Because We Can: Chapter One
It's story time!
Hello all! I write to you from a near-empty bedroom in a near-empty house as the clock ticks down on my time in DC. By this time next week, I will officially be a New Yorker once more, and I am very excited.
That said, it also means I have had even less time to write new material. So I figured it was a great time to finally share some of my pre-written creative writing. The entire story I’m about to share is longer than my typical pieces, so I’ve decided to publish this short story in four parts. Each chapter will go out once a week for the next month, with the next coming this Sunday then the following two Sundays thereafter. So get used to seeing a little more Southpaw in your inbox for the next few weeks—and I hope you enjoy science fiction.
A final note before we jump in: I am in awe of the feedback to last month’s essay on Dungeons & Dragons (read here if you missed it the first time). I cannot believe I was debating whether or not to write about something that seemed so silly and niche when it clearly had such a cool impact. Multiple people have told me they never understood D&D until now, and a few even started watching Dimension 20 (Sam Reich, I expect some commission). This truly was the perfect example of why I started this newsletter: to write about what I want and find the people who want to read it.
Without further ado, please enjoy chapter of one of my short story, titled Because We Can.
Be well,
Ollie
Because We Can
Astrid was barely a year old when the world ended.
Well, not exactly. But it was the beginning of the end; an end that would take an excruciatingly long time to complete. An end that you’re probably only learning about now.
I remember standing in our kitchen and leaning over the marble countertop as she nibbled on her Cheerios across from me. She was always so deliberate, even at that age. One by one, she would inspect each piece, lick off the sugary glaze, then chew and swallow completely before moving on to the next one. I rarely saw that kind of discipline in adults, let alone a toddler.
I remember reading the headline in between her dissections.
Breaking: Humanity doomed to extinction, reads final ICCI climate report. My jaw dropped, then clenched, over and over as I read the article, then the report itself, then responses to the report, then the report again.
I remember desperately wanting to be as skeptical as the friends and family who reached out to me throughout the day. I wanted to tell them it was sensationalist. Or that it relied on bad data. Or that it wasn’t really peer reviewed and just another study funded by the giant clean energy corporations. After all, I was a scientist, too. It was my job to be skeptical.
But you didn’t need to be a scientist to understand why the report was correct. Complexity is not what made it so compelling; rather, its chilling simplicity. It might even feel familiar to you. The team of climatologists behind the report, assembled from the top labs all around the world, hadn’t presented mountains of new data because they didn’t need to show us anything new. At that point, no one actually needed persuading that the world was ending. They just needed us to look outside and trust their eyes.
The composite effect of a laundry list of mistakes made our prognosis irreversible. The Earth’s permafrost melt had long crossed the final Greenbaum Threshold set out decades earlier, releasing ancient greenhouse gasses that catalyzed a positive feedback loop of warming. As the ocean warmed and acidified, carbon sequestration processes that had balanced temperature for millennia no longer operated. Reptiles migrated north to live in Canada and Russia. The average global temperature wasn’t on pace for apocalyptic levels anymore. It had already broken them. The frequency of natural disasters — which had become so commonplace we’d forgotten they were disasters — prevented us from building sustainable infrastructure because we could never stop picking up the pieces of what was already destroyed. A universal tropical zone created breeding grounds for rotating arrays of diseases that preyed on immune systems weakened by our hyper-processed foods, ever-diluted by cheap chemicals in place of natural ingredients, making global pandemics the new normal. “Developed” countries were engaged in resource wars previously only thought to be waged by the “developing” ones we’d already deemed lost causes, and the refugee crises they created pushed every country to its breaking point. And all the while, political and corporate empires kept promising to deliver a new, clean utopia that they just needed a little bit more time to build.
Everyone thought the world would end with some unforeseen event of cataclysmic science fiction, but it didn’t. It ended exactly how we said it would.
The report didn’t waste time calculating exactly how many years we had left, but they did briefly speculate how much time we had before the collapse of global trade, the regression of technologies relying on that trade, and of course our gradual capitulation to the rising seas and blazing heat. No one could say for sure what would happen after that.
What was clear was that we had some time left, just not enough. Our existence as a species had become positively finite. Somewhere beyond our headlights laid the end of the road.
I remember getting nauseous as all my life’s work, along with all my hopes and dreams, fell from my heart and crashed into my stomach. I was an engineer—a space engineer, no less!—who was supposed to go to work that day and build things that would get to leave this Earth. I sometimes half-joked, half-fantasized about building enough rockets for us to go live on some other planet since we so royally destroyed this one. But with the time we had left, now that was just a sad dream.
I remember looking back at the beautiful little bundle of Cheerio-munching life I had helped bring into this world a comically short thirteen months ago, just in time for her to watch what little was left of society burn up and fall into the ocean. What had I done? It’s one thing to read that your species is bound to die, probably within your lifetime, when you’re supposed to be only halfway through living it. It’s another to read that while staring at someone whose life had just begun.
In that moment, I felt all the more jealous of her fixation on what was right in front of her. To her, that report didn’t exist. Neither did the very real panic in my watering eyes. Or the blood orange haze outside our house, or the lashing tide behind our eroding seawalls.
Just her Cheerios.
To be continued…
I really liked this! I’m looking forward to see where you’re taking us :)