Welcome to one of my nightmares.
I expect this post to be the foundation for at least a few others I write, maybe several, but I’ve been putting off writing it, it gives me no joy to dwell on things like this.
The starting circumstances here have been, more or less, my daily circumstance every working day for more than one stretch of my life, and for years at a time. The potential downsides were on my mind even before 9/11, so I’ve had a whole lot of time to think about it. I’ve also had some experiences that taught me what to expect in unusual circumstances not nearly as severe, and those were not encouraging.
Here’s the scenario:
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You work in Bureaupolis, a large city, but you live in the suburbs quite a ways away from it. Your commute into work each morning is in three stages, driving to a subway station (leaving a far suburb to a nearer suburb), taking the subway from there into the busiest downtown area, then walking from the subway station to the building you work in. Alternative routes become possible with train changes once you’re downtown, and you can get a bit closer into work with an extra train change in bad weather, or get to work quicker by walking when it’s nice, neither is a big deal on most days. Subway stations are dense in the middle of downtown, and your walk is just a few blocks at most, but altogether the three legs of the commute take close to an hour-and-a-half. At least on the subway you can read, listen to audio, use a computer or tablet, something… it’s not all wasted time. Driving is far worse, and parking downtown costs just about as much as the subway fare both ways plus the charge for parking in the station, so driving is actually more expensive factoring in the vehicle mileage.
Although you’re not a government employee you’re working in a government building for a contracting company, which since 9/11 means that in entering the building each morning you face armed security guards, metal detectors and x-ray machines, so you have to be VERY careful about what you have on your person when you leave your vehicle back at the subway station, because there’s no real way to change what you have on you from that moment until you face that security gauntlet. At that point your vehicle is 25 miles and an hour away by subway, and, being post-9/11, there are no lockers available anywhere, they’ve all been removed or can’t be used for fear of someone leaving a bomb in one.
The laws also differ in this city from the area in which you live, and the pocket knife you typically carry in the suburbs is illegal in the city where the maximum blade length is just two-and-a-half inches- very short. For fear of forgetting that, one of the things that you carry is a self-addressed padded envelope with postage on it, so if you discover you have broken the law by accident you can put your pocketknife into it and drop it in a mailbox as soon as possible when exiting the subway. You try to be very careful, but you’ve had to use the envelope and later replace it once. The legal limit for a pocketknife in government buildings is also two-and-a-half inches, and since that is also the local law the signs say that the guards will not just refuse you entry into the building where you work, and not just confiscate the knife, but call the local police and have you arrested. They also make it clear that they can confiscate ANY object at the whim of the security guard, if he or she deems it “dangerous”, so the rules for the building are just “guidelines”, nothing is really safe.
You know from long experience that merely abiding by the rules doesn’t mean that you won’t face hassles, maybe even harassment. You carry a small flashlight, mostly it goes through security with no problem, but once, for no apparent reason, it drew a lot of attention from the guards who wanted to know why you carried such a thing. You tried to tell them about the miles of dark tunnels on the commute, but they had obviously quit listening entirely before you got more than a few words out. They seemed to be especially irritated because it was on a thin, light chain. Eventually they just let you (and the flashlight) into the building with no further comment, but it took up about twenty minutes while you were publicly being treated as a threat in the lobby.
The twenty-minute rule seems to apply to other things as well. In theory you are allowed to carry a pocket knife so long as the blade is under two-and-a-half inches long. In practice, not so much. You tried carrying a very small knife once, it brought the entire security check line to a standstill, they opened it up, held it up so that everyone in the lobby could see it, made a big show of measuring the blade, asked you what purpose you carried it for, then discussed it among themselves for… just about 20 minutes. You thought about it all that day, and since you had already gone through the hassle and humiliation of getting it into the building, eventually you decided to leave it in your desk at work rather than take it home. That way in the future if something happened while you were at work you’d have SOMETHING. It wouldn’t help you on the commute to work or back home, but it was better than having nothing at all, all day every day. Later you brought a small zippered pouch into work that could be locked with a luggage lock to make it harder for the cleaning crew to pilfer items from it, and used that for the small knife and a few other things that might be useful.
Even trying hard to avoid hassles was no guarantee. One day when you were dressed a little more casually than normal they stopped you because their metal detector was set off by the eyelets in your boots, which you had worn two or three times before with no problem. They made you roll up your pants legs while they ran the wand over your legs, again while everyone in line watched. There is also one guard in particular that is thankfully seldom at the door you generally use, but who will not, ever, let you wear a belt with a metal buckle through the detector. He always insists that you must take the belt completely off and put it through the x-ray machine conveyor belt, holding your pants up with one hand, even though your belt buckles have never set the metal detectors off.
Not actually working in a government building doesn’t mean you’re free from all this in Bureaupolis either, government buildings include museums, art galleries, some popular tourist attractions, they even enclose popular food courts. Increasingly the entire city population is having to deal with these measures, including tourists from out-of-town to whom all of this is very alien.
As with most “security” since 9/11, the emphasis seems to be mostly on making sure that potential victims remain as vulnerable and helpless as legally possible, and then some.
So, you are severely limited as to what you can carry into the building, which means those limits apply to your entire commute both ways. They do seem to ignore any smallish non-metal objects, at least so far, but the rules do prohibit yawaras, kubatans or striking implements of any kind, and you’ve been told that they use this rule to prohibit even heavy pens.
It’s hard to ignore that every day you pass through miles of dark underground tunnels that go beneath some prime terrorist targets. The subway system in Bureaupolis is not very reliable at the best of times, you’ve had real trouble getting home during severe weather more than once, and more than once just from their equipment and infrastructure failures, so you have little faith in it working.
You don’t know it, but this particular morning your luck is going to run out.
You are reading an ebook on the subway, lost in thought but aware that you are downtown, still some stations away from the one you use most on the way into work. The subway slows, slows further, then very slowly comes to a stop. People look around quizzically, most still avoiding eye contact with each other. The car is crowded and there are many people standing in the aisles and near the doors. Nothing happens. This goes on for some minutes.
Eventually the train operator gets on the PA system and in a deep bass voice says that “because of the emergency in the city” there will be a delay. Nothing more. People are working their smartphones with puzzled looks, apparently they are showing “bars”, getting a signal, but nobody is getting any data. Eventually one guy remembers that the stereo headset he’s been listening to music on has an FM radio built in, he’s not getting anything either, but he wouldn’t, they don’t relay those signals into the tunnels.
Over more minutes people are starting to get concerned. Then the lights go out.
There’s a collective gasp in the sudden darkness, then a few exclamations, then lots of people are talking at once, you can’t sort out much of it. You sit and think for a minute, then dig through your bag by feel to find the little flashlight. It’s there, but you use it all the time, you don’t know how much charge is left in it, and two other passengers have now found theirs and are shining them around the train car, so you decide to conserve yours for now and just keep it ready in your hand.
Even with enough light to see it’s dark, and nothing has changed, so after a few minutes one flashlight goes off. Most people are now silent, and for the first time you notice that the sound of the ventilation system disappeared when the lights went off. A few more minutes and the other flashlight is turned off, and you’re back in the dark. A number of people don’t like that, a young child is starting to whimper, and some voices, though still low, are starting to sound angry.
Then it starts to get hot. People are getting still angrier, now there’s a small child crying loudly. You’re seated, but the car is crowded. The passengers that are standing are shoulder-to-shoulder, and it’s still getting hotter. You hear a repeated loud voice from the front of the car, and realize that someone has started trying to use the intercom to talk to the train operator, but they’re getting no response. You’re starting to feel sweat trickle down from your hairline and neck, your clothes are getting moist, and it’s still getting hotter.
Suddenly there are people and voices outside the car. For a moment you assume that you’re being rescued, but apparently they are other passengers streaming past your car. One or two slap or pound on the sides as they pass, seemingly signalling that you’re all idiots for still being inside. Flashlights come on again, and a couple of passengers start working on activating the emergency exit controls on the door closest to you. Faced with the prospect of leaving the car, a voice in the dark fearfully mentions the third rail… 750 volts. Someone else says they’re being stupid, can’t they see that the power is out? Then a louder, authoritative voice says that the rail is not powered on the local grid, it may still be live even if the lights are all out.
Figures.
The doors are opened, and people are standing up and starting to head toward them, but there’s a problem. Everyone is startled by how high up the train cars really are without a platform to exit onto, and nobody wants to jump down into the dark, especially not when they aren’t sure where that third rail is. Eventually they get a couple of flashlights on the problem and some of the larger guys start helping other passengers out. Eventually it’s your turn. You’re able-bodied enough, after you shove your flashlight into a pocket you’re able to turn around and lower yourself with your hands on the floor of the car and get a footing below, but, yes, you’re also surprised too at how far down it is, and now there are some black marks on the front of your clothes from the train.
The people streaming past the car have thinned out, but there are still people behind you wanting to move forward, so you start walking immediately, then you fish out and finally turn on your flashlight. Apparently the dreaded third rail is on the other side of the train, you can’t see it. It would make sense that someone would figure out which side it was on and people would exit out the other side, but it’s not a smart or comfortable assumption to make, and this is the first real confirmation that you’ve seen. You walk forward in the dark past one car that seems entirely empty, it’s dark and quiet and both doors on this side are open, then past another that is dark but nearly empty, but there is a heavy, middle-aged woman trying to lower herself out the door, being ineffectually aided by another similar woman from inside, so you stop to help them out. Immediately there are some nasty words directed your way out of the darkness, you’re making people step over a rail to move forward, they’re not happy about that. It’s awkward and embarrassing, but you manage to get both ladies out of the car onto the pavement intact, though one is jabbering incessantly about how wrong this all is, and you use your flashlight to help them see to walk forward. The three of you are still slowing some people behind you, though, and those people still don’t like it. Somebody steps across the rail to get past you, slaps the back of your head in the dark and is gone before you overcome the shock enough to even process what happened.
One more car, dark and empty, then another, then suddenly no more, you’re past the head of the train, and the crowd is moving to the center between the two wheel-rails and you can now see the third rail to the far side. You turn around and shine your flashlight through the windshield glass where the train operator should be, but there’s no one there.
So, forward again into the dark. For the first time you have a not-very-rational pang of real fear. However unlikely it may be, if a train came the other way on this track, or the train behind you started forward at least dozens of people would be killed. You would almost certainly be killed. Suddenly just standing between two train rails in the dark seems insane. Other than people shuffling along and talking, though, it’s eerily quiet. At least you’d hear your death coming, maybe in time to do something.
It’s not far. The tunnel widens out a bit in the dark, and abruptly people are climbing the concrete stairs that appeared beside the tracks, and then you and the two ladies are standing on a platform in a dark subway station. People are moving forward, you see the turnstiles are not functioning but there’s a gate open next to them, so you just walk through as everyone else is doing.
You’re silently outraged. When you passed the empty operator compartment at the head of the train you had thought that perhaps he was ahead of the train somewhere helping people out, but now it’s clear that he just abandoned an entire train-load of people and walked away. Now that you’ve made it to the station, it’s dark and completely empty. There are hundreds of passengers making their way out of the tunnel in the dark, and there is not one, not one single transit employee anywhere, they have abandoned you and all the others underground.*
You don’t recognize the station, but everything looks different in the dark. Then there is a flight of stairs and escalators, not moving, and there is faint light coming down them from above. You look to the two ladies you’ve been helping, but they are ignoring you completely, they never even thanked you, so you go ahead up one of the escalators, slowly outpacing them. At the landing at the top there’s another similar flight of stairs and escalators and much more light, so you kill and re-pocket the flashlight, take a breath and a few seconds later you emerge into the morning light. You’re on foot in the city, above ground. You’ve made it out. It’s not that sunny but the light is blinding after the darkness you’ve left behind, and the noise is deafening and chaotic, it’s impossible to sort out individual sounds.
You know where you are now, you’re about five or six blocks from work.
Car traffic is snarled everywhere and not moving at all. There is no clue what’s happened, but there are thousands of pedestrians on foot, most are staring at smartphone screens that don’t seem to be telling them anything, but they all seem to be heading in the same general direction. You take a moment to get oriented. The direction that they’re going is West, heading toward the river, the direction they’re coming from is at an angle to, but more-or-less toward the building in which you work. You have no idea what’s happened, and you’re unsure of which direction to go. You call out to some people in passing “What’s happening?”. Some ignore you, some can’t hear you, one lady who passes nearby says “Seriously?” and keeps going, and a bewildered-looking teenager says he doesn’t know. Ominously, you see one storekeeper lowering a multi-hinged steel-panel door over the entire front of his store and locking it into place.
Trying to communicate with walking people has started you moving toward the river, you’ve half-way made the decision to go with the crowd by default. You’re trying to ignore the growing knot forming in your stomach, you know your decision’s not really based on reason. You fish out your phone while you’re walking, there are five bars showing, but you only get nothing a fast busy signal when you hit your number one speed-dial number.
After a few more blocks you come over a rise and have a clear view of the river downhill and ahead of you. You freeze at the spectacle, trying to make sense what you see. There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people teeming along the bank of the river, unable to go further. The crowd is undulating in waves as it packs ever denser with more arrivals, seemingly everyone shouting at once. There is one large bridge visible to the left, packed with stationary cars jammed in bumper to bumper, but only a very few people moving on the bridge. It occurs to you that those few are abandoning their cars. For some reason not visible yet nobody in the crowd on this bank of the river is able to get onto the bridge. There is no sign of authority, police, military, emergency, anywhere, except for at least two helicopters overhead. There is another bridge far up the river to your right, but it’s too far to see if anything is moving on it. People are still streaming past you, seemingly intent on joining the huge mass already stopped at the river. Some sort of herd instinct.
You step off the street into the recessed doorway of a stone building. The very heavy glass doors let you see a lobby of some sort, but there are no lights inside and you can’t see much by the light coming from the doors themselves. It seems to have gotten darker out, or maybe your eyes have just adjusted to the daylight. The doors are securely locked, they seem to weigh a ton and don’t even budge when you try to pull on the handles.
You crouch down in that doorway, trying not to be pushed along by crowds any longer, trying to filter out the ocean of noise drowning out your thoughts. Your vehicle is in a subway station about twenty-five miles away, but that’s on a line right through the middle of the city. If that course not possible or too dangerous then you’re facing thirty-five to forty-five miles, through panicked crowds and maybe worse, and probably two river crossings. That’s days on foot, possibly through a disaster area.
You see a few little dark spots appearing on the concrete pavement. It’s just starting to rain.
What do you do now?
What did you bring, on a normal day that started out like any other?
– Robert the Wombat
* This part of the narrative is based on my own much less serious experience.
– Robert the Wombat