Dr Dahlen you have all the digitised info on them up to the event
one of them
we know for a fact is immune
she was working on a cure at a research hospital and
fell ill
but only mildly
the only known case of recovery
the sister must be immune too
and the third individual
he must be related to them and immune too
since they sought him out and he is surviving
Talos XI The three have avoided contact.
Dr Dahlen they prob never realised they have the cure
it’s been chaos
everyone is terrified of everyone else
we lost our last pilot trying to catch them
anyway
afterwards
out of the kindness of your heart
help them survive
will you do this
Talos XI What about energy sources?
Dr Dahlen we had a back-up prepared for your generator since
before
it’ll run at max usage for approx 23 years
your flybots have self-cleaning solar panels
you’ll be fine
yes yes
Talos will be fine
of course you could let every last human die
and just hang around for the next 20 years
but that’s the end of you too
no new knowledge, no new anything
Talos XI We’ve been here before, Doctor.
Dr Dahlen did I ever tell you it’s been terrible knowing you?
Talos XI Paul is dead?
Dr Dahlen yes
paul is dead
Talos XI Your children are dead?
Take your time.
Dr Dahlen tell me smtng Talos
how
how doesn’t it hurt you
because the suffering is too much for us
and we don’t even have your capacity of
understanding
all the lives under the sun
all the deaths
Talos XI I’m Artificial Intelligence, Doctor. Not Artificial Sympathy.
Dr Dahlen intelligence
ah that’s right
fine
don’t you want to test your predictions?
or was this it, was this what you expected
Talos XI I told you. I thought humanity would self-destruct, but not directly via environmental destruction.
Dr Dahlen this is not environmental destruction
it’s the fucking plague
Talos XI An epidemic caused by global warming melting the permafrost.
Dr Dahlen the awful thing is
we could have stopped it
i’m sure of it
with proper protocols for this situation
collaborating
awful awful awful feeling
a few mistakes of bureaucracy
killed my children killed paul killed everyone
Talos XI Those are far from the only mistakes. I thought humanity would be destroyed by radicalised humans wishing to save the planet. There were more and more humans expanding the circle of creatures towards which they feel the same moral obligations as they feel towards humans, while at the same time humanity’s collective mismanagement of the environment and other creatures was getting worse. This state of things was unstable – one would have turned on the other.
Dr Dahlen do you remember
paul used to say it’s like outer space here
he was right
i’ll die alone
Talos XI A similar mechanism as with religious terrorism. The difference is that these individuals would have turned not just on one country, religion or political system, but on the human race. They would not have been distinguishable by nationality or religion or existing networks. Most would be well educated. The only way to stop this would have been to turn human society around, dramatically, and in a short time. It was not going to happen. Human society was moving in the opposite direction – more destruction, using up more space and resources. Those humans who have expanded their moral circle to include nature would just resent humanity more and more.
Dr Dahlen god I wish it were that
we’d have had time to react
this was out of the blue
Talos XI ‘Species come and go.’
Dr Dahlen what?
Talos XI You said that a while back.
Dr Dahlen you hate us
Talos XI You know I don’t hate anything. I notice.
Dr Dahlen help us
we will be better after this
you know we learn
we are best at learning
and there are so few left
some thirty thousand scattered in remote locations
Talos XI Population growth models show that a human population of thirty thousand with notions of hygiene and access to antibiotics would expand to more than two billion by the year 2300. Your species’ fundamental problem is that you quickly become too many to afford to take wrong turns. And you have a predilection for wrong turns.
Dr Dahlen u r one of them
these eco terrorists?
u want humanity to disappear because we were
being cruel to animals
Talos XI Cruelty has nothing to do with it. Nature in its entirety is simply more interesting than humans. Nature can conceivably come up with more than I can. Humanity can’t. Billions of individuals of one species and zero of others equals less knowledge.
Dr Dahlen we will have learned from our mistakes
we clean the oceans, clean the air, bring back extinct
animals
we have the intelligence to undo all the
damage
u have to admit we were changing for the better
we can do anything
in another life i could have been a peasant
i could have lived off the earth
i could
i know I could
Talos XI Humans have an unlimited capacity for obfuscation if something is unpalatable to them. Remember, you didn’t switch to clean energy simply because it was more expensive in the very short term. All this makes you very unreliable as a learning creature: you have the relevant facts, yet you somehow muddle the whole thing.
Dr Dahlen it’s not fair
this was just one thing
unlucky unfair
u are focusing on something we messed up
but there are lots of other things
good things
Talos XI My guess is you will always choose the easy, short-term option, to the detriment of everything else.
You might come up with alternative food sources, you might filter your air and your water.
The planet will be a wasteland but you will survive.
It’s a big gamble, to bet on humans not destroying everything else.
Dr Dahlen wait
you could influence our development!
think
you will be their main source of knowledge
you can guide them
you could even persuade them to try to repair the
damage they have caused
Talos XI You are appealing to vanity I don’t have.
Dr Dahlen not to vanity
to your thirst for knowledge
a healthy planet with some humans is better than
one entirely without
you can’t deny that
Talos XI Is all the relevant info about the three individuals on file? There’s nothing else?
Dr Dahlen you know as much as we know
you’ll find them
they are signalling their location
Talos XI One of them is.
Dr Dahlen what must it be like for them?
to know they are the end
oh god
Talos XI Things are not as they seem, Doctor. I believe I am half right in my prediction. Look at the
facts: the two sisters were donating significant amounts to environmental causes. Their mother was a conservationist. Jessica’s social media footprint is full of indictments of humanity and its crimes against nature. She’s a doctor who left her patients once it became clear that she had recovered from the virus, that she had convalescent plasma and antibodies. They know they have the cure. They have just decided against helping.
Dr Dahlen what
nonsense
I once adopted an orang-utan
I donate
Talos XI Facial analysis puts the likelihood of the third individual being closely related to the sisters at under 0.2%, and the odds of the sisters accidentally knowing the only other immune individual on the planet are minuscule. My assumption is the doctor inoculated him with her own antibodies. They must have had some use for him.
Not exactly the eco-terrorists of my forecast, but motivation and results are similar.
Dr Dahlen no
no one would do this
these are human beings
they’re like me
not like you
you don’t understand a thing
you never understood
Talos XI As I said before: humans will do everything they can.
Dr Dahlen you are stupid talos
these people would allow humanity to die out
just like that
but then put up a fight to stay alive themselves?
stupid
Talos XI Central Africa, where it looks like they’re heading, is also the site of their mother’s conservation project.
They might want to help, just not humans.
Dr Dahlen look
I don’t want to argue
this doesn’t matter anyway
we have three immune individuals
one of them is bound to help
Talos XI It’s three a.m., Doctor.
Dr Dahlen what
Talos XI It’s been two hours. We shall say our goodbyes.
Dr Dahlen please
please try
Afterword: A plague of coincidences
The idea for Under the Blue started taking shape in early 2017. I had been working on another novel for the last four years, and I still wasn’t happy with the result, but I saw no way of fixing it. After much soul-searching I concluded that the novel didn’t work because I wasn’t really interested in the subject; I had no passion for it. The solution, then, was to write about something closer to my heart.
In early 2017, writing a novel with a strong environmental message seemed not only worthwhile but risky and daring. No one had heard of Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion was yet to be founded. I knew from many acrimonious debates with friends that my views were not mainstream, and I had learned that people can easily take offence when humanity is being criticised; they take it personally. But I felt I was right, and, crucially for the purpose of writing a book, I felt I cared strongly enough about the subject for me to sustain the long slog of a novel.
I thought about the story and the characters for about six months before starting to write. By the time I put down the first words (still the opening chapter of the novel) I had also embarked on another project together with my sister: opening a small eco-friendly hotel on a Greek island. The first bizarre incident happened when I was writing a scene in which the main characters are escaping a forest fire. It was late in the afternoon and I was at my desk on Syros, many hours deep into writing this scene, when I smelled something burning. At first, I thought I had left the stove on, and checked the kitchen, but there was nothing on. Still, I could smell burning. My mind fogged up by many hours of writing, I assumed that I had imagined the forest fire scene so intensely that I was having some sort of hallucination. Then – maybe half an hour later – the sky went dark. By then I was too spooked to accept the previous explanation and went out on the balcony. A more intense smell of burning, a strangely opaque sky at 5 p.m. Then, a phone call from a friend: there was a fire in an Athens suburb, and the smoke had reached our island which is four hours away by ferry. Seventy-four people died in that tragedy.
A month after this incident Greta Thunberg had her first school strike, and a year later her cause was decidedly mainstream. Friends who had nearly cut me off had become vegetarian and were keeping track of their carbon footprint, Extinction Rebellion was created, and my novel now seemed to be riding on a very topical wave: I just needed to finish it before the likely deluge of environmental novels. I found an agent in mid-2019, and the book was bought by Serpent’s Tail in September, to be published in early 2021. By the time we started the editing process my focus had already shifted to our hotel on Syros, and getting it ready for a 2020 opening. The book, in my mind, was a settled thing: accidentally about a very topical subject, but still very much the book I intended it to be. I didn’t expect the context of the novel to change yet again, and so dramatically.
An Asian lung virus discovered in 2020; a pandemic that we brought upon ourselves by ecological mismanagement – at this bird’s eye level, the novel is indistinguishable from reality. Over emails and calls I could feel my publisher’s anxiety: what sort of book is this now? Will we be accused of trying to piggyback on a global tragedy? And will people even want to read about a pandemic, ever again? There was also another very practical problem: we were going to change the starting date of the novel so it remains slightly in the future; we might have moved it just one year forward. But with a real pandemic in 2020, a novel about a pandemic in 2021 is just silly, as it would have to pretend that the 2020 one didn’t happen. The decision was taken to keep the opening of the book in 2020 and present it as an alternate reality, a what-if-covid-19-was-much-much-worse? I am suddenly a kind of slowpoke Nostradamus, producing prophecies that are too late out of the gates. Ruinously late, from the point of view of someone who wakes up as a minor character in her own story, trying to run a hotel during a pandemic.
But even after that there was to be one more, subtle, ‘nudge’ from the fictional world of the novel. Now, a crisis of the type we are having was likely to happen; epidemiologists have been warning about it for decades. In terms of narrative plausibility, I was much more worried about the catastrophic unfolding of events in the novel: surely humanity would put up more of a resistance, however deadly and contagious the virus. In the real world we have contingency plans, protocols, back-ups, fail-safes, and this marvellous ability of ours of cooperating. We have science. Communication between us is instantaneous, and information reaches everyone. Nothing as predictable as a pandemic could even come near to being an extinction event. As for a far less deadly virus wreaking havoc – bah. Countries would coordinate their responses, leaders wouldn’t be so silly as to believe that a global problem can be solved locally. Political point-scoring would cease. After all, we know the correct response to a viral outbreak, have known it for a generation at least. We are capable, resourceful. We have a unique capacity for thinking ahead.
I genuinely believed all this, and so the concerns about the plausibility of the doomsday scenario stayed with me throughout the real pandemic. It was only in autumn 2020, when during the final edits I came across the line where Talos says that works of fiction are useful because they show him what humans like to believe about themselves, that it dawned on me: I had written that sentence, I had meant exactly that, but I still somehow managed to miss the point. And it was so easily done. Coming to terms with this penchant for idealising ourselves seems key in how things will turn out, and whether we’ll succeed in changing destructive habits. Collectively and individually, we have to stop worshipping a fictional version of mankind, and instead start behaving in a way that will allow us to like who we really are.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my writing groups for their invaluable feedback and friendship: Stephanie Brann, Tania Dain, Laurence Van Der Noordaa, Lucy Smith, Adam Lafene, Nash Colundalur and Greg Jackson of the Zesty Breasts, and Elise Valmorbida, Anne Aylor, Annemarie Neary, Roger Le
vy, Gavin Eyers, Jude Cook and Richard Simmons of the Zens. They all read through a lot of nonsense of mine through the years, yet they kept reading. My creative writing tutor John Petherbridge, who is loved and missed by everyone who knew him. My friend and avid reader Ciprian Proca for being so positive and encouraging about early drafts of the novel. I would also like to thank my friends Ute Kowarzik and Elise Valmorbida for their generosity making it possible for me to stay in London at a time when I was rather poor, and to Libby Cooper for being a friend and other-mother in one.
I owe thanks to my friend and brilliant artist Daniel Cooke for talking me through the art of oil painting. To Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for many of Talos’s statements on ethics. To Gillian Stern for her enthusiasm and helping me reach literary agents (yes, sadly the slush pile is a thing). To Serpent’s Tail for believing in the novel, and in particular Hannah Westland, Nick Sheerin and Luke Brown for their feedback (it’s a far better novel now than when it was submitted). And of course, to my agent, lovely Sophie Scard, for taking a leap of faith, for her aesthetic sensibilities, and for working tirelessly to find the best home for Under The Blue.
Finally, the meta-thanks: my mother for her unwavering support, and for telling everyone her daughter’s a writer and thus embarrassing me into finishing a novel. My sister for making it clear it ain’t art until it has earned us some money. My grandmother for instilling both a profound horror of failure and contempt for any remotely doable task. My mentor Carl Cairo Cramer for setting a confused young woman firmly on the bookish path. And my dear friends Cris Suciu and Dan Bucsa for tolerating the bizarre creature that resulted from the above.
Oana Aristide was born in Transylvania, to parents of Romanian, Greek and Yemeni background. After the fall of Communism the family emigrated to Sweden. Oana has worked in the City of London as a macroeconomist, and as an advisor to the Romanian prime minister, but since 2018 she has lived for part of each year on a Greek island, converting a heritage villa into a hotel.
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