When Joe Sewell came home from a deer hunt to the family doublewide in the wilderness, he found his parents dead on the living room couch, holding hands, with Algernon the dog dead between them.

     They left a note of apology.

     He’d been half-expecting this. Mom had been real sick. He’d had a plan in the back of his mind for a long time. He resented them for abandoning him–and they took his dog with them! They’d lived alone in a doublewide in the Machesna wildlife refuge inland from the California central coast ever since Joe was a little boy.

     He left them on the couch and began packing his big backpack. Joe just wanted to get out of there. His parents were preppers but they hadn’t prepared him for this. He was going to have to find out for himself whatever was left of California after all these years.

     He knew the terrain well, he’d been roaming it all his life. He headed southwest toward the nearest city, Arroyo Grande, down in the forbidden direction–toward the rest of the world.

      It took him two days of hiking. It was a tough climb to get to Lake Lopez, but from there he followed the Arroyo Grande Creek down toward the ocean. He’d never seen the ocean.

     He found a road that paralleled the creekbed. He thought he knew what California would be like, because he’d grown up watching the videos his parents brought to their mountain refuge away from the evils of the Singularity that doomed all of humanity.

     So it was no surprise that the road led him past mile after mile of abandoned homes. He saw no other people. He saw no cars, moving or parked, either.

     But he was confused by the fields of well-tended crops. He saw no farmers, just an occasional robotic tractor. That wasn’t what he was expecting. He reached the freeway, US 101, and stood on the overpass.

     He could see the ocean.

     A steady stream of self-driving container trucks flowed past in both directions as Joe stood on the overpass. One every minute or two. It was noontime.

     He stood and watched, trying to decide what to do. A few cars went by amid the trucks, but there was zero traffic on the Grand Avenue/US 101 interchange.

     It was still another four or five miles to the beach along Grand Avenue, according to the old map. He walked cautiously down the into the town from the overpass, sticking to the middle of the road. He didn’t know what to expect. The buildings were decayed and overrun with vegetation. He saw nobody.

     He stopped to rest–took off the backpack and sat on it. Then, out of nowhere, a Tesla camper van stopped next to him and the window rolled down.

     “Hi,” said a young woman. “You look lost. Do you need a ride or anything? I was recharging the van at the gas station and I saw you walk by.”

     Joe stared at her. He hadn’t seen another person besides his parents in…how many years had it been. He didn’t know how to talk to a beautiful blonde wearing wraparound mirror sunglasses.

     “I mean, I was surprised to see anybody at all here, and the way you were walking so cautiously, looking in every direction. Where are you going?”

     “I don’t know,” he said.

     “Well, I’m going to Santa Barbara, from there you can get to anywhere in the world,” she said. “You look famished. When was the last time you ate?”

     “I had half of an MRE-22 for breakfast today,” Joe said.

     “What’s that?” she said.

     “Asian beef strips,” Joe said. 
     She opened the door and stepped down from the camper van. She was wearing short-shorts and a bare-midriff halter top.

     “Come on, I’ve got plenty of room for you and your–” She picked up Joe’s backpack–but could barely do it. “It’s so heavy! How far have you been carrying it?”

     “I came down from the Machesna wildlife refuge,” Joe said.

     “Were you camping up there?”

     “I lived my whole life up there,” he said.

     “Let me guess,” she said: “your parents were preppers.”

     Joe was astonished. “How did you know?”

     “There have been a lot of you coming out of hiding lately. This area was among the hardest hit when Vandenberg blew up.”

     Joe said nothing.

     “There’s nobody around here. Whatever you’re doing, you’ll be able to do it better in Santa Barbara. Come on, climb in. I’m Olivia.”

     They rode in silence south on US 101. Inside the van, Olivia’s wrap-around sunglasses reverted to transparent and he could see her blue eyes.      She was muscular and compact, a lean physique. The contours and separation of her individual muscle groups were defined and visible through the skin. “Are you an athlete?” Joe eventually asked.

     “What? No.” She flexed her arms without letting go of the steering wheel. “Yeah, maybe I look buff but it’s from the smarticles, everybody has them now. Smart particles with the same DNA as your white blood cells, but revved up.

     “No, I’m just a student, I’m coming down from Stanford for my father’s birthday dinner today. How long were you up in the mountains?”  

     “All my life,” Joe said. “My parents fled the Singularity when I was a baby.

     “Well, the Singularity didn’t turn out to be that bad. Smarticles are part of it. You give a blood sample, and the robots analyze it, and you get a zillion custom microbots that flow through your bloodstream and keep your immune system revved to optimax.”

     Joe said nothing. The van was going faster than the container trucks and Olivia steered around them, moving Joe side to side in his seat. He’d never been in a car before.  

     There were a few personal cars getting on or off the freeway as they passed the city of Santa Maria. Tractors worked the fields.

     Eventually Olivia said, “So, why did you come down now?”

     “My parents suicided,” Joe said. “Some kind of poison. They took my dog with them. I didn’t know what to do. So I came down the hill.”

     “Why did they kill themselves?” said Olivia.

     “Their note said our last SSD failed. It had all the entertainment programs that they loved and watched continuously–every movie and TV show ever recorded up until the day they fled the Singularity and took me with them. They sealed us off in a self-sufficient solar-powered doublewide trailer.

     “They brought thousands of terabytes of videos on SSDs. Then when I was 9 there was a giant electromagnetic pulse that damaged most of the SSDs that weren’t in the Faraday cage. My father said it must have been a nuclear strike on the Vandenberg space force base, it meant a big, big war was under way. We never saw any more rocket launches after that and he said it validated our escape into the wilderness.”

     “I was nine, too–we’re the same age!” Olivia said. “It wasn’t a war. They tested this nuclear rocket drive that AI developed and it blew up. The ‘bots moved all space launches to the equator after that to take better advantage of Earth’s rotation.

     “It killed a couple hundred people on the South Coast and destroyed every computer within line of sight of the blast. That’s why there are no cars in Arroyo Grande. They were all rendered inoperable by the EMP. And then most of the people moved away. The old people might have wanted to stay but it was the last straw for the younger people.

     “There never was a future in the town for the kids except as a maid or a waiter for the tourist industry. In the aftermath of the Singularity, they all left.”

     “I never knew about that,” Joe said. “My father left us alone for a couple days  and went down to Vandenberg to take a look–that was against our family rules. When he got back, all he said was, it was even worse than he’d expected. We’re so lucky to be up here, he told us. He would never say exactly what it was that he saw. All he said was that everybody’s gone.”

     “What was your father’s name? Olivia said.

     “Malcolm Sewell,” he said.

     The 17″ dashboard monitor turned on and displayed Malcolm and Julia Sewell in a news article from two decades ago.

     “The web never forgets,” Olivia said. Joe’s parents had vanished and there were arrest warrants for embezzlement. Stocking a mountain hideout for a 25-year stay was above Malcolm Sewell’s pay grade.

     “Well, the statute of limitations was long expired,” Olivia said.

     “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Joe said. “He’s dead.”

     “My father’s not dead, today’s his 80th birthday. The ‘bots have kept him patched together pretty well.”

     They rode in silence for a while. The scenery along 101 was fascinating but it didn’t look that much different from what he expected. Lots of vineyards. Cows grazing on hillsides. He’d grown up looking at videos.  

     “What’s your plan? What are you going to do? What did you do for all these years in the mountains?” said Olivia.  

     “We survived,” he said. “We foraged and hunted. “The EMP damaged the solar power units and after that we relied more on the firewood I cut and brought home for the fireplace and the outdoor stove.

     “We reserved the solar power for the videos. They made me watch a lot of educational videos, but then those were left outside of the Faraday closet and were ruined by the EMP. So then Mom and Dad trained me with books about the US Constitution and The Rights of Man. Taught how we were better than the idiots down in the cities. They raised me on the same TV shows they grew up with,” Joe said.

     “There isn’t any TV any more,” Olivia said.

     They reached Gaviota and the freeway paced alongside the Pacific shore. Joe was entranced by it.

     “It won’t be long now,” Olivia said. “What’s your plan?”

      Joe said nothing.

     “I can’t just dump you off. Hello, Mom? I’ve invited a guest for dinner, a young man. Joe. You’re not going to believe it, he’s a prepper. Yeah, whatever we’re eating is fine with him. Just order one extra portion.” She was silent for a while. “Mom, I’m sure your new wallpaper is great.

     She turned her attention back to Joe. “My sisters are already there. Sophie and Ava. They’re a lot older than me. I hope Sophie didn’t bring her wimpy boyfriend.”

     They reached the Mission Street exit and Olivia drove to her parents’ home on Garden Street. They got out of the van. Joe stood there. “I don’t know,” he said.

     “It’s going to be fine,” Olivia said. “Come on in. They’re going to be fascinated to meet you.”