Options Are Good (18 page)

“That is good to know,” Bandy said, suddenly looking much better. “She was a good soldier, you know.”

“Well, we know what really happened, Bandy,” Magdalene said. “So don’t you worry about it anymore. You’ve more than proved yourself. Then and now. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for saving my daughter.”

“If I hadn’t…” Bandy was say when he was more or less shouted down that it was not his fault. Any of it. So he shut up and let Ana-Bella take his hand and hold it.

EPILOGUE

It was seventeen years before the Intelligence’s own infrastructure that it had created began to fail without human assistance. Another ten and the Intelligence was no more, the links broken that allowed the different super computers to connect and have enough computing power to be self-evident.

Needless to say, Bandy and Ana-Bella were married shortly after that final battle and moved to Bandy’s, much to the other Sheridan’s and all the Longhammer’s disappointment.

But it worked out for the best for the first couple of years. With the leadership of Sheriff Broadhearst, backed by the Longhammer’s and Sheridan’s, that Oklahoma County became the hub of a struggling area populace reduced to less than twenty percent of its original.

Bob set Angus up with breeding stock, and both places were soon furnishing much of food for them. There was enough to send regularly to Bandy and Ana-Bella for distribution through the warehouse, to keep that area going as well. Alan was running the place for Bandy. And Bandy and Ana-Bella furnished small amounts of fruit and nuts, plus a few other things that Bandy had established, that the others were just getting into.

But after two and a half years, and Bob and Magdalene beginning to have health problems, the Hawkins’ sold the mostly self-sufficient place Bandy put so much time and money into, to Alan, for a surprising amount of gold and silver coin. They moved back to the Sheridan Ranch, and took over for Bob.

Alan had managed to survive, those first few weeks, selling off some of the items in the warehouse suited well to making life easier in the conditions now existing. And due to one random comment Bandy had made in the old days, that stayed with him, Alan had insisted on food, gold, and silver in payment for the items needed to live in the current circumstances.

Life would never return to the old normal, but Bandy and Ana-Bella were able to live to see the day that people could once again have the option of being able to be on a working, protected infrastructure to make life much easier for their children. Or not, as many would chose, having learned their lesson the hard way.

THE END

EDITOR’S NOTE

Editor’s Note: Hollywood seems to have the ability to anticipate the human experience. The 1970 film
Colossus: The Forbin Project
based upon the 1966 novel
Colossus
, by Dennis Feltham Jones, about a massive American defense computer, named Colossus, becoming sentient and deciding to assume control of the world. The principal character in the film is Dr. Charles A. Forbin played by Eric Braeden. Colossus and the Soviet computer, Guardian, when combined became a sentient being.

In a final remark addressed to Dr. Forbin concerning its world control, Colossus states that “freedom is just an illusion” and the machine predicts: “In time, you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.” Forbin replies: “Never.”

The origins of the Internet reach back to research commissioned by the United States government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks. While this work, together with work in the United Kingdom and France, led to important precursor networks, they were not the Internet. There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but sometime in the early to mid-1980s is considered reasonable.

The funding of a new US backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. Though the Internet has been widely used by academia since the 1980s, the commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people – over a third of the world's human population – have used the services of the Internet; approximately 100 times more people than were using it in 1995.

The End
 

THANK YOU FOR READING “BUGGING HOME”

By

Jerry D. Young

LIKE THIS BOOK?

See more great books at www.creativetexts.com

“OZARK RETREAT”

“BUGGING HOME”

“THE SLOW ROAD”

“LOW PROFILE”

“RUDY’S PREPAREDNESS SHOP”

“CME: CORONAL MASS EJECTION”

“HOME SWEET BUNKER”

“THE HERMIT”

& MANY MORE GREAT PAW FICTION & OTHER TITLES

THANK YOU!