“My parents are making me record these entries and place copies in every shelter. We know there are a lot of people out there who don’t know what happened, or how we came to live like this. They don’t know what happened to the animals who used to share the planet with us. So here I am. A Rover kid. Sharing history. I’ll try not to be too boring.” His brown eyes twinkled as he tucked his jet strands behind his ear. A shadow passed over him, and he looked up at someone off-camera and smiled. When the person left, he leaned close to the camera and said, “My mom. Checking up. I’m supposed to have recorded five of these things by now, but this is only my first. Don’t tell her.” He put a finger to his lips and winked.
“Now where to begin?” He donned a more somber look. “The beginning, I suppose. See, a long time ago, libraries started closing down because no one was using them, and universities shut down their math and science programs for the same reason, so a few people decided to come together to preserve whatever knowledge they could. This was the beginning of the Rovers. We came from all regions of the globe, of every ethnicity and age. My parents and I are Diné. That’s Navajo.” He grinned. “So enough about us. On with the bigger picture.” He shifted to get more comfortable. “Okay. Lesson one.” He lifted his palms up. “What’s up with the weather?”
He sat back, cross-legged. “It started to go bad a long time ago, after the Industrial Revolution. Too much carbon dioxide was ejected into the atmosphere, and everything heated up too quickly. You see, the oceans are a vital part of creating local weather. Even if you’re way inland, the ocean still affects you. The majority of heat from the sun is absorbed by it. Since so much greenhouse gas had been pumped into the sky by human activity, even more heat was soaked up by the seas. This heat then circulated the globe via ocean currents, which again drive weather patterns. With all that added heat, weather systems became erratic. Drought and megastorms became common.
“They say that some people wanted to prevent it from getting worse, but they were far outnumbered by those who didn’t think it was a problem. So they kept going on as they did.
“It may sound crazy now, but back then people didn’t want to do anything about all this. They didn’t believe it was real. My mom says humanity is resourceful when it comes to a crisis, but they’re not very good at preventing one before it happens, especially if it will cost them money.” He gave a mirthless smile. “Money. That’s what it was all about. But in the end, the damage cost them more than that. Droughts. Floods. Fires. Storms. Preventative measures would’ve been cheaper.” He crossed his arms over his knees, which he tucked under his chin. The wind lifted his hair. “Resourceful when it comes to a crisis,” he repeated.
He snorted. “Well, they thought they were being resourceful, anyway. They thought they could fix the climate by messing with it some more. Someone had the idea of cooling down the earth by ejecting material into the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight back into space instead of letting it reach Earth’s surface. They got the idea from volcanoes. When one erupts, ash gets trapped in the sky, and the global temperature has the potential to decrease for a few years before the particles settle from the atmosphere. So they had the idea to engineer sulfate particles that would stay up there for decades. It was called the Apollo Project, and it was designed to block out the sun’s radiation. No one is sure which country launched the particles. They called it geoengineering. There were no laws restricting who could do it, be it countries or individuals. No one knows who was the first, either. We just know Earth was never the same. There was a miscalculation, and the particles stayed up there for too long. Any funds that could have been channeled to fixing the problem were spent on war and surveilling the human population. Then the heat trapped in the upper atmosphere came crashing down, causing disasters worldwide. The crazy thing is that someone tried it again. They engineered a different kind of particle to stay suspended, and come down slowly over time. Only they messed up the design again, and these pieces never came down. They’re still up there, messing with the sun’s radiation and trapping heat down here.”
He looked at the rubble behind him. “The irony. The road to hell is . . .” He shook his head.
He pulled out a newer PRD. “Check this out.” He tapped out a command, then rotated the PRD’s floating display so it faced the camera. “This is the same spot, if you can believe it. Right here, where all this concrete is now.” He held the PRD closer, and she could see a throng of trees like the one she’d seen that first day out, but instead of five or six, so many she couldn’t count. Sunlight streamed through their branches. Huge green plants grew on fallen logs. An elegant, long-legged creature with a brown coat sniffed the plants. He lowered the PRD. “That was right here.” He stood up, gesturing behind him.
All she saw there now were old roads, crumbling buildings, and fallen signs.
“We have plans to plant these forests again. Since trees breathe carbon dioxide, they would soak some of it up from the
