Eighteen months in Rivertown actually made Betsy miss Sublab 7475.

The first year had been atrocious. The MPD tore them from their hole in the ground and marched them ten miles through the freezing cold and snow under the cover of night to a detainment center that reeked of piss and fear. They crowded the 30 of them into two cells, where you could hardly stand without touching someone. Her companions were meek and silent.

Betsy wanted to make it clear to her interrogators that she could be quite valuable to their organization, but the trio of dullards across the desk gave her little to go on. They said predictable things like, "We'll ask the questions here," and, "That information is classified," as if they were acting out parts from old police procedurals. It did little to hide the fact that her questions about the nature and condition of their research facilities befuddled them. Yes, they admitted they had functioning laboratories but could not disclose what work was being done. Betsy's contempt seemed to cow them, even though it was them who held the truncheons.

She alone was relocated to Summerland, escorted miles south through the fallen city by a phalanx of heavily armed guards. It was a sobering journey in daylight, making the confinement of her cell seem pristine in comparison. Her stomach sank as she saw the squalor of the Grudow, not yet realizing that it represented the worst part of the settlement. It helped make the Riverside district, where she would work and live, feel almost livable. In the laboratory there she found a small host of scientists busying themselves with various pointless projects. The MPD had rooms full of computers and equipment but no means for using it. The few people who claimed to be engineers had never seen such sophisticated contrivances and didn't know how to install them. Besides, they had strict rules about power rationing since the solar cells could only produce so much energy and thus limited using the few scant pieces of equipment they had working for a few hours at a time. The scientists twiddled their thumbs and tried to look busy, but it was a sham and everyone knew it. Except perhaps their captors.

The meeting with the old woman was supposed to change all that. They had discovered a psychedelic drug she wanted reproduced and quickly. She promised a top-notch facility, a fully functioning lab, talented support teams, and perhaps most enticing of all, a reliable Internet connection. Betsy was thrilled about the opportunity. She had long suspected that the MPD had more resources than they were letting on and thought maybe, just maybe, her luck had turned.

Instead it had turned out to be more of the same. The lab had several complete sets of glassware, burners, balances, centrifuges and the rest along with what appeared to be, on first glance, a comprehensive chemical library and functioning incubators. But her support staff of three was, at best, competent in basic chemistry--their most important credentials, it seemed, were close ties to the Lukowski and Johnson families. The working computer—singular—on hand was woefully inadequate. Most of the software required Internet integration, and the so-called "reliable" connection meant it would last for up to 90 seconds every few hours. While she might be able to break down the drug called jack into a formula—with an emphasis on might—she understood immediately that they had no means to reproduce it any quantity. It all amounted to a slightly more glorified form of thumb twiddling.

However, Reichman had her set up with a cozy ground floor condo in the Lukowski building. It had its own library with a fireplace, and they gave her a Premier ration card, which allowed her to buy luxuries like preserved ham and red wine, for which she had developed a taste. And when she was in the grips of a particularly foul mood, she'd squeeze a drop or two of her drug sample in her merlot, just to take the edge off.

What the world needed, she thought drowsily staring into the fire, was a more meritocratic apocalypse. The one that happened had seized the world in its jaws and shook it mercilessly, taking all the best kind of people and leaving only those with no appreciable skills. If only more network engineers and computer specialists had been spared. Them and electrical engineers or nuclear engineers or whoever the hell it was that kept the power flowing. All that sheer intelligence without the burden of so many bottom-feeders. They could have done incredible things.

Belief that people of knowledge still existed kept depression from overwhelming her. What if they had only just begun to emerge from their shelters into the light of a new day? What if they had just begun the process of piecing the world back together? It could be that Rivertown wasn't yet connected to the reborn network. The planet's accumulated knowledge still existed, suspended in digital networks, waiting to be tapped. Whenever that happened, the best of the brightest of the survivors who would forge a new republic, just as her parents predicted.

Until then, she had to content herself with pressed ham and California table wine.

Betsy's biggest fear, the one that shrouded her while she slept, was this: what if when it came time to connect Rivertown back to the grid, their saviors arrived on their doorstep, took one good look around, caught a whiff of the place, and turned their backs? Her biggest fear is that in the cold light of reason, reviving Rivertown might not be worth their time.