This sci-fi story about resilience and hope by Kristine Ong Muslim was originally published in Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation
We hope you are out there, and that 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 70 years ago, the planet’s last polar bear Arturo died, his body freed at last after 22 years of slowly going insane from the sweltering heat and unremitting stress of captivity in a concrete pit at Argentina’s Mendoza Zoological Park. On this day 85 years ago, collared, chained, drugged and used as a mascot for the torch ceremony of the second to last Olympic Games, one of the last remaining jaguars in the world was gunned down when it attempted to escape from the clutches of people wanting to take selfies with it. On this day 92 years ago, the last remaining species of Ceratotherium simum cottoni, the magnificent northern white rhinoceros, was killed by a poacher who bribed one of the guards in a nature reserve in Sudan. And on this day 150 years ago, we were like you in many ways – either well-dressed in a corporate office in one of the world’s megacities, or hunched in capitalist enclaves toiling to earn our hourly wage – kidding ourselves again and again that the human race was worthy of celebration.
We are now preparing the deployment of a robotic feeler in the Phrumsengla nature park in Bhutan. Thick smoke has been spotted by an aerial go by courtesy of a newly repaired Hover-567. The smoke may be from a human encampment. We hope that this mission will yield something, someone. Numerous bees and butterflies have been sighted in and around Phrumsengla. Pollination activity is proceeding as expected for a protracted summer.
Meanwhile, one of the lateral heat-sensing screens shows a walrus and its calves two miles from here. They seem to be frolicking in the snow. They can laze all they want in this infinity of cool reflective whiteness. Nobody will ever hurt them again.
It is still relatively dark outside the vault. It is always relatively dark.
We hope you are out there, and that 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 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 was discovered too late that all the plastic waste dumped in what was formerly known as the United Kingdom were being washed into the Arctic region within two years. Autopsy results showed that all the marine animals collected in that region for the next one hundred years had plastic inside 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 had 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 the 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 started succumbing to various illnesses as they had neither developed immunity nor been vaccinated against even the most ordinary diseases. One even contracted a common cold and ended coughing up lung tissue, throat swollen and bloodied, until he died. All in all, 16 out of the 89 members of the Peruvian indigenous tribe survived.
“A body with conventional hands – the human body – is a ruinous construct, prone to injury and susceptible to the ravages of time”
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 in the vicinity of Chukotka in East Siberia, the subsequent deaths of women. Patient Zero was Dr. Emilia Gattskill 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 take a look inside the 20th floor of an apartment building submerged 18 stories down. Inside a living room, there is a framed poster of a wind turbine whose nacelle and rotor blades 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 mould has taken over this living room, the bedroom, everything.
On 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?
We hope you are out there, and that 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 one 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.
On the slopes 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 geo-engineering project that aimed to regulate the earth’s climate through the aerial spraying of aerosol. The aerosol droplets were believed to reduce ground solar radiation. By then, the project was already too late to make 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 the rocks.
Are you still out there? Let us know.
We hope you are out there, and that 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 labourer 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 12. On this day 187 years ago, South Korea 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 event. 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 shield them from the radiation around the reactor. They died painful deaths within 36 hours of exiting the power plant, successful in preventing the catastrophic effects of the meltdown.
Today, a manually controlled 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.
“Boltzmann Brain” first appeared in the anthology Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2017) and was later republished in the short story collection The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017).