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The Shards Survivors
Joe McKinnon
Copyright © 2011 Joe McKinnon
This is a work of fiction.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
The Publisher makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any commercial damages.
2012-05-18
Dedication
I dedicate this book to my lovely wife, Belinda, and baby Jessica.
Acknowledgments
I hope that the readers from New Zealand can forgive me for the use of people’s names, place names and rearranging the landscape to make the story work.
For some reason I was drawn to writing this story based in New Zealand, and the strangest fact of all, is that I’ve never been to New Zealand. I hope to change that fact in the near future, as we plan to visit the places my book mentions.
I’d like to thank Belinda in helping with proof reading and being a listening post to toss ideas around from the book. I also need to thank Petrus, Judy and Laurie for also listening to my ideas and coming up with some human reactions to the main sub-currents running through this book.
I’d also like to thank Hazel and Francesca Bennett for their time in reviewing my work, much appreciated.
I hope you like this book as it’s the first in a series of books based on this topic.
Foreword
Hi. I hope you are able to read this diary of events that I’ve recorded, as have left you a picture dictionary that covers many of the words and their meanings, plus there is an old paper English dictionary.
I’ve kept this diary for several months, cataloguing the events that have occurred. Hopefully one day someone will find this safe, in the cave and know what happened to us. I’ve decided to stop writing this diary as I’m secretly aware that our future will be short, as the Shards are getting closer. People keep saying that they won’t come but I know they are closing in, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
We don’t know if we are the last people alive on Earth, as we have regressed back in technology to before the industrial revolution era. If anything, we are loosely described as being able to cultivate land, hunting, fishing and perform reasonable animal husbandry. It’s funny how in such a short period of time we have gone from a perceived technologically advanced world, back to a life style almost something like 1000 years ago.
All of our electronic technologies amount to little more than bits of useless unpowered pieces of junk. Our powerful Internet2, the always-on-web gateway around the world that was taken for granted is now like the majority of Earth’s population, quiet, dead and vanished back into nothingness.
We are a small community of 200, just holding onto life. It has been far from easy to still be here after only 10 months, as we had to learn how to make a living off the land. We used to take so much for granted before the Shards. I don’t know how we made it so far and I don’t know how we will end up.
I’ve started a second diary and when I’ve completed it, I shall place it in the camp’s library, because by then I don’t think I’ll live for much longer.
Hopefully our settlement lives longer than my diary, but I don’t believe that is possible.
Troubled Times
7/2/2012
The world we built for ourselves was based on a foundation of distrust and falsehoods, which always seemed to breed an endless series of skirmishes, denials and deaths. We always seemed to be introducing new rules daily to restrict and ‘protect us’ from ourselves. We have become a nanny state where legislation has been created on nearly every aspect of life, aimed at guiding us in the direction that our leaders demand.
However to me it seemed the more we tightened our grip the less freedom was attainable, as it really didn’t feel safe with the constant negative media reports and the overly glowing government propaganda. If you believed the media, then the sky was falling. If you believed the Australian government, then you’d know they were doing everything to protect our way of life from mysterious figures who sought death and destruction. If you followed religion, then you were preparing for the second coming and the end of days.
In recent years we saw a ramping up of the war on terror that seemed to trivialise people’s beliefs and make anyone ‘touched’ with the word ‘terror’ to be instantly deemed a threat and therefore became an ever increasing threat to the rest of us. To me it seemed that suddenly out of nowhere it would be announced that a person or persons living in a remote region of the world were suddenly a dangerous threat to our way of life.
I took this with a dose of scepticism as I couldn’t believe that it could be that bad. Bubbles, my wife, on the other hand took it very seriously as she was a well-paid lawyer for the Ministry of Intelligence. She felt that the world’s governments were doing the right things and everyone should trust them and that they were doing their best to keep us safe. This always made for an interesting night on the couch as we’d get into ‘discussions’ over this issue, however it was never enough to make us want to go our separate ways.
For example one of our discussions surrounded a statement from the ‘rebels’ who said that any nation that wanted to be safe and recognised as being neutral should openly announce its neutrality and disband it’s military services. This would assure that nation would never be a target for any ‘freedom fighter attacks’. I said to Bubbles that we should do this, for if it was true then what harm could this be for us? After all we were unscathed so far and I couldn’t see the sense of us being a target. After all, I reasoned, other small nations hadn’t been targeted and they had no active commitments to the war on terror. Needless to say I got a lesson in the geo-political, social and ideologies from Bubbles and agreed not to speak of it again publicly or privately, because it would be bad for her reputation.
1/3/2012
The United Nations announced today that they believed the war on terror will be over by the end of the year, due to their excellent mopping up of hundreds of terrorist cells. They believed that given their progress it was only a small matter of time until they had captured the terrorist leaders.
I couldn’t help feeling that this mopping up process was only going to isolate and further inflame tensions around the world as more and more people were touched by this process. Surely, if anything, we had seen as one group is removed another group is more than happy to step into the void and proclaim their right to act for their state and protect their people. The more we cleaned up corruption the more it seemed to breed. One man’s way of life became another man’s form of corruption and deceit.
