by Spencer Bald | Dec 23, 2018 |
A mist of salt water gently met her face as the woman stood at the bow of the boat, looking ahead. There wasn’t much for her to do, she didn’t know how to sail, and the constant rain of dark ash made cleaning pointless. So, she looked ahead, watching for anything at all to appear in the distance, if only to keep her mind busy. The girl came up behind the woman and took her hand. Are we there yet? she said.
Not yet.
How much longer?
I don’t know.
The woman didn’t look down at the girl through the entire exchange, she just kept staring straight ahead, desperately hoping for something to appear through the haze of dark clouds.
They heard a loud bang behind them. One of the life boats had broken it’s rigging and smashed into the hull of the ship. The captain barked orders at his two men to pull the boat back up, but they just stared back at him. They did nothing as the life boat broke free and floated away, saving no one.
There were five people aboard the Pájaro de Esperanza. There were twenty when they set sail from Tenerife, headed across the Atlantic. They were hoping to find something better in the West.
, anything other than the dead world they were leaving behind.
Two people fell overboard during a harsh storm and were lost, six died of dehydration, five more died of an unknown disease, and two were murdered. The captain, the two crewmen, the woman, and the girl were all that remained. There wasn’t much talking among them.
This wasn’t the first time the crewmen had disobeyed the captain’s orders. He was losing their loyalty, they just didn’t care anymore, they’d given up. They sulked around the deck all day, doing the absolute bare minimum to keep the ship moving. The captain could be found at the helm most of the time, keeping the ship on course. The woman could not remember the last time she had seen him leave his post. One particularly cold night, when she couldn’t sleep, she came up on deck to look ahead, and he was still there at the wheel. She never saw him sleep.
On they went, with the sun setting straight ahead, breaking through the choppy, black waves, not quite knowing what they were headed for.
It’s time for bed, the woman said to the girl. Go below and get ready, I’ll be down in a few minutes.
Already? Do I have to?
Yes.
But why?
You need your sleep to help you stay strong. Who knows, maybe we’ll be there by the time you wake up.
Really?
Really.
Alright. You promise you’ll come down soon? I don’t like it down there alone.
I promise, the woman said, I’m right behind you.
The girl turned and went below deck while the woman turned her attention back to the horizon. The clouds in the distance looked darker than usual. She feared another large storm was racing toward them. The captain always said that in all his years on the oceans, he’s never seen so many storms, of such huge sizes, so frequently.
The world really has changed.
The woman felt afraid as she descended the small steps to comfort the girl in the complete darkness below deck. They crawled into their hammocks and drifted off to sleep with the gentle rocking of the boat on the waves.
The woman awoke to the sound of rain pounding on the deck above her. It was not a soft rain, it was the kind of rain that hurts; with the wind so strong, it almost looks like it’s falling sideways. She then felt the ship swaying, much more than usual. So much, she felt sick, which hadn’t happened in months, since their first week on the ship. This was a bad storm.
Wake up! the woman yelled to the girl.
What’s happening? the girl asked and rubbed her eyes awake.
It’s a storm, a bad one.
The girl knew what to do, they had been over it a thousand times but had only had to do it twice before. The girl met the woman in the middle of the room and wrapped her arms and legs around the main support beam.
Good girl, the woman said, as she did the same, with the girl pinned between her and the beam. It was the best plan they could come up with. As long as they held on tight, it kept them from being tossed around the room and getting hurt, but also kept them loose enough to escape the hull if the ship sank.
The next five hours were hell. The ship rose and fell again and again, the waves seemed to get bigger each time. Water came pouring into the hull, the woman really thought they might go down. She closed her eyes and held on as tight as she could, she held on for the girl’s life.
The storm finally passed. The woman and the girl stood in the hull with a bunch of debris floating around in about three feet of water.
Stay put, the woman said as she waded over to the steps and climbed out onto the deck. The girl didn’t argue.
The sun was just beginning to rise, and the damage of the storm was revealed by the daylight. The two masts had snapped in half and the sails were gone. The last lifeboat was nowhere to be found. Everything that wasn’t tied down had washed overboard, including the captain and the crewmen. They were nowhere in sight, even the captain’s wheel had been ripped off and taken by the sea.
The woman shrank down on the deck and started to cry. Their last hope was gone. Even if she could have figured it out, there wasn’t enough of the boat left to sail.
They were adrift at sea, soon they would run out of food and drinkable water
, and that would be the end. The woman’s hope was almost gone.
The girl heard the woman crying from below. She came up to see what happened.
What’s wrong? the girl asked.
Everything, the woman said through tears. I don’t know what to do now.
Are we still going to make it there?
I don’t know.
The girl turned away and walked up to where the captain normally stood. Look! she yelled.
The woman looked up in the direction of the child’s voice. Out there on the horizon, she saw it, land. The tide carried them in and a few hours later, they run aground. The woman fashioned some packs and filled them with as much food, water, and other supplies they could carry. They left the boat and found themselves in a world just as bad, if not worse than the one they left behind. The sky was dark, the air dirty, and ash covered the ground. The woman was disappointed but held back her emotions for the girl’s sake, she still refused to lose hope, they would keep looking for a better place. There had to be a better place somewhere. Was the whole world gone?
The woman and the girl left the boat behind, made their way up the beach, and began their long walk down the road.
by Jeffrey Insko | Dec 23, 2018 |
climoji by Nichole Duncan
During the Fall 2018 semester, I taught a course on the emerging literary genre called “Cli-Fi” (or climate fiction). The course examined short stories, novels, films, and various other forms of narrative fiction that concern themselves with climate change or global warming. Our discussions centered upon the various narrative strategies through which a number of late-twentieth and twenty-first century works (such as Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, among others) approach the environmental crises and social problems generated by a rapidly warming planet.
For their final assignments, students in the course produced their own “cli-fi.” The results were so exciting, I asked a number of students in the class for permission to publish their stories here. I have selected a stories that represented the variety of narrative strategies– not just conventional narrative, but a podcast, text messages, voicemails, film, and satire– the students employed. These stories also take up a number of themes and tropes— social breakdown, displacement, flooding, resource scarcity, the ravages of capitalism, techno-utopianism, and more—central to many of the works of cli-fi we discussed over the course of the semester. This collection therefore represents both the students engagement with the genre conventions of climate fiction as well as their own interest in grappling imaginatively with the urgencies of climate change.
by Danielle Osborn | Dec 23, 2018 |
My earliest memory is of my mother bathing, in a wooden tub moved in front of the fireplace. Dirty blonde hair pulled up on her head, her pale form outlined in an orange glow, steam rising up from the water and swirling around her face, as though she was some otherworldly sacrifice.
I sat on a woven rug over the floor beams of our one-room cabin, chewing wild mushrooms gathered from the forest outside. My mother stood up with the sound of sloshing water and reached for a piece of old bed sheet hanging on the mantel. On the stone chimney above was the framed painting of a pink sunset in an unfamiliar place. Painted in the middle was a tall figure rising from the ground, its arms held out, glowing boxes where its head and hands should have be. Below the painting, between my mother’s shoulder blades,
I saw the same figure in black ink
.
“It’s a lamppost,” she said when I asked. She was dressed then, in hand patched clothes and a tattered shawl around her shoulders, braiding her wet hair. She let me unbutton the back of her dress so I could see it again. I traced my fingers around its lines and curves.
“How did it get there?”
“In the old world, I had someone paint it with ink under my skin, so it would stay there forever.”
I pointed to the painting.
“Yes, Genesis, that’s the same lamppost,” she said.
“Where is that place?”
“It’s a city very far away called Venice. I vacationed there when I was young.”
“Is that one of your stories?”
“Yes.”
My parents’ heads were full of these stories. Images forever etched in their minds of a foreign world I had no memory of. They would one particular storie to get me to sleep at night, when I laid restless on a straw-stuffed mattress.
After years of drought, rain hammered on the roof
and leaked through the unpatched holes, accompanied by the sounds of wolves howling deep in the woods, lighting slicing through the sky and thunder claps I could feel in my chest. Nature regaining balance, flexing her muscles. Reminding us she was queen once again. You don’t own me anymore.
My father took another blanket from his shoulders to cover me with, while my mother smoothed my hair from my face.
“In a world before you were born,” my father would begin, “humans tried to tame nature to their will. They paved over the soil and clogged the skies. They cut down all the trees and killed the animals. There were too many of them, billions of them, and it was too much for the earth to handle. Soon nothing would be able to live on the planet anymore. Everyone was warned–”
“But some people didn’t believe it,” I said.
“Right, Genesis. Some people didn’t believe it,” my mother said, “so they wouldn’t do anything to change. The earth was hurt, and everyone was going to perish.”
“Until the sickness came.”
“Yes, until the sickness came. It killed almost everyone. Only the people with simple blood could survive. Your father and I were some of the few lucky ones. Now we live like this, taking only what we need from the earth, and it will always provide.”
Outside, the wolves were singing again.
As I grew older, I learned the rest of the story. 2030 was the endpoint, the year of no return, as the scientists called it. By 2030, there would be no fixing the climate, and no going back, unless drastic changes were made.
2025 was the year of the sickness. Nothing was changing, the earth was as polluted as ever, the temperatures even hotter, and the air even more clogged.
Then came the doctor. One of the CDC’s most renowned scientists. In a makeshift lab in his basement, he created the disease that would kill ninety three percent of the population. It attacked all antigens in the blood, so that only people with an O negative blood type, about seven percent of the population, were immune. People of “simple blood” as my parents called it. The lucky ones.
The doctor’s blood was not simple, and he died in the same airport where he released the disease.
My parents would never say if the doctor was right or wrong.
“What happened has happened, Genesis,” my mother said once as we were stringing up our clothes in the late spring breeze. “There’s no point in debating the ethics of it now. Will you hand me another pin?”
And so, like my parents, I accepted my life as it was, living off the land in the cabin at the edge of the woods. We gathered our food from the forest.
We caught fish from the brook and sewed our clothes by hand.
I pulled vegetables from the garden with my father and bundled firewood with my mother. We trapped and skinned what we needed. Everything in our cabin had its purpose, the hides, the rugs, the bathtub, the jars, the fireplace, the shelves, the handmade lock on the door. Everything was about surviving, leading our simple life as those of simple blood.
Everything except for the painting on the stone chimney.
I rarely showed interest in the old world. From what my parents told me, it was destined to fail. A place of greed and destruction and disaster. The planet was moving forward now, and there was no use looking back.
But there was always something about that lamp post that I could never quite pry from my mind. Something about that place far away where the sun always set pink.
Once I made my mother take the painting down for me, so I could get a better look. Beyond the lamp post, in the city square, was a building of white pillars and long porticos, carved statues of lost people guarding over it from the roof. A tall pillar stretching to the pink sky with a winged lion on top. Decorated gondolas floated in the water and further off, domed buildings rose from the sea.
I didn’t know any of these words at the time. My mother was the one who explained them to me, pointing to each thing formed so carefully by brush stroke. It didn’t seem possible that such a land could exist.
“Where is Venice?” I later asked my mother as we followed the foot trail, checking our traps in the woods.
“It’s across the ocean,” she answered.
“How did you get there?”
“In a machine that flew in the sky.”
My father and I were in the cabin, boiling drinking water, on the evening when I finally asked about my kingdom’s fate.
“What happened to Venice?”
“It flooded,” he said.
“The whole thing?”
“Yes. It’s underwater now. When the earth got too hot, the ice melted into the ocean, and the oceans got higher,” he said, pouring the bubbling water from the iron pot into a glass jar. It fizzled and cooled with a hiss. “Venice was very low and close to the sea. It was one of the first cities to go.”
“Is it still underwater now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you ready for landing,” Sawyer says.
I smile and slice another piece from the apple in my hand, leaning over the railing to watch the trail of the ship under the fading sunlight. After almost three months at sea, we’ll reach what was once was called Venice this evening.
“Yes, aren’t you?”
He shrugs.
“You’re really just here to measure the water levels? You’re not even curious about this place?”
“Venice, New Orleans, Bangkok. All the sunken cities are the same to me. I can’t even tell the difference.”
“You’ve heard the stories though?”
“About people living in the clock tower? The church?”
“The basilica,” I correct.
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
“I’m not hoping for anything.”
It’s long after dark when we anchor just beyond St. Mark’s Square. The pale moon makes it difficult to see what’s left of the city. I think I can make out a tower sticking up from the water, maybe a few roofs, but I can’t be sure. The entire crew has gathered on the deck, hovering around the edges to try and catch a glimpse through the darkness of our awaited destination.
“Get some rest, all of you,” the captain says. “Tomorrow morning we’ll send out the first boats.”
The thought of what’s sunken underneath me, all around me, keeps me awake for hours in my bunk. Just before dawn, I rise, pull my woven bag from under my bed, and carry it up to the deck.
The sun is just beginning to pull itself up from water, casting a pink glow over the sky
, as I take the hide canvas and handmade paints out from my bag. I perch myself on the ledge of the deck, balancing the canvas on my knees, and gaze at my childhood kingdom.
The ocean has swallowed much of the city, but not all of it. The gentle waves just barely touch the feet of the rooftop statues. They stand in a perfect line like ghosts walking on water. The winged lion has remained untouched, and it rises proudly on its pillar. Further into the square, I can see the pointed roof of the belltower, still green, and the arched domes of the basilica, like rounded islands in the ocean. Everything else is submerged in a blanket of dark blue.
I paint all of this as the sun rises higher in the sky, just like someone else did, long ago in another world, who sold it to my mother in the same square.
When the sunlight hits the water, I can barely make out a black shape, perhaps a lamppost, deep down in the sea. But it’s gone a second later.
I paint it anyway.
by Kyle Phillips | Dec 23, 2018 |
“Be as quiet as you can.”
“No one’s gonna hear me over the sound of that.” He pointed to their cozy, two-story home, lit up with flames.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re radicals. If they find us, they’ll shoot us in the fucking face. We have to keep moving,” said Brad. He shifted uncomfortably and coughed His dress shoes and socks were soaked with swamp water. Mateo said nothing. The heat from the flames was melting his layers of theatrical makeup- mahogany skin drips and smudged eyeliner. A human candle. Brad reached for his hand. “Mateo. We really need to go. We can only stay hidden for so long.”
…
Brad knew something like this was going to eventually slither its way into his life. His career. His marriage. His conscious. Everyone’s temperament tightened and tightened like a snakeskin that needed to molt.
Brad often felt like an old wad of skin.
No longer needed, only covering up the truth but everyone saw right through it. Especially Mateo, it seemed. Mateo could always plug into what Brad was thinking. But he still made him say the thoughts out loud.
“It’s not healthy to keep all that in,” he’d chide, “you try to fold in on yourself and hide from me.”
“It’s not always about you.”
They had been driving for a little while down the freshly-paved Florida highway, Brad with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. Winds from a nearby storm were picking up, but they stayed the course. They were used to it now, though they didn’t want to be.
“Why are you so nervous?” Mateo glanced over at Brad’s bony hands. “It’s just a holiday party.”
“You’re going to be meeting all of these people for the first time.”
“And you’re afraid I won’t like them?”
“Yes.”
“Since when do you care what I think?” Mateo asked with a smirk. He wiped a stripe of dust off the dashboard.
“Since always,” Brad said quietly.
“It doesn’t matter if I like them. It doesn’t even really matter if you like them.”
“I like them fine.”
“That’s a fucking lie. I’m surprised you’re even going tonight.”
“It’ll be weird if I don’t. Besides, I’m sure you’ll make it fun.”
“Hey, I’m not there to entertain. I’m off the clock,” Mateo pointed at his wrist that had no watch on it. “I’m there to eat food and nod and smile when people talk science-y at me.”
“Damn. I was hoping you’d do your Mickey Mouse impression.”
“That’s for your ears only.”
Brad loosened his grip on the wheel a little. The winds had eased up some too. Mateo cracked his window open.
“They’ll probably think I’m weird. No, not weird. Useless.”
“How are you useless?” Brad asked as he merged over, passing a slower-moving sedan.
“I mean, you’re actually doing something noteworthy. If someone was forced to shoot either an actor or a scientist, they’d probably shoot the actor.”
“That’s… really grim, Mateo.”
“I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t think that way.”
Mateo just shrugged and looked out the window. They pulled into the hotel parking lot. The holiday party was to be held in one of the ballrooms. A large sign by the valet parking read “Welcome, ORLANDO OIL!”
Brad grimaced. “They should really take that down.”
…
The smoke from the last lab fire nearly suffocated him. His ashen face, sunken cheeks, and tired eyes were screened on every news outlet, unfairly exposed.
Brad’s identity and his story became a human rights morsel
, a finger food of all the household conversations. He was the only lab worker that survived. Everyone else perished. Every single person that exchanged Secret Santa gifts and ate peppermint brownies and downed eggnog at the holiday party were ash.
They called it a terrorist attack.
Brad emerged with a permanent chemical burn that emblazoned his chest and the entirety of his left arm and hand.
Mateo took it personally.
“This is bullshit,” he fidgeted with the tubes connected to Brad’s oxygen mask, “We can’t do this.”
“I’m… trying… to do… different things,” Brad managed to say between clogged breaths.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now. You’re not going back.”
Brad stared at him with wet eyes.
“What?” Mateo plopped down on the couch next to him and leaned his head back. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot.
Brad shrugged. He didn’t feel like talking anymore. It hurt too much.
“I’m sorry. I know it seems like I’m mad at you.”
Brad rolled his eyes just a flicker and nodded.
“Ouch, okay. I felt that eye roll in my soul,” he took Brad’s bandaged hand in his, ever so carefully twining their fingers together. “I’m just scared. I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared before.”
…
That was all some time ago. Brad still had a cough now and then but was mostly better. If he had to cough during one of Mateo’s plays, he put a hand over his mouth and held it until his eyes watered.
“Along with me! I’ll see what hole is here and what he is that is now leapt into it-” Mateo’s voice bellowed through the auditorium.
Brad involuntarily spit into his hand. His heart jumped.
Mateo stared down at him from the stage with heavily-inked eyelids. His forehead was sweating underneath the fake crown and bright lights. Brad waved off his gaze and buried his face into the crook of his elbow.
“Say,” Mateo cautiously continued, “Who are thou that lately didst descend into this gaping hollow of the earth?”
…
Now they watched their home burn.
Someone had recognized them and followed their car all the way back, two car distances behind, headlights dimmed. The circle of suspects was getting tighter.
“Our home…” Mateo whispered mournfully over and over again, “Our home…”
“Mateo, we can’t-”
Brad felt the irritation from the smoke rise in his chest and throat. Mateo had forcefully shoved Brad out of the bathroom window first, but he still swallowed too much. Too much for someone already previously exposed. He doubled over and hacked into the swampy grass, hands on his knees. Mateo touched his arm.
“Okay, we’re going. You’re going to get sick again,” he said.
Brad coughed out one more forceful gust of infected air. He looked up at him and nodded, took his hand, and entwined their fingers.
by Jaymes Schutz | Dec 23, 2018 |
The words flashed intermittingly, a half second pulse, on the screen and backwards on his face. The sun had gone down outside and, engrossed in finishing his work, the man hadn’t yet turned on any lights leaving the dim glow of the liquid crystal display as the room’s makeshift candle. Wires crawled across the floor and tables of his ramshackle laboratory, tangled and frayed, destination unknown, and the room smelled vaguely of silicone and strongly of body odor. Luckily, the man was alone.
“KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF”
Actually, maybe it would be better if he weren’t alone. The words took on an intimacy that they may not have if one of his various assistants had been around to look at the screen quizzically and suggest various bugs that may have caused the computer to flash such a strange, macabre message. It wasn’t really a computer in the sense that most people would think, a self contained box that the internet comes out of in the same way toast come out of a toaster. It was a collection of various parts, not fit for retail although that would be its eventual destination, spread throughout the room with a screen and keyboard sitting at the man’s main desk in the center of the room. He unplugged the machine and the message continued.
“KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF”
His heart sank into his stomach, and he swallowed hard. Then he double checked and realized he’d unplugged the toaster he’d brought in once he started spending every night on the project. He found the appropriate plug and looked at the screen again as he gripped the chord at its base. After a moment he took the proper plug out of the socket and the screen shut off, as did the cooling fans for the various machine parts, and the room took on a strange silence. The man fell lifelessly in his chair, eyes wide with fear.
The investors were going to be pissed.
. . .
All eight members of the board, along with The Chairman, had gathered in a conference room. They were agitated that this meeting had been called at all as it was interrupting their various games of golf, extramarital affairs, or what have you. But The Chairman, his head as bald and as reflective as the waxed marble floor beneath him, had sent them an email marked “UREGENT” which was usually reserved for serious events such as a slight decrease in profits or an employee in one of their third world sweatshops asking for a bathroom break. Clearly something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
“Gentleman,” he nodded at the two female board members, “and, uh, women. As you know, our business plan for the next several quarters hinges on the successful rollout of our new product. Some disturbing information, however, has come to light.”
He pulled a remote from an interior pocket in his suit jacket and with a few button presses a screen was lowered from the ceiling on the wall behind him. He walked to a light switch and turned the room’s lights off.
A video began playing and faintly illuminated the room.
The man working on the computer with the strange message began the video by fiddling with the camera, getting himself and the computer screen into frame. The room had been cleaned up a bit, many of the components placed in a single box next to a computer monitor. He cleared his throat and began.
“Uh, yes, I’m the lead designer on project DESIRE. Uh, the Alexa killer? The predictive shopping assistant? Right, well, we’ve been getting this read-out no matter who we’ve had use the thing, no matter whose meta-data we include, at least no one we’ve included so far which at this point includes most of the University staff and administration.” He grabbed a microphone connected umbilically to the box next to the screen. “Project DESIRE,” he asked. “What should I buy?”
The man in the video picked up the camera and held it in front of the computer screen until its message filled the frame, blinking like an unset digital clock and in a similar font. In the board room its message was reflected across the faces in the meeting, many with mouths agape. It was reflected clearly, almost more so, on the shined marble floor in front of the screen and from there to the ceiling above. It filled the room. After a moment The Chairman flicked the switch and the lights returned. He walked back in front of the screen.
“As you can see, this hardly bodes well fo-” he stopped when he noticed everyone staring nervously at him, not at his eyes but slightly above.
“KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF”
Standing between the screen and the projector, the message was still pulsating on his bald head. “Oh god dammit,” he said and pulled the remote back out and turned the video off. He straightened his suit jacket and tie unnecessarily and continued. “As you can see, this hardly bodes well for our next quarterly earnings report.”
“I’ll say!” a board member shouted. “This is appalling!”
“Horrifying!” chimed in another. Soon the whole room was a cacophony of worried looks and raised voices. The Chairman slammed a fist onto the table.
“Calm down everyone!”
“Calm down? I’ve got about 50 people working on marketing this things to tweens. You think with all this bullying and suicide shit in the media their moms are going to buy them a goddam suicide Leapfrog?!”
“Yeah! We’ve been trying to stave off fears of Christian conservatives about our all pervasive advertising and spying and now you’re telling me we have to sell them on the Dr. Kavorkian iMac?!”
The chattering began again and The Chairman himself was now engaged in several arguments at once. This went on for some time until the doorway to the room opened with a kick which slammed the double doors against the walls. Everyone stopped and turned around to see the man from the video standing in the doorway, arms overflowing with papers.
“Don’t you see?!” he yelled. “Do you see?!”
The board member’s countenances quickly cycled through terror to confusion, settling on anger. One of them stood up, furrowed their brow and pointed forcefully to the man in the doorway.
“You.” Other members stood and launched accusatory stares of their own at the man. “You fucked up and turned our multi-million dollar shopping assistant project into a sick joke! A sick, unmarketable joke!”
“A joke? A joke!” the man dropped all his papers. “There’s no JOKE. There are no BUGS. The program has simply determined that the best course of action, logically, is that-”
“Is that humans are destroying the planet and the world would be better without them,” interjected a board member, in a bored tone as if he knew exactly what the man would say. The man stared blankly for a second, then regained his composure, his fury.
“Y-yes. That’s RIGHT! We humans have-”
“Overburdened the ecosystem with extractive industries causing mass extinction and global climate change,” another board member said. Again, the man had to pause. But he pressed on.
“P-precisely. Yes. And this computer, the most advanced Artificial Intelligence ever devised, has determined, without error, that-”
The entire board said in unison, “the best outcome for the planet generally would be the extinction of human beings who are more destructive even than the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.” One of them stepped forward and added, “why do you think the very wealthy have invested so much in security and bunkers, private islands and that stuff?”
“Yeah,” said another. “We pay the scientists who say all that stuff is fake, we don’t believe them!” The room erupted in laughter and back patting. A few members even lit cigars.
“But you could change all of this! You could stop it all now!” the man was now more exasperated than ever. It was as if he had epiphany except in this moment of sudden clarity what was clear, crystal clear, was the absurdity of the situation.
“Listen, guy, let’s say I turned this company into a locally sourced cookie company that only employs grandmas who are also war widows,” the chairman said, eliciting a few more laughs from the board members. “Unless we made more money doing that than we did last quarter, I’d be out on my ass immediately.”
“It’s true,” said a board member. “We’d be ‘obligated to our shareholders to take such action as would maximize returns on their investment.’ Otherwise they’d vote out the whole board and get a new one.”
“Yuh-huh,” The Chairman agreed. “So we might as well soak up the good times and prepare for the end times, heh heh.” The board members were all now, somehow, holding glasses of Champaign and toasted. “To wealth!”
The man picked his jaw up off the floor and regained his determination
. He pulled a handgun from his jacket pocket, aimed it squarely at The Chairman, and pulled the trigger before he or anyone else could plead with him to stop. Moments before, The Chairman had pressed a button for a silent alarm and security arrived just as he collapsed forward, half of his bald head in pieces on the projector screen still hanging behind him. The man, realizing the guards had reached the room, turned the gun on himself.
The board members reassembled an hour or so later in an identical conference room. The group was virtually unaffected by the event. A new member was present and one of the female members took on the position of The Chairman, her head now as bald and shiny as her late predecessor’s.
. . . . .
He found the strange box during one of his regular visits to the Computer Graveyard. That was what he called the dump because he felt better about going to a graveyard than a dump. 15 years old, the boy’s family, like most in his village, made money by harvesting the metal out of the old computers that were dumped in — sorry that’s “donated to” — his Kenyan village. The villagers burned the old machines until all the plastic was melted away leaving behind only the precious metals, metals that could be sold for pennies. The Green Economy, the boy thought.
He took the strange box home and kept it under his bed until he could go to the city. He could take it to the shop that fixed up old computers, the owner usually let him hang around and help out. He carried it a few miles and the owner of the shop, a man barely in his thirties but betrayed by his scraggily beard, was as intrigued as he was.
“Doesn’t look like any commercial brand.” He unscrewed it and looked inside. “That’s a sophisticated CPU. I mean, probably. I’ve never seen one like it.”
They booted up the machine and were greeted by a list. A long list of personal details with spaces to fill in answers. The boy and shop owner looked at each other and without a word grabbed a keyboard and plugged it into the box. They filled out the details over the course of several hours. It was a slow day and they became increasingly curious, wondering just how many different questions it would ask and for what purpose. Many words were unfamiliar to them as English was not their first language, questions like the one about their partner’s “lingerie.” After they reached the last question they pressed enter. A moment’s pause and a message came on the screen, blinking.
“ORGANIZE AND RESIST….ORGANIZE AND RESIST….ORGANIZE AND RESIST”
by Nicholas Drabant | Dec 23, 2018 |
History is a subject I struggled with throughout school. It just never settled right with me, and I could never keep the dates right. For the longest time, I thought that the Civil War happened in the 20th Century, just two-hundred years ago. God, I was so stupid. So I don’t know why I began writing biographies and biopics. Maybe because it’s all just a story rather than some subject in school. If I wrote about someone, there wasn’t a test or tuition to be paid for it: I just had to look back and start writing. Of course, things get lost in translation, but isn’t that the same with every story? Nothing ever turns out quite how we like it.
Science was the other subject I hated. Ask me to name an animal and I could likely do it if it was big and famous enough. Ask me how the world worked and I’d just say “God.” People just sort of stopped asking what that meant too.
My two hatreds combined this past year. 2133, the centennial of the signing of the United & Immediate Sustainability Act, or the Eco Act. You know, that anniversary that gives you the day off from school and work. Another labor day. The fact is, you don’t need to know it word for word and
you don’t know the world it was made for.
I’ll be frank in saying that I went into this for the worst possible reason: I wanted the money. I wanted that fame that comes with everyone’s big break, to have those massive conglomerates beg for me to write movies for them. I pitched the idea of a safe, family movie covering the history of the Eco Act. Something tame, PG at best: you know the kind of films where a bunch of kind-hearted kids buckle down and write their senators and march in the streets to demand a change of any kind. They bought it up and mentioned very explicitly to me that it wouldn’t be a major film in terms of both budget and earnings — and no matter how it was made, the timing of release guaranteed it a massive return on investment. It was all very methodical, how they reacted to it. Each plot point I mentioned being possible scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb.
“We need to have the group be diverse.”
“We can mix and match characters, mold two people into one.”
They all laughed as they changed my idea in front of me. And I went along. I was so proud of that moment. None of those hack auteurs from school could touch me then, not when I had that five-hundred-thousand dollar paycheck. And then I made that big mistake.
“I can direct it too, if you want.” That shut them up. “Just give me one-thousand dollars for the script, some royalties, and I’ll direct it for cheap. Like you said, it can’t fail.”
That guy at the head of the table, the one who made the decisions truly, he smirked at this. And somehow, I got that contract to direct my own script. In an act of pure generosity, they told me that I needed to take all of their suggestions for the script before I began shooting. And then they sent me on my way to fix what I already made.
Then I started to do research. I scoured the net for articles from that time, for current events and what would be in the news at that moment.
I looked everywhere for the three biggest people involved in the Eco Act
, the architects and the inspirations behind this grand, life-saving act that saved this planet for generations. Representatives Sarah Clarke (D) from West Virginia and Simon Cormich (R) from South Dakota. These two were instrumental in drafting the legislation and getting it to pass in a bipartisan way. And, of course, little Sally Micci, the eight-year old who was the reported “patient zero” for climate change: the only victim of a forest fire stretching from North Carolina to Tennessee.
For the first two, I found piles upon piles of campaign contributions from large fossil fuel lobbyists, and a speech from Clarke denouncing science as something “Anti-religious.”
Instead I found a history hidden in plain sight. Bombings across the western seaboard, sabotage in the Dakotas, fire in West Virginia, and the last execution of a man for treason and conspiracy. But there was no body there. Just a mask: a haunting drama mask with wide eyes and vibrant colors, and attached hair that could stretch into whips. And then that mask came with its own ideas, its own manifesto. The collective work of millennia of civilization and evolution, cast into one last gambit to save it all.
And I’m going to risk my career in pitching this instead: changing it all on the hopes that somebody will accept something that is not feel good. What I am about to share with you is a reconstruction as best as I can make of some of the events leading up to the creation of the Eco Act. The Malcolm X, the Nat Turner, and the John Brown to the Eco Act’s Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglas. The dawn of the final day of the unnamed man behind the mask, whom I refer to as Future, for no real name of their own exists.
*****
The bombing of a series of fracking sites across the California coast was covered briefly between stories on local news channels in 2028. Successfully covered up as an accident involving a series of lighters lighting cigarettes at inopportune times. The police took note, but in order to keep the public calm and avoid terror about a possible fuel crisis, they kept investigations limited. The bombs were expertly placed, little remained of what was there before and instead there were now fields and rubble.
This was the first act of Future,
as described by their writings on the subject — hastily scribbled on the wall of a cell and photographed by guards: photos that still exist everywhere but remain hidden among the plain. Just one search away.
“I was one of many who saw things needed to change, and thus I began to walk when I awoke.” Was the first line of this unofficial autobiography.
From there, the bombings were worse and more terrible. More precise and lethal. Threatening notes and words of warning to avoid locations at certain times of the day. The results would always be the same. Future would announce an attack and direct those who would be close to avoid it at all costs. The police would scour the area in order to find anything. Nothing would be found. Work would resume, carefully. The bombs would go off at precisely 12:00 noon. Oil refineries, coal processing plants, the occasional power plant were all targeted. And each day, those in charge of said facilities would return to the office with a note on the desk:
“Now is not the time for discussion.”
Just a declaration and a picture of the mask they wore in full. A promise of more to come.
And more did come. More fire rained down, each more terrible than the last. What started out as attacks on the refineries and drills became attacks on the bastions of our civilization. Anything with a fleeting similarity to oil was subject to attack.
Yet, nobody paid any attention. Those that did know of the mysterious bomber out in California kept it to themselves. At that time, not a single person had died in any attack, thus the worst it could be described as was destruction of property. The majority of citizens just ascribed it to some incredibly skilled vandal or group of vandals. After all, this was only just a news story on the five o’clock news, nothing important enough to establish a national terrorist hunt upon. And the fact that the bombings had been in varied locations threw off police and citizen alike, leading to the main hypothesis of a group of vandals operating a series of copycat crimes. By the time Future had set off attacks in the majority of the fifty states, only conspiracy theorists considered them to be a single entity.
By 2029, with nothing to show for their actions, Future moved on to destroying pipelines. Each attack was left with the identical calling card: at each site there would be a single circle dug exactly one inch into the ground, upon which some crude oil would be poured into. At the center of every circle was that same note from before next to a mask:
“Now is not the time for discussion.”
And the oil would be lit, trailing back into the pipeline. It would burst into flames, explode, and spill crude oil across hectares of land. The billions of dollars in damages is what finally caught the attention of groups like the FBI, who finally began to make moves in identifying Future. Security would be increased at every step, and yet the attacks just continued. Billions of dollars in damage, hundreds of workers laid off, dozens of notes written, and a rise in gas prices the world would never consider possible. Of course, that’s what got the attention of those without a personal stake in the case: when it hit seven dollars a gallon, hell would break loose for once. The oil itself was not in short supply, but men and corporations willing to make the risk of transporting it were.
There would be one last pipeline attacked
on the dry and warm eve of April 14th, 2029. A pipeline running up from Virginia through appalachian territory and into West Virginia: the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The crowning achievement of all new pipelines, said to bring growth to both the local and international economy.
And it was in this attack that Future was caught.
The Pipeline companies who sponsored the construction held an event to celebrate it’s first full year in operation. Of the guests invited, the two included would be Representatives Clarke and Cormich — invited as a courtesy so that they could show support for the companies who had bankrolled them. Perhaps this was their way of saying they were not scared of Future. They should have been.
It was located near the pipeline, just steps away from the first area of broken ground. Amongst the trees and with tents and lights, they held this last supper of oil.
And it was then that Future made their move.
The many dignitaries gathered all toasted their successes.
“You’re not worried at all?” Clarke asked.
“No,” said Mr. Jemini, the current man overseeing pipeline security, “Not at all. This pipeline will outlast me and everyone here.”
At that time, a figure in a hooded dress stepped through the crowds and towards the pipeline. With pale skin visible from the fingerless gloves, nobody batted an eye towards them. The mask would be associated with a face tonight.
They stood facing towards the pipeline, and removed the hood revealing that mask. How nobody noticed it upon Future’s entrance and whether anyone saw their true face is a fact lost to time.
It was then that people began to move, for those who worked at the company were far too familiar with that mask.
And then Future simply turned to them all as the security lifted their guns.
“Don’t shoot! You’ll hit the pipeline!” Jemini said.
“I will go peacefully.” Future said, a voice but not attached to anything or anyone in particular. “But first…”
And then the trigger was pulled. And then another. And then another. Ten in total.
The explosive chain reaction came from someone’s gun and was aimed at Future. Who pulled the trigger first was never jotted down, likely ignored in the ensuing chaos.
The first bullet is believed to have traveled through Future’s arm and through the fence and into the pipeline. A spark hit the oil and caused an instant ignition.
Pressure built up fast in the burning pipeline. It exploded section by section to give some release to the tension.
Future stood against those who had shot them. All bullets that had hit past that first one likely did nothing to the pipeline — yet their impact upon Future could not be understated. It is believed that six of the shots hit their mark.
People panicked and ran. But Future just stumbled towards them. In the horrible chaos, more shots were fired at Future, only half hit as the flames grew behind them, reaching a crescendo as they spread from tree to tree.
Mr. Jemini stared at the flames undoing all of his work. He moved his eyes down to Future, who stood before him at this point. Blood dripped from wounds across their body.
“You’re real.” He said.
“Oh, very much real.” They said.
“What do you intend to gain?”
“Nothing. I plan to die here. You will execute me. And when I die, people will look at this fire and see who it kills… They’ll look at the deaths of others like them… And they will blame you.”
“You’re just some man in a mask. They’ll blame you.”
“How can they blame someone who may not even exist? How can they blame an idea?”
Bang.
The final shot knocked Future over, probably dead before they impacted the ground. The flames were high and powerful now. They had no choice but to leave.
The wildfire that started burned for five straight weeks, scorching the eastern seaboard in a way unprecedented. Homes, electricity, pets, it all burned. In that first city on the West Virginia border, a young girl slept as fire climbed through her house. Firefighters would save her parents, but not her. Dry trees from a lack of rainfall turned the house into an oven within minutes.
Sally Micci, the first white American victim of climate change, became the last. Her face became the one put to every news report on the fire as it rampaged. Jemini and all those associated, including Clarke and Cormich, were forced to debate with her picture in the background. In a reelection bid, Clarke and Cormich dropped all ties to fossil fuel lobbies and cosponsored the Eco Act, which they hoped to name the Micci act.
She became the face of victory. Future was relegated to the backburners, where true revolutionaries belong, I suppose. This is the story I want to tell, but they will never fund: not everyone gets their happy ending.
by Collin Olson | Dec 23, 2018 |
by Lauren Ramer | Dec 23, 2018 |
LOCAL TEENS CONNECTED TO HUDSON WOODS INCIDENT
By Reyna Jimenez | 16 May 2020
When loggers set to work on the morning of April 29, to begin clearing an approximately two-mile expanse of woods along Hudson Street, stretching from the back of St. Frances Xavier Church to the Aldi on 4th Avenue, they found signs posted along the border of the site: “WARNING: Trees have been spiked. Proceed with CAUTION.” A team equipped with metal detectors confirmed that although not every tree had been spiked, a significant number were, and, citing safety concerns, operations were halted for the day.
Earlier this week, Creekwood PD arrested Ryan Schultz, 19, Darren Johnson, 18, and Beatrice O’Connor, 18, in connection to the incident. All three are students at Maynard High School, and could be heard discussing their plans openly in the halls in the days prior to the incident, according to an unnamed sophomore. The suspects, all seniors, are expected to graduate later this month. According to Maynard principal, Craig Chenoweth, “It’s unclear whether we will allow them to walk” at the commencement ceremony next week.
Other teachers spoke highly of the students. “They’re really great kids, and I would have said they had bright futures ahead of them, before this,” said history teacher Anthony Mason. Amelia Huang, who teaches science at Maynard, said, “It’s a shame, and obviously I don’t support what they did, but it’s still nice to see young people who are passionate about the environment. I’ve known Bea for years, and… she has the makings of a real leader for change. I’m surprised she was involved, and I wish they would have applied themselves differently.”
CONT. ON NEXT PG.
CONT. FROM LAST PG. CPD has also obtained evidence, in the form of SMS conversation records from the month of April. The text messages implicate Schultz and Johnson, at the very least; by the time O’Connor joined their cause, they had begun to speak only face-to-face, in order to avoid leaving a paper trail. However, once arrested, all three teens confessed immediately. “I don’t think there’s any point in hiding it anymore,” Schultz said. “I want people to pay attention. We already did it, and they can’t stop us after the fact.”
The act of spiking trees gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, as a form of protest. Tree spikes are easily caught in
sawblades and other logging equipment, damaging and often destroying them. They’re also incredibly dangerous to the workers who operate that machinery. Tree spiking is officially recognized by the state of Pennsylvania as an act of eco-terrorism, punishable by up to five years in prison, or a $20,000 fine. The trial is slated for Wednesday, June 10.
As for the woods on Hudson Street, they will remain standing, for the time being. According to the mayor’s office, the city has been having trouble finding a new contractor who is willing to remove the stakes and proceed with the scheduled clearing of trees from the area.
by Jared Lane | Dec 23, 2018 |
by Sean Ayres | Dec 23, 2018 |
The following is a collection of recovered voicemails left to Steven Russell, from his brother Carter.
The voicemail itself will appear on the left while a *rough transcription on the audio will be on the right.
Man, it’s almost Christmas and it’s 80 degrees here. John and I are driving over to lake Johanna to go jet skiing. I we had to go to like 50 stores to find any place that still had swimsuits in stock it cost me like 100 dollars. But worth it right? I’m not sure why everyone on CNN is freaking out over this climate change. Well anyway I was just wondering if you had any ideas for Christmas gifts to buy for everyone at the BBQ this weekend?
Bro, it’s over 120 degrees now. There was a warning on the news this morning that told us not go to outside till the sun goes down and it drops below 100. I heard that the farmers haven’t been able to grow any crops or even feed for the cows. So, food may be really expensive this fall. Or worse there may not be any food at all. On my Facebook today they were advertising doomsdays kits. They had freeze dried food in them for a whole year! Do you want to go in on one with me? They are $10,000 dollars and you know that the banks won’t let me take out anymore loans since my credit is so bad. The food looks disgusting! The stew looked like barf! I can’t imagine anyone eating that! Do you think all the richie richies up state will eat that crap? I can’t even afford to run my AC anymore. It’s miserable!
Dude, it’s unbearable here. They canceled the parade and fireworks for tomorrow. The temperatures won’t even read the temp outside anymore. None of the farmers can grow crops anymore. The University has cancelled all classes indefinitely so I’m out of a job. No severance package or anything. How do they expect me to live?
All electricity lines have overheated and no one can fix them. I’m glad that by some miracle the cell towers are still working. But, my phone battery is getting low and there’s no way to charge it. No one can grow food anymore so, everyone rationing out food from their doomsday kits. I wish we would have bought one. I’m starving! I only have one more Big mac left. Thank God those things last forever. I was messaging back and forth with Sarah a few days ago and she said her and her parents are moving to Antarctica. I guess some people are starting to build a city there since it’s the only place that’s not too hot to live in. She told me it costs 1 million dollars just to rent a studio apartment up there. I don’t know how they expect a guy like me to get a place up there. I’m trying to find a way to desalinate and purify waste water since my well is starting to dry up.
Bro, I’ve been using this new cellphone with a solar battery so my connection may sound a little funky. But, I have to leave here. We aren’t even supposed to go outside anymore at all since it’s so hot. There’s nothing here anymore. Everything has closed. The grocery stores finally ran out of everything, and everyone’s doomsday kits are empty. I had to stop giving away my clean water for free since I was running out of chemicals to purify the water with.
I heard most of the neighbors have died of thirst or starvation. Did you hear about Mr. Dunkin? He was so hunger he lost his mind, ran outside and jumped straight on the asphalt.
That’s a terrible way to die. Sarah told me I could move up to Ant. with her if I could find a way to get there. I’m not sure how much a ferry ticket even costs. I don’t think they are taking money anymore. Maybe I can trade them for some of the bottled water I have been making. It seems so cruel to sell a necessity like that. She tells me it’s like a utopia there. Can you imagine? There’s still a perfect world somewhere.
Letters From Bestville Antarctica
What follows in this next section is a group of recovered letters from Carter to his brother Steven from his time spent in Bestville, Antarctica.
The letters were found unopened so we are to assume they never reach their recipient.
Antarctica
May 18th 2080
Week 1
The following sentences have been redacted from this letter:
Outsiders
Steven,
I wish I could call you here from Antarctica, but they only let us have written communication with the “outsiders” .That’s what we here call everyone who doesn’t live here in Bestville. It’s BEAUTIFUL here. It’s like a whole different world. Since it’s 75 degrees all year long they can grow all the crops they need. They have lined the streets with maple trees. It’s going to be tough to stop eating meat since everyone is vegan, and they don’t raise cattle for beef but I think I will find a way to manage. There are so many cool little shops. I’m going to go check out what they are selling soon.
There are no cars, but there is a bullet train like the ones it Tokyo that run on solar power. It can take you anywhere in the community in under 30 minutes. They are all about clean renewable energy. Sarah’s apartment is kind of small but I can’t complain since she is letting me stay there for free.
There is this cute little park across the street and I took her dog out for a walk there this morning. No one else was there, it seemed kinda odd for a Saturday. Maybe everyone else was still asleep. When I got back Sarah was acting weird telling me I shouldn’t go outside on Saturdays. She acted really strange and wouldn’t tell me the reason why. I hope to explore the city more soon!
From,
Carter
Antarctica
May 25th 2080
Week 2
The Following sentences have been redacted from this letter:
Level Zero
separate the social classes
Steven,
I finally went into town there other day. When I went on the train no one would talk to me. I tried to say hello to the guy sitting next to me, and he acted like I wasn’t even there. It was odd; everyone was wearing these little pins on their shirts (which by the way I don’t know how I never noticed but EVERYONE wears the same thing: a blue button down, and khaki pants.) I couldn’t make out what the pins were. But there seemed to be a few different styles of them. I’m not sure what that’s all about. I’ll have to ask Sarah.
Ok, but that’s not even the weirdest part. When I went into the store called “clothing” they only sold 2 kinds of shirts. One was labeled “workday” the other was labeled “Saturday”. The worker at the store saw me walk in and instantly handed me a set of shirts for free. He asked me where my pin was? I told him I didn’t know where to get them. Then mumbled something about me being a “damn Level Zero”. What’s a Level Zero.
When I got back to Sarah’s place she handed me a pin that was shaped like a zero. I tried to ask her what they were and she just said it was a way for everyone to recognize each other. I don’t think this is true. She showed me her pin and it was a giant golden eight. She wouldn’t say why hers were different than mine. I’m starting to think it’s some kind of way to
Separate the social classes
She also told me I had to “report my job tomorrow”. I was confused since I hadn’t applied anywhere yet. But, I guess I am now the Lead manager of crop recycling. I have no idea what that means. I guess I will find out tomorrow.
From,
Carter
Antarctica
Bestville
April 3rd 2080
Week 3
The Following sentences have been redacted from this letter:
Reading my letters 1
isn’t really all that great. 2
This cool air is your payment 3
Be careful or they will make you leave
Steven,
I think I have figured out why they only let us write to you outsiders. They want to control how the outside world views us. So they are reading my letters before they are getting sent to you. I don’t think I like this feels like we are prisoners or something.
So it turns out being the lead manager of crop recycling isn’t really all that great. You see since we grow so many crops we have to find a way to use all the not edible parts so we don’t have any waste. So, today our project at the factory was washing off all the corn husks so they could be ground up and used as fabric for our clothes. I knew these blue shirts were a little strange, they didn’t feel like cotton it was all corn husks. Can you believe it. Back home I was the head of the chemistry department at Saint Cloud State and now I’m washing corn husks!
During my lunch break today I tried to ask some of the other workers about what the pins meant. Everyone there had a zero pin like me or a number one pin. But I saw our boss, and he had a number 8 pin like Sarah.
At the end of the day I tried to ask my boss when we got paid. All he did was laugh. He said this cool air is your payment. I don’t think they pay us in Bestville. How is that possible!
I tried to ask Sarah about my paycheck when I got home and she told me not to worry about it. That everything is “taken care of in Bestville.” I think she’s going CRAZY. How is it alright? They make us all wear the same clothes. We are assignment jobs, and have to wear these dumb little pins everywhere. How is that ALL RIGHT? I couldn’t talk any sense into her. She tried to hush me and said be carefully or they will make you leave.
From,
Carter Level 0
Antarctica
Bestville
April 10th 2080
Week 4
The Following sentences have been redacted from this letter:
You’re being removed from Bestville
Bestville Government
The Rich to get richer and the government to be their mouthpiece.
Steven,
I hope you get this letter. Today, I was woken up these two men unlocked my door. They just came in and grabbed me and said you’re being removed from Bestville. I wasn’t even allowed to grab my things.
Sarah was already gone to work for the day so she couldn’t help me. But, I’m not sure how the men were able to get into the apartment without a key. I think she may have given it to them since I complaining so much. Or maybe they had some kind of master key.
I’m getting on the ferry soon. I keep asking everyone where they are sending me but no one will tell me. There’s a few of us in the holding tank right now. Everyone has zero pins like me. We aren’t allowed to speak. I’m not sure how they are allowed to hold us in here and just send us off. It’s like everyone here in Bestville has given away all their rights to live here.
When I say “they” I’m not even really sure who I am referring to. I think it must be the Bestville government. On the way to the holding tank I was driven by all these large houses with tall gates labeled LEVEL 10’s/GOVERNMENT. I think this is where the wealthy and government officials live. Steven, they all live TOGETHER. There is no separation between the level 10s and the government. I thought Bestville was going to be a safe haven. It’s not that at. It’s just a place for the Rich to get richer and the government to be their mouthpiece.
Steven, if this place isn’t a safe world. What is?
From,
Carter Level 0
by Saeben Haverington | Dec 22, 2018 |
COMMUNIQUÉ: URGENT MESSAGE TO FOLLOW
TO: EVENT 3 COMMANDER
SUBJ: COLLECTED INTELLIDIARY™
THE FOLLOWING INTELLIDIARY™ WAS CAPTURED BY TREK-SCAN™ NODE 916 AND TRANSMITTED BACK TO EVENT 3 COMMAND FOR YOUR REVIEW AND APPROVAL. IT IS BELIEVED THIS INTELLIDIARY™ IS PART OF THE MORNINGSTAR CHRONICLES FROM THE FAILED MORNINGSTAR MISSION. CAREFUL REVIEW IS ADVISED. ENSURE ALL UNAUTHORIZED PORTIONS ARE REDACTED PRIOR TO TRANSMISSION TO THE COMMITTÉE.
TRANSCRIPTION OF INTELLIDIARY™ TO FOLLOW
The Élisa Diaries
161-2149: Père gave me this today! He made me promise to capture in it every day so I could track my entire voyage. I can’t wait, my own IntelliDiary™! I told him I’ll always write in it, no matter how busy I get, I’ll always make time. I wish he was coming with me, but he says the voyage is only for the young, I don’t know what that means, but it makes me laugh when he says it. I’ll miss him the most!
162-2149: Mom says I’m lucky to have been chosen. That there were thousands of parents who put their children on the list, but she says only the best and brightest got chosen for the voyage. Klein says, only parents with more than one child had children chosen, so I’m not special, I think he’s just jealous that he didn’t get picked like me!
163-2149: How did Earthwalkers run out of fresh water? Why didn’t they just TeleMark™ themselves new water like I do when I’m thirsty? Stupid Earthwalkers, no wonder why they all died.
165-2149: I wonder what it is going to be like stepping on real ground. My instructor says, it I will feel a lot heavier. Then the other kids started making fun of me saying I was going to instantly get fat when I touch Morning Star. I hate them! I can’t wait to leave them all here on this stupid tin can. The instructor told them that all people were heavier when the Earthwalkers lived on Earth. It’s only because we live on CielMonde™ now that we are all lighter. Instructor seems old, I wonder if instructor is old enough to remember the weight of Earth.
168-2149: They’ve picked a date for the mission! They said that due to solar flares expected in the near future, they are stepping up the timetable! Only three weeks!! Klein says its cuz everyone on the station is running out of water faster than they predicted. He must hear this crazy stuff at secondary from his stupid friends, except James, James is nice.
173-2149: Why can’t my whole family go? I’m going to miss them. Père says it’s because not everyone is as brave as me, but I know that’s not true. Papa was one of the bravest and he didn’t get to go to Mars on Event 1.
181-2149: I don’t want to go. What if I don’t come back? What happens then? No one has really told me what the voyage is, just that we are going to Morning Star. What do they think we are going to find on Morning Star? Something we weren’t able to find on Mars? Something better than what we ruined on Earth?
184-2149: I asked instructor today and instructor said no one knows what we will find on Morning Star, but since Mars turned out to be such a disaster, that Morning Star is our last real hope of terraforming. Instructor said that no one has ever been to the surface of Morning Star, that the atmosphere is choked with carbon dioxide and it rains sulfuric acid; just like it does on Earth now. The first probes sent to Morning Star only lasted 19 minutes in the atmosphere before being completely dissolved by the acid rain. Only one probe made it to the surface, but was too badly damaged by that time to transmit anything useful back.
185-2149: They should send another probe! I DON’T WANT TO GO! James was at balance, and we talked for hours! It was probably only a few minutes, but it seemed like forever. I didn’t want to stop talking to him. I’m about to leave on a voyage and he finally gets brave enough to talk to me, of course that’s how it works out for me!
186-2149: Instructor says that the oceans choked first. The sheer imbalance of polypropylene to water became unmanageable by the marine ecosystem. How could they have been so stupid to make things they didn’t understand? Then dispose of it without any type of social obligation to community or environment? Instructor says that’s why polypropylene is banned on the station. We can’t risk it getting into our drinking water, it’s the only closed-system water we have left. When Earthwalkers finally woke up and realized that they were killing their own world, they started putting scientists in charge, but it was already too late. Insects and reptiles were the first ones to feel the impact of the climate transition, but they were deemed so ‘insignificant’ by the Earthwalkers that they barely took notice of their disappearance. Why did it take them so long to connect the dots? Didn’t they understand that everything was interconnected? The toxicity of the entire planet had reached an unbearable level, heavy metals and other toxins in the soil, air and water collected in the smallest animals’ brains and created ‘symptoms’ that they called other things at first. Rabies, Colony Collapse Disorder, mass die-offs, sea whales Cetacean strandings, all were misdiagnoses of a much larger problem, massive levels of contamination. That was the age now known as The Onset. When the oceans stopped the birds quickly followed. This was what finally got the Earthwalkers’ attention. It wasn’t that they were the most important, or the first to go, it was the fact that they were the most noticeable. No song birds in the mornings, no mass migrations of airborne beasts. That’s when Earthwalkers started to exhibit psychological problems of their own. The dramatic shift of something so noticeable had mass mental impact on the Earthwalker species. They started to exhibit signs of mass depression. I can’t even imagine, an entire species thrown into fits of depression together. The results were catastrophic the instructor said. Massive wars, genocide, murder, mass suicide, complete mayhem. So egotistical of them not to realize that something so small as a plant or bird would have had such a massive impact on their psyche. It must have been horrible seeing those changes all around and not being able to comprehend what was happening. Luckily for us, LesFaiseurs realized what was happening and helped a small group of us emerge from The Transition, although I can’t say I don’t dream about what it would be like to live back on Earth rather than in this tin can!
201-2149: So much has been going on! Our mission date had to be pushed back because of another failure to the AirExchange™ system on Deck D. Everyone that didn’t get out within the first few seconds (which was only a handful) is still in there, dead…just dead. Dropped right in the middle of whatever they were doing. All of us were at Event 2 headquarters when we heard about it. Kids I’m with, their whole families were in there. That’s where James lived too.
202-2149: Now I understand why we are going. We can’t continue on here, just like the Earthwalkers couldn’t continue on Earth. Another sustainable option has to be found. Terraforming Morning Star is our last hope.
203-2149: Mission day! This will be short, but I hope we are successful for everyone’s sake. I said bye to my family, seeing Père cry made me cry too. Last time I’ll probably see any of them; Klein didn’t seem to care.
303-2149: Suspended state sucked, although it slowed my aging, so I won’t complain about that. The slow-motion training thoughts they fed us while suspended are still messing with me. Sometimes I can’t tell if I am still going in slow-motion or regular speed. I’m not the only one though, one of the kids (well doesn’t seem like a kid anymore) forgot to chew and almost choked himself at first meal. We are only a few days away from Morning Star now. It is beautiful in the observatory portal, much better than the pictures.
305-2149: Our PulseEngine™ is failing and the engineer says it can’t be fixed. We are at the outer limit of the TerraPod™’s range, but we are going to have to push it, or stick around until total system failure. I keep thinking of those poor people on Deck D, but maybe they were spared a slow and agonizing die-off.
306-2149: Everything is set, we leave Event 2 today for Morning Star. It almost fills our entire observatory portal now, so bight iridescent blue. I’ll capture again once I settle into TerraPod™ life.
308-2149: Things happened in transit and not everything is functioning properly. Some of the flora decayed in transit, this will slow the terraforming process. Luckily life-support and the CoatAll™ system are working. I just hope the sodium bicarbonate coating actually counteracts the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere like command said it would. Dissolved in sulfuric acid would be worse than asphyxiated instantly I think.
315-2149: We reached the surface without incident! Even though I haven’t stepped foot on Morning Star yet, I do feel heavier, just like instructor said I would! I’m excited to think that I might be only days away from setting foot on actual ground. I wonder if Morning Star will ever have grass, enough to roll around in; like the old picture Père had.
315-2149: Drilling began only hours after we touched down. Current depth – 250 meters, it is progressing slower than we anticipated. Hopefully we are able to reach our target depth and get everything down before the coating system runs out.
317-2149: The incessant drilling, I can’t sleep. I hang somewhere in between asleep and awake. I can’t stop thinking back to my lessons while we drill down into the unknown. I can’t stop thinking about how it finally ended on Earth. One small pop of a bubble as the ice around it melted and the Antarctic wind took care of the rest. Sweeping the unknown bacteria out into the warmer ocean where it bloomed and infected everything. What little life there was left in the oceans was gone in weeks, reptiles quickly followed, then the avalanche hit land and was unstoppable. It ate everything in its path, Vostok Disease killed everything that was left. Only those that had already traveled to CielMonde™ survived. It must have been horrible, the pain, the suffering, watching everything around you rupture and hemorrhage open onto itself. This is what I lay half awake, half asleep dreaming of. My family hemorrhaging open in front of me, as we drill further and further into the unknown.
320-2149: We hit something unexpected today. A large void in the terra layers. Everything we had been taught about Morning Star was that no voids should exist within the predicted base layers of the planet. The void extended more than 30 meters down, which brought us to our target depth, so we halted drilling. Finally the grinding has stopped. Tomorrow I descend with the rest of Team 1.
321-2149: Initial readings of the atmosphere in the void are mixed. The atmosphere will not sustain life, but it is also not toxic. I’ll capture again once we reach the void in the MarkChute™.
322-2149: It is dark here. The only light this far beneath the toxic surface of Morning Star is the light we bring with us. The team has spread out to search the void. No signs of life.
322-2149: I don’t know exactly how to explain this, we have found the remains of something down here. Structures, not natural structures. Places where things could have lived…still no signs of life. But I did find something odd, a wet drive, a memory stick, an old disk, a IntelliDiary™ of some sort? I don’t know. We have agreed to bring it back to the TerraPod™ for analysis.
325-2149: I’m still exhausted from my venture down into the void. Everyone from Team 1 seems to feel the same way. The people that stayed in the TerraPod™ are fine, but those of us that went down have barely left bed in almost three days. I’m forcing myself up because one of the engineers found out how to extract the data from the disk I found. They said they matched the language to an ancient language, ancient even by Earth standards. I’m not sure what that means.
325-2149: It’s a Vid™! No one told me that! A Vid™ of a woman, a human woman, or at least that’s what she appears to be. In her 40s, speaking in an ancient tongue that stopped being spoken on Earth well before the Miocene Epoch. Her hair is brown, her eyes are sunken and brown, her skin looks tired, but I can tell that at one time she was probably considered beautiful. The translation process is painfully slow, and they have to keep rewinding the Vid™ to play it again to capture the dialect she is using. How could a human Vid™ be left on Morning Star? Event 2 Command had told us that no one had ever been to Morning Star. The technology seemed so old, could Earthwalkers have made it to Morning Star and forgotten? Or was this part of a larger conspiracy that was never meant to be discovered?
327-2149: They have translated the entire video. I don’t know how to relay its message to you, so I will capture it here in its entirety:
Please help us; if by the time you receive this message there is still any hope for us. We did not understand what we were doing. It wasn’t until it was too late that we realized we had made grave mistakes. The atmosphere has become toxic and forced us underground. We are slowly dying, the air here is becoming unsustainable. Our last chance is to break free of the atmosphere and attempt transit to Earth. Earth’s surface remains untouched, unscarred by our greed. It will give us a fresh start if we survive, a new beginning. A chance to learn from our mistakes here on Venus. Wish us hope!
We were already here!?! Humans had already lived on Morning Star, or Venus as they called it! Then destroyed it and traveled to Earth only to destroy that also? Human devastation caused them both. Who are we? Or more appropriately what are we? Habitual planet destroyers? Serial environment killers? How can we not stop ourselves? How can we not learn from our past mistakes? How many worlds will our species bring to ruin?
330-2149: All work has halted since the translation of the Vid™. Many have already sent themselves out, not wanting to participate in the closed loop of destruction any longer. I cannot bring myself to eat. The work we were sent here to accomplish…what use is it now? Knowing that if we are successful in re-terraforming Venus we will only bring destruction back upon the planet in the future. It’s pointless.
332-2149: The coating system has failed. The hull of the TerraPod™ will be breached in a matter of hours. This will be my last entry. I’m sorry Père, we have all failed.
by Nichole Duncan | Dec 22, 2018 |
Through dense clouds of smog that clung listlessly to the dilapidated buildings looming over the crumbling roads, Ivy Paterson navigated a path through the trash choked sidewalks. She covered her nose with a swath of filthy fabric to filter the toxic air as she made her way to work. She stopped at the run-down newsstand, as she did every morning, and quickly read the front page of the day’s paper since she couldn’t afford to buy a copy to keep. Reading the first page became a habit for her that began when she was a girl and her mother would collect old newspapers to teach Ivy how to read, since they couldn’t afford to send her to school. Five years ago, when Ivy turned ten and was eligible for working papers, she made sure to walk by the stand every day on her way to Mrs. O’Leary’s Bakery and read the front page. Mike, the owner of the stand, tolerated her loitering and even let her keep some of the old papers that didn’t sell. Although Ivy did not know, for she was just a girl and did not yet understand the extend of her destitution, Mike pitied her.
She skipped past the familiar stories: fossil fuels have almost entirely run out and the remaining supply has risen to even more astronomical prices than the day before, the death rate and unemployment rate has dramatically increased since the week prior, and the economy is still in shambles. Nothing new. One story on the front page caught her eye in particular. The boldfaced headline jumped out at her with, “Citizens traveling to the Mar’s colony landed safely.” Normally, Ivy didn’t care for news about the terraforming efforts on Mars, since she didn’t entirely understand what terraforming was. She also learned from her father that Mars was an empty planet with a toxic atmosphere, so she didn’t see how it was too different from Earth or why people wanted to go there so badly. This time was different, though, since the most recent Mar’s expedition included volunteer citizens to test out the new colony, and Ivy’s friend Tsukiko happened to be one of them. Tsukiko worked at the bakery with Ivy until she left with her family several months ago for the Mar’s expedition. Ivy’s family had applied to go as well, but so did countless other families and only fifty people were accepted due to resource limitations, or that’s at least what Ivy read in the paper.
People were desperate for a chance to escape the poverty on Earth, and a chance at a new life on a freshly terraformed planet seemed like a second chance to many. Plus, NASA paid the colonists a large sum of money to participate in the first test colony. For poor families like Tsukiko’s, this sum was ten times more than their yearly income. Ivy was secretly jealous of Tsukiko for getting to be apart of the first colony, especially with how exciting her parents made the expedition sound, but more than her jealousy, she missed her friend. There weren’t many young girls around Ivy’s age for her to talk to, and those that were in her district were often working on the street corners, offering their services in exchange for food or sometimes money. The special ones worked at Madame Celeste’s Parlor. Ivy heard rumors of what these girls did – what they were forced to do – but she didn’t know, not really. Her parents protected her from such things.
Even though the sun had just begun to rise, the temperature was already suffocating, and Ivy fanned herself with a scrap of paper she found on the sidewalk as a reprieve from the December heat. By the time she reached the bakery, Mrs. O’Leary had already opened the cracked windows for ventilation and started the fire in the oven. The small kitchen in the back was windowless and dark, and Ivy took the liberty of lighting the candles, so the room would be well-lit when the bakers arrived.
“We’re out of wood today,” Mrs. O’Leary said tiredly as she stoked the small oven fire with a blackened poker. “Would you be a dear and collect scrap for the oven?”
“Of course.”
Ivy quickly grabbed the trashcan with two rusty wheels that they kept for this reason and a spare fire poker. She made her way back outside and spent her morning collecting anything that would burn in the streets and retuned in time to add fuel to the dying fire. Ivy worked through her duties of the day by kneading dough and stoking the fire in the already stiflingly hot room. Customers came and went as they always did, and always fewer than the day before: they were running out of money and the bakery was running out of supplies to make bread. After the economy collapsed when fossil fuels began to run out decades ago, food shortages brought waves of famine to the poorer populations, which were becoming the majority of people. Now, with fossil fuels almost entirely gone, things were worse than ever.
Before her eyes, the city was collapsing, and it wouldn’t be long before she and her family went with it.
♦
At the end of the night, long after the sun had set, and the city had closed its eyes to sleep, Ivy made her way home through the dark. The smell at night was unbearable: the oppressive sun had scorched the world and the city was full of rot and ruin. The heat awakened decay and the putrid garbage and festering raw sewage overwhelmed the streets and alleyways. With the absence of garbage collection services or functional indoor plumbing, the city was a nightmarish pit of death and disease. Ivy did her best to avoid stepping in questionable reeking piles, but it was hard with so little light. The moon and stars were but a fable to Ivy, for she had never seen it behind the thick layers of sickly smog. Her parents would tell her about this brilliant white orb that would glow at night and how the sky would glisten with sparks of fire scattered across the darkness, and she would look at them with wonder for remembering such lovely things of a dead world. Ivy thought of this hidden moon and wondered if Tsukiko could see it from Mars, and if it was as beautiful as her parents promised. She hoped she could.
As she was lost in thought about the worlds outside of hers, Ivy became careless and stepped on something soft. She looked down and although she could only see a murky outline, her nose rather than her eyes told her what she stepped on: the body of an emaciated child. She covered her mouth to keep from gagging and hurried through the street, making sure to pay better attention to her surroundings. She felt sad for the starved boy, but the stench told her that he had been dead for a while and there was nothing she could’ve done. Besides, she saw the remains of the dead rotting in the street every day. It was the living sleeping in the streets that she had to worry about. Girls in her neighborhood would sometimes come home with unfocused eyes and blood between their legs, and some wouldn’t come home at all. Still, she was one of the lucky ones who never had to find out what happened to girls like that. The only figures that disturbed her on her walks home were beggars asking for food, and nothing more.
In the distance, she focused on the single source of light that beckoned for her to come near like a beacon full of promises. She buried her fears and worries in the deepest part of her mind and decided to stray from her usual path to follow the light. Tonight would be special, she decided. When she neared the base of the sky scraper, she gazed up at the light coming from the top. The building was in disrepair like the rest, but this one was different: it was cleaner, and someone had taken care to keep it from collapsing, but most of all, it was magic. On the top floor, light flooded the rooms and pierced the darkness for miles. As she peered into the room, she was captivated by what she saw. There were countless people inside, all were well dressed and without a speck of dirt on them. They were laughing and dancing and drinking something out of clear glasses. One man had something in his mouth that looked like it was on fire and a woman was leaning in close to whisper in his ear. Against one wall was a table full of food and Ivy knew that none of these spectacular people had ever gone hungry. She realized that she had been starring for too long and that it was well past the time she was usually home, so she hurried into the bleak and empty darkness with the last vestige of the past clinging to life behind her.
She felt warm inside for the rest of her walk and pushed the image of the dead boy out of her mind and replaced it with the spectacle of prosperity she witnessed through the light in the building. Her parents told her stories about this light that they called electricity, and even said they had possessed it when they were children. Even so, Ivy thought of electricity as an enchanted mystery that brought safety and opulence to those who possessed it. She mourned the inevitable loss of this light, for she knew that it too would wink out when its keepers run out of fuel, and then the darkness of her city will be complete.
♦
When she got home, Ivy climbed the rickety stairs of her dilapidated apartment building and navigated her way through the complete darkness of this interior space. She opened the door to the bedroom and found her parents already sleep. She was about to undress for bed when her mother stirred and lit the candle beside her bundle of blankets on the floor. Her face became visible in the dim light of the candle and Ivy could make out the layers of wrinkles that became her mother’s face where beauty and health one lived.
“Ivy, is that you?” her mother whispered so as to not wake her father.
“Yes mama, I’m sorry I’m late. I took the long way home.”
“Looking at the light again,” her mother said, her tone weighed down with sadness that Ivy didn’t understand.
Ivy just nodded and apologized for waking her when her mother asked her to come closer. Ivy knelt down beside the tattered blankets and her mother took her hand before speaking.
“Your friend arrived at the colony today,” she began slowly.
“I know, I read it in the paper.”
Her mother smiled grimly and kissed Ivy’s hand.
“You are a good girl for reading when I’m not here,” she squeezed Ivy’s hand tighter and continued. “The paper did not tell the full story. Sometimes powerful people pay the writers to publish things that aren’t true.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those on the expedition didn’t survive.”
“What?” Ivy asked as her stomach dropped. This couldn’t be, she read that they were safe just this morning.
“The environment wasn’t stable enough to support life. They all suffocated,” her mother said carefully, watching Ivy’s face for her reaction.
“But how? I read that NASA made it safe,” Ivy said, close to tears now.
“They tried, but even their technology isn’t advanced enough to terraform a planet. They can’t fight nature.”
“What about Tsukiko?” Ivy asked in disbelief.
Her friend couldn’t possibly be dead. The government officials in charge of funding the program said the expedition would be the beginning of a new era, a new world. They were supposed to leave their rotting planet for a better one.
Ivy’s mother said nothing and just held her as she cried. Her father awoke from the sound and wrapped his arms around his wife and daughter, already knowing what happened since he learned the truth about the expedition when his wife did. There, the three of them sat huddled together on the dusty floor, clinging to each other as the flame clung to the wick before burning out, and leaving the family in the dark in their dead city.
