Miranda Kate’s Mid-Week Challenge : 2017/10/11

It took decades for us to find it. First, we had to recover from the floods, storms, fires, droughts, desertification, and forest shifts. The environment was certainly hosed, and it killed better than half of us.

Started in 2017, with the US getting hammered by a whole string of hurricanes. Several of them were category 5 storms. Bigger than any storms in recorded history. The North West US also caught fire. Of course, everyone blamed the sinners. “God is striking back at us for not being good enough Christians!”

But, the science told the truth. Put enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and all hell breaks loose. And for all the proud politicians, and stupid conservatives and Christians, when New York flooded, along with Boston, Houston, DC, Seattle, and damn near everywhere else, the best recovery plans were useless. And not affordable.

The smart people moved to Canada. Northern Canada. And to Southern Argentina, and Chile. Above the new ocean levels, and in the new temperate zones.

Everybody else? Well. In the US it was guns. Lots of guns. As you can imagine. Some moved to the mountains, which caught fire. Some moved to the deserts, but the temp topped 140F and they died from the heat.

It was the worst disaster anyone could have imagined.

Of course, the ice packs melted. All of them. That’s why the oceans went batty, and rose 20 meters in a hundred years. So, we kind of forgot about everything other than survival. Underground bunkers didn’t help but so much. Eventually, they ran out of food, and fuel, and resources. Another thing we stupid humans did to ourselves.

So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we shut down all the research stations in Antarctica, and everyone abandoned the continent. Once we adjusted to the new environmental conditions of the planet, we started building new cities, and governments. I suppose because we never learn anything.

We started flying airplanes again, too. No ships though. Nothing can survive the oceans behavior. You might get lucky a few times, and make a trip across the Atlantic. But, the Atlantic is littered with thousands of ships now, all having went down in the last hundred years. Rogue waves started cropping up everywhere. They even started forming bands hundreds of miles long. In the middle of the ocean, hundred foot waves, two or three hundred miles long, and no wind anywhere. The ships never stood a chance.

The airplanes have done better. They get bounced around a lot in the atmosphere. More than a few have crashed, or been ripped to shreds by the turbulence. But, for the most part, air transportation works. And we’ve been able to build better planes that adjust their flight paths through the turbulence.

It’s those planes that finally flew over Antarctica. We wanted to see how much ice was left. And if the volcanoes we’d learned were under the ice were starting to become active.

And that’s when they found it. The city. The land of giants. Where everything was freaking huge. House keys were ten feet long. Houses were the size of Egyptian Pyramids. It had all been under the ice. For millions of years.

We’ll never know anything about any of it, of course. The volcanoes are starting up. And there’s enough of them to kill everything on the planet, and turn the atmosphere so toxic nothing will survive.

But I did find it interesting that giants once lived on Antarctica. I wonder, sometimes, as I look at the pictures from the planes, did they do what we’ve done, and kill themselves by destroying the world?

601 Words
@mysoulstears

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Miranda Kate‘s weekly short fiction challenge is in it’s 25th week. And…. I’m behind… It was a bad two weeks. So, I’m playing catch up. Here’s my little story for Week 24. You can read about the challenge here. I couldn’t think of anything worth writing. So I just made something silly up. Please, go read Miranda’s short tale this week, and any others that showed up. They are always little works of art, crafted with words, meant to be shared, and enjoyed.