Insomnia

19: Jacob

Hudson Bay, March 2125

The bay was filled with shards of glass, cut diamonds shimmering in the morning light, or perhaps just scores of crystal teeth which formed a jawline in the surf. It was enough to make me shield my eyes. I had expected boats, but not such works of art as these. Our vessels shone as if crafted from solid silver, and each perfect steel hull was capped with billowing sails of white; the Arctic coast had once been used to snowy peaks which floated in the sea, but even the palest icebergs hadn't been as pure as their replacements, ironically built by the polluters of the those floes. Not content with melting Mother Nature's jewels, we insist upon surpassing her as well.

I knew that it was all just show. Our fleet didn't gleam because the Union was rich or elegant, but because we wished to project a face of wealth and beauty on the world. Above all else, the Union is vain and insecure. The ships were meant to dazzle and intimidate, to delude a broken world that our nation remained healthy and whole. Once again, we wished to cast ourselves as the world's brightest star, a beacon of light, hope, and liberty for all. That bar had been lowered in a world of dying fires, but even so our own light seemed hollow, as empty as the second-hand starlight of the moon.

These boats would have been built by the greatest shipwrights that the Union had, from the highest quality materials that our government could find. They were not typical of the dirty streets I knew, and lied if they implied our people didn't share the rest of the earth's hunger. For our first appearance on the global stage in my lifetime, we were desperate to dress the part; we had chosen to present the pinnacle of our achievements, a silver mask to cover our scarred and filthy face, rather than admitting our flaws to an equally damaged world.

We have a beautiful disguise, but even the most polished mask requires a simple face to wear it. The one hole in our facade was that these masterpieces would be crewed by imperfect men like me; I was one of a thousand volunteers, and it was clear we'd been selected for our willingness above anything else. We chose to serve, not the other way around. There had been a brief vetting process, but we still represented quantity over quality, serving as mere distributors rather than ambassadors. 

There were delegations for every corner of the Earth. I had been assigned to the Latin America quarter of the makeshift lodgings here, but we had Africa to our right and East Asia to our left. The future of every continent, crowded into a single Arctic bay. Some of these ships were headed east, some of them west, some of them merely south, but all would have to depart due north: the Great Wall had caged us in on every other side, with this coast only spared because it was deemed too remote and inhospitable for any refugees to try to reach. Cold, bare, and many miles from any life. After being made to wait here for the past few days, I could see how the government had come to that conclusion.

The world was smaller now, smothered by the sea, and the fleet had been trimmed accordingly. There were no ships bound for the regions of the past, like West Europe or South-East Asia. We are too late to save them all. Even more conspicuous, however, was absence of a domestic force. We want the others to go first. The Japanese had trialed their treatment on themselves before rolling it out, and what might have been selfishness at the time seemed almost honourable now. 

The Union likely featured more super-centenarians than the rest of the world combined, and my generation had a good chance of succeeding them. The wealthiest nations had been hit the worst by floods, and I doubted any of the rest would have survived as well as us under a cloud of drought and famine. Most of those cured will not know it. They all had rarer metals than iron floating in their blood, but that blood would dry up or leak from them before it had a chance to salve the cruel effects of age. Only we would still experience its unnatural rejuvenation, but the campaign to reverse its effects would somehow only reach the regions where there weren't any.