What happened wasn’t anyone’s fault. It’s important everyone understands that. We all need to be in agreement. It can’t be stressed enough. No evil plot, no vindictive scheme, or cold-blooded revenge.
And that’s what makes it terrifying.
We had time, there were options. People forget that. People will always keep forgetting that. None of this needed to happen, and that’s exactly why it did.
One mistake, a miscalculation of blue sky thinking. Good intentions from those with their heads in the clouds. In that hubbub, in that buzz of noise and hope it was heady optimism that blinded, the excitement of discovery that switched off inhibitions as easy as a lightswitch.
The first sign something was wrong was subtle. The wind changed. That was it. Most going about their day to day didn’t notice, those that did were soon distracted again by the beat of their ordinary lives.
Wind blows one way and then another, you see it in the branches, bending and cavorting as it flows. What it doesn’t do, is go up. Imagine that, all of a sudden the wind travels upward, skyward, as if escaping the very world we built. It wasn’t a cool breeze either, no it was a heavy, dripping wind.
The sycophants and the preachers bleated that it carried souls away to heaven. A comforting thought, a nice idea, but wrong. Just moisture in truth, all of the moisture in fact. Plucked and hewn from the earth, like dogs at a carcass. Whipped off sweat laden skin, drank from the rivers, evaporated from our taps. One great big suck as the wind departed for the last time.
Subtlety gave way to sheer terror after that.
We know this now for fact. Before it sounded like poetry, some reimagining, a prophetic embellishment of something more mundane, more explainable. But no, it was correct. All of it.
The sky fell. All at once it shunted downward. The blue gave way in one great big tear to stark void black. Black is wrong, black is a colour. This was nothing. How do you explain nothing though? An absence of anything. Death in the most clinical sense. The sky died, ripped from itself in one movement as it crashed and condensed into the earth below that it had only ever known as its neighbour.
Anyone watching at that moment was blinded. Of course, that was everyone at that point. Some speculated that the human body wasn’t designed to witness an event like that. An unnatural violation of the laws of physics, a hardcoded bricking of our brain. ‘You saw something you shouldn’t, sorry, got to shut it down now.’
It’s a powerful idea. Follow it through. See, the wind they could ignore, the moisture less so, but as the sky fell it purged every sense of self, every petty idea in the head of the population. For that one dazzling moment, that last moment that anyone could see, there was unity. In a way the only vision they’d ever need. As a people, as a species, Christ as sentient beings. One thought pervaded all. This was the end.
Except it wasn’t. Not for all. Like humans do, we find a way. If you believe in a higher power perhaps they demanded someone be left to tell the story. To remind the future of the past we run from.
The sky now ripped from its cradle kept falling, pushing the earth deeper. Cities, the large population centres, became mausoleums, a cacophony of twisted metal and wasted lives cried out. Everywhere else was blanketed, with nothing to stop it spreading it enveloped all, continually drinking from the ground, the seas, from vegetation. Forests crumbled into dust, sea’s boiled away to nothing, and every vestige of normalcy broke apart, scattered, like rain on the wind. A throwaway saying from the old days, a nice metaphor, but reality in a way. The wind became the rain, and the wind fed the clouds, until all that was left rolled across the earth and suffocated, no, sorry, drowned us.
The few that are left, the new world isn’t a world. It’s a colony of ants squashed below the ground amongst the tombs of our friends and family.
What happened was discovery. Optimism unchecked. The earth was running out of drinking water. A global countdown that provoked action, provoked brilliance and unity. The clouds were malnourished. That was the buzz, feed the clouds, quench the thirst. A simple idea in the end. Re-engineer the sky to take on more water, to take on enough to self-sustain a constant monsoon, a beautiful storm that would act as salve for the soon to be parched human race. It would and could rain forever, and we would drink, by God wouldn’t we drink. We had time, we had options. People always do. Not now, we made sure of that.
This is how Concordia came to be. The epicentre of the Nourish Initiative. A country whose old name is lost to time. It was a land of opportunity, we’re told. No longer, our name is our vow. A sincere agreement, held by everyone in harmony.
That’s what it means after all, Concordia.
Discovery, exploration and the pursuit of betterment can only end in pain. So we leave alone. We exist to exist and that’s it.
For those that are left, for those that can see, the vision of the sky falling is enough.
Concordia is the acceptance of all that, this is the end.
By Louis Urbanowski – Inspired by the prompt ‘What if the United States was called Concordia – A new world…. ’
Stories by Louis Urbanowski 