It is still relatively dark outside the vault. It is always relatively dark.
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We hope you are out there, and you are reading this message. We are broadcasting from 78°14′09″N 15°29′29″E, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. On this day 61 years ago, the Amazon carbon sink had failed. It failed permanently. The primeval rainforest, which once drew atmospheric carbon for storage in its soil or trees, was emitting more greenhouse gases than it could take in. On this day 102 years ago, it had been discovered too late that all the plastic wastes dumped into what was formerly known as the United Kingdom were washed into the Arctic region within two years. Autopsy results showed that all marine animals collected in that region for the next one hundred years hence had plastic inside of them. And on this day 98 years ago, the melting of the permafrost in Siberia was finally kicked off by years and years of massive deforestation. Subterranean craters were revealed once the trees that insulated the frozen ground for millions of years were removed. With these craters came the release of methane into the atmosphere, effectively accelerating global warming.
Then the eventual megaslump, the precession of the Earth’s axis from the melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the dominos that mark all possible paths to extinction quietly falling in place. Then came the isolated tribe in Peru, driven from their native land by a four-day wildfire. Four days in the city square, and they succumbed to various illnesses as they had not developed immunity nor have been vaccinated against even the most ordinary of diseases. One even contracted common cold and ended up coughing up lung tissues, throat swollen and bloodied, until he died. All in all, 16 out of the 89 members of the Peruvian indigenous tribe survived.
Remember how it all started in the once frozen north. Remember the thawing of the permafrost that bared all—the anthrax outbreak in Russia and then the mutation and subsequent spread of the once dormant 50,000-year-old Mollivirus sibericum virus, first discovered close to Chukotka, in East Siberia, the subsequent deaths of women. Patient Zero was Dr. Emilia Gattskill of the State of the Global Climate Research Center. Survivors of the deadly disease, who were mostly men, were ultimately felled by extreme weather disturbances and the drought from the eternal summer in the few yet-to-be submerged habitable parts of the world.
Right now, we look inside the twentieth floor of an apartment building submerged from 18 stories down. Inside a living room, there’s a framed poster of a wind turbine whose nacelle and rotor blade are on fire. Atop the turbine are two men, their sole exit blocked by the roaring fire. They are embracing, waiting for the flames to engulf them. Black mold has taken over the living room, the bedroom, everything.
Days like these, we wish we could pat a domestic dog for comfort. We wish we had conventional hands to pat a domestic dog. But a body with conventional hands—the human body—is a ruinous construct, prone to injury and susceptible to the ravages of time.
Are you out there reading this?
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We hope you are out there, and you are reading this message. We are broadcasting from 78°14′09″N 15°29′29″E, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. On this day 119 years ago, the Syrian civil war saw the bloody takeover of Aleppo. On this day 143 years ago, Heinrich Himmler bit into a cyanide pill a day before his scheduled interrogation for war crimes. And on this day 123 years ago, over 1,000 members of the Glorious Dawn cult, hastening their journey to a promised utopia, committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced purple Kool-Aid.
At the slope of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, we maintain a base camp. Thankfully, it is still fully operational after all this time. A long time ago, it was built for a geoengineering project that aimed to regulate the earth’s climate by aerial spraying of aerosol. The aerosol droplets were believed to reduce ground solar radiation. By then, the geoengineering project was already too late in making any difference to the rising global temperature. The base camp has just sent its weekly readouts. As usual, atmospheric and ground readings are consistent with the projections of the Copenhagen Diagnosis. Microscopic extremophiles, the only signs of life, teem on the surface of rocks.
Are you still out there? Let us know.
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We hope you are out there, and you are reading this message. We are broadcasting from 78°14′09″N 15°29′29″E, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. On this day 286 years ago, Iqbal Masih was born. Iqbal Masih was a bonded child laborer in Pakistan. When he was ten years old, he escaped from the carpet factory where he had to work in order to pay off his family’s loan. Then he helped release more than 3,000 children from illegal slavery in Pakistan before he was murdered at age twelve. On this day 187 years ago, South Korea had at last, although a century too late to spare millions of dogs, put an end to its Boknal dog meat festival. Spain followed but not soon enough, putting an end to its Toro de la Vega bullfighting tradition. And on this day 154 years ago, five firemen put out the fires in a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. They knew that no protective suit in the world could protect them from the radiation around the reactor. They died painful deaths within 36 hours of exiting the nuclear power plant, successful in preventing catastrophic effects of the meltdown.
Today, a manual probe has parachuted and safely touched down at Tristan de Cunha. We remotely guided it to check the houses for human survivors. None. This far-flung place in the southern Atlantic Ocean once had a maximum total population of 272 people. Tomorrow—still on schedule—we’ll make a sweep of the Huascarán National Park in Peru. We hope to find you there. If not, we will try again. Next stop is the Tanggula Mountains of Tibet.
Hope, hope is a good thing. We hope to see you soon.
Solar Flare
Christine Moleski
Fairy Tales & Other Species of Life
Chloe N. Clark
Under the gaze of snakes and spiders
we dip our fingers into soil
dig deep enough to feel the dirt
pulsing against our skin
Once upon a time someone said
and we all turned to listen
because stories beg to be heard
because in fairy tales the water
heals and the forests are filled
with mothers returned as trees
Once upon a time this land
was filled with life once upon
a time the roots of trees stayed
firm in soil and babies were born
squalling for mothers and they
were sung lullabies and everyone
Hush someone else said we don’t
want to hear what has been we need
to hear what is coming
And we looked up to the stars
to the deafening dark and the spiders
and the snakes were just shadows
things used to be feared that now
were just missed
We dug deep and pushed seeds
from locked away vaults
into the earth so gentle we pushed
and we wondered if the past
could be reborn
And we whispered to the not
yet born grow
grow
once upon a time you would
grow
The Road to the Sea
Lavie Tidhar
One autumn when I was old enough, my mother took me with her and the other salvagers to see the sea. I had gone with them before, on shorter journeys across the Land, once making it as far away as Suf, where they harvest the sun. But never that far, never to the old cities by the ocean, never to the sea that squatted like a beast beyond the shore, grey-blue and ever mutable, a foreign world much larger than the Land, in which all things were possible and all things, I thought, could be true.
When the world changed and the moon was hurt and our people came to the Land, the ocean remained. It only grew. Old grandma Toffle had an ancient book of sea creatures, and I would spend the winter months curled by the fireplace in my father’s lap, and study its withered pages. Sea anemones u
ndulating, part flower, part animal, their colors as bright as and as vivid as a mirage. Schools of dolphins caught from down below, streaks of shadow against the blue lit ceiling of the world. I envied them, their lithe purpose, the way they chased across a world so much bigger than my own. I loved the Land. Yet, sometimes, I longed for Sea. Whales, as large as mountains, rising out of a whitewash of water. My father told me that they sang, their voices carrying halfway across the world. They sang to each other, and to the moon, as they played and as they grieved. But my father said no one had heard their song in many years.
I did not know the ocean. The creatures in the book were things straight out of fairy tales, of Old Mercurial’s ghost stories or old grandma Mosh’s rambling hand-me-downs of the times before. I knew the story of Flora and Deuteronomy, which I think I told you (though memory plays tricks with me now, like an old yet still-mischievous friend), and how the winds carried them to the Land when the sea rose at last against the shore. I knew many stories, but I did not know the truth of them, if truth they had, or what had happened to the sea in all this time, for there was this: We had left it alone, at last.
Old grandma Mosh, who had many curious ideas, believed humans only ever deluded themselves that they were the ruling species of this world.
“Ants!” she’d say, “ants, little Mai! This is an ant planet, did you know ants grow mushrooms, they herd caterpillars, they forage and hunt and fight other ants. They dig tunnels, build caverns, make alliances with other ants. Their super-colonies stretch all across the Land, a single one is an untold tangle of tunnels, millions of individual queens, billions of worker ants—this is an ant planet,” (she’d say), “it had been their planet all along.”
And she may have had something in it, in the old retelling. One should not make the mistake of ignoring what one can’t see. There is the story of Shosho Mosh and the ant queen of Thebes . . . but did I tell you that one, yet?
In any case, both ants and humans are creatures of Land. But the sea is much wider and deeper, as unknown as space (though as a species we had dipped our toes into both). The world-ocean was there, it had always been there, and I—I longed to see it.
That autumn when we left, the houses shrunk in the distance. A thin fog had fallen over the fields and the pine and olive trees. My father and the others stood beyond the stream, waving. Their voices soon faded away in the fog. We followed tracks made by salvagers passing, we followed brooks, the natural contours of the world. At last we reached the old, abandoned roads and marched not on but beside them, along what the salvagers call the Shoulders. Indeed it felt to me, young as I was, that we were walking on the shoulders of giants, if vanished ones. Often we would come across the remnants of rusting, broken travel pods, now filled with earth. Flowers grew out of empty windows, snails crawled along plastic and rusting metal. The roads were badly broken. The roots of trees had dug out of the earth and broken their black surfaces, and to traverse the road itself would have been hard and dangerous.
Salvagers are practical, stoic people. I was never meant to be one, I was always more given to stories. But my mother was born for this job, leading us true across all the twistings and turnings, and even Old Peculiar, the map maker, bowed to her skill. There were traps, too, though the passage itself was beautiful, as I saw mountains with peaks covered in snow, trees growing wild and free with red foliage falling like sunsets, and little green birds darting in the foliage, chattering in a language I almost thought I knew. We had to beware of the wild machines that still, sometimes, lived here in the wildness; of potholes and cave-ins, of landslides and ice. Shosho Mosh was the hunter, often disappearing for one or two days before returning from beyond the road, skinned rabbits or a small boar carried on her back. My mother would cut the meat into strips with quiet efficiency. We built fires by the roadside and ate warm tubers, buried in coals. We left stone rings behind us like markers, and often used old fire pits left there from other excursions. We would thank the Land for its bounty and never take more than we needed. It is a hard, physical labour, salvaging, but my mother made it look easy. Then, one day, we crested a hill, and I first saw the sea.
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“You’re always scribbling away, little Mai,” Old Peculiar said, looking at me with his one good eye. He was a small, gnarled man; his left eye covered in a rakish patch, his right was bright and curious. How he lost it, I never learned. He’d gone deep into the blighted lands one time, for so long that he was thought lost. When he returned he was much changed, his eye was gone, and in his bag were maps, a treasure trove of maps showing places that no longer existed. Where he got them, and how he lost his eye, he never said. Some cave of treasure, some said, a time vault of the ancients, deep in the lost places of the world where only the ants and the wild machines live still. Once the world was covered pole to pole with human habitation, cities, roads, ports, factories, and fields. This was when we had forgotten Land, and the bond we owe it. In the rare times when he brought the maps out I would be fascinated by their elaborate forms, the lines of elevation and the demarcation of land, of Land. Ash-Sham, Krung Thep, Nooyok. . . . My imagination was inadequate to picture the cities of the past, how close on each other buildings were and how tall, and I could not imagine so many people, could not imagine living among so many strangers.
One map fascinated me in particular. I do not know the place it depicted, if it were real or imagined: it was a fabulous town filled with giant, living rats and lions, puppies who sang, bears who danced to music. There were crenelated castle towers, miniature mountains belching fire and steam, giant walking bottles of soda. There were lagoons and ships and rockets, and though much of the map was hard to read I believe it was called Sneyland. Our own maps were more practical, hand-drawn, current as current could be: my mother, too, spent long hours poring over her maps, but hers just showed routes to and from the old places, marked with black bold Xs to denote threats that were left carefully unmentioned.
“What are you writing?” Old Peculiar said, that night, by the fire. We were not far from the ocean by then. The air smelled different, I realised later. It was an unfamiliar smell to me, it left a salty taste on the tongue.
“It’s a letter,” I said, surprised. He seldom expressed interest in my activities or anyone else’s, his whole focus being on the route ahead, on the dangers only he could perceive all around. But the truth was that the old roads were mostly safe to travel. The wild machines were just a story, or so I thought, gone deep into the blighted lands; and there were few predators on the Land. I always remember that first journey as breathtakingly beautiful, my first real glimpse of the world beyond, and how peaceful, and prosperous, and wild it had seemed.
“A letter?”
“It’s when you write to someone who is not there,” I said, self-consciously. “Like when old grandma Toffle writes to Oful Toffle, who lives in Tyr—”
“I know what a letter is,” he said, shortly.
“Then—”
“And who do you know, little Mai, who lives so far away?” he said, and his single eye, I thought, seemed to twinkle. “And how would you get them this letter? Wait for a passerby? Tie it to the foot of a bird migrating across the Land?”
“There used to be mail carriers,” I said, “in the old days, and they say people could speak to each other even if they were standing at opposing ends of the Land, as though they were right next to each other—”
“Yes,” he said. “But that depended on the satellites, mostly.” He pointed up at the night sky. I could see the Milky Way, stretched out from horizon to horizon, a beautiful spiral like a snail’s. “And the satellites are dead, suspended in orbit, if they hadn’t all crashed down to Earth yet.” He seemed surprised, himself, at his own voice. “In past time, Low Earth Orbit was so chockfull of junked machines that they would often crash against each other and fall down, fiery bright, like shooting stars. . . .” He shook his head, and I realised then I never really knew him, what he was, what dreams he had, for all that
he had always been there.
“Who is the letter for?” he asked, then. I shrugged, self-conscious. It was to no one real, you understand. It was a letter I was writing to the people who came before us, the people who lived on, yet never really knew, the Land. It was about my life, mostly, about our journey to the sea, about the salvagers and my father who stayed behind, about my friend Mowgai Khan and about old grandma Mosh and her collection of antique books . . . and in my letter, too, I tried to ask them questions, though I knew they’d never answer back. What was it like? I wanted to ask them. To have so much, to have everything, and to still want more, to need so much for things, that everything else became secondary, even us—their children?
I tried to explain it to Old Peculiar, I think, in my halting way. He nodded and stirred the embers in the fire with a stick.
“I used to think about that too,” he said. “Even now, sometimes, in the old places, deep in the cities where nobody lives . . . but do you know what I think, little Mai? I think they were not that much different to us, to you, to me. They were just people. They tried to do their best, and sometimes they succeeded, and sometimes they didn’t.” He poked at the fire some more, sending a shower of sparks into the air.
“You’ll find out,” he said, gently. Then he was gone, and I was left there holding my pen and staring into the fire. You never really know people, I remember thinking, even if you spend all your life with them. Later, I signed the letter, and I buried it in the ground. Perhaps I wasn’t writing it for the past at all, but for the future, and for my own children, after all.
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation Page 15