We came through it by the skin of our teeth. Like a toddler heaving herself up onto a bench, we kicked and scrabbled and bootstrapped enough technology that the whole thing didn’t fall away into nothing. There’s solar. There’s wind. There’s hydro. There’s geothermal. There’s nuclear. There’s a bacteria that eats organic matter and turns it into electricity. All told, these sources produce around 30% of the energy we used to gobble up from oil and gas and coal. So things have changed.
But then, there are fewer people too. Estimates are we’re down 2.5 billion. Maybe more. We watched them go, we had very little option. When the seas rose, when the deserts expanded, we had the gift of thinscreens and live streams and video calls from phones in distant places, with people saying: help. There was instantaneous translation by then, we knew what they were saying.
Tsunamis and rising tides took tens of millions between the Cambodia-Vietnam peninsula and Bangladesh and across the Caribbean. People tried to run, but there was nowhere for them to go. Borders were closed in India and China — what else could we do? The deserts expanded in Sudan and Chad and Ethiopia. The waters took coastal settlements in Colombia and Costa Rica, Cuba and Miami. The Caribbean islands are gone now. People came in tiny boats, but there were too many, and we were afraid, and we knew they would not stop coming, so we turned them away. Back into the brown rushing water. We knew how the story of the flood went. We’d managed to provide for ourselves, but there’s only so much room in an ark.
That was when they started livestreaming and calling. Mobile phone technology was everywhere — remember that? — cheaper than land-lines, more reliable, you could guess at numbers until you hit something. Prod the buttons with one finger, make a line between yourself and another human, far away. They just wanted to talk. Drawing power from their little generators, sucking out their last sips of fuel on us. They said: here we are. Remember me. This is my name. This is who I was. Remember. Let me tell you this story of myself, my family, this way my father had of knotting the cords on his shirt, let me show you. Remember this. Those were the bearable ones, the elegiac calls. Many of them were: fuck you. Fuck you in your wealthy nation with coastal defences. Fuck you with your resettlement to hastily-erected government breeze-block buildings. Fuck you with your carefully-calculated rations. Fuck you, screamed down the line, an assault on the face, a scrabbling feeling inside the chest.
Many of us didn’t want to take these calls. They weren’t pleasant. There were ways to block them. They found ways to spoof the number of a close friend or an employer. Still, you could find a way to be rid of them. But many of us took them anyway. Just to listen, which was all we could do. The waters were rising and the rations were thin and the accommodations were overcrowded and we were the ones who had screwed this whole thing up but they were the ones who were paying so there seemed some justice in listening. Many of us answered the calls. Many of us cried. As the lights went out, many of us used the last days of unlimited, free-flowing power to answer just one more ringing phone.
But it took its toll. Probably that is why there has been so little opposition to the energy-ration. We did not remember our communications technologies fondly. We found it hard to bring back to mind the delightful screens that had shown us reruns ofBattlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead from the screens where we’d seen people die. All of us had seen someone die. You might try to protect the children from it, but they wanted to answer the calls as much as the rest of us did. It was our last collective moment of immediacy.
There is enough energy, now, just about. Enough to run the farms, and to show a movie every once in a while. Enough to run a version of the internet — slow but practical, text only. We did think the internet was useful; we don’t find we miss the streaming videos. There are wide, empty roads and enough power for large self-drive vehicles to carry passengers around the country. It is hard for the children to believe these roads were once filled with cars. ‘But where did you all need to go? What was the point of going?’ We can’t remember ourselves. Did we really leave lights on all night in shop windows? On advertising hoardings? We must be remembering that wrongly.
And it feels peaceful. Like waking up from a fever dream. Like the day you know you’ve drunk enough now and you’re done with drinking, you must be or it will consume you. Like that day when you kneel on the floor and cry uncle, we are done with guzzling. We re-use, re-purpose, recycle. Every object must last a lifetime, dozens of lifetimes if we plan it right. We think of the future more than the past, which is as well. We find, these days, we think of ourselves more as a collective than an individual. It is not me who will survive, if something survives, it is us. If we are worth saving, it is for what we all are together, not for any particular one of us. We have rediscovered this old way of thinking.
Bodies wash ashore, we bury them. We give them names we remember from the calls we received in the time before, or we name them for the bird we saw in the sky on the day they came to the beach. There are fewer each year; sometimes they are newly-dead, sometimes it is a little boat of whitened bones, kept afloat by a caprice of the ocean. We are grateful. We live simpler lives in the shadows of a vanished civilization. We are not the first to do so. We try to remember.
What does our climate future look like to you? Write your own story below.
