Chapter Notes: Part III, Chapter 1

Primary Source Extracts & Notes to Self

NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.

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Though it only covers a few months from late 2035 to early 2036, Chapter 1 distills a period of history in which a lot happens across the entire world. I therefore did not have the space to discuss individual stories, as I did with Part II. If you are interested in hearing specific peoples’ stories, I highly recommend “The Severing: An Oral History of the Great Re-Alignment in North America” by Emma Winslow (2040).

Winslow’s history includes over fifty interviews; here are excerpts from four of them. (NB: You will recognize the final interviewee from Part II.)

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From Frank Kowalski, former Air Traffic Control Manager, Denver International Airport:

“You have to understand, by 2035 we'd gotten so dependent on the network coordination that half these young controllers had never worked a shift without full digital assist. When everything went dark at 22:45 Zulu — that's 4:45 in the afternoon our time — I had twenty-seven aircraft inbound to DEN and maybe six controllers on duty who remembered how to work purely by voice and radar.

“But here's the thing: I started out in '92 at a little municipal strip in Grand Junction. Back then, you learned to talk planes down with your eyes and your gut. No fancy overlays telling you wind shear probabilities or optimal approach vectors. Just you, the radio, and your experience of watching how aircraft behave.

“So when the screens went blank, I didn't panic. I got on the horn to every local airfield within a hundred miles — Centennial, Rocky Mountain Metro, hell, even the grass strips up in Greeley. Most of them still had working radios and emergency power for their lights. We kept everyone in the air talking to someone, diverted the heavies to fields that could handle them, and brought the rest down one by one.

“Took us until about six in the morning, but we got every single aircraft on the ground safe. Not one incident, not even a hard landing. The young guys, once they stopped staring at their dead screens, they remembered their training. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”

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From Julia Stein, Upper West Side, New York City:

“Our daughter was six months old when it happened. We were doing well — my husband’s in finance, I worked in publishing before the baby — and we lived in one of those big elevator buildings near 86th. That first night we thought it was just some kind of outage. The power was still on, lights in the hallways, the elevators working most of the time. But the overlays were gone. My husband kept tapping at his dead glasses, I kept asking my Voice to play lullabies, and nothing happened.