Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

by Phoebe Wagner

  She caught sight of me, and her eyes widened. Then she stiffened and swung away. Her walk was brisk, just the way I remembered it. When I was a child she had expected me to keep up with her.

  “Mom!” I called. “Mom!”

  She didn’t stop, though I know she heard me. People were stopping to look at me, and some recognized me from the television programs. I heard them whisper, felt them pointing at me. I began to walk faster, discreetly trying to catch up.

  But just as I was about to call again, she turned to me and pinned me with a cold, hard glare. Even at her most abusive, when she hit me with her own hand, she had never looked so hostile before.

  I was so startled I tripped and fell.

  Someone with manicured hands helped me up. “What was that about?” they asked.

  I shrugged, smiling sheepishly. “I got the wrong person, I guess.” I adjusted my bag. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. You’re Tan Nam Jing, aren’t you? From the future.”

  “No,” I lied, because I just really wanted to go home and lie down. “Sorry, I really gotta go now. My mother’s expecting me.”

  §

  When Dr. Morton was put on trial, he was accused of genocide.

  With supreme confidence, he calmly rejected the idea that he had been responsible for any such thing. The Reset had not involved any of the actions within the United Nations’ own definition of genocide. He had not done it to kill entire groups—in fact, his intent had been to restore the Earth to a condition that would make it salvageable for the world’s population. The Reset did not prevent births of entire groups; if fewer children were born this generation, it was a result of personal choices made on a societal scale and suited perfectly what popular wisdom on overpopulation advised.

  The Reset did not necessarily create injuries that targeted specific groups and restored the health of many who had been terminally ill, to such a state that they could diagnose their health earlier and prevent future deterioration. People who had unjustly died in the last thirty years were now alive once more, and people who were known to be criminals could be caught and removed earlier before they snuffed out the lives they did. And if they did not, it would be an indictment of the society that allowed them to continue existing.

  Dr. Morton acknowledged that in the first days after the Reset, people had suffered several health issues as the result of their bodies readjusting to the condition it had been in thirty years before. However, studies had shown that people were, for most part, surviving and taking preventative measures to safeguard their health. He cited my grandparents as an example, a nudge-nudge-wink-wink to how close he was to his grad students.

  It was hard to not get angry at him. Yes, there were studies showing that people were rethinking their life choices before any problems escalated, but there were just as many studies showing that in the face of hard data, it was still easy for people to ignore the consequences of their decisions. When I yelled at him after, too mad to hold back, I didn’t even mention the articles on the suicide rates post-Reset. I quit my job on the spot and managed to not talk to him for over a month. I also managed to not talk to anybody else. He wrote me glowing letters of recommendation, anyway. Small favors.

  As for the children, well, every parent who had lost a child could start over if they wished and do so with the added wisdom of having done it before. There was also a generation who would grow up wiser as to what the future could hold for them, because they had already lived it.

  “You can always have more children,” Dr. Morton said. “But you cannot replace the Earth. Now with the Earth restored, you can have the children you miss so much, all over again.” He sounded like he was right, but he was actually wrong.

  §

  We are taught to believe, as children, that our parents love us so much that they would suffer through any trial for us. And for most part, they do. Not because they know how we will turn out, but because they don’t, and they already have a squalling baby and are committed to the parent task. The parent’s love is unconditional. We repeat this not because it is objectively true but because we want to believe it is so.

  If you had asked anyone from my peer group whether we would have willingly suffered through what we did to become the person we did become, some would have said no. It isn’t because we loved our parents any less; in fact, some of us couldn’t love our parents at all. Those of us who did love our parents, we just felt screwed up and not really worthy of our parents’ love. And those who said they would, indeed, do it all over again, make the exact same choices, were generally insufferable people I never cared to be around.

  I read advice column after advice column about children, now back in their teens, having to renegotiate boundaries with their parents, when they had been adults so long. When someone physically became a child, it seems even with thirty years’ experience of that person being an adult is erased, or made murky. Of course, some children knew their parents would be abusive no matter what, and “children-run children’s shelters” cropped up all over the world. Parents of newborns wondered if they should treat those children as adults too, or if the Reset didn’t affect them and newborns had a completely fresh slate. Couples who were formerly parents wrote thinkpieces about whether they should go through the same thing again, with full knowledge that their children won’t turn out exactly how they remembered. Did my father have such conversations with his new partner, the woman he might have married if not my mother?

  No one seemed to have any advice for me, the adult child whose parents were now the age of her peers. My parents were not interested in recreating the life they had together that would produce me and my siblings.

  “What for?” Dad said when I asked him during a visit. We were having tea in the house he shared with Grandpa.

  “What, you didn’t like us?” I teased.

  “Not that I didn’t like you. But your mom and I didn’t get along very much. Why put you all through that again?”

  “But you’d have me.”

  “But I still do,” he pointed out.

  “You could have another me!”

  He burst out laughing. “Gee, you!”

  My father would never go back into that marriage that made him unhappy for thirty years, not for the brilliant, kind, caring children he had from it. I supposed that he had the chance to have kids who were just as smart and great, without the terrible marriage. And if he never did have us again, the exact same us he lost, we didn’t exist for our opinions to count, so it made no difference, really.

  Well, it made no difference for Nam Ling and Nam Yong. I, on the other hand, went home after these visits and cried myself to sleep. Some things cannot be restored. Some things will never be.

  §

  The one thing Dr. Morton was half-right about? The environmental consequences of the Reset. I now see the blue skies of my very early childhood, and everyone has been scrambling to create best practices for maintaining it. Clean air bills pass. Citizens vote out the people who resist them. Cities are starting the process of ensuring that their infrastructures don’t deteriorate. Procedures are established to prevent the degradation of rivers. We can now swim in Lake Ontario!

  People of my parents’ generation are suddenly brimming with positive energy that I didn’t see them have when I was growing up. It got annoying very, very quickly, and hypocritical too—these grown-ups who used to tell me off for being passionate about the environment, saying I was too young to understand the world, suddenly themselves were so gung-ho in their activism. On the plus side, they weren’t complaining about the state of the world anymore. Whether they were of the camp that this was an actual Reset of the physical world, or if they were of the camp that the last thirty years were a premonition, everybody had an opinion on what went wrong with the world, and lots of them were finally doing something about it. I’ve written to sociologists and psychologists asking about it but haven’t heard back. Maybe it’s still too early for those studies. My theory is that the
se people have to maintain their self-righteous attitudes somehow, and being passive about what is essentially a second chance to get things right would make them lose any moral ground to their children.

  I say he was half-right, because there were things Dr. Morton stuck back in place that we could probably have done without. Some places in the world had bad air pollution, cleared up after several years of moving industries around, and they were now back to their previous levels of pollution. Dr. Morton got a lot of hate mail from people who had spent years restoring lakes, animal populations, natural reserves, only to have the Reset undo their efforts. Public transit systems have to be reestablished all over again—and this time with triple the resistance from auto companies. And governments are still prone to using shortcuts for everything. I’m pretty sure we’re still going to fall apart, just much faster than before.

  Because of the understanding that technology develops at the cost of the environment, the technological status quo was never quite established, and may never be. This means less out-sourcing to developing countries (ha! Cold War nationalist frameworks still apply in the Reset!) and more workers striking against unsound work environments. The Internet, which really should have been reestablished by now, is facing danger from governments who intend to establish more limitations on it. Underground “networktivist” movements have arisen to deal with this problem. And as always, money makes the world go ‘round: profiteers will always find a way around laws. The last thing we all need is a price inflation on a basic internet package, but I’m not positive.

  This also means I haven’t been able to use a smartphone in years and that sucks. No more late-night chats with friends to keep my sanity. The Reset didn’t make me less socially awkward. I don’t think I’m the only one, but no one’s investigating that. I’m going to get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from handwriting all these letters, but scented paper is back in fashion, and I’ve always liked stationery.

  §

  When I took the stand for the first time, I was aware of the cameras trained on me and aware that digital streaming had also occurred way faster than it did before. I remembered the high-profile trials of my youth and sighed in resignation that I was now being recorded in high-definition. At least I wouldn’t go viral on social media.

  The questions didn’t really make sense to me. I consented to the project because it was my job. The project was part of my funding. Yes, everyone on the team knew what the parameters of the experiments were, and no one could have predicted these results. Maybe we could have thought about this particular possibility, but it genuinely had not occurred to anyone, because we had all been acting out of indulgence (and, to be frank, fear of financial insecurity). Dr. Morton never got around to teaching us the physics behind the machine, despite promising to, so we could have a better sense of how the machine worked. Instead, he had us each work on specific parts of the machine, like we were line factory workers. In the four years, he recreated all his notes, and the task of interpreting has of course fallen to yours truly, but even then, I’m not sure I could confidently say that the machine would work.

  What I resented the most was the implication that I should have, could have talked Dr. Morton out of it. Haha, what a joke, like a tenured professor was going to take someone fresh out of undergrad seriously. I thought this was Dr. Morton’s trial, not mine. I said this out loud, and was scolded for speaking out of turn and not answering the question.

  I really appreciated the donations from people who sympathized with me. It was nowhere near the amount of money Dr. Morton received from people who thought him a visionary genius, but it was enough to put away for a rainy day after paying my lawyer. I tried using it for therapy for a while, but it didn’t work out.

  I also really appreciated the money I received when Dr. Morton, who had not regained any youthfulness nor health with the Reset, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. In the absence of any heirs, the state decided to award me that money as the only person close to him and who also suffered his unique position during the Reset.

  I sent some of that money to both my parents. My dad called me up when he received it to warmly thank me, and that he was going to use some of it to put Grandpa and Grandma on a cruise around the world. I didn’t hear from my mom.

  Does the truism that “if you love someone, you learn to let them go” apply to parents? I thought the filial response would be to do my best to patch things up with my mother the best I could. Her silence, snarling in my heart, said otherwise.

  §

  I used the money to rebuild Dr. Morton’s machine. My apartment isn’t very large, but it’s big enough for the machine. I haven’t told anybody about it and built it using stuff I developed for the firm I’ve been working for. I think it will work. Even if it doesn’t, no harm no foul. Maybe.

  The thing is, I feel he was short-sighted. Restoring the world to what it was thirty short years ago? That’s not really meaningful. Thirty years ago everyone had the most terrible aesthetic sense, and it shows in the buildings built back then. If you want clean air, then go all the way back sooner. Maybe two hundred years before coal. Maybe five hundred years. And maybe those people then would have their memories of what had happened and prevent diseases and whatnot from happening.

  I’ve widened the parameters, and this time I haven’t bothered building a containment chamber. I don’t need to be there to see what happened. Mostly, I just don’t want to be here anymore. It turns out that when armed with knowledge of what would, or could, happen, everyone becomes even more insufferable.

  Somewhere at the back of my head, there is a voice saying that this isn’t really the best idea I’ve had. It’s not kind, it’s not compassionate to pull this prank all over again on the world. I ignore it, because the recent Qing Ming celebrations have reminded me that I’m not close to any family, and Dad has remarried someone else, and they’re expecting a kid who’s not me. My friends either hate me for not regressing or pity me for not having thirty extra years. No matter what I do, there’s no me-shaped hole to fill because Dr. Morton’s machine closed up all the possibilities for it five years ago.

  The phone rings, sharp and loud. I jump up and knock my head on the frame of the machine. I frown at it; I’d have to fix it later.

  When I pick up the phone, my voice is as snappy as its ringtone. “Wai?”

  There’s a shuffle on the other end for a moment. Then a huffy sort of sigh. “Nam Jing?”

  I need a moment to recognize the voice. “Mom. . . ?”

  Outside, it begins to rain. Petrichor. I’m hearing my mother’s voice, soft and wavering. She’s not a premonitioner; I’m real to her. I know we’re going to get into a fight later. I might slam my phone down.

  Right now, though, I understand the smell of petrichor, for the first time in my life.

  Pop and the CFT

  Brandon Crilly

  I went out to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse.

  “Mr. Cameron?”

  The last notes from Keith’s guitar faded away, and Gabe looked around his father’s old dining room, taking in the clutter, dust, and age as he remembered where he was. Eventually his focus came back to the woman seated across from him, staring over her reading glasses.

  Gabe grunted. “Hummin’ to myself again?”

  “Yes.” Before he could ask, Ms. Flynn added, “I didn’t recognize that one, either.”

  “Damn,” Gabe murmured and shook his head. He’d reached a point where most people looked like kids to him, but he figured Ms. Flynn was in her late thirties or early forties—old enough to recognize the chorus to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” She hadn’t picked up on “Take It Easy” earlier, though, so maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Do you need me to repeat the question, Mr. Cameron?”

  “Might not be a bad idea. Sorry, darlin’.” He offered his famous stage smile, but the one she returned stayed polite and professional. Ah, well.

  “Did your father
use his car less or more after he retired?”

  Gabe glanced across the adjoining living room, through the window to the front of the house. His father’s old Camaro was sitting in the driveway under a tarp, waiting for Pop to take it for a spin. The only thing he had loved more than restoring that car had been driving it around. He could imagine Pop taking the Camaro out at least once a day, maybe twice if the mood struck him.

  Baby, don’t you hear my heart, you got it drowning out the radio.

  “More,” he said. “Guessin’ that’s another point against him.”

  Ms. Flynn sighed and removed her glasses, causing strands of blonde hair to tip over her ears for a moment before she tucked them back into place. “I’m not here to pass any kind of judgment on your father’s memory, Mr. Cameron. The CFT is in place simply to assess the impact of an individual’s actions, not the character of the person. I know this tax may seem like a black mark, but—”

  “That’s the man’s attitude, not yours?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Fair enough. What do you need to know next, darlin’?”

  Ms. Flynn swiped at her tablet, full of charts and spreadsheets she had shown him earlier. The last time he had sat down for something like this, there were mounds of actual paper spread across the table; he supposed that wouldn’t make sense for someone concerned about the environment.