Back then, I had quite a few city friends to stay out at our Arcadian idyll. Beds and sleeping bags all over the place. But we had a great time. Talking all evening, working in the fresh air all day. It was really cold that first millennial January. But well dressed and active you could be outside. We built a latrine (there's a lot of it when you have to dispose of it yourself), gathered and chopped firewood, and brought back potatoes galore from the local farmers. The well did nearly run dry - but we adults managed on rations so the kids could drink. And we all washed together in the weekly sauna. Looking back it was a strangely happy time. I was sad to see them go back to the slowly stirring city, jerry-rigged into some semblance of metropolitan life.
That's when we first talked about giving up clocks. It seemed a crazy kind of revenge against those innocent timekeepers. But for some reason the idea caught hold. And once the networks were restored, it became a major debate in what I always jokingly called the noosphere, but me, I never use short words if I can find a longer one.
I'd been outworking for several years before the Fall, as Taru called it. (Taru plays Eve to my Adam) As a financial analyst, I didn't need an office in town. Everything I needed to know was floating about like Schrödingers cat in a vast melange of electrons pulsing through atomic lattices and photons whipping round the world in fibreoptics. All I needed to do was pluck it out of the cobweb with the old faithful 128 modem, shovel it into my 8G, and then pore over it later with a mug of cocoa. In fact, to be honest, I didn't have to do much at all. It all downloaded on auto, and my brilliantly honed algorithms did most of the poring - alerting me with the sound of a Javanese gong when anomalies arose. And they paid me for this! Lots.