Previously: … He moved to press the button. And the screens went black. All of them. At once. Not just tactical overlays — everything. Maps. Channels. Network feeds. Diagnostic tools. Voices. Overlays. Gone.
Just silence.
Mueller stood in the center of it, still reaching forward.
From marketing materials for Isla Palenque, “Thoughts on Islomania” — Ben Loomis, 2015:
“Islands hold a special place in the collective unconscious. They are places of mystery, discovery, isolation, adventure, and occasionally horror. The mainland is where ordinary life occurs, but islands are special. Gods live on islands; so do monsters.”
When the old world ended, I was in a better position than most.
It’s not that I was clairvoyant, though my early involvement in cog-net experiments had given me an insight that most network members — even most Indies — didn’t have.
My edge was more practical. I happened to be in charge of a private island.
Isla Palenque sits in the Gulf of Chiriqui, just a few miles off the Pacific coast of Panama. Four hundred acres of tropical jungle and volcanic stone, with a half-dozen beaches. I spent over five years here in the 2010s developing the island from untouched wilderness into a small, highly-serviced luxury eco-resort. The initial resort — eight detached beachfront suites and a six-room lodge, all nestled in the trees with amenities and operational infrastructure — opened in 2018.
By 2034, the island was fully developed. That meant two dozen detached hotel suites and ten multi-million dollar homes — along with expanded amenities and infrastructure: an organic farm, networks of solar panels, roads, two beachside restaurants — tucked into the jungle like contraband.
With the last home sold and the investors’ original capital returned, I found myself in an unusual position: the asset manager of a functioning resort enclave. Thanks to the structure of the original sales, I controlled the HOA for the next eight years — and the hotel for the foreseeable future. For all practical purposes, I was king of the island.
And I was starting to prep.
I’d been making the same joke for decades: if the zombie apocalypse ever came, I’d head for the tropical coast. All you need is a roof, a line in the water, and a few papayas. The fish are abundant. The fruit falls off the trees. There is no easier life.
Now that a zombie apocalypse of sorts did seem to be seriously possible, that glib remark was turning into a plan.
I made the pitch to the homeowners — all wealthy, all foreign. Things were unstable in the US, fragile in Europe. The island could never be a bunker, I told them, but it could be a fallback. A place to ride out the worst. Some thought I was alarmist. Most nodded politely. But enough agreed. They signed off on upgrades to the farm, improvements to the infrastructure, discussions about strategic stores. Slowly, I began setting things up
Plans are useless, planning is essential.
I enjoyed the process.
When I first developed Isla Palenque back in the 2010s, I soon learned: islands force you to think like a prepper. There’s no default infrastructure. You generate your own electricity, secure your own water, and if you’re missing a part, it’s not coming tomorrow. You learn to appreciate redundancy and keep multiples of many things around.
Panama magnified that mindset. It wasn’t an undeveloped country, but it was seriously inconsistent. You couldn’t assume suppliers would have tomorrow what they had today, and if they didn’t have it you could not trust their lead times. So you learn to stockpile.
And when I left Panama in 2018, I also spent years in a campervan I built out myself, mostly living off-grid. Same lessons: if you’re boondocking in Baja for a month, food and water require precision planning. Planning becomes habit.
So when I began prepping the island in 2034 — this time with a serious budget from special assessments and a few prescient homeowners — it felt almost familiar. I leaned into it. Researched obsessively, made lists, bought gear, wrote SOPs. It was fun.
We already had a good foundation. Wells provided more than enough water, and solar most of our electrical needs. The hotel maintained deep inventories and had a small wood shop. The farm produced eggs, chickens, pigs, and vegetables. Not enough to feed a full resort, but plenty in a crisis — especially with coconuts, plantains, and papayas growing like weeds year-round, and decent fishing possible right from our rocky shores.
I cleared out and cordoned off a back section of Purchasing & Receiving to house our stash. Such as:
Food
> Vacuum-sealed grains, salt, vinegar, spices
> Oils rotated through hotel use
> Freeze-dried soy, greens, multivitamins
Medical
> Full emergency kits, thousands of pills, hospital-level redundancy
Equipment
> Extra tools, more farming gear, enough spare parts to rebuild most anything
Communications
> Walkies, radios, laptops, tablets, backup interfaces
> A small Faraday Room to shield electronics from EMPs
Library:
> Dozens of e-readers, preloaded
> Hundreds of paperbacks, just in case
It wasn’t a bunker, but the island was now equipped like one.
And if things got as bad as some of us intuited, it felt like the island could become a proper sanctuary.
From “Prepping Goes Mainstream — and Corporate,” — Marcia Redbourne, Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2034:
“Once the domain of conspiracy theorists and backwoods loners, prepping is starting to look less like paranoia and more like prudence.
“With national institutions faltering under economic stress, symbolic fragmentation, and scattered outbreaks of political violence, a growing number of families and communities are quietly preparing for worst-case scenarios…
“From upstate New York to southern Chile, cooperatives, private enclaves, and even a few municipal governments have begun stockpiling essentials, securing off-grid power, and drafting emergency communication plans.
“‘It’s not just the wackos anymore,’ said Julianne Kerr, a logistics consultant whose firm now serves several so-called Indie communities and Cog-Net enclaves. ‘It’s lawyers, schoolteachers, and retired engineers. They’re not expecting the world to end. But they’ve stopped trusting it to hold together.’”
By 2035, I wasn’t the only one prepping. Not even close.
The headlines still framed it as fringe behavior — panic shelters and canned beans. But something quieter was happening beneath the surface. Not hysteria, not even pessimism. Just… caution. A growing sense that what was happening was not sustainable.
Some of this was just ordinary people sensing the vibe. Quiet cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest and Indie communities in Scotland, Morocco, Canada. Engineers and ex-urbanites pooling resources. Retired couples installing solar and building up water reserves. Not bunkering for the apocalypse — just preparing for a slower unraveling.
But some of it came from the networks as well, especially in 2035.
Bloomvale. Karelia Kotia. The New Covenant Order. A few of the more mystically-aligned Cog-Nets. Not officially prepping, of course. But messaging shifted. Vocabulary changed. Phrases like “long resilience” and “substrate continuity” started popping up. Some users were nudged toward supply audits, creating bug-out bags, having places to go if your city went sideways.
Even the more practical nets weren’t immune. Two of the homeowners at Isla Palenque — deep into cognitive overlays and decentralized feedback models — said they could feel a subtle atmospheric shift, as if the systems themselves were bracing for something.
In hindsight, I wonder how many cog-nets were in on it. They wouldn’t have provided direct warnings, of course — that would’ve caused panic. Just suggestions that it might be time to prepare for worst case scenarios.
Of course, most people didn’t. If they had, the aftermath of the Great Re-Alignment would’ve looked very different. But prepping was a bigger phenomenon than ever before. By the time 2035 rolled around, survivalist thinking wasn’t just for doomsday prophets and Montana separatists. It had entered the cultural bloodstream.
From “The Original Affluent Society” — Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (1972):
“Half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves…
“A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.”
There’s a reason civilizations didn’t flourish in some locations, especially in the tropics. It wasn’t because the people were lazy. It was because they didn’t need them.
Civilizations have indeed emerged in many tropical zones — river valleys in Southeast Asia, coastal basins in Mesoamerica. But in some parts of the world — lush coastlines where food grows year-round with little effort and the sea never stops giving — civilizations have always struggled to take root.
I lived on Isla Palenque for years before any proper buildings existed. No infrastructure. No hotel. Just a thatch roof, a machete, and a slowly shrinking list of what was essential.
And what I found was: not much. You work in the morning and nap in the heat of the afternoon. The jungle and ocean both give more than they ask. So you take what they give and leave the rest alone.
“Civilized” people tend to call this laziness. But that’s projection — the ideology of scarcity speaking. In a world of abundance, it makes no sense to obey a priest’s calendar, submit to a chief’s planting schedule, dig canals for some far-off harvest. Why would you labor for a state when lunch is hanging over your head or swimming under your dock? You set a shrimp trap and reach for a mango. And in the heat of the afternoon, you take a nap.
The tropics, in that sense, are paradise. Not the paradise of kings and empires, but of survival without struggle — a life that renews itself day by day.
And when that tropical paradise is encircled by water, it gets distilled into archetype. A tropical island is not only easy to live on, it becomes mythic.
The sea turns abundance into sanctuary, the shoreline your side of a vast moat. What you have is not just a refuge but a world complete unto itself.
Crossing water to get there feels like ritual: the rocking boat, the unfathomable deep below, the sense of baptism and rebirth. Arrival is abrupt and total — one moment at sea, the next on land, inside a bounded cosmos.
An island is a whole unto itself, a complete ecosystem resting in equilibrium. Its coastline defines the world — not an endless continent, but a realm a mere mortal can actually come to know. A place to gain an existential foothold and feel that, at least here, everything is comprehensible.
That shifts your perception. You stop scanning for distant threats and start attending to local rhythms — the tides, the fruiting seasons, the smell of rain in the air before a storm.
From a Weather Advisory Bulletin by the IMPHA (Panama’s Meteorological Agency):
ADVISORY BULLETIN #042 — OCT 24, 2035 — 09:15 UTC-5
SUBJECT: Tropical System YSIDRA – Regional Rainfall and Coastal Impacts
Issued For: Western Caribbean and Pacific Basins. Including coastal sectors of Bocas del Toro, Chiriquí, Ngabe-Bugle, and Veraguas.
Tropical Storm Ysidra currently located south of Jamaica, moving NNW at 14 knots.
Projected to strengthen to Category 3 hurricane within 48 hours.
Outer bands bringing elevated moisture and unstable air mass to Pacific regions.
Expect widespread rainfall from Honduras to Panama, with localized flooding in vulnerable areas.
Coastal squalls (gusts up to 45 km/h) and high surf likely.
Critically, in October 2035 we had not shut the hotel down. While the old geopolitical order was clearly fraying, we all still assumed that—if things truly collapsed—we’d have at least some warning. Maybe months. At least a week or two. Time enough to cancel bookings, call in the homeowners, tighten the perimeter.
That assumption was financially motivated, of course. Shutting down the hotel preemptively would have meant forfeiting significant income. And for the homeowners, most of whom rented their properties through our management program, there was little incentive to hunker down full-time, even on a paradisiacal island, unless they absolutely had to.
It was pure coincidence that I was even there. I had been in my cabin in New Hampshire the week before, hiking in the explosions of fall color.
Even in the years that I spent significant time in Panama, I usually left during the rainiest season. October and November are the soggiest months of the year in western Panama, and I had learned to plan around them decades earlier.
But in the fall of 2035, a personnel crisis upended my usual pattern. The accountant for the hotel management company had flagged some irregularities, and within days uncovered evidence of serious misconduct by the general manager and two key staff members. The fallout was chaotic: audits, system lockouts, temporary shuffling of remaining employees, emergency interviews. It couldn’t be handled remotely.
So I flew back to the island for what I thought would be a quick week of triage. My outbound flight was booked for October 24.
Then Ysidra arrived.
The storm wasn’t headed directly for Panama — it was well north, off the coast of Jamaica. But its outer bands had begun shearing across the isthmus, soaking everything from Colombia to Nicaragua. Flights across the region were canceled, and David’s airport was entirely shut down.
I rebooked for the 27th and settled in to ride things out.
By then, of course, it was too late. Whatever countdown had been ticking in the background — whatever silent protocol had been creeping toward consensus — was about to reach zero.
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