WHERE THE WATER FLOWS
by Irene Iris
Chapter 5: The City Jungle
Water is everywhere.
It wraps the city. It is hard to say what composes the bulk of the cityscape – concrete, steel, glass, or vegetation. The Glass-and-Grass concept of the city. With walls made of living and growing plants, the skyscrapers resemble gigantic Jack’s beanstalks, connecting the ground with the place where water dwells in its gaseous state until condensing into a rainfall. Some of the building tops are lost in the mist this living bio-city generates, cocooned in its own naturally regulated microclimate. Everyone and everything breathes here – buildings, plants, people…
Jack Waterson inhales deeply and loudly. He gazes absentmindedly through the augmented reality windshield as the autopilot is lazily manoeuvring his car in the city traffic. The highways are drowning in the mist that usually coats the city jungle around sunsets and sunrises. After the on-the-ground tractor drive, a couple hours in the Hyperloop line connecting Australia and North America and now an hour in a self-driving car seem like hovering in sweet nothingness. The visual music record plays in the air, bringing to life the lines of the retro track “Imagine” by Someone Lennon. The man was a visionary, yet even 200 years later we are still not quite there, thinks Jack and sighs. I wonder if tomorrow’s doomsday prophecy cuts humanity’s plans to get there someday…
Habitually, the young billionaire connects with his fingertips to the Waternet in his car and checks the water index in the stock market. Rising. Ever rising. The most valuable asset in the world, and he is lucky to have inherited a huge share of this new, blue gold. His gold is safely deposited deep underground, in natural banks called aquifers…
Suddenly feeling guilty of his riches, Waterson closes his eyes.
He cannot fathom how people from the past could live in the world where they depleted the non-renewable fossil fuel resources, burnt them, breathed in the fumes and greenhoused the planet, in a vicious self-imposed anthropo-natural cycle… What were they thinking? How could it happen that cars were initially electric, but somehow his great-grandfathers ended up with the oil- and coal-fueled global warming apocalypse on the wheels?
Internal combustion engines are relics of the past and outlaws now, substituted by the new species of vehicles. With the latter, the only pollution they still cause is sound pollution. One can hear their distinctive electronic buzz as they glide by. Some models always come in one color, black – their entire surface is covered in paint that performs like solar panels. Then there are the ether-powered ones, they are the most noiseless and smooth. The most widespread are bio-fuel driven cars. All vehicles have the retractable four-traction wheels they use mostly for land-based routes for in-city movement, switching to hover mode for more mobility, as well as in wildlife areas and green zones with the zero-footprint requirement.
In the meantime, Waterson’s self-piloted two-seater Etherean passes by the water animation theater with a 3D poster of a running water man – a subtle reminder we are 70 percent water… Water…
When finally home, Waterson looks at himself in the watercrystal interactive bathroom mirror. The businessman’s complexion looks pale and dirty. Frantically, he splashes a handful of tap water all over his dusty face and starts rubbing vigorously with the luffa sponge. Watching dirty water going down the drain and pure one pouring out of the tap hose, he sees the hydroloop at work. Used water is to be purified and stored for future reuse in this household’s water treatment no-sewage system. How else? How could it be that two centuries ago, people dirtied clean water and then simply dumped it into the rivers and lakes, from where they then took water for drinking? A vicious circle instead of a sustainable loop…
By observing the filthy contents disappear from the sink, the man sees the sad legacy of his great-grandfathers. Dusty lands and dirty water. Both went down the drain.
He just cannot live with the blame of dust on his face, forever. If recycled water cannot wash it off, perhaps the holy one will…
Copyright ©️ 2024 Iryna Dihtiarova-Deslypper. All rights reserved.
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