LJ Idol 02: I should care, but....
This is topic #2 for therealljidol - I Don’t Care About Apathy: What I "Should" Care About - But Don’t. For the sake of those who don't read this kind of thing, I've put it behind a cut.
You should still read it, though. It would make me happy.
==========================================
When he opened the door to his apartment, the cold air rushed out, raising the hair on my arms. "Jesus, 'Shades, how cold is it in there?"
He looked very self-satisfied. "A nice, chilly 23 centigrade," he said. "And don't ask me to convert that in my head. C'mon in."
Coming in from a nice warm day, the apartment was almost uncomfortably cold. His air conditioner was pumping out cold air and, I noticed after a moment, he was wearing slippers. The TV was on, as were most of the lights, and his computer was, is it was every time I visited, humming along doing whatever it was he was doing. Little LED indicators were blinking and lit up all over the place. The apartment was a cozy place, lined with books and full of... things. That was the best way to put it. It was a comfortable extension of his personality, and it made me feel slightly uneasy every time I went.
I could never put my finger on why. Perhaps it was the feeling that, if the rest of the world just disappeared, he'd be fine. As long as he had this place to himself, he would be happy.
Still, he was an interesting person to know, and despite my better judgment I did my best to get him out and about. "You doing anything this weekend?" I asked.
He glanced over at me. "Nothing really special," he said. "Why?"
"Well, some mates and I are going off to some Earth festival. You know, bands, food, do a little good for the world."
"Yeah," he said. "Hordes of drunks and electricity-sucking sound systems are really eco-friendly. Thanks, but I'll pass." His hand wandered back over to the mouse and started clicking.
This happened every time. I try to get 'Shades interested in something, he shuts me down. I try to bend his opinion on something and he just closes up. Talking to him was like playing Jenga - push the wrong way and you're lost. It was no wonder he didn't hang out with anybody. "Listen," I said. "I just thought you might want to have a good time. And maybe do something besides suck up electricity and play your part in destroying the world." I put my sunglasses back on and went to the door. "I'll catch you later."
He grabbed my arm as I passed. "What. Did you say?"
"I said I'll see you later." I snorted. "If you want me to."
"No, no. Before that. What did you say about the world?"
I thought for a moment. "Destroying it? What about it?"
"You think I'm helping to destroy the world," he said, still not looking at me.
"Well yeah, man. Look around. You've got everything on, you're probably pushing global warming forward at least fifteen minutes all on your own."
He didn't say anything. For a minute, at least. Then he just muttered, 'That's it," under his breath and stood up. "Don't move," he said. "I want to show you something." He got up and pulled a drawer out from under his bed. I started to ask what he was doing, but he just held up a hand while he rummaged through it.
After a moment, "Ah, there it is. Now where's the slave unit... Gotcha." When he stood up, he was holding what looked like two small eggs. One was silver, the other black. "Here," he said, handing me the black one. "Take this, and don't let go of it, whatever you do."
"Why?" I asked. "What is it?"
He looked closely at his silver egg. From what I could see, the wide end was covered with dials, which he spun quickly to the left. "Time machine," he said, and pressed the small end of the egg.
*FRINK*
We were in hell. There was no other way to put it. The air felt hot, the ground was soft beneath our feet, and everything was either black or red or glowing an evil orange. 'Shades was standing next to me, his hand around mine, the one holding the egg. "Do. NOT. Drop it!" he shouted.
"'Shades, where the HELL are we?"
His lips nearly touched my ear, that's how close he had to get so I could hear him over the roaring wind and the rumbling earth. "The Hadeon Eon," he shouted. "Just about four billion years ago!" He started to say something else, but an outgassing of something that smelled worse than sulfur cut him off. "Hold on!" He tweaked his egg a bit and the sound cut down to a dull hum around us. "That's better," he said. He looked around. His hand was still holding mine. "Promise you won't drop this?" he asked. I nodded, mute. The infernal scene around us had driven the words from me. He let go, and I gripped my egg harder. "We're safe as long as we have these," he said. "I haven't figured out how it works yet, but they'll protect us from whatever environment we're in." He looked around.
This was like something out of a movie, if the director had God's special-effects budget. There was nowhere I could look that didn't make me think that, any second now, Satan was going to erupt out of the ground and start telling us to abandon all hope. Nothing in my life so far had prepared me for this, and I'm still proud that I managed not to piss myself.
"This is the Earth," 'Shades said. "It's the very beginning - the crust is still moist, there's no water, no atmosphere to speak of. It's all just heat and gravity right now. If you didn't know when we were, you'd think that life could never make it here." He smiled. "But it will - in about...." He looked at the egg, twisted a dial and pushed the end. "Half a billion years."
*FRINK*
The scene was vastly different. The eruptions were gone, the place looked... grey. The sky was mottled with clouds, and we were on the edge of a dull grey ocean. It was still hot, and humid, and it stank to high heaven, and the wind seemed to be whipping the waves into a hurricane-like frenzy. "This is the Archaen," he said, as quietly as if we were still in his apartment. He knelt down and dipped his hand in the water. When it came up, it was coated with a reddish-brown goo. "This is us," he said. "Our ancestors are right here. In a chemically fouled ocean, where oxygen hardly exists. There's no ozone layer to protect anything, so life on land is futile, if not impossible." He turned his hand so the goo caught the light a little. "But there we are."
Carefully, he removed the goo from his hand and dropped it in the water. I forced a laugh and gripped the egg. "Aren't you worried?" I asked. "You squish the wrong blob and, I dunno, octopusses rule the earth?"
He shrugged and twisted the dials again. "Hasn't happened yet," he said.
"Yet?" I asked. "You mean you've done this before?"
"Lots of times," he said, as he twirled a dial on his egg.
"And you haven't, like, completely screwed up history or anything?"
He looked at me. "If I had," he said, "how would you know?" He didn't wait for an answer, which was good - I didn't have one. "Let's go."
*FRINK*
The air was heavy and hot, but I didn't care. The land was what caught my eye. It was... green. Plants a dozen feet tall towered around us, dripping in the moist atmosphere. A buzzing like a small plane came up from behind us and a dragonfly as long as my arm went overhead, hovered for a moment, and took off. It was starting to look like the Earth I knew. "This is the Paleozoic," 'Shades said.
"It's beautiful."
He nodded. "Yes it is. Giant insects, huge plants, things that we don't even have names for.... And in half a million years, nearly all of it will be gone."
I looked around. "All of it?"
"Nearly," he said. "Palaentologists figure that over 95% of every species extant now will go extinct."
I watched a beetle as big as a football trundle past us. Its shell caught the sunlight and threw back rainbow patterns that dazzled my eyes. "Why?" I asked.
"No one's sure. C'mon." He twisted the egg again.
*FRINK*
The land was desolate. Ash covered everything around us, making it hard to walk. The sun barely shone through a cloud cover that seemed to be made of grey dust. The air we were breathing was clean, but just looking at it all made my chest seize up.
"This is where we lost the dinosaurs," he said. "About ten years ago a massive object smacked into the Earth. It set half the world aflame and covered the rest in choking ash and dust. Killed a whole lot of things." He knelt down and dug in the ash. When he stood up, there was something in his hands - something small and, it seemed, furry. The creature's large black eyes stared up at us and it trembled in his hands. "But not everything," he said.
He put the mouse-thing back on the ground, where it burrowed back into the dust and vanished. Then he turned to me. "Do you get why I'm showing you all this?" he asked.
I must have looked stupid, because he closed his eyes and sighed. Totally unfair - you take a guy time travelling without warning and get annoyed because his brain barely functions on a pop quiz? "No," I said. "I don't know. Right now, I...." I looked around as the wind picked up and blew ash around. "Right now I have no idea at all."
He looked at me with something approaching sympathy. "Our world," he said, "is a hellish place." He pressed the egg.
*FRINK*
Everything was covered with ice and snow, with winds that could cut through stone. Even with the egg's protection, I shivered.
"It has been baked, boiled, pounded and frozen over and over and over again."
*FRINK*
We were in a field of golden wheat, with a blue sky overhead. In the distance was a small group of tents, and I could hear drums.
"The time we're living in is a tenuous island of peace and stability. But it won't last."
*FRINK*
The city was aflame, towers that reached halfway to the sky were crumbling, and what few people I could see were all either dead or dying. Above us all was a glowing red fireball. It looked bigger than the world. "The Earth will never be a truly peaceful place," 'Shades said. "Over its lifetime, it will take an amazing amount of abuse." I could feel the air pressure and temperature rise as the great, glowing death above us came closer.
*FRINK*
Brightness. The light from an over-large, swollen red sun was almost tangible, and even when I put my sunglasses on, it didn't help. "In the end, this world will be sterilized by an aging and dying sun. But...." He knelt down again and put his hand into steaming black water. When it came up, there was a tiny, wriggling thing between his fingers. It seemed to be made of... plastic? "Even now," he said, "there is life." He dropped it into the ocean. "And there will continue to be life for as long as possible." He looked at me again and smiled. "No matter what happens, the Earth abides, and life abides with it."
*FRINK*
The chill air hit me. I didn't want to open my eyes - I figured he'd put us in another ice age. "You can give me your egg now," he said.
We were back in his apartment. Everything was as it had been - no cephalopod overlords or anything - and he was putting the eggs back into the drawer. When they were safe and sound, 'Shades sat back in his chair and swivelled around to look at me. "This is why I don't care about 'saving the earth,'" he said, and gestured for me to sit on the bed. I did, gladly - my knees were just at the point where they didn't want to hold me up anymore. "The earth doesn't need us to save it." He shrugged. "We couldn't if we tried."
I found my voice, with a little effort. "So what do we do, then? Just... just use it all up? Go nuts because there's nothing we can do?"
He shook his head. "Of course not. There's still a lot of ways we can improve our use of the earth, for the short time that it's being friendly to us. That's certainly worth caring about. But really, the best we can do in the long run is just to make it livable for ourselves for as long as we can."
He smirked. "But that doesn't read nearly as well on a t-shirt, now does it?"
==========================================
"This world is an anvil. Everything here is between a rock and a hard place. Every single thing on it is the descendant of creatures that have survived everything the world could throw at them. I just hope they never get angry.... "
Rincewind, The Science of Discworld
==========================================
With oblique thanks to William Sleator....
Voting will commence on Friday, so I'll give y'all a heads-up to start stuffing the ballot box....
You should still read it, though. It would make me happy.
==========================================
When he opened the door to his apartment, the cold air rushed out, raising the hair on my arms. "Jesus, 'Shades, how cold is it in there?"
He looked very self-satisfied. "A nice, chilly 23 centigrade," he said. "And don't ask me to convert that in my head. C'mon in."
Coming in from a nice warm day, the apartment was almost uncomfortably cold. His air conditioner was pumping out cold air and, I noticed after a moment, he was wearing slippers. The TV was on, as were most of the lights, and his computer was, is it was every time I visited, humming along doing whatever it was he was doing. Little LED indicators were blinking and lit up all over the place. The apartment was a cozy place, lined with books and full of... things. That was the best way to put it. It was a comfortable extension of his personality, and it made me feel slightly uneasy every time I went.
I could never put my finger on why. Perhaps it was the feeling that, if the rest of the world just disappeared, he'd be fine. As long as he had this place to himself, he would be happy.
Still, he was an interesting person to know, and despite my better judgment I did my best to get him out and about. "You doing anything this weekend?" I asked.
He glanced over at me. "Nothing really special," he said. "Why?"
"Well, some mates and I are going off to some Earth festival. You know, bands, food, do a little good for the world."
"Yeah," he said. "Hordes of drunks and electricity-sucking sound systems are really eco-friendly. Thanks, but I'll pass." His hand wandered back over to the mouse and started clicking.
This happened every time. I try to get 'Shades interested in something, he shuts me down. I try to bend his opinion on something and he just closes up. Talking to him was like playing Jenga - push the wrong way and you're lost. It was no wonder he didn't hang out with anybody. "Listen," I said. "I just thought you might want to have a good time. And maybe do something besides suck up electricity and play your part in destroying the world." I put my sunglasses back on and went to the door. "I'll catch you later."
He grabbed my arm as I passed. "What. Did you say?"
"I said I'll see you later." I snorted. "If you want me to."
"No, no. Before that. What did you say about the world?"
I thought for a moment. "Destroying it? What about it?"
"You think I'm helping to destroy the world," he said, still not looking at me.
"Well yeah, man. Look around. You've got everything on, you're probably pushing global warming forward at least fifteen minutes all on your own."
He didn't say anything. For a minute, at least. Then he just muttered, 'That's it," under his breath and stood up. "Don't move," he said. "I want to show you something." He got up and pulled a drawer out from under his bed. I started to ask what he was doing, but he just held up a hand while he rummaged through it.
After a moment, "Ah, there it is. Now where's the slave unit... Gotcha." When he stood up, he was holding what looked like two small eggs. One was silver, the other black. "Here," he said, handing me the black one. "Take this, and don't let go of it, whatever you do."
"Why?" I asked. "What is it?"
He looked closely at his silver egg. From what I could see, the wide end was covered with dials, which he spun quickly to the left. "Time machine," he said, and pressed the small end of the egg.
*FRINK*
We were in hell. There was no other way to put it. The air felt hot, the ground was soft beneath our feet, and everything was either black or red or glowing an evil orange. 'Shades was standing next to me, his hand around mine, the one holding the egg. "Do. NOT. Drop it!" he shouted.
"'Shades, where the HELL are we?"
His lips nearly touched my ear, that's how close he had to get so I could hear him over the roaring wind and the rumbling earth. "The Hadeon Eon," he shouted. "Just about four billion years ago!" He started to say something else, but an outgassing of something that smelled worse than sulfur cut him off. "Hold on!" He tweaked his egg a bit and the sound cut down to a dull hum around us. "That's better," he said. He looked around. His hand was still holding mine. "Promise you won't drop this?" he asked. I nodded, mute. The infernal scene around us had driven the words from me. He let go, and I gripped my egg harder. "We're safe as long as we have these," he said. "I haven't figured out how it works yet, but they'll protect us from whatever environment we're in." He looked around.
This was like something out of a movie, if the director had God's special-effects budget. There was nowhere I could look that didn't make me think that, any second now, Satan was going to erupt out of the ground and start telling us to abandon all hope. Nothing in my life so far had prepared me for this, and I'm still proud that I managed not to piss myself.
"This is the Earth," 'Shades said. "It's the very beginning - the crust is still moist, there's no water, no atmosphere to speak of. It's all just heat and gravity right now. If you didn't know when we were, you'd think that life could never make it here." He smiled. "But it will - in about...." He looked at the egg, twisted a dial and pushed the end. "Half a billion years."
*FRINK*
The scene was vastly different. The eruptions were gone, the place looked... grey. The sky was mottled with clouds, and we were on the edge of a dull grey ocean. It was still hot, and humid, and it stank to high heaven, and the wind seemed to be whipping the waves into a hurricane-like frenzy. "This is the Archaen," he said, as quietly as if we were still in his apartment. He knelt down and dipped his hand in the water. When it came up, it was coated with a reddish-brown goo. "This is us," he said. "Our ancestors are right here. In a chemically fouled ocean, where oxygen hardly exists. There's no ozone layer to protect anything, so life on land is futile, if not impossible." He turned his hand so the goo caught the light a little. "But there we are."
Carefully, he removed the goo from his hand and dropped it in the water. I forced a laugh and gripped the egg. "Aren't you worried?" I asked. "You squish the wrong blob and, I dunno, octopusses rule the earth?"
He shrugged and twisted the dials again. "Hasn't happened yet," he said.
"Yet?" I asked. "You mean you've done this before?"
"Lots of times," he said, as he twirled a dial on his egg.
"And you haven't, like, completely screwed up history or anything?"
He looked at me. "If I had," he said, "how would you know?" He didn't wait for an answer, which was good - I didn't have one. "Let's go."
*FRINK*
The air was heavy and hot, but I didn't care. The land was what caught my eye. It was... green. Plants a dozen feet tall towered around us, dripping in the moist atmosphere. A buzzing like a small plane came up from behind us and a dragonfly as long as my arm went overhead, hovered for a moment, and took off. It was starting to look like the Earth I knew. "This is the Paleozoic," 'Shades said.
"It's beautiful."
He nodded. "Yes it is. Giant insects, huge plants, things that we don't even have names for.... And in half a million years, nearly all of it will be gone."
I looked around. "All of it?"
"Nearly," he said. "Palaentologists figure that over 95% of every species extant now will go extinct."
I watched a beetle as big as a football trundle past us. Its shell caught the sunlight and threw back rainbow patterns that dazzled my eyes. "Why?" I asked.
"No one's sure. C'mon." He twisted the egg again.
*FRINK*
The land was desolate. Ash covered everything around us, making it hard to walk. The sun barely shone through a cloud cover that seemed to be made of grey dust. The air we were breathing was clean, but just looking at it all made my chest seize up.
"This is where we lost the dinosaurs," he said. "About ten years ago a massive object smacked into the Earth. It set half the world aflame and covered the rest in choking ash and dust. Killed a whole lot of things." He knelt down and dug in the ash. When he stood up, there was something in his hands - something small and, it seemed, furry. The creature's large black eyes stared up at us and it trembled in his hands. "But not everything," he said.
He put the mouse-thing back on the ground, where it burrowed back into the dust and vanished. Then he turned to me. "Do you get why I'm showing you all this?" he asked.
I must have looked stupid, because he closed his eyes and sighed. Totally unfair - you take a guy time travelling without warning and get annoyed because his brain barely functions on a pop quiz? "No," I said. "I don't know. Right now, I...." I looked around as the wind picked up and blew ash around. "Right now I have no idea at all."
He looked at me with something approaching sympathy. "Our world," he said, "is a hellish place." He pressed the egg.
*FRINK*
Everything was covered with ice and snow, with winds that could cut through stone. Even with the egg's protection, I shivered.
"It has been baked, boiled, pounded and frozen over and over and over again."
*FRINK*
We were in a field of golden wheat, with a blue sky overhead. In the distance was a small group of tents, and I could hear drums.
"The time we're living in is a tenuous island of peace and stability. But it won't last."
*FRINK*
The city was aflame, towers that reached halfway to the sky were crumbling, and what few people I could see were all either dead or dying. Above us all was a glowing red fireball. It looked bigger than the world. "The Earth will never be a truly peaceful place," 'Shades said. "Over its lifetime, it will take an amazing amount of abuse." I could feel the air pressure and temperature rise as the great, glowing death above us came closer.
*FRINK*
Brightness. The light from an over-large, swollen red sun was almost tangible, and even when I put my sunglasses on, it didn't help. "In the end, this world will be sterilized by an aging and dying sun. But...." He knelt down again and put his hand into steaming black water. When it came up, there was a tiny, wriggling thing between his fingers. It seemed to be made of... plastic? "Even now," he said, "there is life." He dropped it into the ocean. "And there will continue to be life for as long as possible." He looked at me again and smiled. "No matter what happens, the Earth abides, and life abides with it."
*FRINK*
The chill air hit me. I didn't want to open my eyes - I figured he'd put us in another ice age. "You can give me your egg now," he said.
We were back in his apartment. Everything was as it had been - no cephalopod overlords or anything - and he was putting the eggs back into the drawer. When they were safe and sound, 'Shades sat back in his chair and swivelled around to look at me. "This is why I don't care about 'saving the earth,'" he said, and gestured for me to sit on the bed. I did, gladly - my knees were just at the point where they didn't want to hold me up anymore. "The earth doesn't need us to save it." He shrugged. "We couldn't if we tried."
I found my voice, with a little effort. "So what do we do, then? Just... just use it all up? Go nuts because there's nothing we can do?"
He shook his head. "Of course not. There's still a lot of ways we can improve our use of the earth, for the short time that it's being friendly to us. That's certainly worth caring about. But really, the best we can do in the long run is just to make it livable for ourselves for as long as we can."
He smirked. "But that doesn't read nearly as well on a t-shirt, now does it?"
==========================================
"This world is an anvil. Everything here is between a rock and a hard place. Every single thing on it is the descendant of creatures that have survived everything the world could throw at them. I just hope they never get angry.... "
Rincewind, The Science of Discworld
==========================================
With oblique thanks to William Sleator....
Voting will commence on Friday, so I'll give y'all a heads-up to start stuffing the ballot box....