Bixby Linus

Bix Linus was the only son born to a struggling country couple in rural Alabama, with little to their name other than the expansive and largely wild property passed down through generations. There was a post-reconstruction era house on the property, but it had limited electricity, which they couldn’t afford, anyhow. So mostly they relied on coal and wood to heat the house, and their own well sourced their water for plumbing. Jemma and Hal Linus didn’t have much, but they loved their son Bix and always encouraged him to read and learn. Hal was a mechanic who worked on cars out of his self-proclaimed shop, and was shocked to find that an 8-year old Bix had completely disassembled the engine on a client’s ’57 Ford pick-up…and put it back together again, perfectly.

From that point on, it was clear that Bix was going places. He was an excellent if not frustrating student, constantly questioning his teachers about everything. When they didn’t have the answers he was looking for, he’d try to find it at the library, often in a textbook that the librarian told him was too advanced for his age.

His quest for knowledge and beauty seemed to never stop. He loved working puzzles of every variety crossword, jigsaw, jumbles, anagrams…everything. His remote residence made it difficult to gain access to many of the things he wanted to learn about, but he managed to teach himself how to play chess (and win), as well as Latin so that he could better understand word origins. He learned piano from his mother and expanded on that, although he never really focused in on learning to excel at it. With the development of the Internet in the latter half of the ‘90s, the world was at long last opening itself to him.

And there was Bix’s only real problem: an inability to focus. Later, he’d say he probably had ADD with some Obsessive Disorder tossed in “just to really screw me up proper.” He would become interested in a topic, then become obsessed with it, and learn all there was to know about it…before moving on to the next thing.

He got along well with most of the kids at school, yet had no real close friends because he simply wasn’t patient enough with most people to develop an interest in them and their lives. He was well-liked by most of the people in their small town, and understood as being both freakishly smart and rather moody. Yet anyone he came in contact with who did not rub him the wrong way would find they had a friend for life in him.

Bix got a scholarship to Cornell University, where he majored in physics (first quantum, then particle), minored in chemistry, and then his third year, also got involved in mechanical engineering (although he claimed that this was just a hobby he already knew basic mechanics from his own reading, but wanted to know if he’d missed anything).

But it was in his fourth year at Cornell that Bix suffered a sort of breakdown and dropped out of college completely. He’d grown tired of being pestered to focus in on one program, and to apply to graduate school and then possibly a doctorate program. His advisors were constantly pushing him into internships that went nowhere and to think about the future – always with the future! He felt a lot of pressure to “pick a thing” and buckled under that pressure.

He found himself clashing often with students who dreamed of hitting it big with government grants and working on weapons or “security” at Lockheed Martin. Yes, he had a thirst for knowledge but at the same time, he worried that knowledge in the wrong hands could be a dangerous thing. He began to withdraw more from society, his friends at school finding him too concerned about things beyond his control to be interested in his immediate surroundings and the people there.

It was also during this time that Bix became obsessed with the topic of climate change and various theories regarding the same. He read extensively on the topic, including the writings and articles of Dr. Siris Sharpe.

That was when Bix decided that considering how things in the world were going, there very likely was no future for the world as it was, and therefore, no point in dedicating his life to applying for research grants to study physics. Instead, he came back home to Marr Creek, Alabama, where he helped out around his father’s shop and made some investments for the family on the side. Their investments boomed in the dawn of the computer age, and Bix wisely cashed them out when he figured they would not go any higher…just before the crash in 2002.

Since he’d set up his family to live comfortably, but not too comfortably, in their rickety old house on a hundred acres of woods, he turned his attention back to the things that made him happy in small ways: restoring antique clocks was a favorite hobby, as was creating and reconfiguring an elaborate hedge maze he’d cultivated in the back meadow. Since the outside world had disappointed him, he decided to concentrate on his own little corner of the world.

He kept company at the only place nearby that people would gather to drink: the local gas station. The local men who hung out at Jepson’s Gas Stop ranged in age from 19 to 69, and there were usually four or five regulars to be found there on a given night. Either that, or some of the local citizens would find their way to the Linus’ porch. At least, until Hal and Jemma died in a freak car accident. That was when Bix really started to withdraw completely from society.

He felt alone and isolated, yet also unwilling to leave his property and experience the world outside. He’d work on his clocks, often amazing longtime collectors with his ability to craft a needed mechanism out of the “proper” materials from memory, without a diagram to work off of, and have it work as precisely as needed. He’d leave to go to lectures and symposiums, but never having completed any degree, he never really went in any one direction with his interests. He was a dabbler with great skill, but without focus.

When the world fell apart, Bix took shelter in the storm cellar hurricanes didn’t usually hit their area of Alabama but this one did, and hard. The creek flooded as it never had before, and he was flooded straight out of the cellar and up to the top floor of the house while the waters receded. The house was a shambles, but Bix set straight to work with repairs to the roof and windows, clearing the drive and roads of downed trees and for once relieved that they didn’t have any power lines to worry about.

He didn’t want to find all his friends dead, so he didn’t look for them. He’d gone to town to salvage supplies, and seen enough bodies floating in the floodwaters to understand that things didn’t look good. He had no idea just how grim things were everywhere else yet. He was cut off from the internet even when he got the generator running at his house, he still found nothing online, a disturbing prospect.

He was not at all surprised by either the events or their aftermath he’d never had much faith in mankind’s ability to hang onto their humanity in a long-term stress event. They did okay with short-term stressors, but a challenge like this one? No, sir. Weren’t no crossing back over that river, he said to himself.

So he holed up on his property with the requisite gun collection that had been his father’s and now was his, working on simply maintaining some level of life on his land. The hedge maze was in tatters, the gardens were a muddy mess, many trees had fallen…but it was still his land, and he had no plans to leave it.