The silence is laying still, like a heavy leaden rug over the landscape. Nothing out of the ordinary, perhaps, but it seems a lot more noticable today. The silence is sharply contrasting my heartbeat, which sounds like mortar rounds beating into the vast nothingness surrounding me.
The silence is not just an absence of sound. It is intense in a way that fills me with fear.
I step on a lone twig. My heart skips several beats, as the sound of breaking wood projects its infernal noise into the silence. The silence, not even interrupted by my own breathing or my own hearbeat is deafening. The manifestation of my fear.
I stand where I stood, and I feel the day slowly moving forward. Filing its claws. Changing its skin. Becoming night.
The snowflakes stopped falling from the sky. Their slow, uncertain path towards the earth, just to melt the second they hit their inevitable target, strikes me as somewhat meaningless.
Just like my own life. Falling towards the earth with small saltos, twists and turns. Before I will hit the ground. Melt. Be forgotten.
The past fifty years have been meaningless. The machines took over all our work. The humans had all the spare time we could possibly want. All the time to do.. well. What? What is time, anyway?
Time travel, I think, and smile to myself. Everything we do is present, but everything we see and do is the past. On earth it doesn’t matter. The sun, however, is 8 minutes into the past. I think about the new colonies. They are so far away that the colonies themselves, where people have lived for hundreds of years, are not even visible from the earth yet. Meaningless.
My stream of conciousness is broken by the sound of a discharging powerfield. More people heading for the colonies. Can’t really say that I blame them.
Before the winter. (It seems so long ago). That was when the accidents started happening. Acapulco. Kiev. Rotterdam. Brugge. Faults in the reactors that cost the lives of mrore than three billion people. The winter became our rescue - they packed the faulthy reactors in giant blocks of ice. Giant cathedrals of ice and snow. Then the evacuation began, to the 1764 colonies.
That was when they let me out of jail, three years ago. They needed the prison buildings - with their walls of lead - to protect the important people. Presidents. Kings. Not that there were many left of either, but that seemed like a better reason to protect them well. So they let us out. The prisoners. We roam the fields in our newfound freedom. Boredom.
I find myself wondering how much radiation I have been hit with so far. Luckily the blocks of ice stop the reactors from being directly lethal.
The past few years, the debate on the value of human life has been eminent. Managers, presidents and stockowners have high value. I wonder if managers and stockowners would have value if the machines (which are worthless) wouldn’t have worked for them?
I used to work in an office that made machine components. That is, a machine did my job, but I supervised it, and got paid for it. Then something happened. I got mixed up in - and found guilty of - a car accident. Or an unintentional vehicular homicide. And suddenly I was without any value. I was put in jail for three years.
Bitter. I think that is a fair description of me. I am looking over what once must have been a forest. The silence is again abused by a power field. I feel like a bird. Free. Or in this case; probably dead. There are hardly any birds left. Perhaps that does something to my value? Surely, being a bird when there are hardly any birds left, must be a good thing. Free in nature. Or what is left of it. I think I would rather go for my snowflake theory, despite my suspicion that my path to the earth is not nearly as graceful as that of a showflake.
Perhaps I am a rock. Or something else. Something heavy. Something dangerous.
I remember when I was younger. Lene and I were together. Not together-together. But friends. Every winter we would make a sceleton of fiber and wood. We would use my dad’s fire hose to pour water on our sceleton, and shape it into a dragon. We would put a lightcell in its mouth, to make it look like it was breathing fire. Another time we built a church. It was huge. Lene said it was a cathedral, and that we were going to get married in the cathedral of ice. We promised to stay faithful until the cathedral would fall.
The week after, the cathedral melted. That spring, we started on different schools. I never saw her again.
The thoughts of Lene make me sad. It must have been 15 years ago. The only love I ever knew. I hope she is safe in one of the colonies.
I used to try to sneak into one of the force fields transporting people to the colonies. Now… Now I have given up hope. Soon, there will only be us left. The ones who were inside the leadclad walls of the prisons when the accidents started happening.
I don’t know what they are going to do to us. I fear nothing. That they will leave us on earth. Converting my three years’ prison sentence to capital punishment.
It is morning. The night is over. With disgust, I notice a ray of sunlight through the heavy clouds. A swallow beats its way through the air, feverishly searching for something to eat.
Meaningless. There is nothing left to eat.
Spring is here.