HUMILITY

By Ed Ainsworth

2068 – The North Sea

Detritus from a previous industrial age littered the Ocean. The formerly delineated White Zone, between the Norwegian and British owned ocean, now housed life forms which could be, and often were, described as aberrations of nature. It was no longer attributed to either country or even humanity. It was wild, and beyond human interaction.

Caroline Wadhwani knew better than that.

Her black hood fluttered in the wind, held in place by two straps of leather clipped to the appellate of her jacket. The wind bit through her despite the fact that the last time humans ventured this far into the oil rig wastelands, the temperature was almost ten degrees lower than it was currently.

Fortunately for her the warmer temperatures had also brought biting radiation tinged winds, what she’d gained in temperature, she lost in cancer.

Cancer.

Her own body, slowly chewing her up.

She bowed her head to the wind, the bandages that covered her face flapping loosely against her cheeks. She could see the waves crashing against the telescopic legs of the rigs that had, against all odds, stayed upright. Seven or eight in the wide field of her vision had listed, one or two legs breaking free and creating strange semi-aquatic reefs.

She looked over her shoulder at the ship’s Captain, a young man, gaunt Norwegian features that were flecked with blood-spots, keloid scars and burns. He’d be attractive if it wasn’t for the fact that half of his face had been melted.

“How?” she asked. Sparse of words, Caroline was. The Captain nodded.

“Accidentally ignited the stomach of a Hydro-Carbon Vampire,” he said, touching the plasticised skin gently. He smiled, gesturing towards her in a chivalrous manner.

“Cancer,” she said. “And something else.”

Everyone had scars, and tales. Nobody said hello anymore. The greeting was how. How did you end up here? How did you end up like this?

The Captain smirked, and locked the wheel with a strap of cloth. He produced two glasses and a bottle of alcohol. Home brewed.

“Tell me about the something else,” he said. Caroline smiled underneath her bandages, not that he’d know.

“Most people want to know what cancer,” she said.

“Cancer is everywhere,” he said, filling up the two small, mismatched glasses. “There was cancer before the fall, and there is cancer afterwards. The something else is always more interesting.”

She took the drink she had no intention of consuming and held it to her chest. The boat listed slightly, her course holding her through a semi-collapsed rig, and a fully erect one.

“The world fell,” she said, nodding slowly. She closed her eyes, and he looked away.

“Tst. Who’d have thought scientists were right?” he clinked her glass and downed his transparent liquid.

“What is this?” she asked, looking at her glass. She could smell ethanol and a musty scent attached to it, stinging the back of her throat.

“Were-Machine Fluids,” he grinned. She had a feeling he wasn’t joking. She glanced out at the scenery. It wouldn’t be long now. It would seek her out, as everything else did. They felt it each, in a deep, strange place that nobody else understood, nobody else could relate to. Not a soul, a lack of something, or perhaps, an addition of something. She couldn’t place it. Only that it was in her, and she felt it whenever those she sought were close.

“So, you were saying,” The Captain said. She nodded quietly. Her voice was broken; raising in places it should not, as though her vocal chords had been ripped.

“The world fell,” she repeated. “Nature died, and we were left with . . . this . . .”

She gestured out to the rigs.

“I wanted to make the best of it, as I always do. People complained that we’d kill the planet,” she said. “But we’d never do that. We’d kill ourselves, but to suggest we’re killing the planet? No. No, that is arrogant. It is misleading. The planet will survive, it did before we existed, and it will up to being destroyed by the sun. Nature will find a way around what we’ve done it to . . . without us, without the marks we’ve put on it.”

The Captain nodded. He drained his glass for a third time.

“Here’s to the magnificent bitch, nature!” He raised his empty glass.

“To nature,” she said.

A pause in conversation made him shift uncomfortably in place.

“I travelled. I wanted to see it for myself. Document it all, and soon I noticed patterns,” she touched her bandages, her fingers actions those of an absent mind. “Things were changing. Amazingly. Quickly.”

The Captain tipped his glass to her.

“Were-Machines,” he said.

She nodded, delicately.

“We’ve both seen it. Things change, slowly, we both know that, but this was . . it was less about the natural order and more about something else.”

“Ah. Now we’re getting to it,” The Captain said. He ruffled what remained of his blonde hair. “The something else.”

“Were-Machines, like you said, people turning into machine, or machines turning into . . . something else. Angels and demons made from weaponry, nuclear faeries, Druids of pure garbage, and worst of all, vampires that drank petrol, diesel, and oil. What’s hurt humanity so much from this fallen world is that, despite how broken it is, and us being the root of it . . . we were no longer prey. Nature, super-nature? They ignore us. They only want our resources.”

“Aye,” The Captain said. “Ain’t that the truth. We’re not even useful to this magical shit anymore. We’re not even food; we’re just . . . ancillary crap.”

“No,” she said, catching his wrist gently. “We’re never crap. Never.”

She pulled her hand back. The boat rocked in silence.

The Captain looked out into the ocean beyond them. He walked slowly back to his wheel, unhooking it and slowing the boat down.

“Are they here, yet?” he asked.

“Not yet, but they’re not far off,” she said. He adjusted his white coat, as smart as he could manage given his deformities.

“So . . .” The Captain said. “We keep being interrupted.”

“Yes,” Caroline said her smile visible in her voice. “We do.”

She moved to the prow of the boat, standing on the very edge. She carefully unstrapped her hood from her coat, the back billowing in the wind. She looked down at the water, the surface coated in a thick layer of lipids, and fat-bergs the size of small cars. Amongst the chunks of metal, oil, and other items made buoyant by the fat, almost three feet in thickness, a sickening layer of algae grew underneath, staring up at Caroline without eyes, but with senses.

“One thing has kept me motivated since this . . . thing crept inside me,” She said.

“The something?”

“Yes. The something.”

She pulled her hood down, the bandages wrapped full around her head and hair, leaving nothing on show to the world. They wrapped around themselves, all the way around her neck and below the line of her thick jumper and threadbare shirt. She turned to look at him, through gaps in the bandages.

For the first time he could clearly see that her eyes, one bloodshot and crumpled, the other simply a black, empty cavity, stared at him through tiny slits in the gauze.

“Hubris brought us to where we are now, Captain. Arrogance. The idea that we control this world we live in, that we are more than just part of an ecosystem.”

She shook her head, sitting on the prow of the boat and letting her thin legs dangle over the edge.

“We are not. We are barely even part of an ecosystem now. We do not rule this planet; we will be a geological blip on an order of magnitude we can barely comprehend.”

“You’re not making me feel better,” the Captain said.

“No, I suppose not. But it isn’t supposed to make you feel better; it’s supposed to give a sense of scale, of . . . humility. We are not the great God destroyers of Earth, we’re dust mites in a carpet.”

She unfastened her coat, letting it drop down onto the decking. The repeated the process with her jumper and shirt, and finally her trousers.

“This motivates you?” The Captain asked, looking up at her. Her body was frail, thin to the point of breaking. Now her clothes were mostly removed, a thick, chemical stench seeped from her, like bleach mixed with chlorine and sulphur.

“When I was travelling, I found something inside me. Fear. Deep, dark, immobilising fear. That fear, slowly turned to cancer. It metastasised because I didn’t understand the scale, or the size, of what the world is. What we are.”

“This something is fear?” the Captain asked.

She shook her head, and began to peel back the bandages. Her fingers, nimble, despite their equally thick covering of bandages, began to unravel a strip, which ended in a moth eaten end, flapping violently in the wind, like a soiled flag.

“I can see them now,” she said. Cresting the waves were shimmering bodies. “Spirits of something? Maybe the Atlanteans, or perhaps the wildlife that lived here, but now?”

She sighed deeply. He watched, eager, and confused by her story. Disjointed and meandering, he wanted her to get to the point.

“They’re plastic kraken, now, tendrils of a thousand bottles. Now they’re mermaids that feed on the plastic bags that refuse to break down in the ocean. Magic has gone the way of everything else in this world,” she said.

“So, what? You’re going to kill them?”

Caroline gasped. Her head snapped to stare at him, blank eye and crimson stain focusing on him. He froze.

“Gods, No,” she said, “We’re responsible for what happened to them. We made them like this. Impure. Tainted.”

“God,” The Captain said. “Caroline, please. What motivates you? This talk of something inside of you, the way you speak of the world . . . so . . . coldly, distant from it and the people within it. What motivates you to do this, woman?”

“I did what anyone should do; when they are to blame for something . . . I took responsibility.”

“You did what?” The Captain asked. He locked his wheel in place again, stopping the boat. He walked across the decking towards her. “How?”

“Deep, deep down in the burning tyre graveyard in Africa, it is so hot it melts the rubbish and continues to burn at such a heat it will never go out. The sand underneath is glass. That . . . that is where the Devil lives now.”

The Captain scoffed.

“The Devil? Please,” he pointed at her. “Let me tell you, your story? Your story is the tale of someone who survived cancer but doesn’t know why. Medicine saved you, Caroline. Not some existential understanding of life, death and scale. Humanity survives. It always does.”

Caroline smiled broadly, her bandages moving with the expansion of her cheeks.

“Hubris!” she said. “Look at you? Humanity survives because it does! No, it does not. It continues down the evolutionary path it always has, towards industrialisation of life. To produce it on a scale so large it breaks the bonds of nature. Look at the world around us, Captain. Is this what humanity always does?”

“No,” he said, grabbing her. “It survives. We have to survive.”

She touched his shoulders, pulling him into her chest. She was hot to the touch. He resisted her arms, but she was stronger than she looked. Inhumanly strong. The Captain, for the first time, grasped the gravity of the bandaged woman before him.

“It does not, and it will not,” she whispered. “But we do for now. Now is all we need.”

“In Africa, I spoke to the Devil. He saved me from the cancer inside me, but at a price. A price I paid, happily.”

She pushed him away, at arm’s length, and touched his face. She thumbed herself in the chest.

“I became something, Captain. Something that lives in my chest, and eats my cancer. My body? This medical marvel? It produces more and more cancer to feed it. I sometimes wonder if it is tied to what is inside me, or what is outside of me. Do you understand?”

“Not particularly,” the Captain said.

“I suppose not. Please . . . the plastic kraken, it will be here soon. I can see the mermaids leaving. You must get yourself to safety. I cannot guarantee it.”

“My boat,” he said. “My Rules. You made a deal with the Devil? For what?”

“Let me show you,” she said. Her fingers turned and twisted over the top of her bandages, tearing them away, strip by strip. The smell became stronger, and the bandages closer to her flesh, peeled off with a sick, thick sound, as though she were sloughing it off, tendons and all. Slowly, the pale, bald skin of her body was covered in shimmering, red and black flames. Thick with chemicals and twisting tendrils, a chemical fire, burning with clotted smoke, and stomach churning intensity.

“What . . . what are you?”

“Before the fall of the world, there were superheroes. There was a man, Johnny Blaze. He was . . . they called him the Ghost Rider. He punished those who would destroy the world, who would see it burn, and would bring the stench of evil magic to it.”

Her bleached, sickly looking skull stared at him without eyes, without expression. The remains of her flesh melted away, leaving only a skeleton, denting and pockmarked, burning crimson and black.

“He fought the devil, demons and enemies of humanity with magic and the fist of fire, he rode a bike that burned with his desire.”

The Captain stared at her.

“And you? You do this now?”

She looked away, her skull incapable of expressing the emotion of her actions. Shame.

“I am not a Spirit of Vengeance as he was. I am something new for this new world.”

“What then? Monster? Demon? What are you the Spirit of?”

“Pollution,” she said, carefully. “We polluted this world, so I took responsibility for it. It is only right. It is what we should do, need to do.”

“Spirit of Pollution? You . . .”

“Every time I allow myself in the open like this. Every time I . . . am . . . I burn more of the ozone away. I want you to know. I want everyone to know, Captain. I am humbled by their knowledge, and I am humbled by my place in the world. I accept it for what it is and that it will play a part in this picture of the universe, this picture of life. This is my motivation.”

“You’re . . . you’re insane.”

“Perhaps,” she said, looking over the edge of the boat. The wispy tendrils of semi-transparent plastic slithered under the boat. The choppy green waters, thick with chemical algae shuddered and split apart, as the fats on the surface split apart, the yellow fat-berg closest to her shattered into a spatter of debris. It caught fire as it touched her body, turning into boiling oil.

“Once a Ghost Rider, now, just a ghost. The Spirit of Pollution,” she said. “Servant of the death of humanity, and the death of life, but not Earth. No. Earth will always survive.”

“What are you going to do to it?” The Captain asked. Caroline held herself over the precipice of the boat, and looked across at him. He felt the chemicals in his body yearn, grow hot with the touch of her gaze. The radiation around him became strong, the Geiger counter in the bottom of the boat squealing.

“The Ghost Rider before me, as I said, he would beat the evil to death with his fists, with his gaze. I am not a violent woman, but I can talk, and explain . . . I can relate what I am now to humanity, one person at a time if I have to. Captain, the world does not notice you. My words are the fire that burn now, Captain. They do as you have to this planet. Pollute. Infiltrate.”

“You aren’t even worth the notice of the universe, Captain. You brought this upon yourself.”

Caroline pulled her arms to her sides, and leapt off the edge of the boat, her burning body hurtling towards the water below, and the gaping, plastic maw of the Kraken. It closed around her, tightly, and dropped below the surface of the sickly water, leaving the Captain to stare in disbelief, at the pile of stained clothes that sat on his deck, to wonder if she was ever really there.

He slid down the column of his wheel, staring out into the ocean.

What was it all for? He asked himself.

He held his breath. The Earth, continued to turn. The ocean, continued to lap at the hull of the boat. The World did not stop.

Slowly, closing his eyes, insignificance over took him.

The world sighed.

The Captain did not.