Insomnia

13: Karla

Sakha Republic, December 2124

Like many world events, the apocalypse had largely passed us by. Siberia had never been a paradise, but our sanctuary had always been consistent in its bitterness: our people's lives had proven tough through war and peace, through empire and revolution, through prosperity and recession. Instead of fearing it, we have been raised to see that hardship as a basic part of life.Adversity was in our blood. If hell had truly come to Earth, its fires were not yet felt amongst the Arctic ice.

It would take more than civilisation's collapse for us to notice the end of our world; our people had survived before modernity, and they would certainly outlive it now. Not all of us were fully civilised to start. Our lands had been sparsely populated, boasting just one soul per three square kilometres, and those barren plains had remained empty for a reason. Few could bear it here, but those who did were hardened against scarcity and cold: there is no end of days for those who grew up in the night. I imagined that the flourishing summer cities had wilted as the winter nights came drawing in, but it would take more than that for our robust evergreens to fall.

The outside world had always struggled to impose its will upon its most forgotten corner, as if global changes were diluted amongst so much space. Technology had been slow to come, and we had even been late recipients of the cure: some of the eastern districts bordered with Japan, but the island nation's scientists found more kinship with their wealthy, metropolitan trade partners. The Far East and West were first to conquer death, and major population centres followed in descending order. With few patients to demand a dose, we had been bottom of the list.

It was a curious formula for fairness: the rationale had been to reach the more people faster, but the result was to distribute a resource to those who needed it least. Cities overflowing with life saw their reserves extended, whilst our desert remained bare. We had watched the former tear themselves apart, finally crippled by the strain of all those beating hearts, but even after every line of communication had failed, after all machinery beyond the robots in our blood had died, it felt that we were waiting for our turn to come. The cure had come late to our wastelands, and its consequences seemed to have been delayed as well.

Overpopulation had sped the collapse of the globe's greatest cities, but here the concept was a foreign one. Our numbers are far from their peak, and the cure only negated their decline. The microscopic healers in our blood had stopped our hearts and brains from giving in, but they hadn't immunised our souls and minds from struggling in the long dark Arctic nights; a lack of company and daylight could form its own disease, and many fermented their own medicine to counter it. The most depressed found cleaner ways to kill themselves, but white alcohol was the poison of choice for those losing the will to live.

The cure did not cure all our ills, and we were spared its lethal side-effect. Whilst other countries sunk under the growing weight of piling flesh, our region remained cold and bare; Siberia had never been a paradise, and we still had many problems of our own, but we were passed over by the plague which overwhelmed the earth. Our lives are just as tough as they have ever been.

We had lost all lines of contact with the outside world, but we had always been remote. Our technology had died, but most of us knew a simple life: many had been hunters, and could live off the land's wages now no business came to claim our skills. Capitalism follows communism to the grave. We stayed alive, but every day we knew we lived in peril; out in the wild without our tools, we were just a troupe of apes in furs. Our guns had made us apex predator, not our feeble teeth or fingernails, and the wolves and cats were quick to learn. We could hunt freely for nature's goods, but nature possessed hunters of her own.

The predators here could rival those of any African savannah. Felidae, canidae and ursidae, the three major families of carnivores, all keep their greatest specimens for the north. A three-metre Siberian tiger would dwarf any southern lion, with my weight the difference between the two. Gray and Eurasian wolves ranged across the tundra, and bears of every shade consumed anything they found.

The white bear, bélyj medvédj, was the largest land hunter in the world. Despite its 700 kilogram weight, the monster could stampede at forty kilometres per hour; Andrey Yepishin, Russia's fastest ever sprinter, set a record at thirty-six. In the water, no human swimmer had ever come close to the ten kilometres per hour the beast could manage, and the white bear did not even rely on speed. It was an accomplished ambush hunter, near-invisible to the eye and even under infrared, and could swim or walk for days on end when following a trail.

They seemed a spectre from a nightmare, a stalking death which did not rest, but I knew that the fiends were all too real. They had claimed both of my parents' lives, leaving me an orphan in this empty world. In time, they may come to claim mine as well. We tried not to linger for too long at any camp, constantly on the move on our long journey north, but unlike a hungry bear we had to stop and sleep. We had to pause to gather our own sustenance, to build a shelter from the wind, or to lay our cold and famished companions to rest.

"Why do we need to bury him?" Anton asked, tiring as we scraped a furrow from the solid ground. "The snow will do it soon enough."

"Because the snow killed him to start," I said, looking at the younger members of our group. We cannot leave their brother's corpse out on display. "We couldn't shelter him in life, but in death he should at last know peace."

For all his lack of tact or sentiment, I knew that Anton had been right. Each fresh fall from the sky created a new cemetery, interring the dead and dying where they lay; wherever we now walked, perfectly preserved tombs could lie beneath our feet. Shallow graves, however, were more likely to be robbed.

The white bear can pick up a seal's scent from almost two kilometres away, I had once read. Even buried under one metre of snow. I had learnt all that I could about the beasts, my parents' deaths leading to an obsessive childhood fear, but all of the books were out of date. The bears do not hunt seals any more. With the melting of the Arctic ice, the apex predators had been forced to migrate south onto more solid ground, where they had found a whole new source of prey.

We lowered Petya into our freshly excavated hole, already cushioned with a growing coat of white. The snows are only getting worse. The climate had changed just as the models had warned, but it had been much more than a global warming trend: if anything, our temperatures had dropped, disrupted cycles plunging us into the opposite extreme. The Arctic weather had been followed by Arctic creatures, now comfortable ranging further from the pole. Neither arrival had boded well for us.

Our predecessors had rightly worried about destroying the planet's ecosystems, but they had spoken of saving the white bear, the tiger and the leopard, as if those mighty creatures were reliant on us for help. If we destroy their territories, they simply migrate into ours. A new north coast replaced the one the waves submerged, and soon these carnivores' hunting grounds bordered our own towns. It had been a bad time for our tools to fail.

We should have saved their land to save ourselves from the white bears, but not the other way around. We would struggle to harm nature, who had ruled for millions of years before our birth; in forcing her to change her ways, we had mostly endangered ourselves.

"Petya is at peace now," I told Irina, whose tears formed crystals on her cheeks. The youngest member of our group had found the body when she woke at dawn, and had been hit the hardest by her older brother's death. "He has gone to a better place."

"I didn't know you were religious," Anton muttered as we turned away, the simple ceremony done.

"I'm not." I believed in the white bear as my own personal devil, but there were no gods left in this long-forsaken world.

"But you believe in life after death? You said Petya was in a better place, unless that was a lie to spare Irina's heart."

"I just believe in death," I said. "What I said was not a lie, if you consider what it takes to make it true: life need only follow death in quality, not also succeed it in the journey of our souls."

"You would prefer the void yourself?" I didn't answer, but the absence of denial made my feelings clear enough. "I wouldn't judge you if you chose to take your life. We all have horrors in our past which we long to forget, let alone a fear of those which are still yet to come; there would be a certain safety in a timeless sleep."

"I don't care whether I live or die." My eyes were on Irina, Darya, Nikita; we found each other as orphans, but now we form a family of our own. I thought back to fragile Petya, whom I had been powerless to save. "But I do care about the rest of you. Whether by my own hand or through whatever means nature presents, I will not go to my grave until my family are safe."