In the beginning spirits had been high, everyone worked together for the end goal of survival and was happy to make small sacrifices in order to get there. As the days wore on though, these small sacrifices started to get bigger and bigger: people lost their possessions so they could be pooled together and shared out evenly and families lost the chance to spend precious time together as the parents were forced away to work. The knowledge that their days may well be numbered was not a secret amongst the islanders and so as the hardship wore on, there quickly became those among them who tried to fight back against the new lifestyle put in place by the leadership council.
One of the biggest jobs on Kauai was one which quickly became clear wasn’t possible. The island struggled to maintain a source of power, but without the resources they needed from America it just wasn’t possible. The island operated over seventy percent of its electricals through petroleum energy. Despite their location, wind, wave and solar energy only made up a small proportion of what the community used and without this petroleum being flown in from the mainland, usual luxuries were stripped back to a bare minimum and then abolished completely.
Electricity was already one of the most expensive commodities in Hawaii before Trident collapsed; afterwards there was simply no chance they could manage to keep it running. In a matter of days, Kauai fell into complete darkness and the way of living was changed for everyone who remained.
The leadership council tried to do everything they could to maintain a sense of normalcy, but it was just too difficult. Families completely lost the ability to cook any food in their own homes and so the group meals which Martha had implemented became the only source of food. People couldn’t take hot showers or clean their clothes and so the engineers who had previously been tasked with maintaining the power source were given a new task: building industrial wash houses and implementing fire powered showers.
This brought with it entirely new problems, with manpower required around the clock to maintain the fires and kindling quickly becoming an issue. Other teams were dispatched into the islands thick forests to chop down the trees and hack them up into kindling, something which quickly caused uproar amongst certain members of the community.
No matter what the new problem was each day, there were always opposing sides and the idyllic island life which had been envisioned when the leadership council was first formed quickly fell into shambles. Jamie and his council tried to maintain the peace, but even that created problems. No matter which route they tried to take, there was always someone that wasn’t happy and it didn’t take long for minor upset to spiral into full blown arguments.
Arthur was maintaining the water irrigation pipes toward the south of the island one afternoon when he happened upon a private meeting held by some of these people. Keeping himself low and hidden behind the piping, he crouched down and listened, unsurprised to see the group was led by Dennis Bates. Art and Jessie had never liked the man and despite being elected to the new leadership council; Dennis had been more than happy to fuel the fire of dispute over the last few days on the island.
“We should break off and form our own community,” Dennis spoke to the few men crowded around him, a few of whom Art recognized from the engineering group he had been with recently. “Take only the best people with us and stop being forced to support people who can’t look after themselves.”
“But where would we go, Dennis? I don’t want to leave my home.”
“We’ll make new homes on the north side of the island,” Dennis replied, his voice filled with wonder and potential. “The beaches there are less ruined by tourists and the sea less fished. We’ll be able to have everything we need and more when we’re not forced to share with everyone else.”
In recent years, the island of Kauai had become quite divided from the north to the south. The southern beaches were larger and more attractive with tourists and the local businesses there were more targeted to the summer trade as well. It made the south of the island richer and more prosperous. People preferred to buy houses there and in turn, that boosted the economy and prowess of the south.
The northern side of the island, hidden by the large mountain range in the middle, was occupied mainly by poorer residents who didn’t care for the tourist trade. They were ancestors of the original inhabitants of Hawaii, their lifestyles different and less evolved than the other islanders. Very few of them remained now and since the crash, they had been forced to move to the south in order to survive. The north side of Kauai was now almost uninhabited, a collection of empty villages waiting to be overhauled. It was a perfect opportunity.
“It seems a bit extreme doesn’t it,” someone else in the circle spoke up, Arthur nodding along with their opinion. “We’ve just spent a week making everything around here work again without power, why would we move and have to go through all of that again?”
“If we take a group of people we can rely on,” Dennis said, “we’ll only have to set up life on the other side once. Over here you can almost guarantee that there’ll be another problem tomorrow and we’ll be the ones required to fix it. Then it’ll happen again the next day and the next day and when will we be able to reap the benefits? Never. We’re the ones doing all the work around here and
