Ice

Cli-fi | Drama | Tween protagonist

Sep 29, 2024

Hello my fellow voyagers🖖. Ice is a climate fiction short story. Two homeless siblings livestream their shenanigans for a living, but when they decide to go on a dream vacation with ice their lives take an unexpected turn.

One of the most fun things to do in the city for free was walk through the advertising cocoons. The dream vacation was our favorite because it was air-conditioned. I knew the ad copy by heart.

‘A dream vacation comes with ice!’

Every time I heard the slogan, my heart jumped with joy, and my head was a snowstorm of pristine white arctic landscapes.

‘Imagine an igloo vacation village, a zero accommodation solution made from ice age natural materials that your family will love. You wake up in the morning in your sleeping pod, put on your thermal bodysuit and enjoy a steaming cup of homemade coffee from the highest quality lab-grown coffee beans or true herbal tea from the seed growing colonies. After a nourishing breakfast, you throw on your insulating jacket and snow shoes and go for an epic hike in the snow. Imagine the fresh cool air, the steam coming out of your nostrils when you breathe because it’s so cold. The heat is now a forgotten dream. I hope you didn’t forget your gloves and hat! You’ll need them for the snowball fight!

‘After a warm lunch and a siesta, ice skate on the frozen lake or snow tube with your children. For those with a spirit of adventure, we offer the exclusive ice-fishing package, an unforgettable Ice Age Experience™. Please remember that you may not take the fish away. You must throw it back into the ice hole. Wrap up the day with a special dinner followed by mulled wine and hot chocolate premium substitutes while enjoying a cozy chimney fire.

‘Whether winter or summer, the holiday spirit is always present when your dream vacation comes with ice!’

My little brother and I loved cooling down from the unrelenting heat while watching the glaciers, those massive mountains of ice, the clear blue waters, and the families enjoying the luxuries of a cold winter day.

‘When I’ll go on my dream vacation, I won’t have a fire. I want it to be freezing!’

‘I want to go ice skating all day long!’

The robo-guard inevitably chased us away, blaring its loud siren. We were street urchins who could never dream of such a vacation, and they didn’t want us to dissolve their pristine ice world with our existence. Honestly, we were there both for the air con and chase. It made for viral-quality live-streaming material. With the robo-guard on our hills, we would make short stops to catch our breaths and watch the donation coins clink into our treasure box. Poverty held a morbid fascination on many rich kids who spent entire days watching us livestream, fantasizing about their own adventures. Sometimes, they came looking for us, but we made ourselves scarce. We only wanted their money, not their time.

‘If you have money, you can buy anything! Right, sis?’

‘Right on, bro!’

Except for one time. One day, a girl came looking for me. She had brought a special gift from a dream vacation with ice and wanted to see me alone. So I decided to meet her.

She arrived in a black flying pod, a pretty Nordic face with cropped blond curls and big blue eyes. Her name was Freya, the pilot told me. You see, Freya could not speak. Better said, the sounds coming out of her throat were not words but mere attempts at talking, like the guttural howls of a wild animal attempting to speak to humans. It did not matter. Freya and I hit it off immediately. We spent the day livestreaming, running in and out of ad cocoons, doing pranks on innocent robo-guards and sometimes passersby and eating. I had the best meals of my life that day, and everything went live. The coins clinked the whole time in the treasure box. At the end of the day, Freya took out a tiny blue box. I never revealed to my viewers what was in that box. It would’ve gotten Freya in trouble. She had stolen a piece of glacier ice for me.

During the Nordic summers, we watched midnight sunrises atop our kingdom on heaps of trash, and then we sneaked into the city after curfew hours to cool down in the advertising cocoons. Of course, we spent most of our time in the dream vacation cocoons, taking cat naps and switching regularly to avoid getting caught. One night, between dream and awakening, I saw it for the first time. The dream vacation invitation.

The travel company was inviting five families on a five-day, all-inclusive dream vacation. The invitations were hidden in seaweed cracker bags. Anyone who found an invitation could board the passenger ship with their family.

‘A dream vacation comes with ice!’

We never ate so many seaweed crackers in our lives, and we basically lived on seaweed crackers. I was consumed with the idea of that dream vacation. We doubled down on our livestreaming, barely sleeping in the weeks leading up to the disaster. Long story short, one day, we got caught. Because we were repeat underage offenders, the police asked us where our parents were, a question both my brother and I could not answer.

‘We don’t have parents.’

We became the city’s wards. We were brought to an orphanage, and our handpads were confiscated.

‘You don’t have to livestream for a living anymore. The city will take care of you now,’ a serious-looking lady told us.

We lost our freedom and our chance at winning a dream vacation in one scoop. But that wasn’t the worst part. Due to the age difference, they separated me from my brother.

‘He is still young, he has a chance of getting adopted. Don’t you want your brother to have a family?’

I thought I was my brother’s family. This is when I cried for the first time. But not the last. Soon after, a lovely couple came and took my brother away. That went fast. Now, I had no freedom, no dream vacation and no brother. I missed the trash heaps, our elusive existence, the livestreaming, and the clinking of coins in our treasure box. I even missed the unbearable heat. One question kept running through my head, replacing the dream vacation obsession: How would my brother ever find me?

I decided to escape. One night, after everyone was asleep, I broke into the forbidden locker, took my confiscated handpad and ran away. I crawled through the city shadows all night. When I finally arrived in the trash park, I switched on the livestream for the first time in months.

‘I’m back, you desert rats! And I need money.’

I told my fans everything that had happened in the past months, and the coins started to pour in. Clink! Clink! Clink! At some point, I turned to look at my brother, wanting to share the joy of our little treasure. But the place beside me was empty. I cried hard in front of everyone, which made the coins clink even faster.

All the cash from that first livestream went into seaweed crackers. Everything had been taken away from me, but not that dream vacation. Not yet. There was one invitation left. For the following weeks, I lived on seaweed crackers and hope. The only time I wasn’t working was when I slept. Livestreaming. Clink! Clink! Clink! Obsessively buying and opening bag after bag after bag of seaweed crackers. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Oh, wait. A shiny golden chip fell from the bag and rolled on the sidewalk. Roll, roll, roll. It took my brain a second to process what was happening, but my body was smarter. It lounged after the coin before it rolled into a sewer, and my eyes looked at the shiny golden piece and went wide. I lay there with my head resting on the manhole cover and cried and cried and cried. Clink! Clink! Clink!

~~~

‘This is how I ended up on this boat.’

The tiny blonde reporter beams into the bot camera, hovering before her face.

‘What a dramatic story! Our viewers will love it! Enjoy your dream vacation, honey,’ the reporter says, patting my head and moving on to the next girl.

The sparkly, clean white deck of the majestic passenger ship decorated with real garland flowers is empty except for the tiny blonde reporter, the ship captain, three crew members and the lucky winners of a dream vacation: five girls. I look around for their families but don’t see anyone else. Are the other girls alone, like me? Then, the annoying children’s music is interrupted by a loud voice.

‘Are you ready for fun with ice?’

A big screen flicks to life, and my jaw drops when I see a mane of blond cropped curls framing a familiar face lit up by a massive grin.

‘This is my friend, Freya!’

The tiny blonde reporter turns an annoyed face to me.

‘Don’t be silly, this is the ship’s AI!’

Freya winks at me on the screen.

‘Your dream vacation comes with ice!’

Author’s notes

I’m (still) reading The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell. In one of the chapters, he points out that hot places became dream destinations only after the invention of cold air. Today’s society associates heat with positive emotions, such as going on an exotic holiday. However, too much heat can make it very uncomfortable very fast without air conditioning.

We live in the Phanerozoic, the latest of Earth’s four geological eons, which started roughly 538 million years ago. According to new research, during this time our planet has experienced hotter weather than scientists realized, with an average global temperature over 22°C (71.6 °F). Temperatures went as high as 36°C (98.6 °F) and Earth’s flora and fauna changed drastically with the climate. The human species developed in the coldest period of the Phanerozoic with a global average temperature of 11°C (51.8 °F).

This summer, I experienced the European record heat waves in July in one of the most affected countries, and for the first time, I felt the oppressive power of heat. I longed for the fresh air of a cold winter’s day. Especially the mental clarity that comes with cold weather as opposed to the brain fog caused by heat. The average global temperature in July 2024 was 17.16°C (66.88°F). In 2023, the average global temperature was 14.98°C (58.96 °F), and it will most probably increase to 17°C (62.6 °F) by the end of the century, making parts of the world unliveable for humans either seasonally or all year round.

While reading Goodell’s book, a thought came to mind: Will our dream holiday destinations change as the planet gets warmer? Will we run away from the heat to cooler places?

More short stories: Smuggler | Illegal | Ladybug | Sinking