Original Composition Date:Thursday, April 15, 2010
Listen
In 2001, the Navy exercised their muscles in our community. They built a windmill in the water to collect power. They generated electricity to feed our power hungry activities.
In 2090, exactly 89 years later, the powers that supplied our community with electricity, took it back. Everything that we had done with “their” wind, was reversed, and everything flowed back on top of and into the lake. It was a disaster, for most of the people. Only some of us survived.
This is how we did it.
we turned everything off, that ate electricity, and never turned it on again.
we converted all the tools that needed electricity, into manually fed engines, powered by our arms and legs.
we hitched up our animals, beasts of burden like oxen, cows and horses, donkeys, dogs to help create electric food for the powers that had come to reclaim their stolen wind generated electricity.
we separated ourselves from the rest of the people who refused to do anything to pay back the debt.
we lived underground, so when “the axe fell” on them, it didn’t get us.
we carved a paradise underground using underground aquifers and recycled sunlight from the surface.
we changed our skin colour to blend in with the surrounding rock. This made us invisible most of the time.
we learned to survive on very little food, clothing and energy.
we learned how to put ourselves into hibernation, during the colder seasons
we “made friends” with the powers that came to reclaim the wind power, by giving them gifts of our kind of self generated power.
The result: we survived,but just barely. The rest of the world above us on the surface is destroyed and uninhabitable now.
We do not go there.
This is the “in a nutshell” (science fiction ) society /culture of underground dwelling humanoids descended from present day man, in a series of stories entitled “Gathering the Water Wind.”
Writing by Regina Stemberger
Photo “Flat Calm” by Andy S-D
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License .