...only to discover that there's nobody left in Zone 1 in your LATA and polling a guy across the continent will cost you gobs of cash you'd rather not spend, so

...only to discover that there's nobody left in Zone 1 in your LATA and polling a guy across the continent will cost you gobs of cash you'd rather not spend, so you buddy-up with a HAM buddy who's into packet-radio to see if you can find a way to tunnel packets over a long-haul radio link to save money. It would take a year or two for the network to re-establish itself, and we wouldn't have the kind of bandwidth or instantaneous interaction we have now, but we could rebuild.