Androids and Aliens by J. Scott Coatsworth

Author:J. Scott Coatsworth [Coatsworth, J. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J. Scott Coatsworth

That night, I lie on the bottom bunk of the small room Flynt and I share, staring at the mattress above me. What’s Flynt thinking? Is he even still awake? He changed into his pajamas in the common bathroom, not in our room.

Then it hits me hard. Everything I loved is gone—my home, my things, my friends. My mama. I stare at her framed photo in the silver moonlight coming through the clear replast window. A memento from that day she took me to the Oakland Zoo to see one of the world’s last tigers. The tears finally come, and I cry like a baby. It’s not fair. I don’t want to be here! I want to be home! I want my mama.

Flynt either doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t care.

Frustrated, I get up and check my phone. Still no connection beyond the camp network.

I fall back onto the small mattress and eventually slip into a troubled sleep, dreaming about murky, rising floodwaters.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I wake with a start.

It takes me a minute to figure out where I am. Not my own bed. Shit City. My mind starts to fixate on my homesickness again, but I wrench it out of that rut and think about the Brick House instead. My term paper involved pipes and flows and water conversion—setting up a cheap treatment plant in a small village. I wanted to do something to fight climate change, or at least to help mitigate it.

Wasn’t that what the Brick House was, at its heart? The system was so inefficient—having everyone haul their own waste out to the site, moving vats by hand, and then filling the brick forms with a ladle. There had to be way to make it work better, without so much manual labor.

Plus, we were in a desert here, and each of those bricks leached water that just evaporated back into the air, lost. What if we could capture that moisture? I needed to build a system.

Professor Hawkins had said it on the first day of their class. “The better the system, the cleaner the outcome. If you design the system right, the rest takes care of itself. It’s systems, systems, systems, people!” I wondered if they made it out of the storm zone. How many of my old friends are dead?

I push my grief aside and grab at the idea like a lifeboat, hauling me out of stormy seas. My mind races through ideas—pipes and valves, gravity assist, a maze of configurations.

Around midnight, another storm blows through, heavy droplets of rain battering the semi-clear replast window of our dorm room. Does it rain more here than it used to? Climate change screwed with everything. Maybe in a hundred years, the trees they were planting around town would become a forest where the desert is now.

In one corner of the room, on the long shelf that serves as a desk, our phones blink on and off. I slip out of my bed and retrieve mine—it’s about half-charged, thanks to the solar and wind power here in Shit City.

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