SHORTLISTED
KEVIN JARED HOSEIN
There is the old story of the carpenter, the carpenter’s apprentices, and the oak the apprentices admired.
Know that one, friend?
Every mornin, a master carpenter walks past a enormous oak near his village shrine. So big and burly that its branches could shelter a thousand oxen. Wide as a hill, the trunk of this thing. Warped like a funhouse mirror. The carpenter’s apprentices ask him how come he dont stop, take a minute to admire the oak. It deserve a minute of the day just for the trouble to get so big, they say. The carpenter spat out, the only reason it’s so big is cause the wood is useless. All knotted and gnarled and full of worms and termites. Aint have a damn thing that timber could construct. Not a boat, not a door, not a coffin. Its sap worth no more than a splash of old wash-water.
Night falls and the carpenter has a dream. The tree comes to him. It speaks and tells him about all the other trees in the forest. How theys all split and slash down the moment they prove handy to mankind. All cut to lumber, cork, pulp, latex and firewood. Plant or beast or fish or fowl, anything that is within function, and that which is in reach of man will meet a terrible fate.
I am honoured to serve no use to man or his mischief, the oak concludes.
***
When I was seven, somethin bad happen with my eyes. A sensation like little stones got trap behind the lids. Every morning I’d wake with them stinging, as if I pass the night in the trail of some dust devil. Didnt tell my mother or grampa. Couple boys at school started callin me Toad, how my eyes would puff up by recess. For a week, I come up with ways to hide it from the teacher. Kept my face bury in a book. Pretended to copy my notes slow so my head would be down most of the time. Faked headaches, gave myself headaches. The light hurt. The wind hurt. The teacher finally accuse me of sleepin during a lesson and call in my mother. Only then was I pressed to admit something was wrong.
In the office, we had a long wait. There was a TV on the wall, so high you had to crane your neck to see. Volume turned all the way down. They was interviewing a white woman. Her stringy dishwater blonde hair nearly covering her eyes. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands out of frame. She was sobbing, and the captions noted so in little square brackets as if you couldnt see it yourself. She faded to black and from the black burst the flash of a American fireball. Raising the Pacific above the dawn. Text on the footer: Operation Castle. A bomb. And some hundred-or-so miles downwind from the blast was a island. Another footer: Rongelap Atoll, Marshall Islands. The island folk watched white powder drift from the sky. Glittering like frost in the mornin, settling on breadfruit leaves. The young ones played in it. Some tasted it.
Within hours, they began to blister.
By nightfall, hair was coming out in wet handfuls.
A man on the screen now. Grey. A pin of the old Stars and Stripes on his collar. War historian. Talkin bout how scientists wait two days to ferry the people away to doctors. And the doctors took blood, took urine, took grafts, whatever they had to do to get the data. A few years passed. The island was declared safe and the displaced families was ferry back to their homes in Rongelap. War historian back on now, a chuckle sideways out the mouth. That bomb, he said, ended many wars before they could even think to begin. Then they put on this smiling seer man. Paint on his face. He beat a wood drum and offered thanks that his people could serve the world.
The sad woman returned. Talkin bout the bomb. Said this type of bomb gatling-guns out millions of invisible bullets. Shootin all directions for hundreds, maybe thousands of years and cuttin through skin and bone. Making babies be borned boneless, hearts visible through the surface. Jellyfish, was the word the woman used. Jellyfish babies. Crying without voices because their heads and throats was never going to be formed proper.
I gaze around the waiting room. My mother deep in the newspaper, her tongue on the corner of her mouth. A woman sitting opposite was doing a crossword. Her son, three or four, making engine noises with a toy car. Receptionist on the phone. Assistant scribblin something down. Nobody else was seein what I was seein, friend. Down the corridor was a sign that read RADIOLOGY. All goddamn capitals. And that word — RADIATION — kept flashin in the captions. My child’s mind could comprehend that the two was related. My eyes hot like volcanoes now. I started tugging at my mother’s dress with one hand, asking to leave, rubbing my eyes with the other, asking, We have to stay? We have to stay? My mother hold me close.
Cant remember if I was really crying or not.
What happen in the Pacific, I thought was goin to happen here, friend. I thought, that very day, a fireball would fall on the Caribbean Federation and I would die. My mother and gramma and grampa would turn to mush. Up till that day, I thought death was somethin that only happen to old people. And bad people. When we got home, I run to my room. When it was time for dinner, my mother found me under the bed. She pull me out and hugged me. I search her face for the terror I was feelin. But in her eyes was peace and goodness.
Some twenty five years later — the Director-General of the Alliance of Free Nations would don a blue suit and high heels and go live across the world. No flags crowding the frame. She’d go up on that dais, with that same expression of my mother. Soft round the mouth. I’d be small again, becoming helpless, wide-eyed, lookin up at her. I’d almost be able to picture this woman in a ibis print apron and old mitts, taking muffins out the oven. And I’d figure there’d still be some chance. Some good news, friend. This would be her words to the world:
***
I speak to you today as someone who wakes up to the same sun as you. I speak as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife. A member of the human race, the Anthropocene. For the past 5 years, our best scientists, sharing studies across borders, have been carefully observing converging sets of data and gradually coming to an undeniable consensus. The conditions that sustain complex life on Earth are deteriorating beyond our ability to reverse them. Yes, our journey on Earth is coming to an end. We cannot yet ascertain a definite length of this final chapter — it may be years, it may be decades — but the endpoint remains clear. Models have predicted that when we no longer see birds in the sky — from starlings and sparrows, to the mighty albatross and the migratory mallards — we will know we are in the final pages of our story. But another tale can begin in the skies and the stars. And because of that, the Alliance of Free Nations has established the WCC. The World Continuity Council.
***
And it would settle on we sorry folk that humanity could only persist with ones like you, friend. New child of the final frontier. A star sailor of the Afterstay. Whether picked or propagated there. Nobody still wouldnt be sure what exactly and truly a Afterstay is. Some kinda jumbo rocket? A fleet of em? Floating city? Somethin big enough to hold a sample of sapience out of reach from certain annihilation. The Director-General would give word that selection shall be done with care. The future aint going to belong to any one people. But to a long dialogue between science and history.
She’d lean forward, brush her hair back. That tender glimmer in her eyes would be gone now. Replaced by a half-light callin forth this woman’s upbringing, so unfamiliar to mine and most of the planet. Borned in Britannia but grown up around airports and embassies. A upbringing amongst security checkpoints. Where you aint never quite belong anywhere. Groomed to be suited for the public eye. Probably never had to pray to God till now.
***
The WCC has already partnered with private aerospace, energy companies, artificial intelligence and large data firms, and astronautics companies and firms to commence resource acquisition and phased construction of the Afterstay project. This process shall begin on Earth, though we are also looking forward to in-orbit assembly. In parallel, Heads of State will be tasked with the preliminary screening of candidates. These recommendations will be guided by a framework developed by international panels of physicians, engineers, and behavioural scientists. Some of the selection parameters will include metabolic efficiency, reproductive viability, cardiovascular resilience, and the absence of heritable conditions likely to compromise survival. These measures, I assure you, are not instruments of segregation or discrimination. Instead, they reflect our known constraints of factors such as radiation exposure and inhabiting a closed ecological system for long durations. The Afterstay, we already know, will not be a sanctuary. It will not be easy for the candidates aboard.
All candidates will undergo a secondary screening by our panels, and those approved will enter structured training cohorts, conducted in successive batches. We ask participating nations to adhere to these protocols. Those who wish their histories, languages and cultures to persist must understand that only the fittest will survive in the time of Continuity. If a nation does not select its best, that nation and humanity on-board will be compromised. Pretending otherwise would condemn the future of humanity.
***
A pause. Blood hammering her throat now, could see it plain as day. That morning, she might have took her coffee standing up. Took a shower without hurry. Some cities not yet awake. Ruminated on promotions and how each rung there was less and less friends, jokes. And everything that made her. And how the title Director-General wouldnt matter anymore.
***
I, myself, will not occupy a berth on the Afterstay. I am ineligible. So is my husband and my child. Survival, at scale, will not be possible. I am contented to accept an Earth-death. Many of you will have to make peace with a similar fate. I ask those of you without berths, like me, to dream of a time we will never see. Imagine faces we will never know. Throughout time, we have planted trees of fruit we will never eat. We can love a world that extends beyond our own brief moment in it. We can show it the fires of our zeal, or the ice of our despair. Let us contribute our labour, our passion, our expertise to work toward a future greater than our own. We have all become part of perhaps the most important generation to have ever lived on this planet. Please, I urge you — let us be in the interest of Continuity.
***
Continuity. Proper noun. Like Reconstruction. Revelation. We wouldnt all be heading toward that same future. I’d be in the supermarket when I find out the world is a write-off. Comparing prices of peanut butter and realising I forgot to scrub my eyes that mornin. Nowhere in the Director’s speech would there be talk bout fixing what broke. All that brilliance and computing power, atom-splittin, bomb-blastin. Standing on the shoulders of Galileo and Darwin and Curie and Marconi, reaching higher, seein further. Just stars fallin into the dark sea.
A week later, a leak would emerge. A internal memo putting a number to this small sample of humanity — 3,000. The number of berths on the Afterstay. Black and white. A table with nations in one column, allocations on the next. No reasoning, nothin like that.
The American Reach would be budgeted 1,800 spaces.
More than double that of the Schengen, Britannia, and Hindustan combined.
Farther south and the numbers plummet to double digit. The Austral Zone would be projected 60. A dozen for the Maghreb and the New Andes.
The Marshallese and the entirety of the Pacific Island Union would get 2. One for Adam, one for Eve. Lowest in the globe. Our archipelago wouldnt be far off, with 7.
The WCC would put out a press release after that, saying them numbers floatin round was only projections, just one sketch of many possible outcomes. One of many futures. One premise, one hypothesis. Every choice, they’d promise, would be made strictly in the interest of Continuity.
The very next day, they would announce the Omoikane and the Umwelt.
The Om and the Um.
Both to be launched alongside the Afterstay.
The Om would be the planet’s cultural brain. Is how the WCC describe it. A first committee of cultural ministers, academics and scientists appointed a second of museum curators, literary fellows, film directors and more scientists, which then all got to arranging their own sub-committees. Someone who spent their whole life studying cave paintings at Cueva de Las Manos now worrying if handprints deserve a place in the stars. Absurd kind of power, to decide its future. What gets to be remembered? Translation collectives, Japanese animation houses, neo-classical opera boards and Aboriginal heritage trusts. Bats pouring out of the collapsing cave.
The Umwelt had a separate unveiling. No scientist for this one. This time, was a writer from Hanguk. She was striking, graceful. Hair cut straight to the jaw, streaked with white. They put her in a white room with a wooden desk and chair. On the desk was a notebook. She wrote, hands narrow and careful, and spoke about the shame of not being enough for her parents. About falling in love with a friend, sitting on the floor of his apartment. And how it was all over one snowy morning. She looked up. This is what the Umwelt is for. We form our own committee for our emotions and memories.
With a smile, she admitted she will die a Earth-death like so many of us. And she looked forward to contributing to the human record. Everyone was invited to do the same. Drawings. Writings. Songs. Video, audio. Submit something you made, she said. Something that proves you existed.
On the website is a countdown clock. 7 months, 3 days, and so-and-so hours, minutes and so-and-so seconds remaining. No date announced yet for the Afterstay launch, but everyone figure it wont be long after this hit zero. There is a checklist you click through until the button finally turns green and lets you through. No limits and no rules about what kind of file, which is weird to me. I cant imagine thinkin humans in some ministry bunker would be involved in sifting through petabytes of data.
But I aint stupid. It occur to me it’s possible none of this goin anywhere at all. This whole damn thing could just be busywork. Give people something to make so the making fills the space where another worse thing would otherwise sit. Could be a trick. An illusion. Me, I choose to believe. But I also cant imagine them sparing that much processing power to automate it. Dont know how this gonna work out. They gonna pull out the worst of it? The illegal things. The dangerous things. Revenge porn. Rape videos. Child videos. Bomb recipes. Spam. Snuff. Somebody taking apart a cat and insisting this too must be remembered.
Who to say what shouldnt? A two-stanza poem about flowers by a hijabed child in Maghreb, or the magnum opus of a bipolar man from West Schengen. A kind of arrogance to think you should be remembered in the first place. Most people who ever been on this planet lived and was folded back into the ground, and the world move right on without needing a name. You cant expect eternity. The future never owe us nothin. A season or two of local discussion, maybe. If you really think bout it, preservation is a historical anomaly, not a natural right. Though, still, we daydream of Alexandria. Of time travel. Spend a day with our ancestors and hear the songs they had sung to children. Spend another in Prehistory and see the ground shaped by the footprints of the Tyrannosaurus. Is we your cavemen, friend? We, fossils. We, lumbering and desperate Earthlings?
I suppose there is a vast ocean between your understanding and mine — and even usin that word ocean might seem a strange point of reference for you up there. I always known nothin can exist by itself. Every object drag a lineage behind it and when you learn bout somethin, you dont realise at first you learn in this world by triangulation. This like that, that unlike the other. Ocean is like big lake, and unlike a mountain. Rain is like ocean reaching down one drop at a time. Horizon is where ocean meet sky.
You probably never seen the rain. Never smelled it.
But if somebody tell you a story about how they stand in the rain, getting wet, gettin sick, gazing out for that someone that suddenly left and they couldnt follow, I wager you will feel something. Even if that something is the lack. You take the old stories and feel somethin you aint felt in a long time. Or perhaps never felt before. I like thinking you’ll be out there hearing me one day, friend. My voice in this audio file being bunked somewhere up there on one of em brace-ships.
And if it dont happen, well, that’s all right. Worst case, the files sit on some server that dies with the last transformer, and sinks into the deep darkness. Words travel on or they rest. No pain to it.
A week later, they would announce the Gene Pool Initiative — if you couldnt haul your whole self up there, at least your DNA could get lucky. Male donations only for the first batch, we would learn. Then eggs. Then embryos. Women would have a name for a gent with a helix in the mix: Poolboy. One of em Poolboys may even be your papa, friend. I was thinking maybe me too. Even though I smoke too much. But it was never gonna go nowhere after another leak:
***
Subject: Caribbean Federation / GPI Status
Classification: Internal / Non-Public
***
Following review of the Caribbean Federation submission under the current Afterstay Gene Pool Initiative intake window, we would like staff to confirm if the jurisdiction does not meet eligibility thresholds for this phase. The following has been ascertained about this nation:
- Limited confidence in multi-generational morbidity modelling
- Insufficient cryogenic handling, storage, and chain-of-custody infrastructure
- Non-alignment with digital and regulatory frameworks
These criteria are mandatory and have been applied consistently across all participating nations. Re-evaluation may be conducted only if material conditions change prior to final departure, subject to resource availability and scheduling constraints. No provisional allocation has been yet reserved. We are still awaiting advice from relevant departments. To avoid a negative outcome, it may be recommended we still carry out the Gamete Collection phase of the program in this nation, and forego the Storage phase. In such a case, biological materials should be disposed safely and discreetly.
***
By this point, dont think nobody was keeping any hopes up with the WCC.
Doesnt stop people being curious bout you, friend. Who you gonna be. You and your neighbours up there. How much of you gonna be edited and titivated. More human than human. They would do blueprints of that viewport you use to see the stars. Rotating hab rings. Massive hydroponic garden that feed you and your family. Wings of PV cells to drink the sun. It is unfathomable, the work that would be planned.
The American Reach with its data centres and server farms the size of small towns, runnin all sorts of calculations and simulations. New Greenland would become a scar of tundra from being dredged for rare metals. The beautiful mountains of the Sino-Balkans stripped for lithium. Machines and people on overdrive. Some of these companies in the cupboard — Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Whirlpool, Energizer, Pfizer, Bayer, Mondelez, Haleon, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, SC Johnson — now more important than some whole nations.
Every big and fructiferous nation run into the ground trying to get everything off the ground. To the skies, to the stars. Some leaders would get to using policy and dogma and might get folk to work triple shifts. In some churches in the Reach, workin to death would be sermon and scripture. Go to the ant; consider its ways and be wise! Then there’d be nations like the Chinese Dominion, All-Russia, Greater Levant — rumoured to be building their own Afterstay.
The greatest madness is yet to come upon this world, friend.
In Tamil Nadu, a bloc of senior engineers would vote to move their families into the perimeter housing of a mothballed fission plant. The only way they could keep seein em. The plant would explode, kill everyone on the compound. The next day, someone dons a Hazmat hood on a statue of Shiva. A week after, the lead biologist of the Afterstay — who won a Nobel for her work on cellular aging — would hang herself in her office in East Schengen. Her suicide note would leak:
Nebus kam mums atleisti.
(There will be no one left to forgive us.)
The WCC would release a statement within hours. In it, they call her a brilliant mind. A memorial service would be announced and flags would be at half-mast for three days across all Alliance buildings. No mention of the note. The WCC’s official position would remain that the cause of death was still under investigation and speculation would be disrespectful to her memory. The next day, a fire at a server farm in Houston would kill over 250 people. The work must continue, the Director-General would personally come on to say. Honour the fallen by completing what was started.
That future is in the skies.
Worth being killed for. Worth killing yourself for.
Friend, recall the oak.
On this nation archipelago, there was never no heavy industry to retool. No rare deposits to extract. Nothin but flying fish, coconuts, yams and bleached coral. But in all of that, still peace and goodness. This island grid still up sixteen hours a day. No work quotas stapled to the passports here. No riots and fires and sirens and countdowns. While the rest of the world is being disseminated, this archipelago remains intact for the dullest reason imaginable: no one has any use for us. There is no space left in the story of the wider world. The kiskadees are still singing.
Took a drive north-east today. Toco Beach. Used to be you could journey up there on a Tuesday morning and hope to find the place quiet. Just you and the magnificent frigate-birds. You could lean into the sound of the tide. Something bout ocean waves, difficult to describe. A calmness to em, how they was here before humanity. Maybe you have recordings up there, friend. Or a rec room with holograms of sand and surf. Waves come and come again, knowing another is right behind. Couldnt barely hear em today. Few months now, you cant find a place to park half-mile up the coast. Cars like a pilgrimage. Crowds and rubbish. Half a dozen basslines fighting for the same air. Is how it is now.
Everywhere the same. Maracas, Blanchisseuse, Granville, Mayaro.
Full of people and music and food. My eyes hurt when I see it. Some days, I dont treat them. I leave them red and runny. And sometimes I wonder if I am just trying to give myself headaches again, like back when I was in school. All of this bacchanalia will soon pass, I think, and we will realise how we’ve all gotten very tired down here, friend.
I want to say it out loud, right here, right now. It is because of this weariness and uselessness, I dont feel afraid stating the imminent:
If you do hear this, I was killed in the collapse. I am dead.
I was not hiding under the bed.
