Pillars of Sand

I still remember how hot it was that day.

I was sweating as I stood in the middle of the desert in my turban and plain white robes, but I didn't think about it too much. I'd learned to live with it by then. In front of me, and beside me, and behind me to the edge of the visible horizon in the distance, were rows and rows of people that seemed to stretch all the way from one edge of the desert to the next. We were all adorned in the same turbans and plain white robes, and I could tell everyone else was sweating just as profusely in the heat as I was. But they learned to live with it. We all learned to live with it. Because that day, as we stood on the barren remains of what used to be inner city Seattle, we all knew we had no other choice.

It was the announcement that our food was going to be rationed even further that made us trek all the way to that empty desert that day. We barely had enough food already, and now it was possible that we weren't even going to get enough to survive. Everyone depended on those rations because we could no longer grow crops like we used to. There simply wasn't any water left to do so. There was no rainfall anymore, and our local rivers had all but completely dried up. Save for a few patches of farmland that had still managed to survive near the Canadian border, there was no greenery left in the whole Washington state. In fact, there was no greenery left in the entire rest of America at all. The year was 2093, ten years after the great climate catastrophe, and the world had warmed by four degrees.

In front of us, a short ways in the distance, stood a young Muslim girl, no older than twenty, wrapped in a hijab and the same plain white robes as we were, who was giving us a speech on a megaphone to stir up our morale for what was soon to come. Her name was Aadila al-Samid. She was our leader, and the supreme commander of The Resistance. Most of the people that had gathered there that day were miners in the caves that stretched along the Canadian border. They were workers who supplied the people who paid them their meagre wages with the resources they needed for their businesses to thrive. When the announcement was made last month in our camps along the Canadian border that our rations would have to be cut again, Aadila was the one who organised the uprisings that would soon follow. First we overthrew the camp authorities that lorded over us and watched us night and day. Then we marched on, right into the middle of that dry, unforgiving desert, as we prepared ourselves to confront the very people we worked for, and whose livelihoods depended on our labour to survive.

Behind Aadila, some ways away into the distance, was a giant rocky mountain that reached all the way to the sky. At the base of that mountain, you could faintly see, was a large steel door that took up about half the size of the mountain itself. It was almost square in shape, slightly wider than it was tall, and stood about a thousand metres high and twelve-hundred metres wide. And save for the rare moments when it had to be opened for them to send our resources in, that door was always fully sealed shut.

—Until that hot, fateful day.

When all of us would march on, and we would pry that door open for good.

I looked down and reached for the heart-shaped locket around my neck, wondering if that might've been the last chance I had to look at it again. There was a picture of my wife and I inside. It was the last picture we took before she died, twenty years ago. She was shot. On the day that it happened, while the giant rocky mountain in front of us was still being excavated at the time, she tried to tell the world the truth. The rich had great plans, they said. In the face of the impending climate catastrophe that had well passed our means to solve, they were going to build a giant underground shelter for humanity to live in to protect ourselves from its worst effects. They would pool all of their resources together to create the most sophisticated biodome the world had ever seen, powered by all of the most advanced technologies we had available to us at the time. They knew the earth was getting hotter and hotter. And, what's more, they knew that no amount of even our best carbon-capture technologies would be able to reverse it. The rich knew just as well as the rest of us that the wealth they spent so long to create was unsustainable, and that the days when humanity would bend the earth to its will would soon be no more.

But my wife knew the truth. The underground biodome had everything. Everything… except space. There was only so far down you could dig before the heat would become too unbearable from the magma in the upper mantle underneath, and only so far wide you could dig before you might, say, drill a hole into the ocean, and that was a risk everyone knew we could do without. That meant they only had enough room for certain people to live there. But who were those certain people? The ones who could afford it, of course. The super-rich at the time, the top 0.1% of the world's wealthiest men and women, comprising about seven million people, were the only ones who had the means to afford any of the finite allocated spaces underground. Each space had enough room for a whole two-parent, two-children family, and some of the bigger areas even had some extra space for a few friends of yours if you could afford that too.

Because this was what my wife knew from the beginning. As a journalist, and a lifelong climate and social activist, she knew they never planned for there to be enough room for everyone at the start. Once the underground was full, the rest of us would have to live outside, on the remains of a hot, dying earth, left to endure an ever warmer, ever drier, and ever more uninhabitable planet—alone.

I never thought it would be as bad as they said it was. I think somewhere, deep down, there was a part of me that thought that, maybe, it really wasn't as bad as everyone was trying to make it out to be. I thought I could trust that everything that had worked to make my company so rich was going to find ways to fix that planet back up again. Surely, I thought, they would have enough room underground for everyone else to live in. I mean, the fate of humanity was at stake! Why wouldn't they?

If only… I paid more attention to her then.

Because then that day came when I saw them shoot my wife in front of my very eyes as she tried to let the world know the truth.

And that was when I knew it was already too late.

I was originally one of the few wealthy enough to acquire one of the allocated spaces underground, but I never ended up living there. When she found out about it, my wife said she didn't want to join me in living underground anymore. She couldn't sit by while everyone else had to fend for themselves on this dying planet of ours, all so she could live with me in harmony with the world's other richest people and pretend the rest of the world's problems didn't exist. She wasn't that kind of person. So she stayed outside, and tried to tell the world about what the underground really was, and who it was really for, before the gates would close and everyone else would miss their only chance to find their way in. And that was when they shot her.

I should've listened to her. I should've, but I didn't. And that day, as we all lined up to hear Aadila's speech in the middle of that dry, uninhabitable desert, was the result.

"...They told us to wait," Aadila continued to roar from the megaphone in her right hand. "That things will get better in time. That time has long passed, and where are we now? Where is the wealth we were promised? Where are our flying cars? Our nanobots? Our rockets to take each of us out into space? Our hospitals? Our schools? Enough food so we don't go hungry for the day? All the riches they would always promise—where are they? Where has the money gone?"

"WHERE HAS THE MONEY GONE?!", we all cried back in unison.

"Underneath Seattle, there are no resources. There is nothing to mine. There are no trees to cut. No ore to smelt. No cotton to harvest. Where, then, do they get the materials that they so desperately need? Where do they get the steel for their cars, the clay for their homes, and the diamonds for their expensive rings? They get it from us. It is only us, in the outside world, who know when and where and how to toil the lands to give them what they need, because only we are the ones who have no choice but to do so. We mine those diamonds, just as we grow that cotton and cut that timber from our trees. We mine and grow and cut for them, and we have been doing so for two long decades in this warming, dying world. And what do we get in return? Nothing."

Nothing.

Just like how they took my wife from me that day, all those years ago.

Nothing.

"So join me, my people, and make them remember you, for you have been forgotten! Speak your names for the world to hear, and speak them so they may forget those names no more! Let them crash like thunder and ring like a raging storm! For too long have they taken us for granted, as numbers to be used and pawns to be played with, but today, they will take no more! Today is the day we march, and the day we take what we are due!"

"TAKE WHAT WE ARE DUE!"

"Who are you?!"

"WE ARE PEOPLE! WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS!"

"And what do you want?!"

"WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY OURS!"

I closed the locket still in my hand and tucked it back inside my robes. I didn't have the time to dwell on the past anymore. Now was the time to go. Now was the time to do what I only wished I could've done before, long after it had already been too late. Long before the underground, and before the climate crisis that started it all.

Long before I so easily met and married the love of my life, and long before I would so easily lose her all the same.

We all cheered for the rousing speech she'd just given, but Aadila didn't seem to care. She just turned around and stared at the great, looming mountain in the distance. And then she began to walk. The rest of us followed, marching behind the young Muslim girl who had spent her whole life fighting for the rights of people like the ones marching behind her that day, and to get her revenge on the ones who took her parents and everything else away from her, just like how they took everything away from me. I braced myself and clutched the locket on my chest through my robes with all my might. That day, I only wished I could've listened to her sooner—before it would all come crumbling to sand.