Human Island: A documentary

#1 | Cli-fi | Dystopian | Strong female lead

Human Island is part of my cli-fi series There Is Hope about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the things that give humans hope.

This is episode #1. You can find an overview of all the episodes here.

---

Human Island: A documentary

While making a documentary about a sacrificial ritual, a grieving mother comes to terms with the untimely loss of her daughter.

The jade-green kelp forest floats in the crystal-clear water. Lying on her back, Nova allows the swift currents to guide her through the corridors lined by algae stems, stretching their slender arms toward the sunlight. When she closes her eyes, the chlorophyll green light sips through her eyelids, coloring her thoughts, and she floats like this for a while, wrapped in the ocean’s waves, enjoying the silence. A vibration wakes her from her reverie, and she opens her eyes to read the bright orange message displayed on her diving helmet visor: You are running out of oxygen. But she isn’t ready to leave the underwater paradise and return to the dust. Instead, she flips on her belly and starts to swim. Fast. Faster. Faster!

The kelp stems tremble in the currents formed by her vigorous strokes, and myriad tiny creatures scatter in all directions. The kelp forest is thriving with life, filling her broken heart with a joy she hadn’t felt in a long time. Soon, the warning on her visor blinks in red, angry letters: Your oxygen is out. And she greedily inhales the last bits of oxygen and swims to the ocean’s surface, rising with the kelp forest. She feels dizzy when she bursts out of the water and lifts her visor to breathe in the hot, stale, dusty air.

The colonies of the Japanese seaweed farmers are stringed like beads on the shore of the rising Atlantic Ocean. Nova swims amongst floating homes and children cooling off from the midday sun underneath suspended seaweed factories. When she steps out of the water, the sand is burning under her feet, so she runs to her flying pod parked next to the ancient Data Center, the main energy source of the colony and the spying eye of The Cooperatives. She takes off her diving suit, stuffs it in the cargo compartment, jumps on the pilot seat and flips on the engine switch. On the dashboard, there’s a picture of a young girl with long chestnut brown hair. Nova checks the air quality index on her smartwatch: the daily CO2 is 731 ppm.

The cabin cools off as the pod lifts into the white sky. Beyond the colonies, bare dusty land stretches to the ghost cities of the long-gone industrial world, sprawling inland like crippled giants caked in dust and baking in the scorching heat. Outside the cities lies the khaki Iberian desert.

Deep in the desert, a long cloud of dust moves like a giant worm, and Nova flies in its direction. The dust cloud clears somewhat from close up, revealing a long trail of people walking. Nova lands the pod in the sand, turns off the engine and watches the weathered dusty silhouettes wrapped in the ubiquitous green fabrics made of seaweed, the plant that feeds and clothes the world. Young and old stream by, some carrying luggage on their back, pulling carts, pushing electric strollers, bicycles or strangely shaped vehicles made from scrap parts.

On the backseat of the narrow cabin, Nova’s travel bag lays open, revealing a tangle of cables and boxes, her filming gear. With one hand, she pulls out a gearbox; with the other, she fetches a hand control pad from her pocket and switches on her virtual dashboard. Filming bots crawl out of the gearbox and onto her arm: two spiders, four cockroaches, two baby turtles and five mini-drones, her birds, put the whole cabin in motion.

‘Guys, you need to get out of here.’

Nova pulls up her mask, opens the pilot window and hushes the drones out. On her virtual pad, she activates a map of the area, and with two taps, she dispatches her bots and drones in different directions. Soon, streaming of the long caravan from different angles and perspectives upload to the virtual dashboard. Nova wraps a green scarf around her head, picks up her filming camera and microphone and jumps out of the pod just as a wrinkly man wearing a red turban walks by.

‘Good afternoon. My name is Nova Novikov, and I’m filming a documentary about the human sacrifice. Can I ask you some questions?’ Nova says.

‘Do you have some water?’ the man says.

‘Sure,’ Nova says.

She unbuckles her water bottle and hands it to the man.

‘Thank you,’ the man says, taking a long sip. ‘How long until the Japanese colony?’

‘At this pace, about two hours. How long have you been walking?’ Nova says.

The man takes another sip of water and returns the bottle.

‘Ten days, but my food and water rations ran out two days ago. I don’t mind the hunger, but walking without water in this heat is challenging,’ the man says.

Nova digs through her handbag and takes a bag of seaweed chips.

‘It’s all I have left,’ Nova says.

The old man’s eyes fill up with tears.

‘Wasting food and water on an old man,’ the man says.

Nova pats him on the shoulder.

‘It’s my duty and pleasure to share,’ Nova says.

‘More meat on these old bones for the sacrifice,’ the man says, chewing on a cracker.