As Far as the Eye Can See
Flash fiction
“It’s so quiet up here, I see why you love it so much,” Ban said.
“The iDrive made silent flight possible,” I said, “Otherwise it’d be too loud to even hear yourself think.”
The occasional billowing cloud drifted below us, obscuring the rows of tall complexes that made the earth look more like a gray concrete monster than a living planet.
“You know, it was a lot prettier up here, before.”
“Before…?”
“Oh, right. You’ve probably never even seen the pictures.”
“Sorry, you’re talking in weird terms, I don’t follow,” Ban laughed. She was so young. I wondered what it must have been like, to see the earth for the first time as a round ball of metal. I pushed the yoke forward and we began to descend back towards earth. We’d climbed nearly to forty thousand meters, the limit for the smaller iDrive glider.
“I meant before the Confederation began,” I said, “Before the mass migration to Asia and the construction of the Complex. I glanced over to see her reaction. She looked from the window towards me, startled at the words.
“Before the Confederation?” She says it cautiously like it's her first time saying a word she’s never said before. It’s likely she hasn’t, given the rules in the Complex. No one talks of the past, only the future. For survival.
“Yes, before. Before the world turned gray and the Confederation united to save the last of humanity.”
“No, they don’t… show us anything about that.”
I sighed.
“The world was beautiful, once. Up here, the whole world was laid out in front of you. Green, blue, white, black, red. The earth was filled with colors, enough to make you cry every time you saw it.”
She was silent.
“But then the Confederation happened,” she said after a moment.
“Yep. Then we started strangling the earth.”
“Well, there’s nowhere else for anyone to go.” She said it defensively, as if I had just attacked her worldview, which — however inadvertently — I suppose I had.
“I don’t mean to offend you, but the Confederation had plenty of other options. The ocean, the moon, space, the Mars colonies — ”
“There weren’t the resources to even make a dent in the population, it was impossible at the time. Now, maybe it’s different.”
“But now it’s already too late,” I interrupted. “There’s nothing we can do to change the current course. We could have prepared decades ago, we could have built floating cities and sky-homes. We could have flown on one of these, still getting sunlight, still growing and breathing. Zero moving parts, they can fly forever.” I paused my tirade and Ban was quiet.
The sky ahead of us was clear, save for a few small thunderstorms pouring rain towards earth. The iDrive wouldn’t take a rough storm, even with the mag-shields up, so I opted to gain a little more altitude. Beside me Ban was shaking, a fit response to finding out that one’s world was really doomed. She finally spoke as she gazed out the window.
“Was it really colorful?”
“It was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Earth was a beacon of hope, at one point. Not a monstrosity on which mankind was condemned to live out its days.” I probably spoke too eloquently and sounded like it was something I’d rehearsed, but it wasn’t. It was only the truth.
“The ones on the colonies are the lucky ones, right?”
“Lucky until their supplies run out and there’s no one left on earth to send them more.”
“They can grow their own food, though, and produce their own oxygen.”
I shook my head.
“They can barely sustain themselves. Maybe they’ll live, maybe they won’t. It’s impossible to know.”
Our airspeed increased as I swapped the generator power back over to the iDrive.
“I want to show you something before we go back down.”
“What, so soon?”
“Three hours is the amount of time I rented the airspace and if I’m late they’ll charge me double what I paid. That’s a new rule too, since after the Confederation.”
Ban still flinches when I say Confederation.
“This is the only place you can talk about whatever you want without fear of the military police or the Confederation. This is where you’re the freest.”
Ban actually looked relieved at my words and didn’t mind the breakneck speed at which we were racing above the ground.
“I — Is the situation really as bad as you say it is?”
“We’re strangling the earth. We’re suffocating it, we’re locking it in a garage with a running car.”
Some mild turbulence rocked the cabin and Ban gripped the side of her seat until her knuckles turn white.
“It’s okay, we’re almost there,” I said. She managed a smile.
Fifteen minutes later and I pushed the yoke forward, diving even lower towards the ground.
“Won’t the MP’s pick us up if the mag-shields aren’t running?”
Ban was astute to notice I hadn’t flipped them on.
“No, there’s no need. Not here. You’ll see why in a minute.”
A low bank of clouds had rolled over the gray Complex below. I monitored the airspeed gauge and iDrive counters to make sure the wings didn’t rip off and pulled out of the dive when the altimeter read 3200 meters.
We cut through the air just above the clouds, the silent iDrive propelling us as fast as I dared. I watched the navtab carefully, waiting until I was sure we were well past the last Complex before I pushed the yoke forward and dove into the thick clouds.
Ban gasped as, suddenly, we could see nothing but white. All was quiet for several seconds, only the slight hum of the iDrive to keep us company. The turbulence hit us momentarily, but it wasn’t long before we broke free of the clouds. One moment we were immersed in a blanket of white, and the next we were soaring low over the ocean. Behind us, the gray walls of the Complex sat, dark against the blue ocean.
“Usually you can’t fly past the wall due to the weather, but on a day like today there aren’t many limits.”
Ban slowly shook her head as she watched the water pass by underneath the glass floor of the cabin.
“This is amazing,” she breathed.
She’d likely never seen anything remotely like it, being trapped in the Complex her whole life. Most people never saw the light of day, much less get the chance to fly. Slowly, the blue water underneath us began to turn a muddied gray. Ban noticed it.
“What’s this, the water’s not blue anymore!”
“Yeah, this is how much of the ocean we have left.”
Her eyes grew wide.
“It’s… it’s ice then?”
“Yeah, it’s all ice.”
“But it’s almost the end of summer!” she said.
“Yeah, it is.”
“That means…”
“That means next year it probably won’t thaw half this distance.”
I pulled the yoke gently and turned us around in a long swoop that sent us tilting sideways over the frozen ocean. We were flying a few hundred feet off the ice, but icebergs were prone to appear overnight and were difficult to see against the white skies. The black and gray wall of the Complex loomed ahead in the distance, late afternoon storms littering coast. We flew past the ice and I tilted the yoke forward until we were almost skimming the water. Ban’s eyes shone as I’d never seen them shine before.
“This is breathtaking,” she said. Tears fell from her eyes, the immense beauty and rush of flying finally catching up to her. I almost hated to say anything, to break that moment of beauty and awe, so I waited until we were closer to the Complex.
“This is probably the last time either of us will see the ocean,” I finally said, “Next year the world will be nothing. Nothing but gray and white, as far as the eye can see.”
I don’t normally write anything environmental, but this sort of sprang into my head the other day and I couldn’t get it out until I wrote this. Thank you so much for reading if you’ve made it this far, I know this one wasn’t the most exciting!
