Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

by Phoebe Wagner

  §

  That winter we sheltered in the ancient city as the rains lashed down on the Land, and my mother and the salvagers burrowed deep into the tangled mazes of its empty streets in search of useful discard, workable tech, reusable metal. This was a long time ago, when I was but a girl, but I remember that first glimpse of the ocean, how it went on and on until it reached the sky; it seemed to me an immense beast then, always moving, never quite still, its smooth back stretching across the world; and I thought, for just a moment, that it sensed me, somehow, and that it responded. A flock of birds, white against the grey-blue of the world, shot up and were framed in the light of the wintry sun. I blinked. I felt very heavy then, and for a moment the world spun and spun. Then the curious sensation was over, but the ocean remained; and we began the long descent down to the shore.

  As for the city, that is another story, for another time. The light grows dim, and I must soon put down my pen. But one day, a week or so into our stay, my mother led me to the shore, my hand in hers, and together we stood on the sand and watched the sea. I saw, then, a demarcation line: a place where wet sand gave way to dry, and all along that line—which was, I later learned, the mark of high tide—there was debris.

  This was not salvage. I saw seaweed, dulled by the air; small, shining seashells, their inhabitants still cowering inside; human-made ropes, black and slimy from the depths; a half-eaten plastic doll of what I thought must be a mouse, with its head missing and a hole in its chest; a plastic bottle, too—for plastic remained long after the world that had made it was gone; and a small, green-shelled sea turtle, helplessly turned on its back.

  There were many things the ancients could have done and many things they did, in fact, do. It was not so much the doing or otherwise, as much as a certain mass that was required to change things. Towards the end, I think they realised it. Some left their travel pods by the side of the road, and began to walk. Some planted fruit trees, seeded flowers, allowed nature into their cubicle homes. Some stopped purchasing that which they did not need, abandoned things, began, too late, to try and live with the Land. They began to only use the power that they needed, to harvest the sun, to get to know the seasons. They cleaned that which had been polluted. All these things happened. All these things were possible. They didn’t mean harm, they wanted the best for their children, the way their parents did, the way we do. It was all there, it just wasn’t enough, it was just a little too late. They knew, and yet the mind is capable of great delusion. They didn’t want to know.

  The art of those last decades, too, is strange. There is so much vitality and violence in that last epoch, before the sea rose and the winds hit and my people came to the Land. It was the wind that tore Flora and Deuteronomy from Nueva Soledad . . . but I think I told you that story elsewhere.

  All this happened, long ago. It wasn’t enough to save everyone, but it was enough to save some and, in a way, to save a world. The dinosaurs lived longer and died quicker . . . and perhaps old grandma Mosh is right, and this has been an ant planet all along.

  All this happened, long ago, and around me the light grows dim. That spring we returned to our home, laden with what could be salvaged. We try not to waste. Eventually, all that was left will be returned to the earth, repurposed and reused. Already, I know, plants and animals have returned to the old cities. And I remember that debris line, on that nameless beach, under grey-blue skies, and the little sea turtle, lying upturned on its back. When I picked it up, it emitted a stream of pee in fright, and I almost laughed. I had never seen a sea turtle. Then I crossed the line, my bare feet sinking into wet sand. And I walked to the water, which lapped at the shore, spraying me with white foam.

  I placed the turtle gently in the water and watched it swim away.

  The Reset

  Jaymee Goh

  It is now five years after the Reset. I have stood trial for my complicity in it and come away innocent.

  The newspapers screamed about the time-traveler’s companion going on the stand when I testified. They were wrong: it wasn’t a time-travel machine, it was an environmental restoration controller. Also, I wasn’t Dr. Morton’s companion; I was his student assistant.

  I based my defense on my age and relative ignorance. One of several he had roped into the project because the funding was too good to pass up. I was a first-year graduate student, in a cohort that received absolutely no funding from our university. I just so happened to have been assigned a role within the containment chamber that day.

  My lawyer was not completely grateful for the Reset, because he lost all three young children of his. But he didn’t take for granted regaining the youth he lost thirty years ago, without losing all the knowledge he has now. He thought I should play up the fact that I was only a graduate assistant. I had only a vague idea of what my supervisor was doing. If he hadn’t realized the mistake he was making, how could he have expected a fresh grad to catch what he had missed?

  Anyway, if it had been a time-travel machine, no one would have kicked up a fuss, because they wouldn’t have known what they had lost.

  §

  The Earth, Dr. Morton always said, has a long memory. To simplify, if we posit that the universe is a super-computer program, then there must be a way to reset the world back into some prior period.

  “Like save points in a videogame?” I had asked.

  “Like so,” he’d replied.

  The machine he built was designed to take the Earth back to a previous “save point.” A time before the current global warming crisis. If the experiment was successful, we would see clearer skies, and cleaner water, for a start.

  “These parameters have been set to thirty years. Why not last month, or last year?” I had asked, complacently going along with the department’s famous crackpot professor. “Why such a big gap?”

  “Well, Nam Jing,” he said in an exaggeratedly patient voice, “if we set it to just last year and it worked, we wouldn’t know that it did. Thirty years is a good time; it’s close enough to our time that it won’t jar us and far away enough for us that it’ll make a significant difference.”

  I was skeptical of this reasoning, but I didn’t want to say so. Department politics were such that for all his crackpot theories, Dr. Morton was well-liked and well-supported. He had spent years squirreling money away for this project. “What if we mess up?”

  “Then we’ll just try again. It’s just an experiment to see how much we can affect the environment. Relax. Everybody get ready now!” He was so cheerful, as if nothing bad could happen. Part of me now thinks he never expected it to work after all.

  §

  What Dr. Morton hadn’t counted on when he had calculated for physical bodies to be affected by the regression outside the chamber, was that everything would return to its state thirty years before. Everything in the world includes everyone. It seems so obvious when one thinks back, but apparently Dr. Morton had never really talked the project over with anybody else who took it seriously. (If they did, no one owned up to it.) It turns out that he was a rare breed of likable that didn’t translate into actual friendships with people who would have called his stupid ideas out.

  When we had stepped out of the containment chamber, the lab hadn’t changed much, and Dr. Morton hastened to reassure me that it had looked like this for the last fifty years. We could only know whether we had succeeded by going outside. I didn’t buy it, but I did wonder where my classmates had gone. No one ever leaves in the middle of testing.

  In the nearby labs there was uproarious shouting. There were grad students I didn’t recognize. About half of them were passed out, from the inertia of regression, though I hadn’t figured it out at the time. The conscious ones were either puking or they were disoriented.

  “McHenry?”

  “Herb!”

  “Matsu—Mata—whatever your name is, is that you?”

  I looked to Dr. Morton then, who had a growing expression of confusion on his face. It took me much longer to realize tha
t these students had graduated years before, and suddenly, in the Reset, they were back in this lab, where they had been thirty years ago to the minute. Dr. Morton rushed back to our lab to look for his notes. They no longer existed, because, physically, the paper notes probably would have still been trees at that point in time, and tablets were still raw materials in the ground.

  §

  “In this way, Dr. Morton, you have absolutely succeeded, and congratulations on that. But hadn’t you thought about the costs of what would happen?”

  Every single talk show host asked him that question. He raked in more money than ever from these guest spots, more money than he had earned even as a tenured professor.

  “The cost of living once more in a world where we can have a fresh start? If I had asked you, what would you be willing to give up to have your youth again, and the world as it was back in your heyday, what would you have said?”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know Dr. Morton, it would never have occurred to me. . . .”

  And always, I could tell that they were lying, and it had, but they never bothered to answer the question for themselves, because they always thought it was completely impossible.

  “Don’t you worry that your science will be abused, Dr. Morton?”

  Dr. Morton snorted. “Only if they find a way to recreate it, and it was such a fluke, I don’t think anyone will ever risk it happening again,” he bragged.

  I always stood off-set, holding his coat, because in those days, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. They would never ask me such theoretical questions about the Reset.

  §

  “It must be very lonely for you,” a radio show host commented to me on one of the rare times I was invited to speak. “None of your peers exist anymore.”

  “It’s all right,” I replied. “I just find new ones.” I didn’t tell her that I often woke up in the middle of the night, confused at my surroundings. I regularly forgot my way around town, because the landmarks I was used to were not there. I had a few older friends, but it was hard to track them down. The few times I met up with them were discombobulating; it really is hard to take people who look like children seriously. My younger siblings, who I had loved dearly, were completely gone, never existing, possibly never to exist again in any form I would recognize.

  “What do your parents think?”

  §

  To be honest, I was too overwhelmed and terrified to try to find my parents for the first year. I didn’t understand a world without the technology I had grown up with. I had to relearn how to use phones. What are landlines! Everything was suddenly so very slow. And so very boring. Except for the paper. So much paper everywhere! No wonder we digitized everything, what with all those trees we must have been killing to keep up. But I thought about toxic factories endangering workers with exposure to dangerous chemicals and minerals for specialized, unfixable technologies. Paper at least can be recycled or restored to the earth.

  “I missed the smell of ink,” Dr. Morton confessed to me.

  I was sure it was toxic but didn’t say so. “I like the smell of paper,” I replied, trying to connect to him in some way. Dr. Morton had taught me how to sort papers and organize them, and I got good enough to work as his secretary for a while.

  §

  When I tracked down my father, he had gone on holiday with the grandparents I had never met. It was a while before I tried again. I called his work phone, and his snooty secretary refused to forward me to him. I learned later that the secretary was pissed that his (previous? future? I don’t know) workplace, where he had made Director before the Reset, hadn’t taken him back, despite everyone remembering that he had had a perfectly decent track record.

  “Not a big surprise, though,” Dad said. The company where he had been working for thirty years prior dissolved earlier than he expected, and he was now a freelance consultant, as he had been in retirement when I left home. “When you’re as nasty as that fellow has been for thirty years, if suddenly you find yourself in the pits, you’ll find no one wants to help you.”

  He asked me if I had been eating properly (sort of), whether I had a job yet (yes; I was doing R&D with a company that manufactured laboratory equipment), and where I was going to be in the next few years—finishing my PhD? Could I even finish my PhD now that the equipment I need for my project no longer exists? Maybe, because my boss was keen on helping me finish. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  My grandfather found part-time work in a nearby office as a grant writer. “It’s good for him. He got a stroke when he retired because he didn’t get the exercise of walking to work, right before you were born,” Dad explained. “Plus, he gets to scold people for bad grammar. That always makes him happy.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, wondering if I should go introduce myself to my now-living grandparents.

  Grandma went to live with my uncle, despite the strained relationship she had had with my aunt. My cousins were infants again and needed help, because they were infants with some adult memories and were all the worse to deal with for that. When I visited them, they sat in stony silence, while my uncle and aunt made awkward chitchat.

  Dad and I didn’t talk about my mother that first conversation. When I had left home only a few years before, they had been on the verge of a separation. I had been closer to Dad, but not by much; the man on the phone was still, in effect, a stranger and all the more so for his sudden youth.

  §

  Within the years that have passed, everyone scrambled to restore the technological status quo. It turns out that without the rooms upon rooms of air-conditioned servers, digital information cannot possibly exist, despite “the Cloud.” Funny that.

  Now comes the question of memory. If memories are the result of electrons repeating themselves over and over in your brain, are they physical? The answer should point to “yes,” except, as all good scientists say, it is not that simple.

  People remembered things differently, but most retained their memories of the last three decades. Activists worked harder to push in legislation to prevent the environmental poisoning that would occur in thirty short years. Lawyers who were now in their second childhood and teenage years participated in raging wars over what constituted youth for the current generation. Global commerce was fiercer than ever, trying to recoup the losses they made (or never did), and socialist groups came out in full force to prevent multinational corporations from (re)gaining their foothold. There were companies that grew earlier than they originally had, mindful of the mistakes they had made, rushing to offer the services that had been lost. Rival companies rose up from workers of those companies. I was no Steve Jobs fan and was glad that less pretentious alternatives would exist.

  There were, of course, people for whom the last thirty years faded quickly, like waking from a dream. Things got weird for me with these people. They held the theory that the last thirty years hadn’t actually existed, but were a premonition of things to come. I was a sham to them, a fake person cooked up by Dr. Morton. I’m used to not existing to certain people, of course, but they took it to the next level. Before Dr. Morton took the stand, some people turned to the theory of premonition in order to cope and get settled in their lives again. It was traumatic to realize that the last thirty years of life had just—gone. Calling it a premonition instead allowed them to frame the last thirty years not as a loss, but merely a potential life, something to work towards, or against.

  Then there are people who fiercely cling onto the memories that made them what they are, unwilling to give them up, unable, perhaps, to make a fresh start.

  §

  Maybe my mother had hoped that Empty Nest Syndrome would bring them together, maybe she didn’t care anymore. I don’t know. I’ll probably never know.

  I knew she had been a university lecturer when she met my father. When I had some vacation time, I went to the city where she had lived to look her up. Calls to her office were fruitless, because now as before, she hated the phone. So I wandered
the campus, looking for her department. The students were a mix of what appeared to be very young children and adolescents. It felt like visiting a tadika of undergrads.

  “Second puberty is the most overrated thing ever,” one girl complained to her friends as they passed me. “And the mature students’ officer is such an asshole. I can’t believe I have to repeat all my credits because my records don’t exist anymore.”

  Class let out then; a sudden wave of students washed over the quad. I stood up from the bench I’d been sitting on because I recognized my mother. She looked just like she had in her old pictures: short bobbed hair, carefully-done eyeliner. Her fashion sense was a lot more muted, but she still wore her favorite yellow scarf from her lecturing days. I walked toward her, intending to meet her face-on.

  I had agonized a very long time on whether to meet her. We had always tried to recreate some sort of relationship, ruined because she couldn’t let go of her sense that being Mom meant always getting her way even after I’d long grown different opinions from her. I wouldn’t budge, and our mutual resistance to each other led to ever-escalating fights. “Strong-minded women,” Dad said when I was a teenager, “should never live in the same house.” Yet I decided that even if the Reset had torn our family to shreds, I still thought of her as my mother, and she deserved to know.

  I expected that she would yell at me about the long hours she had worked for the family, only to be abandoned by her husband. Just like always. I couldn’t imagine the Reset changing her that much, psychologically. I couldn’t imagine her as a premonitioner, either. I had a dramatic vision that she would launch into a litany about how all her life she had been working, working, working, only to have ungrateful kids who didn’t care about her. And I would say, “Well, I am here now.” Maybe she would burst into tears.