Illustration: Daniel Bjerneholt - Haus Society AB

The Stillout

If electricity was limited during certain periods – Where should we use it?

To what would you prioritize it for during these periods?

Read the story about an energy crisis and a village meeting discussing how the electricity in the village battery (the round building) should be prioritized.

Can the conflicts be bridged and new social values create?

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The Stillout

By Andrew Dana Hudson

On the morning of the sixteenth day, Oskar clamped on his tegsnässkidor and skied out on the tracks cut in the ice-crusted snow, past the lake, following the powerlines out of the village. It was gray-dark, and very, very quiet. Not a branch stirred. The chilly air tasted stale on his lips.

After a kilometer or so—any further and they’d encroach on protected reindeer herdland—the powerlines ended and the trees opened up, and Oskar peered through the half-light at the cluster of wind turbines. They were not so big, but big enough to power the village, to keep the microgrid fed. Now, however, the blades stood utterly still, as they’d been for over two weeks.

Two weeks. Oskar, as both chair of the byalag and the village’s Skellefteåkraft-trained microgrid-minder, knew that was the “expected variability” the village’s battery system was designed to handle comfortably. Usually that was plenty; northern Sweden was a windy place, especially in the winter, when demand was highest. The wind would come for a week and go for a week. Ten days was not out of the question. But this time was different. This time a strange becalming had befallen much of northern Europe, and no one quite knew when it would end.

A ‘climate event’ the scientists called it, as though there were no difference between this uncanny stillness and the violent superstorms and floods and fires that seemed to batter some unlucky part of the world every week. Just another unlikely but inevitable perturbation of an overclocked, chaotic system that still, despite the successes of the transition, found ways to surprise them.

The calm was an event the same way a drought was an event. Once, when Oskar had worked on ships in his younger years, he remembered docking in Turkey, during a now-forgotten water crisis, and the Hemingway quote that had been on every English speaker’s lips: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ ‘Two ways: gradually and then suddenly.’”

For a while Oskar stood in the clearing and willed the air to stir, the turbine blades to spin. Eventually he picked up his ski poles and headed back.

#

Not many villagers came to the first meeting Oskar called. A dozen, maybe, reluctant representatives of the main family clumps. They chatted cheerfully as they took fika in the multipurpose room of the village’s modest library, but Oskar could tell there was a current of worry. Things like this got around, and gossip always interpreted uncertainty as bad news.

“Welcome friends,” he said. “We have some decisions to make.”

That quieted them down.

“As you may have heard, we have had no wind for over two weeks. Worse, it is winter, with very little daylight, and cloudy, so what solar generation we have has been limited. A confluence of poor conditions for the energy system. ‘The Stillout’ they call it in the media. The politicians are all in a frenzy about how much to try to borrow power from the international grids, or whether to close the factories and divert the hydropower to the cities.”

He looked at Ebba, who worked at the steel plant in Luleå. She shrugged.

“I wouldn’t mind staying home with the kids for a few days, provided the government steps in with furlow support,” Ebba said. “But we have not gotten notice of a pause. And with competition from the next gen Moroccan foundries, I’m not sure the company can afford to shut down. We will have to see what deal the government comes up with.”

“Will we be subject to such a deal?” asked Isak, directing his question to Oskar with characteristic combativeness. Oskar had known Isak a long time, and defeated him twice in the byalag elections. Their relationship never got any easier.

“Our community is quite independent,” Oskar answered, carefully. “Even if some sweeping, unprecedented legislation was passed, we have only a small, road-side connection to the larger grid, with limited transmission capacity. We mostly depend on our own generation and battery, as laid out in our microgrid charter. I suppose, if things got very dire, the grid company could try to lay claim on what’s left in our battery, but…well, as I said, it’s a thin connection. One could sever it with an ax, not that it will come to that.”

“So how much longer can our battery last?” Lars asked.

“Hard to say,” Oskar replied. “The village battery is getting toward the end of its life cycle. It’s an old chemical ion unit, so we can’t precisely calculate what we’ll be able to get out of it, not like if we had one of the big gravity units. At our current usage, perhaps two days, perhaps six. But that is what I called you here to discuss.”

“Are we out of power or not?” demanded Isak. “Do I need to take my children away before they freeze?”

“No one is freezing,” Oskar said. “We can take firewood. I do not think anyone would fault us, given the circumstances.”

“I can get us a dispensation from the forest agency,” Lars said, waving a carefree hand. Forests were counted as part of Sweden’s held-carbon on the international stocktakes that took place every five years. Thus any unplanned burning of that carbon, even in small amounts, needed to be accounted for. “So long as we track what we burn, it shouldn’t be an issue. It’s about time for a thinning anyway.”

Everyone knew Lars and his small ecotourism business. Though no longer the one-of-a-kind outfit it had been when he’d inherited the land, it still brought a fair amount of money into the village. When Lars wasn’t snowmobiling rich foreigners around, he was working to age-diversify the forest his grandfather had planted after a clear-cut. That was the way to get back to something resembling the primeval forests that had once covered Europe, he said: thinning a few trees every few years to make room for younger stock, while leaving the oldest in place. As Lars was fond of griping when environmental accounting came up, there was more to caring for the land than keeping the carbon in place.

“Thank you, Lars,” Oskar nodded. “For those without working fireplaces, we will prioritize the heat pumps above all. We will also prioritize power for medical devices, and keeping medication stores at the right temperature. And of course we have a store of biofuels and a generator as backup.”

“Good,” Isak said. “Then let’s use them. If you are asking for our authorization, there, you can have it.”

There was a murmur of agreement at this, and Oskar saw a couple of the attendees shuffle in their seats, about to leave.

“Thank you. We will,” Oskar said. “When we need them. But for now I ask you to consider that we do not know how long this will go. If we assume the calm will break any day now, then certainly, we can use up the last of our reserves and crack open the fuel tanks. No one need suffer any discomfort or loss of convenience, other than you here, attending to my worry.

“However, if we are not willing to bet all our limited reserves on that assumption, if we in fact think there’s a chance this stillness will last weeks more, as the scientists say it might, then I think it would be prudent to talk about rationing, to make what’s left in our battery last as long as possible. Do you agree?”

Nods around the room, if not enthusiastic ones.

“So, I open it up now,” Oskar said. “What can we turn off, just until the calm breaks?”

“Streetlights,” Umar said, always first with a joke.

Everyone chuckled. The village had years ago voted to align itself with the new European light pollution guidelines. Everyone slept better now, and it was good for the birds and insects and animals. In the summer they hardly needed them anyways, and in the winter the lack of light pollution allowed them to see the stars and the aurora—brighter and more vivid than any of them, Oskar included, remembered from their childhood. No one much regretted the move, except when teenagers snuck out without flashlights, slipped on a patch of ice, and rolled an ankle in the dark. And sometimes the forests at the edge of the village seemed too noisy and full of unseen life, stirring up an old, wild anxiety that prickled the back of Oskar’s neck.

“Yes, we are ahead of the game there, I think,” Oskar said, amicably. “But indoor lights are an easy one. Switch them off when you don’t need them. Use your flashlights. Shower in the dark and eat by candlelight.”

Illumination didn’t take much energy anymore, truth be told. Bulbs were just too efficient, unless they were those throwback incandescents that some claimed were healthier for one’s biorhythms. Still, it was a small thing they could do to keep them thinking about the problem, a way to get into the energy-saving mindset.

“How romantic!” Umar put in, to more laughs.

Oskar was glad the mood was light, though he hoped it did not mean they would not take the rationing seriously. He did not want to have to knock on doors and tell his neighbors he could see what they were drawing from the village battery. He did not want to be a scold or a rules-enforcing energy cop. But, when Skellefteåkraft had helped them set up their nearly independent microgrid, and Oskar had taken the training to manage the system, that was a responsibility he had taken on himself.

“What else?” Oskar asked.

“I can charge my car at the office,” said Alma, who worked at a law firm a few days a week all the way in Skellefteå.

“I can’t,” Ebba said, scowling. “New rules, as of yesterday.”

There was a murmur of agreement. Most everyone there who commuted out of the village had gotten similar dictates.

“I could take your car and charge it, if you’d like,” Alma said. “My range is good, I only need to charge every four commutes. We could rotate a couple cars—if people trust my driving.”

Another joke, which most people nervously chuckled at. Alma had notorious bad luck with the AIs that piloted their cars, which sometimes seemed—with her in the back seat—to freeze up, or swerve, or forget their destination. Though this was a rare thing, Oskar wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more superstitious villagers would indeed be reluctant to leave her in charge of their cars.

The world was slowly weaning itself off car culture, and in the north new train lines were radiating out from the cities, making possible the new, highly designed sustainable villages that had absorbed much of the population boom the transition had brought. Still, in older communities, having a car was often necessary, as well as a central part of the independence many people sought from rural life.

“Good idea,” Oskar said. He was thankful that a solution to the driving problem had arrived so easily. “But yes, we may not be able to guarantee vehicle charges from the village battery unless it’s an emergency. So limit your driving if you can. Work from home if you can’t charge at work.”

“If I work from home, I’ll be running my rig hard,” Isak said. “Video calls, golems, that godawful headset my boss wants us to use as some kind of retro-themed teambuilding effort. Are you going to get on my case about that power sink?”

Oskar had known this would be the crux of it. Even more than cars, people needed their devices and connectivity. The countryside was full of people working remotely, doing business across the planet—business that would not want to slow down because of a little power crunch in one area. In Oskar’s experience, such people were very anxious about being cut off, about losing access to the very material feeds (energy and bandwidth) that made their lifestyle possible. Isak, in particular, had always struck Oskar as oddly contemptuous of his own chosen home.

“Isak, I don’t want to disrupt your business. Certainly, anyone with work to do that requires computation will take precedence over running devices purely for amusement. But I also can’t turn down the tap for everyone else and leave yours gushing, if that is what you want. We are asking all of us to make some sacrifices. If you don’t feel like you can do that, then perhaps you should take your family and go somewhere else. I imagine many places in the north will be implementing similar rules, however.”

There was a tense silence. Oskar genuinely did not want anyone to feel forced to leave, but he couldn’t help but do the calculus of how much easier it would be to make their electricity last if a few families took their power needs to another town, or to the cities that had first bite of the hydropower still coursing through the grid. Isak sized up the situation and gave a noncommittal grunt.

“What else?” Oskar asked.

“It’s cold enough out,” Umar said, not a joke this time. “We could unplug our freezers and move the contents outside.”

“And let the wildlife drag off my prime cuts?” Isak objected, a tacit admission that he planned to stay. “Then we’ll freeze and starve.”

“So build yourself an ice box,” Ebba said, annoyed. “I’ll lend you the hammer. Umar is right. It’s silly to do refrigeration inside heated houses when it’s below zero out.”

“I appreciate the ideas,” Oskar said. “But, cold as it is, it’s not as cold out as our freezers get. What we can do is consolidate. Talk to your neighbors and move your stores into one freezer. Then unplug the empty ones. Refrigeration takes a lot of energy. This will help.”

And on it went. It was an unusual activity, asking people to account for their energy usage. They were all used to treating electricity as a commodity, one they could get as much of as they felt like paying for. But price was just one way to distribute a scarce resource, and Oskar tried to remind them of this. Some were old enough to remember monthly limited data plans, and the discipline that parents had asked of them when using those ancient, primitive smartphones. Or there were queues for in-person medical and dental appointments, wait times for popular books from the paper libraries, transplant committees deciding which patients got precious donor organs, limited runs of couture clothing, first-click-first-served tickets to pop star concerts. Oskar, like most Europeans, had looked on with wonder as America, once the enforcer of global capitalist hegemony, had pivoted to what they called “lottery socialism,” raffling off expropriated yachts and mansions and loaning out precious gems and famous paintings for tours in what had once been the lowliest homes. The point was: there were other ways to give out the things everyone wanted.

At the end of the meeting, as the villagers shuffled out, Umar jovially turning the lights off with half the attendees still putting their coats on, Astrid tapped Oskar on the shoulder. The cafe owner had stayed quiet all through most of the discussion. Like Isak, Oskar had known Astrid for a long time, but—unlike Isak—it had been a slow building friendship. Astrid did a little bit of everything around the community, and Oskar believed that much of his success in civil society had come from keeping such busybodies happy.

“What we agreed to today,” she said, voice low, “it won’t be enough, will it?”

“Not if it keeps up,” Oskar admitted. “Maybe if we’d started this regime a week ago. But we had no way of knowing then that we’d need to do anything different.”

“Then why don’t you call them back?” She indicated the others, filing out into the quiet afternoon, the loudest sound their boots crunching on the ice. “Tell them you need more?”

Oskar mulled this over for a minute, the dark of the community room closing around them. “I think I got as much out of them as they’d give me. But I’m open to suggestions.”

“Okay. I’ll think about it. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

#

It took a day for everyone to settle into the regime they’d all agreed upon, but by the morning after the meeting, the village felt like a very different place. House windows did not glow bright and steady as normal, but instead flickered with candlelight and furtive flashes of hand torches. Cars did not zip around as much. Smoke rose out of chimneys and lingered in the dead air, settling down over the village in a smelly funk. Everything seemed even quieter than before, as if people had, for some reason, taken to whispering.

Oskar had read that once people had hibernated through the winter. During the French Revolution, city-dwellers had visited the countryside to bring news of the new regime, only to find the peasants curled up in piles in their homes, sleeping through the days and eating very little. Oskar was skeptical of these stories, however, and did not think it was the kind of lifestyle he could ask of his constituents. To the contrary he worried that such a torpor would strain the situation. Oskar was getting old, and so he remembered covid, and how those months and years of anxious, homebound inactivity had brought out a putrid defiance in many people.

But as he monitored the drain on the village battery, saw the demand creep down, he also saw that Astrid was right: he had not asked enough of his constituents. He had bought them some days. Maybe that would be enough, but maybe it wouldn’t.

He shared all this with Astrid when she came by, and she nodded.

“I’m getting old too. In my experience, you can ask more from people when you give them something in return. Something that pulls them together, even as circumstances try to tear them apart.”

“Like what?” he asked. In lieu of coffee or tea—which took a surprising amount of energy to brew—they were drinking beer.

“You’re the politician,” Astrid said. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at pleasing people?”

“I’m good at listening to my constituents.”

Astrid smiled. “Are we using electrons right now?”

Oskar cocked his head.

“Do we need electricity to talk to each other?” she elaborated. “Or eat together? Or play a game together?”

“Depends on the game. Depends on the meal.” It was not the answer she sought, he knew.

“Oskar, we are all just waiting, aren’t we?” Astrid said. “For the stillout to end or for the battery to go dead. If it’s the latter, we will have to pack up and go to the cities, submit ourselves to their generosity, climate refugees within our own region. Maybe that’s inevitable, but we don’t want to do it if we don’t have to. We don’t want to increase the broader burden, and we don’t want to leave our homes and each other.”

“But…” Oskar prompted.

“But every day like today, of lethargy and anxiety, tempts us to jump to the end, or to break the rationing. We need to help them pass the time.”

#

So the next morning Oskar and Astrid made the rounds, going house to house, inviting everyone out to—Astrid’s idea—an impromptu day out on the nearby frozen lake. A few were ornery (“First you make me dim my lights, now you want me to drop everything to play games?” Isak complained), but most were glad to get out of their homes. They packed day bags and ice skates, herded their children. By the time Oskar made it there himself, activities were well underway. Lars had got a woodfire going under a grill. The smell of cooking vatmeat suffused the still air.

“You know,” Lars said, handing Oskar a burger. “Ebba and I were talking. Her daughter and mine are close, and wouldn’t mind camping out in Ebba’s living room together. So tonight Sara and I are going to move into Ebba and Sven’s house. When we’re done here, I’m going to go home and shut everything down. Might save the village a few watts.”

“That’s great!” Oskar looked out over the lake, the clumps of kids skating or just sliding on their boots, trying moves with hockey sticks, sprawling on the ice together, laughing and out of breath. He had never married or had kids himself, and so he often had to make himself remember how much those clumps shaped the social life of the adults as well, and thus the whole village. “It’s a good idea. Maybe you could float it with some of the other families.”

“I think Astrid already is. She suggested it.”

“Of course she did.”

When the kids got tired and started to whine, and the day felt spent, Oskar walked home with Astrid, as well as Alma, who was coordinating the car-charging scheme.

“All the other law firms are following the rationing rules in Luleå, but for some reason our partners decided they would just eat the fines,” Alma explained. “A kind of ‘power move,’ I suppose. A way to show clients a good time they can’t get elsewhere. Funny how a little bit of scarcity makes some people get so competitive.”

“I like to think we’re above that,” Astrid said. “We have to be. You can’t live in a village like ours and not be cooperative, depend a bit on other people. And today was a good demonstration of that.”

“I don’t know,” Oskar said. “A little competition might be nice too. A hockey game, maybe. Something to look forward to, not just a last-minute gathering.”

“We can do that,” Astrid said. “Sunday, maybe.”

“If we make it that long,” Alma said, and laughed. The others chuckled too, but they all knew it wasn’t quite a joke.

#

On the twenty-first day—three weeks into the stillout—a stranger knocked on Oskar’s door. He looked tired and scratched, and he held his leg like he’d recently developed a limp. He carried a backpack that looked heavier than it should be. Oskar invited him in, and the man set the pack down on a chair, opened it, and extracted four thick battery cylinders.

“I live between here and Harsjärv,” he said. “I went there first. No one was home. They had all left, to beg for power from the cities, I suppose. I am hoping I won’t have to join them.”

Oskar did recognize the stranger then. He came into town on occasion, ate at the cafe alone and brought packages to be shipped off to the village’s drop point. The man was—Oskar assumed then and felt confirmed now—a loner, an off-the-gridder, someone with a parcel of land and a house kilometers away from the nearest village or road. Such people usually had solar panels and small-scale wind turbines to keep their home batteries charged. Indeed, those were the very technologies that made such lifestyles more possible and more sustainable for the very antisocial. But now, it seemed, the stillout had complicated things.

“Is there any way,” the man continued, “that you could spare a charge? With these full, even with half of them, I could return to my home, to my own business.”

“I don’t know if we can give you what you’re looking for,” Oskar said. “Our village is very close to running dry ourselves. But we can offer hospitality, I think. Food, water, a warm place to stay. Would that be acceptable?”

The man considered for a minute, then nodded. Oskar was glad to help this stranger, and relieved that the man did not push the matter further. But he also wondered how many others there were like him, out in the woods and running out of power, soon to bring their problems to Oskar’s door.

#

The days dragged by, both slow and fast. Twenty-three, twenty-five, then twenty-seven. They had hockey games, and days out on the lake, and afternoons spent on chess and cards, and big public meals together: cold but tasty buffets laid out by Astrid, backed up by Lars’ and Umar on the grill. Mostly people were agreeable about the whole affair, but there was plenty of grumbling too. Oskar spent a lot of anxious energy trying to parse which of those was typical Swedish complaint culture, and which were potentially mutinous.

At four weeks Oskar went and checked the village battery. He half-flinched as he lit up the dashboard, saw the BATTERY LEVEL CRITICAL alert still dominating the screen. He tapped it away and confirmed what his grid dash had told him: their reserves had fallen to a nebulous 2%. It wasn’t a number that meant much, given the state of the aging battery. But it was a number lower than when last he’d checked.

Oskar closed up the battery and sat down heavily to put his mittens back on. From the outside, the battery looked no different than it normally did: a two meter-wide cylinder in the center of the village under a snow-topped gazebo, painted with colorful shapes and cartoon characters, a mural by the children that got redone once or twice a year. Around it (a safe distance away, in case of a now-rare battery fire), was the circular bench on which he sat, which sported a number of outlets for anyone lounging to charge their devices. These were supposed to be a demonstration of energy as a common good they all shared. But Oskar had put tape over the outlets two weeks ago.

Except, one of the outlets had no tape. A cord wound away from it, half hidden in the weeks-old crust of dirty snow. With a mittened hand, Oskar followed the cord to where it disappeared into a white, crinkled bioplast bag, tucked at the foot of the bench leg.

Inside was a phone, a fine model from the days of peak-Moore’s, now a weathered hand-me-down, its wooden case stained by decades of human touch. It was a phone Oskar recognized, because he’d seen it for years, sitting next to him on the debate table or held aggressively in his face.

Isak’s house wasn’t far. Oskar walked straight there, phone and cord clutched in his hand. He held it up when Isak answered his knock.

“I found it at the centrum,” Oskar said. “Plugged in.”

It was a testament to Oskar’s experience and restraint that he put no note of accusation or anger into his voice. Isak peered at the phone, then turned and shouted over his shoulder: “Liam!”

A teenage boy emerged from the next room, bundled in sweaters. Isak, who lacked a fireplace, was keeping the house chilly. Liam looked at the phone and shrunk back.

“Sorry,” Liam mumbled, quiet and sulky.

For the next few minutes, Isak berated his son for violating the community ration-pact. Oskar waited awkwardly in the entryway. When they had finished, and the boy had been sent back to his room, Isak turned again to Oskar and took the phone.

“I apologize for him,” Isak said. “He should know better. I told him he could not stay on his devices all day until the power is back, that I would not let him recharge more than once a week. But he has a friend he won’t stop talking to. She’s in another village, in much the same difficulty as us.”

“I understand. Teenagers need each other, I suppose,” Oskar said. “If Liam needs a dispensation, he can come to me. We can work something out.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Isak scowled. “But thank you.”

#

The thirty-first day they had another hockey match. Time seemed to be circling, spiraling around and around a drain. After, lighting their way with emergency flashlights they could power by shaking, Oskar and Astrid walked together out along the powerlines to the park where the turbines sat.

“You know,” Oskar said, looking up at the unmoving blades. “I think we’re both old enough to remember the debate between nuclear and wind, back in the early days of the transition.”

“Ah yes, I remember. I was in politics too, you know. Back when I lived in Copenhagen. I remember the right wing obsession with digging dangerous things out of the earth and setting them on fire. Anything to make sure people can’t get something for free.”

Oskar laughed. “Does all this make you wish we’d gone a different way? The stillout never would have happened if we’d built all those nuclear plants some had been pushing for.”

Astrid thought about that for a while, the fog of her breath hanging in the still air. “I don’t think so,” she said eventually. “The way my aunt put it, there’s sky energy and earth energy. Sky energy—wind and sun—can be fickle and inconsistent, but it’s clean and lasts forever, if we’re willing to work with it, to adjust ourselves a bit to the rhythms and moods of the world. Earth energy, on the other hand—those fuels we dig out of the ground—it bends to our will, making itself terribly convenient, and then bends us to its will. It comes with a terrible cost, one that must be paid for generations. I think I can take a couple weeks of inconvenience, if it means not leaving a mess for my grandchildren.”

“Sounds like your aunt was a smart woman.”

“She was. I miss her.” Astrid put her gloved hand on Oskar’s arm. “What about you? Are you Team Earth or Team Sky.”

Oskar too took his time to think about it. “These weeks have been a challenge, but not so bad that we should rethink everything that’s right about the system we’ve built. A little temporary scarcity helps me appreciate and enjoy the abundance we have.”

“I keep thinking of when I was little, and a storm would knock the power out. My parents would stoke the fireplace and light candles. My siblings and I would play board games for a few hours. Those were happy memories. I hope I don’t eat my words in another month, but a part of me feels like this outage, too, has had its upsides.”

She and Oskar looked at each other for a long moment.

“When this is all over,” Oskar said, turning to head back toward town. “I want to cook you dinner. Something real energy intensive. Roasting this, sauteing that. Every coil on the range buzzing. Ingredients droned in from all over.”

“Shall we eat it by candlelight?” Astrid grinned sly.

“Hell no! Floodlights, maybe.”

“Turn the stereo up. Play something bright and crunchy and complicated on the screens.”

“Exactly. What do you say? Is it a date?”

“Okay. Yes. When the battery fills up again. It’s a date.”

#

On the morning of the thirty-sixth day, Oskar was heading to the lake again when he heard a rustle. He thought someone was behind him, so he turned. No one was there. An animal? Then he heard it again, and looked up.

Above him branches were waving in a gentle breeze. Above that, the listless cloud cover was moving. He tugged off his hat, felt air tickle his bald scalp. The trees were starting to creak, swaying, as if stretching after a long, uncomfortable sleep. The rustle turned into a rushing, like water, almost. But it was the wind.

Oskar, going as fast as he could with his walking stick, hurried to the lake. The others already there on the ice were grinning and shivering, because the wind brought with it fresh cold. He found Astrid, and she took his hand.

Together, and followed by a small crowd, they hiked under the powerlines out to the wind park. The turbines were turning swiftly, creating a satisfying hum. Just to be certain, Oskar opened a panel in one of the bases, entered his admin key, and lit up the dashboard. Sure enough, electrons were flowing through the village microgrid.

Maybe this was not the end of the stillout—just a blip in their new normal—but Oskar decided he couldn’t let himself think like that. With a few taps, he canceled the ration protocol he’d set on the system. It would take a while for the battery to fully recharge, of course, but for now he wanted the villagers to have every electron they desired.

It was a strange day after that. Some went home to plug in devices, crank up electric saunas, cook hot meals, or contact work to see if they needed to come in. Others stayed at the lake, enjoying not the flow of energy but the breeze, and the sunlight as the clouds above blew away—the last day of a difficult time that, nonetheless, many had found some meaning in.

Oskar and Astrid sat together at the wind park, bundled up, cold but enjoying the fresh air. They didn’t talk much. They were just quiet, and still. They were happy to stay that way for a while.