My life’s work, I had thought. When the realization of the consequences finally exploded, I knew what must be done. Of course, I left – I had to.
So thorough was I in what I’d only just learned was now being called A Dissertation on Potential that my writing of it necessitated in person knowledge – that is, I’d done all the preparations – I was fully ready to leave. All I needed was a nudge.
So, with the initial shock nullifying into reason, I simply cleaned my home – even though I knew I’d never be coming back, it felt wrong to leave disheveled – packed a few items, and left.
I inhaled the crisp Canadian air and felt reborn. My boots crunched on fallen leaves dusted with the season’s first snow in my new home, my new start.
I made myself a cup of coffee and got to work. I saw before me everything that needed to be done – which was little, to be fair – and set about it with the zealous pleasure of one checking an item off a list. At day’s end, I had housing and water fully operational. Tomorrow I’d inventory the preserved food and hopefully have a garden fully seeded with potatoes. And the next day I’d just unpack everything from bedsheets to bookends: I was home. From there, routine should strike swiftly, so precise was my knowledge and preparation built for A Dissertation.
Employing all the foresight I could muster, I spent the next few years in preparation for a sustainable future. The swift flowing river marking the north marches of my ‘territory’ provided the solution for immediate water needs, but I wanted redundancies: I practiced building natural filters with rocks, leaves, and sand, and I secured a handful of wells accessing subterranean water reservoirs. Similarly, my single plot of potatoes had blossomed into multiple plots growing lentils, barley, corn, oats, and more. On breaks from this project, I’d identified consistent areas of edible wild grown berries, plants, and mushrooms. As a last resort, I tracked the habits of animal wildlife and practiced with bow and arrow.
What had begun as little more than a ramshackle set of tents and huts evolved into proper buildings of various purposes: some for housing, with others for hobbies and projects and experiments. Yes, I had a library, garages, and laboratories.
Electricity was the sole major project that I’d left rather entirely to theory, and with the completion of the watermill on the river, I now had a reinforced refuge. Yes, I had reliable water, food, and shelter to complement the wardrobe of clothing I’d brought and a similar amount I’d since learned to sew for myself. In these ways, I was safe, but though my valley was home to bears and big cats, I knew basic field survival medicine and always brought a gun and bear spray with me.
Each day I had numerous projects to tinker on at my own delight, until eventually there was genuinely little left that hadn’t been reinforced or optimized. The only thing missing was people – that’s what this was all for, that’s what any of this is all for. That is to say, I got bored, and I got lonely, and I wanted my mother. Aside from having contact with not a soul outside of my books and the flora and fauna, my mental health was sound.
So, not long after contacting my mother for the first time in years, she was here. I was ecstatic, though after withdrawing from our embrace and wiping the tears from my eyes, I looked at her straight and saw the wear of the anxious years upon her face. “What’s happened out there?” I’d asked, and she told me that outside of the continued decline of the world and the increased unrest, life chugged forward. She’d told me of the hysteria ‘my book’ and disappearance had caused and the teams of searchers looking for me. “Had I seen them?”
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