[006] The Ode To The Fallen Cities
The time passing after the Great Drone Wars was dreadful. In few years after that, everyone pretty much vanished from the surface. Lucky ones took the shelter or ran away as far as they could. Well, at least they tried. The ones who weren’t that fortunate were condemned for the painful permanence on the surface.
The air was hot and still thick with the ashes, and there were no signs of it getting cooler anytime soon. Desolated plains and poisoned remainings of forests weren’t suitable for living there for prolonged periods. After spending some time in there, you could swear that you hear steps somewhere behind you.
Occasionally, shortwave radio waves would bounce between the surface and ionosphere, traveling through the obliterated flatland. That was pretty much the only thing traveling through it. When the global networks succumbed - and it took a while - for a few years after the great drone wars, people realized that it’s one thing worth rescuing. The bunch of volunteers spent their time, risking their lives to keep the lights on. But it was an impossible task in the slowly ceasing world, and that seemed only to accelerate. A few more or so years passed, and global grid connections went dark one by one. The short wave radio became a standard way of communicating with the other survivors.
A collapse of the technological Eden uncovered of what was a decades-long deceitful campaign. A somewhat comical situation was that those very complex technical solutions were used to deceit people - to create a mirage that the world is much “greener” right now due to technological advancements. In reality, it was all lies. Simply put, it was much cheaper not to do what was advertised. That didn’t occur until the world of the mirrors started to break apart.
The hot air was stinging in your lungs.
For one thing, the cuts in the carbon emissions that scientists prescribed were impossibly deep. If that would’ve started a long time ago when the first warning signs became visible, the job was still doable: you could have cut carbon emissions a percent or two a year. But waiting for decades and ignoring the problem at hand made it irreversible.
It seemed that the usual easy solutions didn’t help at all: fracked gas wells were leaking vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and the burning of forests for electricity was putting a pulse of carbon into the air at exactly the wrong moment. Environmentalists learned they needed to make some compromises. Most of the aging nuclear reactors were left running past their decommissioning dates: that lower-carbon power supplemented the surging renewable industry in the early years, even as researchers continued work to see if fusion power, thorium reactors, or other advanced designs could work. While burning biomass became not that apparent, nuclear reactors were still running and were a significant electricity source. They were away from the megacities, hidden in the plains. And the maintenance was easier with all of the technological advances. The problem was that it still required it. And that didn’t occur as a problem until there were no people around anymore to do the actual thing. The real problem was that climate change itself kept accelerating, even as the world began trying to turn its complex energy and agriculture systems around. All that giant mass of carbon that the world had put into the atmosphere acted like a time-delayed fuse, and the temperature just kept rising. Worse, it appeared that scientists had systematically underestimated just how much damage each percent would do, a point underscored in early 2030 when a behemoth slice of the Antarctic ice sheet slid majestically into the Southern ocean. All of a sudden, the rise in sea level was clearly visible. And the heating itself kept triggering feedback loops that in turn accelerated the heating: ever-larger wildfires, for instance, kept pushing more carbon ever into the air, and their smoke-blackened ice that in turn melted even faster. This hotter world produced an ongoing spate of emergencies: “forest-fire season” was now nearly year-round, and the warmer ocean kept hurricanes and typhoons boiling months past the old norms. And sometimes previously unknown emergencies would surface: ancient carcasses kept emerging from the melting permafrost of the north, and with them, germs from illnesses long thought extinct. But the greatest crises were still in the “things-to-come-category” - it was perfectly masked by the thick cloak of the global disinformation at the commonWealth. For political reasons, it was more convenient and cheaper to keep the things as they were. Megacities and semi-automated manufacturing and agriculture fields provided enough counterbalance to keep the ever-growing commonWealth population busy and away from the hunger. But, even if the empire wouldn’t collapse, in many places, it was becoming harder and harder to live, as the heat waves had become unbearable, with nighttime temperatures staying above 40C and rendering outdoor work impossible for weeks and months at a time. Now add the poisoned and war obliterated megacities to the picture.
[ … ]
Occasionally, there would be explosions. In a place where emergency shutdown sequences didn’t work correctly, cooling water at nuclear power plants would eventually evaporate, leading to a series of explosions and other malfunctions, leading to cascading failures. That made the area inhabitable for humans almost immediately. These incidents became more common after a few years after the Great Drone Wars, as there were fewer people on the surface. Y2038K was another substantial contributing factor for the myriad of failing automated maintenance systems. Then everything started to succumb to nature’s order more quickly.
It took around 30 years for the devastated megacities to be covered in vegetation, taking over city streets and sidewalks and enveloping concrete structures. Sidewalks crack, and weeds invade. Water-soaked steel columns supporting subway tunnels corrode and buckle. Wolves invaded the local parks. Concrete chunks tumbled from buildings, whose steel foundations began to crumble. Nuclear reactors continued to leak radioactivity into the rivers.
Small clusters of people were still trying to make with whatever they had at that time. Occasionally, there would be attempts to reach out to someone using short wave radio, but more often than not, sweeping through the frequencies wouldn’t give you anything back except the void.
While mega constructions like dams were still holding, it was just the question of when they finally would give in, without the continuous need of a gentle human touch. Once they start to fail and return the previously diverted water flow, it would bring back the surroundings to the truly natural state. But that will take another century or so. Some of the engineering marvels were built to last.
In the meantime, most of the wildlife would come back to the previously human-controlled territory. Most of the plants and domestic animal species wrought by the man would be completely wiped out in the next century or two.
Another 100-year passes and metal constructions like steel bridges and shields in the megacities without maintenance will crumble to the ground. Most bridges collapse.
Cities were either slowly becoming smothered in the sand or drowned. And the swamps covering the majority of the surface started to reappear.
Link to the recording: https://soundcloud.com/palanga_street_radio/decaying-foundations-006-the