The Life Collection - Beauty Precedes Reality
A Sci-Fi Short Story
Having slipped on his seal-blubber-lined jacket, Marcel walked out of his hut to the familiar feeling of ice being crunched underneath his boots. His hood managed to keep the snow away from his cheeks, but the cold took away much of the little strength that he had left in him. He looked around to see if anyone needed any assistance, as was his duty, and his eyes settled on Peter, the mayor, who had just come out of his shelter.
“Marcel, come here please,” Peter called out, his voice barely audible because of the high winds that had become so familiar in the last few months. Marcel crossed a small ice bridge and walked whilst intermittently skidding, until he was right next to his mayor. “Have you gathered the citizens in the main arena?” Peter asked, as he ran over the upcoming speech in his head.
“I’m surprised that you need to ask me,” Marcel countered with his usual self-confidence. He checked his watch, which hadn’t frozen despite the extreme weather. “Your speech starts in one minute,” he said, hoping to be inside before that long. Without a word, Peter led his vice-mayor through the snow until they reached the back entrance to the arena. Marcel stepped onto the stage first to provide the introductory welcome and the crowd hushed out of veneration for its leaders and potential saviours.
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Your mayor, Peter, would like to give a small speech to address the impending problems in our new-found world. I give you, your mayor!” The crowd began to clap as Marcel shuffled to the right to leave the microphone to his leader.
“Thank you, Marcel. I will try to keep this short so I will jump straight to the crux of the matter. We need to find a way to increase our crop yield, because the increasing death rates do not fill me with much hope: people are starving; we will run out of coal quite soon, which we have to use more sparingly if we are to use it at all in the future; our steam power is inefficient and so it looks like very soon all we will have left to provide enough energy to grow crops will be our wood, which of course works in tandem with the sunlight that passes through the transparent roofs and walls of our complexes. Even then, the indoor gardens are not producing the most plentiful food and the sunlight is quite weak for most of the day given the world that we now find ourselves in. If anyone has any suggestions or queries they can take them either to me or Marcel or to The Community Twelve Council. Thank you for your time.”
The crowd waited for Peter, Marcel and their entourage to exit from the back-entrance, before filing out themselves whilst muttering about the impending issues.
“Peter, can we talk?” a voice asked and Peter turned to see Shem, The Council’s leader, hunched behind a support-beam. “How many people in our community have died since the ice age began?” he asked when Peter was still walking towards him.
“One hundred and eighty, which means that just over seven hundred of us remain,” Peter replied. “Why do you ask?”
“The population is going down,” Shem began. “Therefore the amount of food we require is also decreasing. Think about that.” Peter looked shocked when he heard the man’s words and anger flared in his eyes.
“You mean to say that we should keep our food levels low so that more people die?” Peter asked, but he already knew the answer to his question. “You disgust me, Shem, you really do. What about you and me? Do you suggest that we risk dying ourselves?”
“Everyone is thinking it,” The Council leader replied, not in the least bit hurt by Peter’s words. “I’m sure it has crossed even your mind before.” Peter stood still and glared at one of the community’s most important men in shame. With nothing left to say, he turned and made his way to the farmhouse to see if the remaining animals were surviving, leaving Shem to grin to himself at his final jibe. The door took some pushing due to the ice that had made a seal on the hinge, but eventually Peter made his way into the enclosure. A lot of the livestock and domestic animals had frozen to death because of the snow, but Community Twelve had over three hundred animals in their farm and had managed to collect some edible meat from the dead ones. It was easy to keep it fresh because of all the snow, but they still needed to do whatever they could to breed the remaining stock.
“Peter!” shouted a voice from the other side of the farm. The mayor lifted his head to see the chief farmer, Darius, waving him over. Peter knew that the matter was urgent as soon as he began to make the small walk to his compatriot. He moved quickly over to where Darius was standing and took a sip of water from his pouch to rehydrate himself. The water had been made by melting snow and ice and Peter knew that drought would not be a problem whilst the ice age lasted.
“Come into the back room with me,” Darius said without outlining what information he had to exchange. “Don’t leave when you understand what’s going on,” he said as soon as he had touched the door handle. “Let us explain everything afterwards. You just open the door and I’ll wait out here to make sure no-one comes in.” Peter knew that there was something hidden within his words, but still pushed open the door and stepped inside in a sudden fear that they were threatening the safety of the community.
However, he didn’t find himself inside a closet as he had expected; instead he felt warm air rush around him and looked up to see an unnaturally blue sky: there was no snow on the ground, no snow in the air and Peter stood outside in an open field. He couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening and yet he felt no need to. The mayor lay on the grass for a moment in joy before feeling his body sinking. He looked at the ground below him and saw sand instead of grass. Peter was lying in a desert with no other life around him and decided that Darius had injected him with a hallucinogenic drug which had induced these experiences of natural beauty, silence and peace. He knew that there was nothing truly beautiful in the world. Peter stood up and gazed about him before shrinking away from the glaring heat of the late-afternoon sun.
The scene changed again, but on this occasion it was familiar. Snow fell from the sky and began to settle on Peter’s hair before he shook it away to the ground. He saw his very own hut next to him and the great ice bridge that separated Community Twelve into East and West. He was back in the real world of the Ice Age. The setting disappeared.
The door of the large closet at the back of the farmhouse opened and Darius walked in, followed by two of his head farmers. The room was how Peter had originally expected it to be: there was food for the animals, shelves filled with pots of paint and cans of pesticide.
“None of that was real,” Peter said, beginning to make light of what had happened. He thought for a moment and was frightened by a dawning realisation. “Is the Ice Age real?”
“I’m glad to tell you that it’s not,” Darius replied, but he didn’t seem any happier than his mayor currently was.
“Have you been letting people die for a science project? We’ve spent three months in this Ice Age!” Peter shouted and his anger surprised the farmers. He was more surprised by their surprise than they were at his outburst, however.
“Peter, no-one has died. As soon as someone became ill, we created their ‘death’ using our experiment and then took them away to a hotel,” Darius explained. “Perhaps we kept the experiment running for too long, but we needed to make sure that our world-simulation programme worked. And it’s finished now.”
“What is it?” Peter asked, trying to calm himself.
“Through a mixture of hypnosis, a man-made environment, real objects, false video projections and that clip attached to your jacket, we were able to recreate the world around us into anything we wished.”
Peter looked down and saw a small metal object hooked onto his coat, having not noticed its presence earlier.
“That’s incredible,” the mayor mumbled to himself, but he didn’t let the farmers hear him. Then a thought came to him. “What’s really outside?” he asked.
“Have a look,” Darius replied, showing a glimpse of a grin on his face.
Peter opened the door and started to walk through the farm complex, avoiding animal cages as he went. He made his way to what he thought was outside, but came to rows of expansive rooms that stretched for miles in all directions.
“Community Twelve was an enormous house?” Peter asked when Darius had reached his side.
“Yes. And the whole test was funded by the American government.”
“What will you use it for?” Peter asked, staring through the rooms that only contained around five objects each.
“Don’t you worry yourself about that,” Darius replied. Peter looked back to face him, but let the reply pass, as he was too fascinated by the real Community Twelve.
“No, Darius, let’s tell him,” came a voice from within the house that had been their makeshift home. Marcel came into the ‘mayor’s’ vision a moment later, looking rather more authoritative than he had before the speech in the main arena. “He has run this little world for the duration of the whole project without knowing it; his glory days are now over and I think he deserves something for that,” Marcel continued. “I will put you out of your misery, Peter. You may remember what Shem was saying about the need to let people die so that the want for resources would decrease. It’s all about supply and demand, but I’m sure a mayor like you understands all that. Well that is exactly what we plan to do with this project. We shall visit places like Africa and Southern Asia and create ice ages, sandstorms and all other kinds of disasters. People will die without them knowing it was actually us and it will be done to control the world’s over-population issue. It’s what we in the business call a win-win situation: the world will have less people and more resources over time. Then, we will gradually turn those previously poor and barren lands into thriving, beautiful places for the Americans, British and other wealthy people to live in by claiming that the geographical miracle has come about from climate change, a lie that was created by us a few years ago. In actual fact, all we will be using is our little programme to change reality. It may sound harsh, but in the end it will be beneficial to mankind. I’ll give you an example of controlling the population right now.”
Marcel cocked his pistol, took aim and sent a bullet straight into Peter’s chest. The world’s population continued to increase all the same.
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