Fever

A gentle wind sifts across the settlement. The weather is calm, a rare gift these days. A father and daughter lie in the courtyard and stare up at the slowly clearing night sky. She is young, maybe eleven, still brimming with curiosity. He is young too, but doesn’t look the part. The too-deep lines on his face hint at terrible things, what men would once have called ‘experience’ instead of fever-shock. But right here, and now, he’s content.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Tell me about what it was like before.”

“Before?”

“Yeah. You know. Before the Fever.”

A deep sigh escapes his lips. As the last of the clouds pull away from the moon, he begins to speak.

“Once upon a time..."
--

Once upon a time, things were different. They were calling it the Golden age, the Age of the Giant, the Ultimate Boom. Humanity had spent the past hundred years growing beyond belief, in every area. People were living longer, and healthier, and more comfortably. Products were getting cheaper, and more plentiful. Technology was becoming safer, more reliable, and totally ubiquitous.

And the best bit was, it looked set to continue. We had the trend lines to back it up. Statistically, written in the language of pure mathematics, everything would increase exponentially - everything from processing power to population sizes - and keep doing so for as long as the models could predict. It had its bubbles and its busts, as was expected, but once you smoothed out the curve, everything fit. Perfectly. We were unstoppably impossibly ascending.

The power we held was terrifyingly magnificent. Anything and everything, from radishes to radios, was spinning around the world, crossing a dozen borders before ending up where it was needed. People, too. Anywhere in the world was mere hours away, whisked around the planet by the simple fact that if you throw something fast enough, gravity doesn’t count. You could talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, instantly, for free.

But where you saw it most was the buildings. Every city in the world, building monoliths of glass and steel, and not a month would go past when there wasn’t a new tallest building in the world. We dynamited mountains and dumped them in the sea and had ten thousand people living there within a year. We rerouted rivers, forced back the ocean, and steered the rain. We could do anything. Nothing was beyond our reach.

And then things started to go wrong. Just little things, at first. Rainfall projections, perfect for years, would suddenly be just ever so slightly off. Oil wells would dry up a month before they were predicted to. The bees started disappearing, without any explanation. It wasn’t in the models, so we assumed it was just another blip, a part of a bubble bursting somewhere in economics land, but we carried on, buoyed up by our predictions that in the long run, things were going to be better than ever before.

We thought we understood everything. We thought we knew how things worked. Truthfully, though? We had no idea. Chaos theory, fractal complexity, unstable equilibria,call it what you like. God, even. The fact was, we had now inextricably tangled ourselves up in systems far too complex to ever model, where even the slightest change would have enormous impact, and we had pushed and pulled and toyed with those systems to meet our whims. And suddenly, these systems with 4.54 billion years of momentum behind them were pushing back.

That was the start of what we call the Fever. Because our illusion of control was so total, and we were so wrapped up in our bubble of perfect predictions, that we ignored it. Like madmen gripped by a fever we pulled harder, and the inevitable forces of the universe pulled back. We built higher, and the ground buckled. We built islands, and the oceans stopped. We flew, and the air thickened.

And then like every fever, it broke, but not without intense agony. There was utter terror. Then despair. And then... hope. We survived. Not all of us. Not even most of us. But we survived. We should be extinct. But we’re not. We got a second chance, and maybe this time we’ll adapt to our world, instead of trying to do it the wrong way around.

--

The moon is high in the sky now. Father and daughter are sitting up, waiting for the next gap in the clouds, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. The daughter turns to face her father, her face an odd mix of inquisitiveness and terror

“Will the Fever come back, daddy?”

“I hope not.” he said softly, eyes locked on the stars.

She slid her hand into his.

“I hope not too.”

---

This one I wrote after watching a documentary about building islands off the Dubai coast. It struck me as a perfect example of hubris, but honestly, I don't think that really came through in this one. I was going for 'fable-y', but honestly it comes across as more preachy than anything else. I guess that is the point of fables after all, but I still don't really like it. If I were doing this again, I'd have dread Cthulhu rise from the deep after having his eternal slumber disturbed by island-buldiers, and proceed to devour humanity. Or worse.