serendipity

is that what you call it? The Green administration that had come in through the last election had targeted the depressed rural counties with clean energy projects......our town got a company in from Brazil to help finance a factory making the clever gravity-tap generators that the kids in California had come up with......so when we got sliced off from the grid.....and from the rest of our old reality.....we at least had some way to get electricity. The factory couldn't sell their units to the emerging nations like they had been planning to do, since there wasn't any money any more to begin with.....and no more emerging nations either.....so they just went ahead and gave away the stock they had ready to go to the folks around here......We've got ours sitting out in the back yard......just yanked the city meter off the wall and wired the house up to the tap after the factory boys had calibrated it to the local deep gravity phase-shift, or whatever.....anyway, it works.....there's only one channel on the TV though, from the College.....and one radio station, from Public Safety......

But things could have been a hell of lot worse.....we could be reading by candle light I guess....as it is, most cooking gets done on a wood fire of some sort, since there isn't any natural gas flowing anymore, and an electric range draws down the tap pretty fast.....you have to be careful with your current flow.....most folks run the fridge first, and then go from there......no more central heat and air.....except at the hospital, where they have a whole big bank of units.....

And it's a good thing this county had some good breeding stock on a few of the close in farms......you take the engine and all out of a pick-up truck, and then it might be light enough for a team of horses to pull it out into the woods......so you can get firewood for the winter.....a lot of closed up old fireplaces got renovated around town.....

And I use a bit of wood keeping the still going......good thing my grandpa had left all that stuff in the big shed......whisky makes a pretty decent currency in a barter economy......

by the middle of the 21st century

consensus reality was under constant stress from the pressures introduced by accident when experiments in quantum physics got out of hand.....a lot of historians tend to blame the Chinese, since they did not heed the warnings from the CalTech Group which started the whole thing.....the folks in Pasadena had predicted that excessive "dark force" manipulation could lead to undesirable and dangerous consequences.....but with the state of anarchy that came after the fall of the ChiComs in 2132, there was nobody to police the radicals in the Chinese universities, and they still had vast resources at hand....

So the South China Group went hog wild with the new gravity wave technology, pushing things to the extreme......they were trying to achieve an anti-gravity engine, to seize the high ground by levitating industrial complexes to Earth orbit.....but the complications of messing around with basic constants were not fully understood at that point in space-time.....and so the China Accident came to pass.....

The space station they had been trying to lift to orbit was instead transported to another layer of the multiverse, along with a thousand or so hectares of the Chinese countryside.....all that was left to see was a big hole in the ground.....

The newscasters said "This is unreal!" And they were right, un-reality had been introduced into our environment.....the "dark matter" that underlies the consensus reality had shock waves running through it.....so everything started "shaking like a bowl full of jelly".....

One thing that happened was that a small town in South Carolina was whisked away to an alternate history......the moon and the stars and all were still there, and you could breath the air and drink the water.....and there were birds and flowers and trees.....but there were no other people they could find anywhere close by.....and no electrical grid, no radio waves.....nothing technological besides what that had with them.....batteries that would soon run out of juice, cars that would soon run out of gas......drugstores that would soon run out of drugs......no trucks bringing in foodstuffs....you starting to get the picture?

(to be continued)