The Tourist War
Short Story
Halvar’s family had had the house for generations. Built by his great-great grandparents, and added to over the years, the home bordered Angel’s Cove, on sun-drenched Santorini. Over the years, as tourism had flourished, with daily ferries bringing an unlimited number of visitors young and old, Angel’s Cove had become known for its glorious sunset views.
As film had given way to digital, and then, inevitably, the smartphone, Halvar had grown up seeing the tourists care more about the angle of the sunset hitting their lens than drinking it in with their own eyes, unencumbered.
“Pah!” his yaya had told him when he was a child. “Self-obsessed malakas!” When he repeated it to his mother, at another sunset, he’d received a good box around his head.
But his grandmother’s concrete opinion stayed with him even after he left for Athens to study electrical engineering.
As the years passed and his parents became old and frail, Halvar moved his wife and children back into his old home to care for them. The tourists were still there, of course, milling around with their iPhones and selfie-sticks and their thumbs hovering over hashtags.
Then one day, as he was drinking a beer with his father on the deck, an idea seized him.
In his workspace, he conducted some research and drew several designs, and after he was satisfied, he ordered the parts. As they were shipped from different places overseas, he encouraged his children to supplement their pocket money by setting up an ice-cream stand over the back fence, to sell to the tourists.
Halvar constructed the device over three days, and spent the fourth installing and wiring it up under the ice-cream stand. The fifth and sixth were spent shielding his own house from the effects of the device. The seventh, at his wife and parent’s request, was spent in rest.
As the eighth sunset rolled around, and the tourists began to cluster in the cove to take their photos, Halvar switched the machine on.
The localised EMP under the ice-cream stand emitted a powerful blast, and every phone and camera in Angel Cove went blank.
Some tourists panicked; they shook their phones, tried to connect them to portable chargers, but the devices refused to awaken. They bolted from the cove, quickly forgetting all about the sunset, sprinting back to their accommodation, terrified that their lifelines had been forever cut.
The small number that remained, though, put their phones back in their pockets or bags, and sat in the sand still warm from the heat of the day. They watched the sunset go down; all of them would remember it for years and years, even without their digital memories.
The next day, Halvar rigged a timer to the EMP, setting it for sunset exactly, and took his parents and young family down to the cove for a swim.
