts down improperly, that’s all she wrote.

“A competent attack would irreparably damage the vulnerable hardware. You wouldn’t be able to flip a switch and have power again. Even if you could mobilize, transport and feed all the trained workers in the country, it would take years to fully recover.”

“But you wouldn’t be able to mobilize, transport and feed them.”

“That’s right. No electricity to pump oil to the nation’s refineries means there would be very little finished fuel available for transportation. In addition to that, the one hundred twenty-five thousand miles of pipeline used to transport oil across the United States is dependent on the same SCADA systems as the power grid. With an inoperative SCADA system, the pipelines would have to be shutdown. 

“Moreover, the process control of an oil refinery is dependent on integrated circuitry. If an attack damaged this circuitry, it would force the refinery to shutdown. As with the power generators, the forced, rapid shutdown of the nation’s refineries would wreak havoc on the hardware. A percentage of the refineries would never recover.

“In short, the quantity of fuel available to the nation would be dependent on the sophistication of the attack. If we lost the refineries, the fuel supply already in the distribution system would be almost immediately exhausted.”

Jack drew the conclusion, “Without the ability to generate power or to produce fuel, the whole country would simply stop.”

“Yes, it would. We’re talking about raw sewage overwhelming the Nation’s waterways, no drinking water, no food in the grocery...”

“Then how’d your grandmother get by without electricity?”

“Eighty years ago you couldn’t have brought about the end of the world by simply turning out the lights. You’re right about that. But times have changed. Today it takes electricity to do just about anything. Starting with food production...It takes electricity to irrigate crops. Electric pumps, valves, and other machinery. Eggs and poultry are produced in dense populations in controlled environments using computerized feeding, watering and air conditioning systems. In the twenty-first century it even takes electricity to milk a cow.

“The list goes on. The processing of food requires electricity: Captain Crunch, a can of soup, sliced bread. Meat packing requires an electrically powered processing line.

“Farm machinery runs on petroleum products. And the food has to be distributed. When my grandmother was a schoolgirl, food was grown around urban centers. Production was more labor intensive and electricity wasn’t very important. Except for your cattle drives, up until the age of railroads and ice, you couldn’t distribute fresh food over long distances on account that it would rot. 

“To get food into the supermarkets of our modern cities you need refrigerated warehouses. You need refrigerated trucks and trains, which, once again, run on petroleum. Without electricity and petroleum the whole thing stops.

“My grandmother was born in 1902. At the turn of the century, forty percent of the population lived on farms. Today it’s two percent.

“You know what that kid told me: in the event of an attack like the one we’re predicting, you wouldn’t even be able to mobilize an emergency labor force to work the farms because nobody knows how anymore. The knowledge is lost.

“The population of the United States at the turn of that century was seventy-six million. It’s what...three hundred million today?

“Back when my grandmother was a little girl a power outage carried no threat because civilization wasn’t yet dependent on electricity. We’re feeding two hundred twenty-four million more people today. That’s an increase of four hundred percent, but we have only increased the amount of land we farm by six percent. To make everything work the American farmer has figured out how to increase yield by more than fifty-fold. 

“How? Technology. Machines, fertilizers, pesticides. All of which are powered by petroleum. All of which are manufactured with electricity.

“So, yes, food will still grow, but without electricity, we’ll be back to 1902 yields. If everything went perfectly, which it wouldn’t, you’d have enough food for one quarter of the population. That’s best case scenario.

“Food has always been, and may always be, the weak link in the security of a civilization. A typical supermarket carries a one to three day supply of food for its community. So what happens when the power goes out for several years?

“I’m telling you that kid was a scary motherfucker. Most people have never asked themselves these questions. I never did.”

“Are you telling me there are no contingency plans for the production of fuel?”

“There was a push from the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources last fall to secure the refineries from this type of attack.”

“And?”

“The energy lobby raised hell with one hand and donated vast sums to reelection campaigns with the other. The Chairman of the committee flipped. He came to believe that the plan was too expensive, that it would hurt the economy.” The Colonel stood up and stretched. “In effect, the deadline to safeguard the Nation’s critical fuel supply was pushed back twenty-five years.”

He opened the fridge, took out a Coke and offered it to Jack.

“No thanks.”

“You want to hear something bone-chilling?”

Jack leaned forward.

“An attack planned by a super-intelligent computer would be multi-pronged. If a device is connected to the internet, a telephone network or a satellite, it can be hacked. The banking system would collapse. With it, all commerce.

“Worms would be hidden inside the software code of the nation’s critical infrastructure: chemical processing plants, manufacturing facilities, ports–all strategically synchronized for a worse-case-scenario attack. A passive attack would simply shut the facilities down. A more aggressive attack would override the safety protocols. The displays in the control rooms would read system normal. Meanwhile gremlins would be running amuck throughout the plants overloading the machinery, creating dangerous pressures, critical temperatures. By the time the engineers figured it out, there would be fires, explosions, toxic clouds, chemical waste spilling into waterways.

“A computer smart enough could deny us the ability to control some of our weaponized nuclear assets. Any military hardware, vehicle or communications device connected to a network would be at risk of sabotage. Any country who came to our aid would be vulnerable to the same type of attack.”

“That’s an impressive catastrophe.”

“And I’ve only been briefed on the nightmares they’ve thought of so far. A computer smart enough could take over the country’s one hundred and four commercial nuclear reactors simultaneously. At which point, the reactors would run themselves to meltdown or be shutdown manually by the plant operators. Assume, for the moment, all one hundred and four reactors could be safely shut down: there is no shutting down the half-life of a radioactive isotope.

“It takes electrically powered cooling pumps to keep the spent fuel in these facilities from getting over heated. In the wake of such an attack, there would be no deliveries of diesel. Once the emergency generators ran out of fuel, the cooling pumps would shut down. If that happened, the spent fuel would heat up, boil off the water containing them then melt through the reactor cores.

“Even if the nuclear facilities could be shut down properly, without power to circulate water and cool the fuel, you would have Armageddon.

“The President would wakeup to radiation, toxic plumes spewing from chemical manufacturing plants, fires at oil refineries. Using the finite resources available to him, he could communicate by messenger and make strategic choices. Select installations could be saved or, at least, catastrophic failure postponed. But there wouldn’t be enough calculative power in the Federal Government, let alone supplies, to cope with the magnitude of the disaster.

“Here’s the kicker. The conflagrations, the poison clouds, the threat of meltdown would amount to a dazzling distraction. Such a spectacle would captivate the government’s attention, but its purpose would be to keep us from addressing the actual problem.

“The real threat is, and always has been, starvation. If you can’t distribute food, you don’t have a civilization. Forget about the economy. Wall Street went extinct the minute the power went out. Wealth will be counted in canned goods and the guns and ammunition stockpiled to defend them.

“Mass starvation, disease. The conservative number is one hundred fifty-three million casualties by the end of the first year. The middle of the road estimate: two hundred million. Not a bullet fired.”

Jack looked out the window at the city beneath them. “Talk about culling the herd.”

The Colonel cocked his head.

“Doesn’t all this assume the Chinese have a will to destroy us?”

“No, it does not. No rational state would jeopardize its own existence to strike at the United States of America. The country has a formidable nuclear deterrent. A super-intelligent computer would likely be able to neutralize the vulnerable assets of that arsenal. But by design the arsenal is diverse with terrestrial, airborne and maritime assets. Including highly portable tactical warheads. Some of which are so low tech it would be impossible to digitally disarm them.

“In short, if China attacked the United states, it would be obliterated. And the President has another option. A warhead of sufficient size detonated above the Chinese mainland would create a high altitude electromagnetic pulse that would, in effect, put them in the same boat as us.”

“If China’s not the threat, who is?”

“Yan Shi is essentially software. Software that can be sold and distributed to the highest bidder. If you were POTUS, would you take that risk?”

“It doesn’t make sense for the Chinese to sell it. If it were that powerful, they would want control. Besides, the consequences of an attack like the one you described would be catastrophic for everyone.”

“You’re right about that. Aside from the complete loss of China’s investment in American currency and the loss of its customer base for manufactured goods, the total collapse of the United States of America would precipitate a global economic super-depression. There would be unprecedented, planet-wide political instability. That’s a nightmare scenario for any surviving state.”

“But a medieval paradise for an Islamist extremist.”

“Yes, it would be. The Chinese have no interest in giving up control of Yan Shi, but could they prevent the software from being stolen?”

The Colonel looked out his window. The Criterion was banking and descending.

“Why me? Why not abduct the professor and take out the computer?”

“Those details are being handled by whiter agencies.”

The technological singularity is an event after which, theory says, everything will change. Everything. It is theorized that the singularity will happen once computers can think for themselves. A concept that is beginning to find its place, not only in technological circles, but in the cultural mainstream. Transcendence, a film starring Johnny Depp, takes on this theme.

In a technological singularity the potential for good is unlimited. So is the potential for evil. According to the dark narrative, the rush toward the development of artificial intelligence (AI) will be humanity’s undoing.

That humans are about to destroy themselves has been in the Zeitgeist for some time. It is the premise behind the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic stories. When I think back to my adolescence, I remember The Terminator. A generation later came The Matrix. Now we have The Hunger Games and Divergent. All of these stories are relating an anxiety most of us share, that humankind is really messing things up.

The technological singularity borrows its name from astrophysics. A singularity is another name for a black hole. We know that once you cross the event horizon of a black hole, there is no coming back.

What happens once computers start thinking for themselves? It’s a theme I explore in my literary thriller Patriarch Run:

“There are some hair-raising potentialities. First of all, we’re talking about a software that evolves at an exponential rate. So whatever it can do now, it can do exponentially better tomorrow and better the day after that and so on. A software that will eventually design its own hardware, design the machines to build that hardware.”

“You’re talking about a factory.”

“Eventually, yes. But we are not concerned about a factory in the conventional sense.”

Jack stopped at the gate, waiting for the explanation.

“With access to nanotech manufacturing, a computer like Yan Shi could build anything, do anything. Evolve at a pace never seen before on this planet. In the intelligence community, we call this the Technological Singularity.”

“As in a black hole?”

“Precisely. We are living at the event horizon. They call it the Singularity because, just like with a black hole, nobody knows what happens once you cross this line. Only that everything changes.” The Colonel led him through the gate and across the tarmac to the Cessna’s gangway. “It’s all theory. Theory that is taken very seriously by a heretofore neglected niche of the intelligence community.”

“To be clear,” Jack offered, “we’re talking about Terminator, The Matrix.”

The Colonel stopped at the top of the gangway. “As cautionary tales, yes, we are. But there’s also a best case scenario.”

“Which is?”

“In the right hands, this might be the technology we need to solve the great problems of our age. Unlimited, clean energy. Hunger and disease would be topics of history. We might be talking about the next stage in human evolution.”

They sat facing each other in the cabin.

“You’re saying this computer could usher in a new age?”

“Perhaps. But only the dreamers are looking that far ahead. You and I have a more immediate concern.”

“Which is?”

“How long do you think it would take for a computer brain evolving at an exponential rate to become intelligent enough to make the entire digital security apparatus of the United States obsolete?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither does anybody else.”

Jack opened the window shade.

“We’ve known that the country has been vulnerable to a cyber attack on its power grid for years. A blackout which would effect everything from tap water to food production. Such an attack wouldn’t require a super-intelligent computer. It could be done from a college dorm.

“Now imagine what a cyber attack planned by Yan Shi might look like. It is the consensus of the heretofore neglected niche of the intelligence community that if an attack with a high enough level of sophistication were executed against the power grid and other critical infrastructure simultaneously, the nation would be unable to recover.”

The Cessna Citation accelerated down the runway, lifted its nose and was airborne.

“That’s a grim prediction.”

“Yes, it is.”