Global Warming

Warning. Warning. Warning.

Potentially threatening contaminant…Potentially threatening contaminant…Potentially threatening contaminant…

Purging dangerous pathogens per protocol in 10…9…8…7…6…

“Alright! Alright, I’m up!” she exclaimed, lurching out of her cot and lunging towards the safety shutter to annul the ordered protocol. The instant she yanked the heavy handle into the green zone of her nuclear radiation detector the wailing cry of the emergency protocol siren died out.

She let go of the handle slowly; the faulty siren always found ways to blare out, nuclear radiation spike in her contained chamber, or not. She quickly slumped down onto the floor, shutting her eyes in an effort to return to the blissful realm of sleep.

Irradiated rays of sunlight where probably streaming into the windows of the quarantine bay above her, creating rays of dust above the empty beds. She wouldn’t know. Living in a contained basement without windows and depleting resources to avoid radiation poisoning doesn’t help her meager attempt to remember things from before the Greenhouse Disaster.

Opening her eyes, and abandoning the thought of sleep, she let her head loll over her shoulder, eventually staring down her calendar. Weathered paper counting down days to her inevitable end. She scoffed, eyes on today’s date. Wednesday, May 15, 2067. The day she would run out of food, after spending endless months rationing, water, after drinking the smallest amounts a day, and oh, the day the purging systems would fail. The quarantine basement that had top of the line systems to prevent the encroachment of radiation emitting from the sun after the global breakdown known as the Greenhouse Disaster would FAIL. Years of prevention and sacrifice all for this day.

She knew this would happen. She was prepared, falling asleep yesterday with the plan stuck in her head. Today, the day for which she sacrificed her health, parents and future, she would leave this bunker.

Pushing up from the wall, she gathered her things. All had been packed the night before, but still, she needed an excuse to linger. Finally looking at the scarce space in which she had lived for more than a decade, she decided to slip into the Enviro-suit she had saved for today. Catching the last glimpse of her body before it was engulfed by the suit, she noted how thin she was. No food and barely any water have left her gaunt and withered. A shell. Much like the world in which she would venture.

The Greenhouse Disaster was the result of many dangerous things, which eventually became the recipe for an apocalyptic future, but the biggest of them was ignorance. Picture this: a world rife with social inequality, the disruption of the precipitation cycle by industrial pollution and a resulting increase in atmospheric CO2, and life coming to a screeching halt. Long story short, we maxed out fossil fuels, and industrial manufacturing had no limits. The pollution was sky high, no garbage disposal was big enough and eventually, it stopped raining. Climate change had reached its climax and we ignored it. In the end it was the sun that got us. Well, that and the drought. Along with the destruction of the precipitation cycle, the ozone layer thinned out and allowed the sun to shine with all of its glorious might, infecting the human race and then burning them to a crisp.

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