In Context

Today is overcast, such as it has been for the last 14 years or so. Sometimes when I think hard, I remember what it was like when the sun shown. Other times I feel like its all in my imagination. That it wasn’t at all how I remember it. Just like when you see an old photograph and you swear blind you remember the living room tv being bigger. ‘Jesus’ I audibly say aloud to myself. Photographs, TVs - what even were they now when I think of it, even memories - what were they now? Nothing more than a frustrating frame to hang around nostalgia for the way things once were.

Certainly, in my lifetime and subsequent generations lifetimes, things won’t ever be the same again. But then again they won’t have my point of references, nor panging for what we had. They’ll be free, but in an ironic way that they will never truly appreciate. Makes me laugh inside to think of a time in the far future, when (or if,) society and the world recovers, they come across ancient relics like iPhones, tablets, bicycles, subway stations, and pcs. It will be familiar but not in a first-hand sense. The way when you used to see something ancient in a book or on tv like The Mona Lisa. Then one day you finally see it in the flesh and it’s strangely familiar yet completely unusual at the same time. There I go again - museums, books. Things that aren’t things anymore.

It’s all changed so much since Yellow-Day or Y-DAY as it became known.

Technology still exists, but it’s highly coveted and in the hands of the government. Even then it’s incredibly rudimentary. Tv’s still exist in a sense, but they aren’t recreationally in every house like they once were, they’re now found in the centre of cities usually reinforced and protected to the eyeballs. They even have police that protect them now! Tv’s and the Towers. That is the only real things they protect now.

The Towers were erected years after the event and continue to appear slowly but surely across the country. Them and the city centre tv’s are the only things the police protect now. I mean I call them police, but I remember when the police were a force. Now they're a collection of individuals who in a previous life would have constituted the neighbourhood watch. They aren’t paid money anymore, but instead in dwellings. People’s attitudes changed post-event; monetary value was replaced by raw material value. Having a house that can withhold the fluctuating weather and keep you warm is more important now.

It’s not like there are malls left to spend your weekends in, spending cash to seeing the latest movie and then going to your favourite burger place anyway. No, malls are now homes to thousands of lower-class people. All huddled together, all self-sustaining (as anything can be now), protected by an ad-hoc army base ruling the individuals inside by martial law. After the pandemic years of the early twenty’s most economies had become cashless. But computer servers didn’t do too well after Y-Day, as you can imagine is the case in any disaster. Trillions of people’s savings, pensions, pocket-money, and bank balances gone in the blink of an eye. So, money is gone. People think one day they will sift through all the paperwork in buried bank vaults, and tech companies, piecing it all back together bit by bit and the economy will be reborn. If it, it will be on the backs of those in debt, and even then, 4th, 5th generation? Imagine being told you must pay back your great-great-great-grandfathers defaulted mortgage from 2036. Of course, that’s providing they can piece together anyone’s birth-records. It’s not like anyone born today is registered, least not electronically. Nor are there photographic records. Everyone got too preoccupied with their pictures being backed up on the cloud, back then you couldn’t be online without something asking to save your password or back up your files. All of it gone.

Mum used to love printing pictures; our house was adorned with them of us all growing up. But when things went bad, we didn’t have time to grab our 15kg box of family albums. Mum cries a lot about that, even now. She grabbed a few from the fridge which she holds dear and are always with her. So valuable are they, more so now than any smartphone used to be. One is of my younger brother at the cinema dressed up as Captain America going to see the latest Marvel Movie, me, and my dad just out of focus on the right. Another my mum and dad on their 10th wedding anniversary in the Bahamas, little did they know then it would be their last time on a plane, for forever. Planes don’t fly now, occasionally a few specialised military ones fly important government officials from country to country, but commercial flights are a thing of the past. Y-DAY, or Yellow Day caused a major amount of electrical damage, and the ash clouds generated from it still linger in the atmosphere grounding flights permanently, save from a few days a year when meteorological reports show the safe path through them. Even then some flights still don’t make it. Pilots who can navigate them safely are treated like royalty, and are highly coveted, living the richest of lives like the kings from times gone past. The towers give them a point of reference, as well as protecting our lives. Some 250ft or 76m tall they emit a green light, which travels for miles and is clearly visible to anyone on the ground. They act like an early warning system, showing when it’s time to get indoors as quickly as possible before the ash and snow arrives.

When the Yellowstone Caldera, or Yellowstone Super volcano erupted on January 21st, 2036, it was the end of an era for mankind. The ash plume lasted for 6 days straight, predicted to have covered ¾ of the earth’s atmosphere by the end of the first day. Billions of tons of ash fell from the sky, as well as lava all over the land. Huge super electrical storms from above the explosion lasted for around the next month, the storms then rippled through the atmosphere and a domino effect cascaded around the whole of the northern hemisphere as well as just south of the equator. Anything electronic was fried, from washing machines, traffic lights, chargers to pacemakers. If it ran with a chipboard then it was gone, forever. It wasn’t just the immediate impact of that, tens of thousands of satellites in space controlled by stations on earth wandered aimlessly in the stratosphere. We, America, by this point controlled the space infrastructure ever since Musk and Bezos joined forces to monopolise the internet and space. China had their own infrastructure, but once America lost control of their fleet, it resulted in daily collisions. In the early days it would constantly rain space junk. Now less so but every now and again a huge shooting star can be seen on the horizon.

Now people’s lives were dictated by the towers and the green light they emitted. Gone are the easy days when people would be regularly seen with their phones in their hands, streaming the latest TV shows, or checking their Fitbit to see how many calories they’d burned. Existence was rough now, as I’ve said I remember the way it used to be, granted I was only 19 years old, but I’d lived through the halcyon period of humanity. We’d come close to wrecking the planet with global warming in the mid 20s, and although we didn’t undo total damage, we at least curtailed our carbon emissions to the point it didn’t get worse. But it was too late for the ocean’s, they’d warmed and destroyed around 90% of the sea’s coral life, and the biosystems that relied on them. A few pockets remained, and I imagine they will thrive again far in the future now the planet has cooled, and humanity have been halted in our track’s. But it won’t be in this lifetime or the next hundred thousand or so. That’s what was ironic about it all. We tried to save the planet, we stopped pumping Co2 into the atmosphere, halted the warming but in the end? It was all undone by the Super volcano.

The surrounding states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho surrounding the Yellowstone were destroyed by molten rivers of lava hundreds of miles long. What that lava didn’t finish the ash cloud got. People, cities, rivers all buried. Neighbouring states as far as Nevada, Utah, Colorado, North and South Dakota were all covered in 1m of ash and volcanic fallout. Oregon and California also didn’t escape the effects of Y-DAY. The fact that it was winter didn’t help either. As the lava flowed, any snow or ice ahead of it also caused widespread flooding. Mix in millions of tons of ash, and it was like a flowing river of concrete. From the Midwest to the Pacific Ocean is gone now.

Our family was lucky we lived on Miami on the east coast, so weren’t severely affected directly by Y-DAY, however the one thing we couldn’t escape just like everyone else on the planet, was the cooling. Sulphur dioxide released in the eruptions covered the entire planet within the first few days, causing a cooling of our planet by 5⁰C or so. Poetic justice for the years we’d been warming the planet. As the weeks worn on the northern hemisphere found itself locked in a mini-ice age. When we were still were able to pick up internet signals in the early days, scientists argued amongst themselves as to how long it would last. Some thought it would last 50 years, others a 1000 years or more. Many even said they thought it would only last 10 years due to the amount of CO² still in the atmosphere.

All I can say is the last 10 years have been extremely cold, and millions have died, with no end to the ice-age in sight. Even on the long-wave radio, or on the TV’s they still don’t seem to have a definitive answer to when it will end. When heading out on foraging trips to get resources for the shopping mall commune I live in, you occasionally see a hand sticking out of the frozen ground. Just another poor person who didn’t get into shelter fast enough when it all went south. Sometimes you come across bodies which are just laying frozen solid with the sides of them buried, but the face and chest exposed. Almost like the way kids used to bury themselves in the sand at the beach, with just a head poking out. That’s why the green lights are so important, if you don’t see one, or don’t heed its message, then prepare to be buried under a blizzard of volcanic ash and snow slush mix. If the exposure doesn’t get you, the sudden drop in pressure produce's a sub-zero snap that will, especially if you aren’t wrapped up in multiple layers.

I chuckle to myself again, thinking about beaches, wondering when they’ll be a thing again. I think I can remember what sand feels like, and the sound of crashing waves. But I can’t, and the context of these things means nothing anymore. Seems whenever I put any of these things in context, the context itself is no longer a thing. Funny. In years to come the young generation growing up won’t have these points of reference, all these things I know will be alien concepts to them.

Now I feel really old, even at 29, but the harshness of reality or the context of it has made me age further than I think, or really am.