We stumbled in, this old beaten down shop. I scrambled, pulling the piles apart. Junk, all of it modern junk – useless to us now; the flashy phones stacked up, the blank displays glossy behind their protectors.

We sorted, filtered the piles, we only had a short time before the power would return and life bounce back in to the new, our oppression by technology.

At the back, hidden behind a rusted door we had to break through, we found the old stuff. The good stuff, what we could swap for food.

This stash didn’t need the rationed electric, and there was the most majestic of all – a box of ballpoint pens. A way for us to send messages a computer couldn’t read. We’d all learned to be messy with our writing to confuse the machines. These would feed us like kings for months,

Back at camp we were the heroes. The joy of smuggling the forbidden. What was obsolete, was also dangerous.
I took the first message to the next town. They traded with ours, the resistance needed our blue gold. We teamed with them.

Over threw the overlords.

The power remains off.