Prompt: After the Fall

“Jase? Jason! Mom said come on—”

Jason looked up as his younger sister Bethany threw open his door. She stared open-mouthed as he swept the items on top of his desk into the center drawer and slammed it shut. He glared at her. “Honestly, Bebs—”

“Honestly? Jase, a techhead? How could you? What if someone saw you? What if they took you away like Daddy? What would happen to Mom and me?” Bethany burst into tears and ran from the room. She ran into her room and slammed the door shut. Jason sighed and followed her down the hall. Coming into her room and closing the door, he faltered at the sight of her standing in the middle of the room. She hugged her arms around her middle and stomped her feet. He’d taught her that trick. Let the anger chase away the sad. After Stacey died…

Jason knelt behind her and wrapped his arms around her in a big hug. Leaning his forehead against her shuddering back, he said, “I won’t get caught, Bebs. I promise. It’s just…there’s so much…I just want to see if I can make anything work.” She tugged away in his arms, and he picked her up with a squeeze. “Besides, you’ll scare away anyone who comes looking for me with that scowl,” he teased, tossing her on the bed and tickling her.

She shrieked and threw pillows at him, then climbed up and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Please, Jase. Be careful. Tech is bad.”

He hated to hear her parrot the party line. Hated that they taught it in school. Hated that their dad had been cuffed and carted away for trying to tinker with medical equipment when their older sister had been dying and no one could do anything about it.

Now. The technology had been lost over two hundred years ago when the Peacemaker virus swept through all the interconnected systems throughout the globe. It had been lights out for everything with, well, lights. And in the Aftermath, all tech became the enemy.

But their father, a doctor trained in a real medical school, knew stories about technology that did wonderful things. Saved lives. When Stacey got sick and he couldn’t cure her, he went looking for options, and found rebel techheads in an abandoned hospital who showed him some of what they’d been able to restore. Not much, with no power grid. But he brought back a few tools he thought might be useful.

How did they know? Did someone tell? Men showed up in the middle of the night and took him away. Stacey got worse. Then she died. If the tech could have saved her, how was that bad? Jason ran away from home and found other techheads. When he came home three weeks later, their Mom didn’t ask any questions.

TBC?

Dogs in House	Brindle, Houdini
Music	Chorus frogs
Time writing	~30 minutes
April word count	1752