Two Hundred Years
Two hundred years ago, man looked at the sky and saw the future.
Two hundred years ago, space was big and empty and full of hope. The biggest superpowers of the world were locked in a space race, fighting to be the first: the first to reach the sky, the first to land on the Moon, the first to find that knowledge we had sought for generations. Two hundred years ago, our minds reached new heights we could never have seen before: artificial satellites, remote medicine, laptop computers. Two hundred years ago, we became more creative, more intelligent, more educated. Two hundred years ago, Captain Kirk fought aliens, HAL refused to open the pod bay doors, a galaxy was at war far far away, and the Universal AC said, “Let there be light.” Two hundred years ago, no one expected this would happen.
But that was two hundred years ago.
Now, I look to the sky, and I don’t see what they saw. I’m not lucky enough to not know what I know now. I’m standing in the shambles of a city that looks like it was swept away by a tsunami. Dirty water pours out of windows, flooded buildings half-collapse under the weight of the water, iron rusts and paint corrodes, and the ground is invisible under layer after layer of dirt and grime and cloudy, polluted liquid.
No one had imagined the floods could come so fast.
When I was little, back when I didn’t have to worry about the sea rising up and swallowing me whole, the world was so much colder. It snowed, sometimes, in the winter: big, white, fluffy flakes that concealed the garbage that piled up on street corners and made the world look like it was a winter paradise for a few days. I remember the icicles that formed on the fire escape like stalactites, dripping into tiny puddles on the concrete. I remember my mother yelling at me when my sister and I were building tiny snowmen on the balcony, telling us how we’d all get frostbite if we didn’t come in this very instant. I remember the elation of a snow day.
But that was when I was little.
The next year, there wasn’t enough snow to build a snowman, and the icicles were incredibly underwhelming- small twigs of ice that melted in less than a day. By the time I was ten, I had stopped anxiously waiting for a snow day; there wasn’t enough snow for school to come to a halt. Then, once I turned eleven or twelve, winter stopped coming. There were no white Christmases- the season from December to March had become a sort of perpetual rain and darkness. The rain didn’t make the world look like a cotton-candy wonderland for a day. It just sloshed around my feet when I waited for the subway, turned the sandbox in the park into a disgusting mud, and made the whole city a cesspool of dirty water. I felt cheated when it poured on Christmas Eve. I felt even more cheated when the rain became a hurricane.
I remember my thirteenth birthday clearly, because it was in the middle of June and it was hot, so hot my friend passed out and my mother had to drive them to the hospital. We were playing tag in 115-degree weather; the world was so boiling hot it almost started to feel cold again. We were all sweaty and sunburned, so hot it seemed like no air-conditioning in the world could make us cooler and no sunblock could protect our skin from the horrible burns. We were right in our beliefs: so many people were using AC and so much was overheating that the whole city’s power went out. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the little blinking lights being snuffed out one by one as the world went dark. As for sunburn, that was the year my father died. Melanoma is an ugly cancer.
Still, I miss being thirteen. It was hot and disgusting, but at least it was dry.
The biggest problem with the heat was that the poles started to melt.
It happened so very quickly, so fast I hardly even noticed it until half the city was going underwater and it seemed like the world was sinking. It felt like Neptune had finally risen to take his revenge, like Poseidon had decided to rise up against Gaea for the last time. I was fourteen years old when the subways shut down for maintenance and never came back, swallowed by a watery grave. I was fifteen when my best friend’s little sister slipped and went under and drowned- the water carried her away like it was a river. One foot of water seems shallow until it’s moving, moving quickly enough to steal a little girl from this world.
We had so many warning signs. They told us to stop so many times. There were so many companies, massive monopolies no one dared to challenge, that kept on doing the same thing they had been for hundreds of years. Even as it tore apart our atmosphere and sent us heatwave after heatwave and floods so bad they were practically Biblical, even as people rose up in protests that became deadly riots, even as crops failed in the smothering heat and cities were swallowed by the ever-rising oceans, they didn’t stop.
I was fifteen years old when it all became too much.
They had been working on terraformation for the past few decades. There was no planet B, so we worked as hard as we could to create one. By the time we decided it was necessary, my home was half-underwater. One of the biggest metropolises in America had been sent to its death after centuries. Earth had been falling apart for decades now, and my family was among the lucky ones who realized early enough to secure an escape.
I’m fifteen now, and I’m looking at my city for the last time. In my hand, I hold a ticket stamped with the words Acidalia Planitia- a big, empty Martian colony nowhere near half as vibrant as the Earth was, nowhere near a quarter as cultured as my city was. We’re leaving, and I don’t think we’re ever coming back. Even if we could, it wouldn’t be worth it. The only home I’ve ever known is gone.
I stand on the balcony, just as I did when I was little, but now no icicles drip onto the pavement far below. Now I can’t even see the ground. New York City has drowned.
Two hundred years ago, man looked at the sky and saw a hope for a better future. Today, I stand here on a dead planet, and I see the same thing. We have been given a second chance. I can only hope this time we’ll listen to the warnings before it’s too late.