Free Tomorrow’s World by Davie Henderson

a breeze, and it’s like the whisper of distant, ancient voices echoing through the concrete canyons formed by the apartment blocks. But, when there’s a superstorm on the way, the whisper gets steadily louder until it’s like the screaming of a banshee and you can hear it even inside the havens. As for color, well, there isn’t any—everything’s logica gray. Even the sky. Leaden, oppressive and suffocating, it looks like it might fall to earth at any moment. It’s as if you can see an accumulation of all the toxic fumes spewed forth from car exhausts, factory chimneys and airliner engines during the Old Days.
    As I walked up the hillside the city was built on, between the gray, ten-story blocks with their tiny, storm-resistant windows, I wondered what it had been like to live under a blue sky. The only good thing about the superstorms is they sometimes thin the haze enough to reveal a hint of what lies beyond. Word spreads when it happens and people—Names, that is—hurry down to grab a filtermask and gather outside the havens to get a tantalizing glimpse of the pale blue sky impossibly far above them. I can’t help thinking if only people a hundred years ago had felt the tiniest fraction of the awe we feel when we look up at times like that, we’d be living in a very different world. A world of big skies, far horizons and bright colors.
    I can’t help wondering what it would have been like to lie in a field of tall grass with my arms and legs spread out and the stalks caressing my skin. If I’d lived back then I would have spent an entire day and night doing just that. I would have listened to the quiet, rhythmic language of living things all around me: the lulling susurrus of the growing crops; the chirruping of crickets; the scrabbling of field mice, and the lyrical songs of unseen birds wooing a mate or warning a fledgling… Feeling the planet turn beneath me; gazing up into the boundless blue high above and making shapes from pure white cumulus and high cirrus clouds. I’d turn the clouds into everything from far-off mountain ranges of the kind that might conceal Shangri-La, to ships that sail across the vast ocean of the sky.
    And all the while I’d be vaguely aware of the rise and fall of the sun, and intuitively I’d understand why people in the past had worshipped it with awe and wonder.
    Closing my eyes when the sun got too bright I’d soon doze off, and in my dreams I’d visit the Shangri-La in the mountains and sail on the ship of clouds.
    I’d wake as the sun fell slowly from the sky, and watch blue change to the glowing red and amber that love would be if it was something you could see.
    Then I’d let darkness and the night cast a spell over me, watching the stars come out one by one and feeling like I was looking at infinity and eternity.
    At least, that’s what I like to think I would have done if I’d lived back then. But in all likelihood I’d have done the same as everyone else: consumed conspicuously, polluted with carefree abandon, and not given a used filtermask about the moral high-horses I mowed down with my SUV and the little living things I trampled with my disproportionately large environmental footprint.
    I felt a catch in my throat as the slope steepened: maybe a sign all the lonely Saturdays I’d spent exploring the old city with a camera for company were catching up with me. Filtermasks help, but they can’t keep all the toxins out. The only way they could do that is if they kept all the air out, which would kind of defeat the purpose.
    I know I’ve spent more time Outside than I should have over the years, but I don’t regret a moment of it. For one thing, I’d go nuts if I had to live my whole life in the haven. It’s comfortable enough, but dull and predictable. Life for me only comes alive Outside. You never know what you’ll find when rooting through the half-flooded