Day 137 - Land Story

Land Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The deluge that wasn’t supposed to happen had anyway. Many of the formerly great and vast coastal cities were decimated. Lands changed. Resources changed. People changed. There were cost analysis reports for nearly everything. Someone somewhere decided that the cost of recovering and repairing the cities was too great and they were allowed to wash out to sea. Then someone else decided that the cost of recovering resources lost at sea was cheaper than discovering new sources to exploit, so ventures were launched to reclaim the past. Somehow somewhere someone determined just how many people could be supported by the scorched earth, and the number was nowhere near close enough to the population count. No one took credit for that analysis report.

They were strange and contradictory times, times of growth and construction and death and collapse. There were homeless nomads everywhere. But there was no escaping the sorrow and misery. It followed people around. It wasn’t going to go away. In the north Pacific an effort was launched to determine just how many people could sustainably live on floating cities. In the mountains, new cities grew and cut themselves off from the countries they had formerly been a part of. They were strange times indeed.

Stanley read reports but was not in charge of approving them. His job was to read them and record them and pass them on to a supervisor for approval. He was said to have the power to make notes and recommendations, but Stanley knew better than to believe that. Even if he had been brave enough to try, he didn’t understand most of what he read. It was as if he had been put in this position exactly because he was unqualified to hold it. Someone somewhere wanted the reports passed on, unaltered, but with the seal of approval from some middle management review system. Such was life in the long chain of command he supposed.

Stanley had heard of the Aleutian Islands. He had never heard of Beringia. Both names appeared in a great number of surveys and recommendations recently. There were several studies being done on volcanoes and volcanic ash. There were references to theories from years before. One spoke of a proposal to use ash and droplets of sulfuric acid to block the sun and cool the temperate. Another was about how iron-ash would feed photosynthetic ocean plankton and in turn the plankton would reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. These were old theories and many doubted their usefulness. One geo-engineer argued that these proposals would cause more damage than they cured. Stanley didn’t know enough to know if any of these requests were worthwhile ventures or not.

There were calls for new research into atmospheric solutions, but mostly there were an increasing number of calls for new and inspired seismic and volcanic activity. That theme had been appearing over and over again. Something was going to happen. Someone somewhere wanted something to happen. They kept talking about ‘Beringia this’ and ‘Beringia that.’ There were charts full of probabilities. And they kept using the term ‘man-inspired’ volcanoes. Something in that phrase struck Stanley as rather frightening. He irrationally hated that phrase. He doubted if anyone else who had already read and passed on this report felt that way, but he hoped they had. He hoped he was not alone. That would be scarier still, almost too scary to handle.

There had been a story he had heard about some of the displaced. Supposedly there were whole populations that had been driven out to the water, patching together anything that could float and connecting them with boats and rafts and barges. There were new vast cities now, interconnected remains at sea, strung together like lost junk. Stanley rarely believed the stories. Stanley couldn’t believe it was true. It was just too horrible.

Stanley wondered why he had thought about that and why the term geophysical disaster hadn’t been written in big red letters on the latest report about Beringia. He cast the thought from his mind. No one anywhere was going to write in red on this report. Someone somewhere knew what they were doing and the creation and development of new land was a crucial necessity for man’s survival. Smarter men than Stanley had plans, and they were to be trusted.