A Country Breeze
To Laura, it almost seemed real.
A Country Breeze
Her workday complete, Laura reached across her desk and turned off her desk lamp. In this century, one might have expected to just "will" a desk light on or off. But Laura knew to feel fortunate that she had any kind of an electric light at all. In fact everyone did have electric lighting, and felt no differently about it than did Laura.
She was one of the lucky ones...or more accurately, a descendant of two of the lucky ones. Lucky because they had survived. Lucky because they were alive to help to get the family of man back on its feet. And now, the great-granddaughter of of the two, Laura, had become an Earth scientist. But of course.
Science had been divided into three distinct camps: "Survivors", those who thought things were "okay", and that the best thing to do was to improve life within existing parameters; "Mechanics", who were insisting on trying to fix what had been broken; and "Explorers", who believed the best life for mankind was to be found on a new planet. All three groups might also have been labeled "revisionists" as well, because nobody was prepared to blame mankind for the nearly simultaneous failure of Earth's planetary ecosystems.
Or maybe there was no point in accepting blame, because no one really knew what had happened. Through the smoke, carnage and violence that typify world war, there may have been no way to know…
But all of that was part of human history, now. Lost were the great libraries, the fine arts, the entirety of the animal kingdom, and almost every form of plant life. The oceans were acidic and mostly, lifeless; planet Earth was a static cauldron, a great globular Petri dish full of lifeless muck, with no indication of its former weather systems. The sun was scarcely visible in the former broad daylight, the skies, darkened gray. The remnants of mankind lived beneath enlarged, somewhat fragile plastic bubbles, evolved over time into nothing that might have been recognizable to pre-war humans. Privacy was no more, individuality, what was that? Communal living had at last succeeded within each of the bubble communities, because there was no one who might have been elevated above the rest, no one left to take advantage. The word “government” had fallen into disuse.
Housing was not poured, but inflated, bubbles within the bubble.
Total population of the human race numbered but a few thousand, after two centuries of “recovery.”
There were no streets.
It was famine that had taken most. For when weather systems fail, agriculture follows. The few who had survived were those reached by technology, because all food was now synthesized and manufactured. The crumbling, rusting graveyards of cities remained, somewhere. No one ever visited those.
Laura was leaning toward the feelings of the Explorer class, those who felt there should be a better home for humanity, elsewhere; her chosen area of study was the propulsion of spacecraft, which for the time being, there were none of.
There was, however, one bit of respite from the hellish environment outside their bubble communities. There were certainly computers, and a facsimile of an internet. Home computers there were not, so that access was strictly informational, and work-related. And of course, there were programmers.
One of the projects the programmers had devised was intended to be a clone of the Star Trek “holo-deck,” in which reality was re-created for you. There were some partial successes, although you couldn’t move around in it, and the objects you perceived were, not solid. And, they were relatively simple. You got to go there, once a week; and it was Laura’s turn, this evening. She set out for that particular location, her destination three bubbles distant, about a half-mile on foot through a dimly-lit, interconnecting passageway.
Arriving, Laura punched in her personal code. The door opened noiselessly, and she entered.
The programmers had done their homework, viewing films, studying planetary conditions, extrapolating the unknowns. The 20th century, pastoral scene that Laura now selected was likely their crowning achievement; a green meadow with a small stream, in dazzling sunlight; a soft, warm breeze scented with the fragrance of new-mown hay; birds by the thousands, chirping in the surrounding forest, a small herd of deer grazing the fresh young shoots from the undergrowth.
Laura gasped. She switched it to night, and for the first time in her life, beheld the billions of stars in the great beyond. The breeze was cooler now. The sound of a screech owl echoed across the scene. The presence of everything about her felt, so very real.
Laura switched it off, in disgust.
Why on earth did these programmers feel the need to overstate everything? It could never have been like this.
It would be some time before Laura would return.
She had better things to do.
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