January

It had been a crisp, tempestuous January. I walk through this crowded city, my hand trembling on account of the collapse of the global economic system.

Could that have happened just a fortnight ago? It couldn’t have just been two weeks. I couldn’t help but compare this catastrophe to a game I had once played as a child, where a child protagonist, clad in green, had to save a world where the Moon fell from the sky. But that game could not have been further from this reality.

The Jesus-buffs had pinned the apocalypse on the wrath of their God, since those damn Muhhamed-buffs are wrong, bad, and their prophet was a demon. The Muhhamed-buffs pinned it on the Jesus-buffs, along with a myriad of other buffs, including but not limited to, Buddha-buffs, Veda-buffs, Tao-buffs,for a myriad of reasons.. The Alien-buffs thought it was their alien beings' will. And basically every type of buff pinned it on the Moses-buffs.

I was lucky, since I live in one of the few wall-civilizations, the one that reacted the fastest. The paranoid people of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland had built foundational, albeit decorative, walls in the past, but none akin to those now deemed necessary. The whole world had taken up a war with neptune. First declared by Caligula, then held up by the Dutch for centuries, and now everyone had joined them.. The walls were, as of the end of January, four and a half metres and rising. The tides had grown in accommodation with this, four metres they were now. More than any man-made catastrophe could have ever done.

I walk down the streets of Surrey, popping my head in the door of a Costco, long since closed. The supply lines were dead, and had been a rotting corpse for approximately a month. As I walk down the aisles, I find a hidden can, behind an old pillar, clearly hidden to return to later.

“SLICED PINEAPPLE, IN PINEAPPLE JUICE”

It had been a terrible few weeks, since I had seen anything like pineapple or banana, or really any sort of fruit, other than apples. I felt a feeling of hope at the sight of these pineapples.

Maybe humanity can survive this. I then left the store, leaving a few toonies at the door.

Can’t forget to pay, now no one reminds you. The shadows grew on the pavement.

I slowly made my way to a bike rack in the centre of the city, perusing the shops and stalls that now line the streets of the market district. Cars, especially, but not exclusively ones with internal combustion engines, were extinct. This area transformed from empty train tracks and highway, to a myriad of market stalls and temporary housing, causing foot gridlock. A mosh of humans, yelling deals and perusing vendors. Since the death of the supply chains, most of the major corporations of the western world had pulled out of low lying lands leaving their niches in the economy for local businesses. Now, due to the quadrupling number of businesses, the buildings were all but reserved for offices and homes. So the shops flooded into the streets of Surrey. All the people of the west coast had fled to Vancouver. British Columbia was overpopulated.

On my bike, I ride to the downtown of this metro area. I pass shops after shops. I ride on the sidedrive, formerly a sidewalk, the streets were now for pedestrians, sidedrives for the wealthy cyclists. I passed through the refugee camps, the police cyclically tried to clear them, but then they surged into the suburbs, and then those suburbs turned them back to Vancouver. In these eternal migrations, ideological fanaticism breeds. But that won’t be a problem, since they still have their voice in Victoria.

Now back at my building, I went to the elevator. At nearly four hundred metres above sea level, I peered out my window. In the deep night sky, next to the stars, out of its orbit, the moon was halfway to earth, and closing.