Those were good jobs, the sort of good jobs everyone said globalization would make disappear. The end times beat globalization to it, I guess. You'd have to ask my parents; my father died in the Second Event - the two hundred million ghost horsemen, which had a worse death toll than the First and Third Event each - but you can still talk to my mom. She'll cry a lot. She'll smile a little. She's done a better job keeping her innocence than I have. For me it was all just... normal; I didn't know anything else.
I got a lot of attention growing up. All the Children of the Tribulation did. Big surprise, right? Probably too much for our own mental health. You've probably read an editorial or a blog post lamenting how the CoT generation are entitled, and how Gen Alpha are glued to their stenopads. Then again, maybe it's what kept us sane. There were few kids, so at least in America, driving them a hundred miles for a play date was normal. In some areas people with children were encouraged - even to the point of receiving what today we'd call universal basic income - to move close together, so that primary schools could be reestablished in a few years' time. Moscow had one such community. There was a playground, with 24/7 surveillance and an ambulance on standby in case a kid got hurt. My mom got work elsewhere, a deli I think, and my dad could afford to study full time and keep an eye on me in the morning. We'd lucked out, really, at least at first. My dad even managed to qualify for a scholarship at UI, so he could get his programming degree there, and wouldn't have to commute.
I have very nebulous memories of my father, and those I have, no doubt contain as much or more of my mother's stories about him than my direct experience. I remember him teaching me to swim at the community pool. I remember him picking a fight with the lifeguard because i wasn't wearing inflatable armbands, and him telling the lifeguard that humans had evolved to know how to swim at birth, and the lifeguard calling him deluded and straight up calling the cops. They must have sorted it out, because I definitely remember sitting on my dad's shoulders swimming.
I remember him teaching me to type. I was precocious, I guess. I learned to type on the brown keys of a secondhand Commodore 64 before I learned to write. That must've been right before he died; the first program I ever wrote, when I was five, was 10 PRINT "I MISS YOU DADDY", 20 GOTO 10. In a sense it was a kind of prayer. Later in life, I learned that Buddhists have prayer wheels that work on the same principle.
I remember watching a movie over and over with him, Wargames. He was studying and it was playing on the VCR in the background, I was playing with toy cars taken home when Zevo had shut down. It helped him focus - both watching me and having the movie in the background. I was incredibly impressed when he got his dinky computer to sound exactly like the supercomputer in the movie. "Shall - we - play - a - game?"
That was when it looked like things were looking up, you see. Nicolae Carpatescu was doing a surprisingly good job keeping the planet running. A series of what the media called natural disasters and the Christian Remnant called the Seven Trumpet Judgements came and went, each tackled by Global Community remediation workers. There was an earthquake that cut up a bunch of phone lines, and a week later everyone got a free cell phone plan, with texting, even. There was a hurricane, and two days later people on the east coast were being lauded with great fanfare for having given shelter to sailors evacuated in the greatest operation since the Berlin airlift. There was an asteroid coming to hit the Earth, and they got American and Russian rocket scientists to work together and shatter it in orbit so that only small fragments would fall. Of course, a good chunk of that was propaganda, but where we lived, things were in fact timidly looking up.