The Ministry for the Future

Chapter 51

The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.

Everyone felt it. The culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed. They went through motions, always in a state of suspended dread, always aware of their wounded status, wondering what massive stroke would fall next, and how they would manage to ignore that one too, when it was already such a huge effort to ignore the ones that had happened so far, a string of them going all the way back to 2020. Certainly the Indian heat wave stayed a big part of it. They could neither face it or forget it, they couldn’t think about it but they couldn’t not think about it, not without a huge subconscious effort. The images. The sheer numbers. These recalled the Holocaust, which had left a huge hole in civilization’s sense of itself; that was six million people, but an old story, and of Jewish people killed by Germans, it was a German thing. The Palestinians’ Nakba, the partition of India; on and on these bad stories went, the numbers always unimaginable; but always before it had been certain groups of people who were responsible, people from an earlier more barbaric time, or so they told themselves. And always these thoughts obtruded in an attempt to stave off the heat wave, which was now said to have killed twenty million. As many people, in other words, as soldiers had died in World War One, a death toll which had taken four years of intensely purposeful killing; and the heat wave had taken only two weeks. It somehow resembled the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920, they said; but not. Not a pathogen, not genocide, not war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end.

And yet they still burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the heat wave and would cause the next one. Profits still were added up in a way that led to shareholder dividends. And so on.

Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little. Repression of course followed, it was all too Freudian, but Freud’s model for the mind was the steam engine, meaning containment, pressure, and release. Repression thus built up internal pressure, then the return of the repressed was a release of that pressure. It could be vented or it could simply blow up the engine. How then people in the thirties? A hiss or a bang? The whistle of vented pressure doing useful work, as in some functioning engine? Or boom? No one could say, and so they staggered on day to day, and the pressure kept building.

So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. All over the world, flights of all kinds, although when the analyses were done it became clear that a disproportionate number of these flights had been private or business jets, and the commercial flights that had gone down had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day, ordinary civilians going about their lives.

The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day. And it was later that same year when container ships began to sink, almost always close to land. Torpedoes from nowhere: a different kind of drone. It was noticed early on in this campaign that ships often went down where they could form the foundations for new coral reefs. In any case, they were going down. They ran on diesel fuel, of course. Loss of life in these sinkings was minimal, but world trade was severely impacted. Stock markets fell even lower than they had been after Crash Day. A worldwide recession, a feeling of loss of control, price spikes in consumer goods, the clear prospect of the full-blown depression that indeed followed a few years later… it was a time of dread.

Two months after Crash Day a group called Kali, or the Children of Kali, issued a manifesto over the internet. No more fossil-fuel-burning transport. That was about twenty to twenty-five percent of civilization’s total carbon burn at this point, and all of it vulnerable to disruptions, as the manifesto put it.

Next up, the Children of Kali (or someone using that name) told the world: cows. Later that same year the group announced that mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had been cultured and introduced by drone dart into millions of cattle all over the world. Everywhere but in India, but especially in the United States and Brazil and England and Canada. Nothing could stop these cattle from sickening and dying in a few years, and if eaten their disease could migrate into human brains, where it manifested itself as Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and was invariably fatal. So to stay safe, people needed to stop eating beef now.

And indeed in the forties and ever after, less beef got eaten. Less milk was drunk. And fewer jet flights were made. Of course many people were quick to point out that these Children of Kali were hypocrites and monsters, that Indians didn’t eat cows and so didn’t feel that loss, that coal-fired power plants in India had burned a significant portion of the last decade’s carbon burn, and so on. Then again those same Indian power plants were being attacked on a regular basis, so it wasn’t clear who was doing what to whom. Scores of power plants were being destroyed all over the world, often by drone attacks. Power outages in those years were most common in India, but they happened everywhere else too. The War from the Earth was real, but the aggressors were nowhere to be found. It was often asserted they were not in India at all, and were not even an Indian organization, but rather an international movement. Kali was nowhere; Kali was everywhere.