Global WarNing

by Lakshmi Narayan V

The alarm hammered on my head. I woke up with a start. It was 6.00 AM and it was not entirely a good night’s sleep as usual. My head was aching and my lungs burning. The ash tray was full of cigarette butts burnt last night. The rest of the apartment was as much a mess as the ash tray. I got out of the bed and opened my apartment door. The milk was unmistakably where it was every morning. I opened the bottle and drank from it. The burning sensation in my chest seemed to ease up.

I logged in to my organizer – it was always switched on and I simply logged in and logged out – and went through the day’s top story. Closing the lid on the rest of the milk, I put it in my eco-friendly refrigerator. The day was special and the first thing on my otherwise empty schedule was to get to the Grand Mall. I got ready; entered into my bio-suit and sprayed the deodorant on to get rid of the wretched odour. The heavy tinted glass helmet rotated into position as I put it on my head. I walked out of the apartment and got into my Lamborghini Gallardo. I couldn’t afford a much costlier car. The Elite Turbo Jets cost a fortune these days. The traffic was a hell as expected. It was only 6.30 AM and already the stampede of peak hour traffic was beginning to take effect. I wished I had taken the aerial route in one of those Elite Turbo Jets.

Ramya had called the previous night, immediately after seeing her off home, following the New Year’s eve dinner date. She seemed very disturbed about everything that was happening. We didn’t have much to talk during the dinner. It was more of a perfunctory celebration of the New Year, rather than a night filled with the air of exaltation. New Year had become more of an excuse for celebration than a reason. We were considering marriage but our immediate worry was finding a good place to setup our new home.

Everybody knew that India is not the safest place to live any more, especially with the raising temperatures, as the climate was becoming too hot to handle. Ramya felt the same too. With all the emigration processes ceased, I was contemplating of approaching Govind for a way out to England and had told her at the dinner table. She didn’t know what to say but I knew that she was considering the risk intensely. With Japan completely under the sea last year, Africa and the American continents with an ever raising temperature, Europe seemed to be the place of the dying future; it just took a little more time dying. She had called back and given her approval. I had called Govind immediately after she had hung-up.

Govind arranged for people to get into another country without any passport or documents. He did a clean job of transporting his lucky clients to the place they wanted to go from the list of few places he prescribed, complete with all their authentication papers of the respective country they wanted to smuggle themselves to. Govind was the chief of such an organisation and my college mate. I had always wondered how such a feat was possible without being detected by the international security or the satellites. Govind told me that his brother had an oil company and was pumping oil across the continents through an inter-continental pipeline. When his brother was not pumping oil, Govind pumped people through them. He had special spherical submarines, which would transport forty at a time through these terribly huge pipelines between the different countries, which he called the Pulses. A journey through the Pulse was as risky as through a submarine and the whole operation was a covert one. I assumed that all the oil companies across the globe used or misused their pipelines in a similar way. But I didn’t have much time to contemplate on that. My priority was to get to England and get married. And Govind had asked me to meet him at the Grand Mall today to plan our evacuation.

I am used to driving the car and following the right direction although my mental self was elsewhere thinking about other things, most of the times it was Ramya or the heat. I came to rest behind a Corvette in a traffic intersection and cursed that we still had to go through the signal routine when half the traffic has been shifted about hundred stories above us. I opened my roof window and gazed at the stream of Turbo Jets while I heard a thunderous explosion just a few feet ahead of me. A Rolls Royce flew high in the air and crashed back on the ground. Everybody knew what had happened. It should definitely have been a cooler failure. Cars these days used heavy water as their engine coolant and also around the fuel tank to avoid the highly inflammable propane being exposed to the atmospheric heat. If you had a leak in your cooling system, then you are driving a potential time bomb. And the countdown had just ended for the Rolls.

It was how life was in 2069. World was no more a safe place. While the dinos were exterminated by nature using cosmic interference, we, human beings, chose our own dooms way. Global Warming was slow but very effective. This was the ultimate test of the survival of the fittest. The fittest are destined to move to Mars in a few decades. The operation ironically called ‘The Rapture’.

I got down from my car and slowly made my way through the people surrounding the Rolls. The Rolls limousine was the official taxi cab. Who needed exotic cars anymore when one can afford flying cars? I saw a few men helping the cabby out of the car. He would have been smoked inside the inferno, if it had not been for his bio-suit and helmet. People had to wear special suits to counter the unbearable UV rays and the heat, after we had lost the ozone layer a decade ago. And these suits were made good enough to protect the occupants of a vehicle from a possible fuel tank blast as such a thing was very common with coolant failures. However the suit only protected against burns and the victim still suffered fractures. The worst case scenario was when you didn’t wear your seat belt, for the crash after the explosion could grind you inside the cab and the glass window of your helmet might break and pierce through your cranium.

Such was the case with the sole passenger on her last ride. They pulled the lady out of the passenger seat and I could immediately recognize the bio-suit as Ramya’s. I realised what had happened. I fainted there.

The alarm hammered on my head. I woke up with a start. It was 6.00 AM. And I was still in my apartment. I took my cell phone and dialled for Ramya. She picked up the call and wished me the morning good. I said, “Are you OK Ramya… Mm… I… I saw you in your bio-suit in a blown taxi… And I thought… I thought… I lost you…”

“What are you talking about Bharat? I am fine. And what is this thing about a ‘bio-suit’”, she giggled, “Are you OK? Or still bothered about the Global Warming seminar we attended last evening. You sure looked in a trance after the documentary film…” I waited no more to turn and look back at the calendar.

It was still 2009.