The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [205]
At the elevator banks closest to home, A.B. rode up to the 201st floor, home to the assigned space for the urbmon's Power Administration Corps. Past the big active mural depicting drowned Perth, fishes swimming round the BHP Tower. Tags in the air led him to the workpod that Jeetu Kissoon had chosen for the time being.
Kissoon looked good for ninety-seven years old: he could have passed for A.B.'s slightly older brother, but not his father. Coffee-bean skin, snowy temples, laugh lines cut deep, only slightly counterbalanced by somber eyes.
When Kissoon had been born, all the old cities still existed, and many, many animals other than goats and chickens flourished. Kissoon had seen the cities abandoned, and the Big Biota Crash, as well as the whole Reboot. Hard for young A.B. to conceive. The man was a walking history lesson. A.B. tried to honor that.
But Kissoon's next actions soon evoked a yawp of disrespectful protest from the younger man.
"Here are the two other Jocks I've assigned to accompany you."
Interactive dossiers hung before A.B.'s gaze. He two-fingered through them swiftly, growing more stunned by the second. Finally he burst out: "You're giving me a furry and a keek as helpers?"
"Tigerishka and Gershon Thales. They're the best available. Live with them, and fix this glitch."
Kissoon stabbed A.B. with a piercing stare, and A.B. realized this meatspace proximity had been demanded precisely to convey the intensity of Kissoon's next words.
"Without power, we're doomed."
2
45th Parallel Blues
Jet-assisted flight was globally interdicted. Not enough resources left to support regular commercial or recreational aviation. No military anywhere with a need to muster its own air force. Jet engines were too harmful to a stressed atmosphere.
And besides, why travel? Everywhere was the same. Vib served fine for most needs.
The habitable zone of Earth consisted of those lands - both historically familiar and newly disclosed from beneath vanished icepack - above the 45^ parallel north, and below the 45^ parallel south. The rest of the Earth's landmass had been desertified or drowned: sand or surf.
The immemorial ecosystems of the remaining climactically tolerable territories had been devastated by Greenhouse change, then, ultimately and purposefully, wiped clean. Die-offs, migratory invaders, a fast-forward churn culminating in an engineered ecosphere. The new conditions supported no animals larger than mice and only a monoculture of GM plants.
Giant aggressive hissing cockroaches, of course, still thrived.
A portion of humanity's reduced domain hosted forests specially designed for maximum carbon uptake and sequestration. These fast-growing, long-lived hybrid trees blended the genomes of eucalyptus, loblolly pine and poplar, and had been dubbed "eulollypops".
The bulk of the rest of the land was devoted to the crops necessary and sufficient to feed nine billion people: mainly quinoa, kale and soy, fertilized by human wastes. Sugarbeet plantations provided feedstock for bio-polymer production.
And then, on their compact footprints, the hundred-plus Reboot Cities, ringed by small but efficient goat and chicken farms.
Not a world conducive to sightseeing Grand Tours.
On each continent, a simple network of maglev trains, deliberately held to a sparse schedule, linked the Reboot Cities (except for the Sin Bins, which were sanitarily excluded from easy access to the network). Slow but luxurious aerostats serviced officials and businessmen. Travel between continents occurred on SkySail-equipped water ships. All travel was predicated on state-certified need.
And when anyone had to deviate from standard routes - such as a trio of Power Jockeys following the superconducting transmission lines south to France - they employed a trundlebug.
Peugeot had designed the first trundlebugs over a century