Reboot

My island.

At first, I saw just a cloud. Slowly, one lone gray hill became clearer. There was that single cloud over it, like a hat that tapered down to a foggy nothing. As I got closer, the fog drifted away and the gray turned into a very inviting green sitting on beige.

There was no way I could park the Myriad. No way. So I headed straight for the middle of the island. I could point it in any direction; that was easy. But no parking.

Now, big ladies like this have a large bottom and that bottom stopped me about three hundred meters from shore. I hit a reef. The schooner moaned to the left and crunched put. I got a bit of whiplash when it hit and everything on the boat ended up one meter further toward the bow, then it just stopped. I figured maybe it would be ok.

No.

As I went below to take a look, I saw that I’d punched a ten-centimeter hole in the hull. There was a chunk of reef sticking through the hole and water gushing in. I was in no mood to try and fix it so instead I hurriedly brought the important stuff on deck. I figured the boat would just stay there for a while, broken but immobile. Water was pouring in quicker and quicker. The most important things to save were food, tools and my pillow. Can’t sleep without my pillow.

I was wrong again.

While I was pushing a mattress up the stairs, a wave hit the Myriad and wrenched it sideways. The hole was ripped further open and the water gushed in. The schooner moved off the reef and started to sink. I hurried.

I ran myself ragged trying to beat the water. I didn’t want foodstuffs to get wet. I was very tired and the wading really tested me, but soon there was a tall pile of things I’d need on the island sitting in the middle of the deck. I realized I’d forgotten the ham, so I rushed back below and since the hold was now completely submerged, I had to swim it. I took a deep breath and dove. It only took about twenty seconds to get there, so I had plenty of time. But as I was unhooking the ham from its hook, another wave hit the boat and my ham and I were tossed around the hold as if we were in a washing machine. Up until then, I’d still felt secure. I mean what could happen. I could stay five minutes under water and I’d only been down there for a minute or so.

The shelves fell on me. They hit me from behind so I never saw them coming. They were made of heavy Iron and I got pinned. I was under water so everything happened in slow motion. If I’d been facing the other way, I think I could’ve pushed it off me, but now I was facing the floor with a very heavy object on top of me. I smiled. I thought that there was no way I could survive a nuclear war just to die face down under a bunch of shelves at the bottom of a boat. That would be just way too stupid. So I pushed off. And I got flattened. I pushed off again. No luck. Now I didn’t smile. I started to panic. I was running out of breath. Gasping, I pushed off again with all my strength and something else fell on top of the shelves. I couldn’t see what it was. I choked once, smiled one last time at the utter silliness of it all and I died. It happens very fast. One second you’re alive, the next you’re dead. There isn’t much in the way of warning because until the last second, you figure you’ll find a way out. I didn’t.

But Hjalmar and Gunnar did.

I woke up in a tent. Everything hurt. I could barely move. My throat felt like sandpaper. I gingerly peeked out and saw that I was on a beach near a forest. My memory came back gradually. My saviors were busy dragging my stuff away from the dinghy. I looked further behind them and saw nothing but blue. My boat was gone. I tried to move. First there had been the weight of the shelves and their impact on me, then the, well, the drowning. I drowned. That hurts. I was still dead tired, but I really wanted to meet the boys who had saved my life. So I pushed myself out of the tent. I saw that they had saved the essentials from the Myriad: tent, compass, maps, food -even my ham-, a knife, some gas, matches and, luckily, my pillow. I don’t go anywhere without my pillow. It’s an older style of cushion, heavy with down feathers. Stays cool at night. Love that pillow. They don’t make them like that anymore. Obviously.

“Hello.” I said. I surprised them so they jumped and turned around. Then Gunnar and Hjalmar rushed at me and hugged me happily, babbled to each other in a Scandinavian language and laughed hysterically. I hadn’t expected that. It was a huge relief.

Gunnar and Hjalmar had just arrived a few days earlier. I later decided to call them Stan and Oliver partly because of their I and O shapes, but mostly because I can’t pronounce Hjalmar. Best I could do was Helmet and that was just insulting. They were both from Stockholm.

“Where’s my boat?”

“It is gone my friend. It broke up on the reef and the pieces have scattered. We got everything that you had put on the deck though. It’s all there under the sail.” He pointed to a mound on the beach.

“Thank you. Thank you. You, you saved my life,” I said in wonder.

“Yes,” they both answered with a smile. “Hjalmar here lifted the shelves off of you and I pulled you back up on deck. I pushed on your chest a couple of times and you coughed and you came back. You’re lucky Hjalmar is so strong.” I looked at both of them more carefully and indeed, Hjalmar was huge.

“How is our island?” I asked them this as I lay down next to them on the beach after the initial burst of happy had died down. I needed to rest.

“It is nice,” said Oliver evasively.

“Very nice. Good sand,” added Stan, looking away while giving it a kick.

I sat up on my elbows, winced, and stared at them for a little while. One was looking at the forest and the other was playing with the sand at his feet. I waited.

“OK. We have not really luukt around. We stayed on da beach waiting for help. We slept on da buut,” Stan said.

“You haven’t toured the island?” I asked, incredulous.

“No,” they both answered. “We um, like da buut.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Silence.

“Come on, what”? They looked like embarrassed little kids.

“Lizards,” whispered Stan as if it was a dark secret. My eyebrows went up.
“Beeg ones.” Stan stretched out his hands about twenty centimeters

apart. “He, um, we don’t like the lizards.” Vikings, my new friends were not.

“That’s why you were so happy to see me,” I said with a smile.

“No, no, my friend Robert, we are happy to see you because we thought there was no one else.” Oliver said sadly.

“No one else? You mean on the island?”

“No Robert. We thought we were the last ones,” Oliver said while fighting off tears.

They had been languishing with the prospect of being the last two survivors on earth. That’s why they were on my boat so fast. They’d rushed over to meet me because they were so happy to see another live person. Stan and Oliver hadn’t done anything here. Just sat there on the beach, hopeless for two days.

“Guys, come on, there must be a million people floating around on the oceans at any one time, add to that all the people living on unaffected islands and people living in far off places like Kamchatka or Greenland. Millions of survivors; out of ten billion. I’m sure many will head for the islands if they can and if they are displaced. Wouldn’t you if you were afraid of radiation and had access to a boat? And there aren’t that many attractive islands out there believe me. I checked. Most are uninhabitable and others have too many people on them already, right? In fact, we may even get too many people coming here.” I stood up and started looking around, measuring the place. It was about noon. I felt better. The sun was blistering. You could barely stand on the beach. The sand was too hot. Had to get moving.

“First let’s go get some stuff from your boat, ok? We’ll do a couple of trips. Backpacks, some dried goods, things we’ll need on a hike, tents, tools, you know? And then we’ll have a nice dinner. We can have a go at that damn ham, which almost cost me my life. Is that good for you? We can sleep in your boat tonight if you like, is there enough room? But I’d like to set up a small camp for us here for now before it gets dark - to make it more homey. Tomorrow, we’re sleeping on our island.”

“Ok.”

“Ok, Robert.”

I was full of energy for about five minutes and then I passed out again. What I awoke a couple of hours later, my friends had brought some more sails, everything needed to make a fire, a saw, hammer, ax, ropes, lamps, knives, books, and hammocks.

“We’ll deal with your boat later. I mean we shouldn’t cannibalize it just yet. We’ll

have to move it later on.”

“Cannibalize?” asked Oliver.

“Uh, yeah, sorry, um, break up, tear up to use the parts for other things.”

“Ah. Good, yes. Um.. You scared me dere a little bit, my friend Robert,” said Oliver.

I smiled. “More people will come. We should be prepared for them. We have to go for a tour. Let’s get familiar with our new home.”

We took the dinghy and went to their boat where I got busy with the food. I cut some dried ham, prepared a bunch of cheeses and some wine. We tried to relax.

The Swedes organized a table and chairs, cushions. They made it nice. They even found flowers to use as a centerpiece. I think they needed a bit of civilization. Stan found a CD player and put on some music. The batteries still worked.

I put the food on the table and we sat down. Quiet at first.

“I’m sorry about your buut,” said Stan.

“Yes,” I answered.

“The Myriad was it? Strange name.”

“The owners were strange.”

“What happened to them?”

“We disagreed,” I said angrily. I let them toy with that one for a while as the sun went down. Then I felt guilty for saying that and I tried to change the subject. “So how did you boys get here?”

Oliver was the quieter one so he nodded at Stan who started talking.

“We have known each other since we were small. We were on a sailing trip we had planned for years, a dream for us, yes? We were going to visit Indonesia, New Guinea, like that, but when the war happened, we headed straight here. We were close by because Tetepare was one of the places we wanted to visit. Oliver likes bats. There are bats here. Special ones. Rare ones. I suppose everything is rare now.”

Their boat was new and small, fifteen meters, all plastic, easy to maneuver and maintain. Fifteen meters sounds big, but for a long trip, it gets small very quickly.

Oliver was a big man, could lift anything and loved doing it. He was going to be very useful on a deserted island. He was friendly and quiet like most large men I’d met. He had a deep quiet rumbling laugh that was very endearing.

Stan was a nerd. A computer hack. They’d worked for a games company in Sweden. Not much use for that here.

“What’s that like, working for a gaming company?” I asked him.

“Long hours, (he pronounced that – hourjz) you work on the same game until you are completely sick of it, and then you end up getting fired. It is project work so when the game is ova, you are ova and you have to find anoda project.”

“Great. Well, I don’t think we’ll be needing gamers for a while I’m afraid. What about you Oliver?”

“We both verked in the same place. I hired guyjz like him. And he is correct, I would haff fired him next week.” He smiled. Stan laughed - a short one. Too early to get excited. It was a comfortable night, not too hot. No clouds, the moon was full so we didn’t need any lighting.

“Thank you for the food. It’s very good,” said Oliver.

“No worries!”

“Are you Australian?” asked Stan.

“Oh yeah. That? Ah. No. I’m American. From Upstate New York. I just like to say that. No worries.”

“And you, Robert? What brought you here?” asked Oliver.

And that got me babbling for about thirty minutes. Everything from my quitting my life back home to the Vacation Village, to the Myriad, to hearing the news of the war, and finally the altercation and my decision to come here.

“What about our future,” I asked them. “Do you have any news that I haven’t heard maybe?”

“Just what we could get from the radio. I think you are right, Robert. More people will come. We don’t know how all this happened. But maybe others will have more information,” said Stan. “I am worried about how we will survive.”

“What do you mean? Us or the human race?” I asked.

“So many things can go wrong,” he said. “We could get sick, we could run out of food, the oceans could die out, a coconut could hit me on the head, the ozone layer could disappear, we could run out of oxygen, there could be a sudden climate change, pirates could kill us, mutants could eat us… volcanoes… tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear winter, nuclear summer, nuclear zombies… Ice cream. No more ice cream. ICE. Good Gott, how do you make ice? Anyone know how to make ice?” He put his head in his hands.

“Ok Stan. Let’s just take it one day at a time. I’m sure we can find a way to avoid

falling coconuts and nuclear zombies. Please tell me more about how you got here, to Tetepare I mean.”

“Like Stan said, we were coming here anyway. Probably why we are first. We read that it was a protected place, one of the last on Earth and that you could get permission to visit with a guide. Now it looks like we’ll be staying. Could be worse. I’m sure it’s a very nice island.”

Then we got quiet again. In the silence, we each found our lost friends, loves and families and it became difficult to muster up the courage to speak again, so we went off to bed.

The next morning I woke up refreshed, not too much pain. We went back to the beach and organized our stuff so it would be safe from rain and animals. We secured everything under a sail and planned our exploration. I didn’t want to build a serious camp because there had to be a better spot somewhere else. I wanted to go find it.

It was a large island so we filled our packs with enough provisions to go on a three-day hike. Dried food, some dried twigs to make a fire in a damp environment, two tents, a notebook to record what we see and Stan - surprise - brought his guitar. He strapped it to his backpack.

“We should leave a note in case someone else shows up,” Oliver suggested.

“What should we write, Welcome to New Sweden?” I smiled.

“Ha ha, no. Welcome to your new home, we went scouting, please make yourself comfortable. Be back soon with fresh fruit. “How’s that?” said Oliver.

“I think that’s perfect,” I said, “short, welcoming, amiable, simple.” I wrote it on a large piece of wood and stuck it on the dinghy. And then we took off on our first exploratory tour of this beautiful place.

“Which way should we go?” asked Oliver. He was playing with the sand with his toes.

“Let’s look at the map. I saw an inlet last time I looked and I’m pretty sure it’s to the west,” I answered while pointing. We opened up the map and spread it out on the sand. And there it was. Quite clear, to the west.

We started crunching sand westward. We thought we’d get to the inlet and follow it inland to find the lake I’d seen on the map. Oliver waded in the shallow water most of the time, kicking at stones and shells. Stan and I walked barefoot on the beach, babbling about inconsequential, safe things.

“Look at that forest. I don’t think we could even get three meters in there.”

The beach was similar throughout our stroll. Just beautiful untouched sand, pristine, clear water painted with the undulating colors of numberless darting fish, and fifty meters the other way, a wall of dense, green jungle. Deep, dark amazon type wet stuff.

“What’s Sweden like?” I yelled at them from about twenty meters behind them. I was feeling left out at this point as they’d begun talking in Swedish to each other. They stopped and waited for me to catch up. It was very warm. The sun hit hard, but we were well protected with hats and long sleeves. The swedes’ legs were very red though.

“Oh, Robert. Sweden is a dream. Rolling hills and beautiful forests. Stockholm is a fun place. The lakes are very nice. The parks… You know Sweden was the first country to create a national park? The flowers… I can still smell them. Ooh Robert, our home is a lovely place. Was anyway. Now it’s probably gone.” Stan looked at his feet and then kept walking. All talked out.

“Yellowstone was the first national park.” I broke the silence.

“It was? Well ours was the first in Europe then.”
He tried to smile.

“No doubt.”

It took six hours to get to the inlet. We headed inward following the river. It gradually became smaller, darker and more covered until it seemed as if we’d entered a cave.

The darkness of the jungle is stupefying after that stark glare on the beach. And the mist - It’s like penetrating into a cloud. Your skin is constantly wet. You can reach out with your hand and grab water out of thin air. It’s cool and humid and dark. It smells like clean, pregnant earth; a completely different world than the beach. The noises are new, birds and monkeys make a cacophonous blast that never ends and it’s as if you were in a large echoing dank green cave. Everything moves. Life is everywhere, slithering and flitting away. And yes. Lizards large and small. But my new mates weathered it well. I guess they just needed, um, support.

“Be careful guys. You don’t want to catch your foot on one of those roots. If you twist an ankle, I’m leaving you here. Food for lizards.” I smiled to myself.

“Don’t worry, Robert. We will not fall,” Oliver said seriously. I understood that to mean that nothing could get them down there, closer to the lizards.

Low lying branches snagged our packs and we were half blind from a constant stream of sweat dripping in our eyes. So we moved slowly. Getting hurt was simply unacceptable.

After only a few hundred meters of this, we were pooped. Stan and I were anyway. Oliver, despite his size, seemed perfectly ok. It was late afternoon and it was a good time to start looking for a good place to camp. We found a beautiful spot next to the river, between the giant roots of a tree the size of a large building. Lucky I’d brought some dry firewood, because there was no way we’d ever find anything dry around there.

We jumped in the river for a quick refreshing swim. Then we sat around the fire and tried to dry our clothes. I built the fire bigger than usual just for that purpose. While our clothes were hanging all around the fire, we sat down to wait for our beans to warm up.

“Take out your guitar? I would like to hear some music, please,” said Oliver.

And Stan played wonderfully. A melancholy piece, but it cheered me up anyway because it fit the mood and the place so well. As the evening creeped up on us, the notes bounced off the darkness. The echoes became part of the music as if there were two instruments playing. Stan understood this and timed the song perfectly. The fire gave those big roots a new life. They now moved darkly side-to-side, undulating, dancing to their own irregular beat. I tapped a simple rhythm on a couple of rocks. Oliver hummed. Wow! Beautiful, and eerie. When sitting around a fire in the deep forest, everything untouched by the light of the flames is infinitely lost and foreboding.

Next morning we had beans and sausages and started off refreshed to pursue the river. A couple of hours later, our green cave opened up to reveal a small lake about one kilometer long by three hundred meters wide. We stopped there and organized our new camp quietly, the mood somber, but hopeful. The lake was lovely. It was the best place for a permanent camp so far. And the river was small, but we could certainly move up smaller boats like Stan and Oliver’s.

After a quick lunch, we walked around it without our packs. It was just a short hike, but sometimes tricky. There were some natural trails trampled by the wild pigs, but once in a while we had to do a little creative trailblazing. Teeming with fish and birds, it reflected the light and made everything nearby brighten up. You could see the tiniest flying insects glowing brightly above it and the sunbeams bounced off the small waves and splashed disco beats on the tree line.

We walked up the hill, which was at the far end of the lake to get an overview of the island. It was slow going. The jungle was too dense and there was nothing interesting away from the river or the lake. When we made it to the top, all we could see was a green ocean of treetops. And further, beyond, the blue one - endless, hazy, calm. We came back to the lake and camped there a second night. I looked for my knife to start preparing the food. I’d taken some sausages and sauerkraut, but I couldn’t find it. I could’ve sworn I had taken it. Oh well…

“How in the hell do you make soap? Cheese? T-Shirts….? Can’t google that shit anymore,” I said. “Could the internet still be running?”

“I doubt it,” said Stan from under his hat. He was lying down, his head resting on his backpack. He’d put the hat over his eyes to relax like in cowboy movies. “I don’t think the system could hold up to such abuse. It can be rebuilt easily though. It will. Probably start small at first, like it did before. All you need is power and a bunch of computers. Wiring.”

“And people,” Oliver said while looking down.

“Well, then I certainly hope we haven’t tossed away all the encyclopedias. We’re gonna need those.”

“Some libraries will still be around. Oh Jesus, the money…Everybody’s money is gone. Ownership deeds, everything. Borders.”

“That’s right. Everything will be up for grabs again. So get ready for another set of smaller conflicts, border wars, tribal turf battles,” I said.

“Oyoy.”

“How do you make paper, or glass?”

“Who cares? Don’t need that stuff.”

“Diapers? Tampons? Aspirin? Condoms, toilet paper, fridges, twinkies, Corvettes, sinks, anti-histamine?”

“Yikes, ok, but then, no taxes, no bureaucracy, no shopping. I hate shopping.” I smiled. I was making an effort to keep positive.

“Maybe we’ll do better this time around,” said Oliver.

“You mean that maybe the human race may have finally learned something?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever think back to when you were four years old and say “Boy I’ve changed a lot since then?” I asked.

“No. Actually I was the same. Just smaller,” said Oliver.

“Smarter too,” added Stan with a smile. “We don’t change that much. We’re born the way we are. We stay that way. Hardwired. We’ll never learn. We forget too quickly. History repeats itself. That’s what I think anyway.”

“That’s not true. We get better; we change. I think,” said Oliver.

“Well it certainly doesn’t look like it so far. Some damn fool pushed the button and everyone else went nuts. How is that getting better? We just keep forgetting. One peaceful generation goes by and we forget what war was like.” I concluded.

“Maybe it was meant to happen,” said Stan. We looked at him quizzically.

“I’m saying that whoever pushed that button was destined to do so. The person who put himself in that position was born for it. Maybe he was the typical kind of person who needs, even craves power at any price, and that is by definition a psychopath, and those are the people we often vote for. People who want to be in leadership positions are exactly the people who shouldn’t be.”

“Maybe,” said Oliver. “But maybe this button-pusher was nudged. He might have been surrounded by nudgers, yes?”

I couldn’t help myself and giggled uncontrollably. Try saying nudgers with a Swedish accent. Lordy… It was contagious and we all started laughing together. Felt good, though they had no idea what we were laughing about.

We were then quiet for a few minutes, enjoying the feeling.

“How many people can this island hold?” I asked, drying my eyes with the palm of my hands.

“Quite a few I suppose,” said Stan. “It is a bit bigger than Manhattan. But the jungle would have to be managed. It is ridiculous to consider causing more destruction to make room for people after what happened. Maybe trees are endangered now. How can we have enough air if all the trees are burned?”

Great! Now I worried about oxygen. If too many trees are gone, do we still get oxygen? I supposed small plants and grasses would also contribute. And if there is less oxygen, what does that do to the oceans? I wasn’t sure.

We’d just have to wait and see. Everything was about balance and the human race had just beaten the crap out of the scale.

“How many people will come?” asked Oliver.

“There are thirty thousand islands in the pacific,” I said. “I looked it up. Let’s hope the survivors don’t all show up here. But this one is perfect so it will attract people.”

“Do we need to defend ourselves you think?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. We might even still be at war. No way to know yet.”

I went to bed with these questions needling at me, but the sounds of the jungle were soporific and knocked me out.

The next morning I woke up to the smell of coffee, which truly, truly is a luxury.

“Thanks Stan. You’re a wonder,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied seriously while handing me a full cup with both hands. He concentrated on not spilling a drop, mouth wide open as if that somehow helped his balance. It was a bit chilly and that first cup cut through the morning mist. We’d have to grow our own coffee… I put that on my checklist.

We packed up and headed back to the beach. More people would come, let’s get ready for them… Hopefully they’d all be as nice as Stan and Oliver.

The island was about twenty kilometers long and five kilometers wide. The small lake is near the middle and there is a nice hill next to it. We still had lots of food left from the ship, but we’d have to start producing our own soon. Bread for example. We needed wheat.

Tetepare Island is the largest uninhabited island in the South Pacific. Using my encyclopedia, I found out that it’s a part of Western Province of the Solomon Islands. It covers approximately a hundred and twenty square kilometers. The island had been recognized for its conservation significance and archaeological value so visitors weren’t allowed. Most deserted islands are empty for a very good reason. They’re a crappy place to live. Usually barren, windy, lifeless. Not here. This place was a treasure. We saw three species of marine turtles, including the endangered leatherback and hawksbill. They all nest on Tetepare’s volcanic sand beaches. Sharks, dolphins, crocodiles and an extraordinary diversity of fish species make the island’s reefs their home. So swimming around the reefs would soon become one of our most entertaining activities. Since we were now probably an endangered species, it was only fitting that we ended up on this island.

The Solomon Islands skink is one of the largest living skinks, if not the very largest (the skink is a type of lizard and certainly the kind that scared my friends). However, lucky for Oliver, most mammals on Tetepare are bats. Fardoulis’ Blossom-bat and a roundleaf bat, some unknown new taxons, some flying foxes. But apparently you shouldn’t eat bats. They can transfer some terrible diseases. Too bad because that would solve one of our problems. Easy to catch too. Just stick a net up in the air.