The Man Who Watched the World End Read Online Free PDF Page B

mix in as you like. I’m not complaining though.
    It tasted so good I went back through the user guide to find other food settings I’d forgotten. The variety it offers amazed everyone the first time they saw it. It can make ten different kinds of macaroni and cheese, but each of those recipes can also be modified to be extra cheesy, extra moist, and so on. The settings can also be altered to contain extra calcium, fiber, anything you can think of. Chicken stir-fry will be tomorrow. Halfway through the user guide, I remembered walnut crusted salmon was at #1016. I got so happy that I gave Andrew a low-five (he can’t hold his hand up for a high-five). I forgot all of the other things I was missing out on—evening walks, vacations, neighborhood cookouts—and for one evening was content.
    It makes me wonder how many other things I used to enjoy that I not only no longer do, but that I don’t even remember enjoying in the first place. And once I start doing that for food, it’s inevitable that my mind wanders and I find myself thinking of watching football on Sunday with my dad, playing neighborho od games of two-hand touch, trying capture the other team’s flag in the forest behind our house, even something as simple as running to the grocery store to get milk for dinner. As soon as I think of one thing I used to miss, the dam breaks and I’m flooded with eighty years, a lifetime, of things I’ve enjoyed that are no longer possible.
    During these times, I try to think of the positive things that came to fruition during the Great De-evolution. Every day I find a different reason to be thankful for the Survival Bill. Our presidents and congressmen got a lot of things wrong over the years, but they may never have gotten anything as right as the supplies that provided the last generation of functioning adults with resources to take care of themselves and their Block relatives. The Bill was our government trying to protect its citizens one final time, ensuring people like me would be taken care of when there was no more government, locally or nationally, no grocery stores or farms, no trash trucks or power companies. It gave me the resources I needed to grow old by myself. It also allowed for the population of aging adults to take care of an entire society of people who couldn’t take care of themselves.
    I remember watching the news as a teenager. The naysayers always asked the same question into the camera: “Well, who’s going to pay for all of this?” It showed they still didn’t understand the magnitude of the situation: there weren’t going to be future generations to be stuck with the bill; the people being provisioned for were all that was left.
    There aren’t any grocery stores anymore. Remnants of some farms still exist, but they have long since been abandoned, have become weed-filled fields that haven’t grown healthy crops in twenty years. There’s no need for money at this point, so also no reason for people to have stores or to sell goods. If I had to work the earth for my own food, or carry a rifle into the woods for hunting, I wouldn’t have lasted a single month. I would have died forty years ago. If there is anyone still alive in New England or Canada they have to be a resourceful hunter-gatherer capable of killing animals every time they need something to eat. Only that kind of self-sufficiency, the kind we’ve all forgotten about, could allow a man to live in the abandoned northern regions. Instead of that fate, I have a food generator that produces my meals each day. The same generator allows me to refill Andrew’s nutrient bags.
    The Survival Bill didn’t produce thousands of each machine, but millions. And not just food processors. The incinerator in my backyard ensures I don’t drown in my own trash. A power generator produces all the electricity I’ll ever need. Each house is a self-sustainable unit of civilization; no one has to rely on anyone else. Luckily for me and for Andrew, if