Tephra Times Three

I: FRANCIS

Francis Tong had one humble wish for her birthday: to go to the beach. Sari and Gemma, her best friends from Floor 14, would come with her. They would build sand forts, eat ice-cream, see the sky from somewhere other than the covered observation deck on the roof. She would graciously allow Matthew to tag along, with the promise that he would not embarrass them with obnoxious little brother antics.

She had told all this to her parents a month in advance, so there would be no excuses. “I’ll wear my mask!” Francis had pleaded, adding quickly, “if Alto says I need one.”

Francis’ mother, Alice, had designed Alto for the latest version of the BREEZ monitoring app that everyone in Elysion Heights used. The mascot was a puffy cartoon cloud that changed color depending on how safe it was to breathe outdoor air. Normally it was pale orange on the best of days, but lately it had been trending closer to red. Francis dreaded waking up to the cheerful little cloud’s repeated refrain: “Today looks like another beautiful day, but don’t let that fool you! The temperature is 93.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Harmful particulates are at 72%. Sensitive groups such as children, the elderly, and those with a respiratory condition may be especially affected. Stay safe, stay inside.”

Francis had hoped that today, her special day, that Alto would have a different message for her. As her eyes fluttered open, the first thing she saw was the pinhole effect of morning sunlight struggling to pierce her bedroom window’s automatic shutters. She held her breath and waited. Her morning alarm peeped. Right on cue, Alto’s bright voice piped up:

“Good morning, Francis! The heat is on, and my advice is to stay indoors. Due to ongoing wildfires in the north, the risk of smoke inhalation and harmful particulates are especially high. If you must go outside for any reason, make sure you’re wearing a properly rated mask with a safety rating of at least 13.”

“Shut up,” said Francis. She buried her head in her pillow.

“You gotcha!” piped the little cloud. “But before I do…”

The A.I. voice seemed to shift to a gentler register. For a moment, Francis felt the presence of her mother in the room, warm and familiar.

“…I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, Francis. I hope it’s a really good one.”

The Tongs were not big on personal celebrations, and their floor wasn’t very kid-friendly to begin with. Most of the green thumbs didn’t have children, for whatever reason. They spent most of their time cloistered in the basement, because, as Francis’ father Raymond explained, that was where the decommissioned equipment from their lab had ended up after the mass government layoffs. It was easier to keep doing the work in the basement than sending everything up the freight elevator, which was constantly breaking.

The green thumbs were biologists, botanists, climatologists. They could simulate weather patterns, measure acidity, track ozone erosion. But, as Ray was always complaining, there was not a single elevator repair person among them.

Being the only non-morning person in the family, Francis ate a late breakfast alone, as usual. She chewed her soy sausage on English muffin while scrolling through the birthday well-wishes on her tablet. Sari and Gemma had both sent texts with a cryptic invitation:

Francis felt her mood subtly change color, like Alto—a smooth fade from yellow to green. She quickly scarfed down the rest of her breakfast and headed downstairs.

The main draw of the rec room was the huge flatscreen TV mounted against the south wall, which could be booked for large gatherings. Most families had perfectly serviceable entertainment setups at home, but it was nice to get the whole floor in one place for parties and movie nights. But Francis’ destination was located elsewhere.

On the wall opposite the TV was a floor-to-ceiling mural. It depicted a row of smiling children dancing over a stylized patchwork of colorful biomes: a forest, an ocean, a wheat field. The painted sky over their heads was an alien shade of blue, except for the ominous dark cloud that hung over an erupting volcano in the background. On the edge of the caldera, the artist had subtly written their initials in tiny block letters: P. O.

Francis had never understood why P. O. had seen fit to add such a disturbing image to the otherwise carefree landscape, but for that reason, it was her favorite part of the mural.

As she opened the double doors, she was struck by a wall of sound. The rec room was packed. At first, her heart beating fast, Francis thought that her parents had somehow managed to wrangle a giant birthday gathering in her honor. But a quick scan made it clear something else was going on. For one thing, the crowd was pushed over to one side, gathering around the TV so thickly Francis couldn’t see what was on the screen. The other strange detail was that most of the people in the crowd were adults. Some of them she recognized: Mrs. Pryce, who used to babysit for the Tongs as a teenager; the old man from Floor 19 who went door to door selling his wife’s homemade empanadas every Sunday; a Filipino couple who had just moved into the unit down the hall. There were others who looked like colleagues of Francis’ parents, but she couldn’t place any names.

And on their faces, the same look. A mix of anger, defeat, and something else that Francis couldn’t identify. The mood hung heavy in the air, making the already stuffy room feel even more oppressive. Various body odors twisted through the air. Some of the green thumbs looked like they hadn’t slept in a few days.

Her tablet pinged in her pocket. A text from Sari:

Slipping furtively between the grown-ups, Francis made her way to her friends. Sari and Gemma were there with Matthew, standing beside a rickety folding table on which sat a small white cardboard box. The painted volcano loomed behind them, spewing its frozen whorls of ash behind their heads.

“Where have you been?” Matthew said loudly, probably to compensate for his own unease. “You’re late for your own birthday.”

“What’s going on?” said Francis. “Where’s mom and dad?”

“I think it’s about the planes.” Gemma’s voice was so quiet, the others had to lean in towards her. Her dark hair was stringy with sweat against her forehead.

“What planes?” Francis started to ask, but she was interrupted by the arrival of Alice and Raymond. They bustled in along with a group of people in soil-stained coveralls, looking as if they’d just come up from the labs. A few whom Francis recognized as friends of her parents went immediately to join the huddle around the big screen. Above the murmuring of the throng, an official-sounding announcement was being made through the TV speakers.

“They’re starting!” called a voice from the middle of the crowd. “Turn up the volume for those in back!”

A news reporter’s voice broke out clearly over what sounded like a hundred fans whirring at once:

”—a mix of sulphates will be released high above sea level, well away from any human settlements. These ‘stratospheric aerosol injections’, or SAI, will have to be repeated every one to two years to maintain protection against harmful UV rays. Though Benson Catmull, CEO of Cloud Drop Industries, has secured permission from the governments of multiple countries, this inaugural mission has sparked controversy amongst environmentalists and many in the scientific community…”

Low, bitter murmurs spread through the watchers, like the kind of lightning that jumps from cloud to cloud without touching ground.

“No shit, controversy. What were they expecting? Nobody voted for this hack to get involved.”

“Where are all those chemtrail conspiracy theorists when you need them? It’d put some numbers on the side actually fighting this thing.”

“At least our folks are out in full force… I think I see Sam and Arya there in the back!” This was followed by some scattered clapping and hollow cheers.

Alice finally pushed past the restless throng to give Francis a stiff embrace, followed by Ray.

“Happy birthday, sweetie,” said Francis’ mother. “I’m sorry things are a little hectic.”

Francis tried not to sound sullen. “So no beach day?”

“I’m afraid not. The air isn’t good, anyway. Listen, today is a very important day for mom and dad, and for you and Matthew, too. Everyone in Elysion Heights. Maybe even the entire planet. We thought we had more time to stop it, but—“

“Daddy, what’s going on?” said Matthew, voice trembling.

Ray scooped Matthew up in his arms. Francis thought her brother was too old for such a move, but he’d always been the sensitive one.

“…is expected to lower global warming by up to two degrees Celsius. Now, that may not sound like much, but of course, every little bit counts. Especially here at the launch site, where temperatures reached a high of one hundred and eight degrees earlier today…”

“Why don’t we check out what’s happening?” Ray said in Toisanese, which he preferred over English when he wasn’t working. Francis recognized the same tone of voice he used when he was trying to get them to learn something about the world: Are you curious about how something works? Let’s find out!

Alice turned to Francis with a pained smile. “Remember when your dad and I told you about all the different ways we were trying to fix the bad air situation? Make it so we could all go outside and breathe freely again? Well, it looks like someone else got their bright idea off the ground first. Someone we don’t really agree with…”

Sirens from the TV, followed by loud booing from the green thumbs. The reporter spoke over top:

“As you can see behind me, several anti-geoengineering activists are being removed from the scene as we speak. Security for this mission is being provided by Catmull’s private firm, a move which has been criticized for lack of accountability and the disruption of peaceful protests. Catmull insists the measures are necessary given the public-facing nature of the launch, which leaves it vulnerable to sabotage. We are now seventeen minutes from the final countdown…”

Raymond and Matthew had disappeared into the crowd to get a better look. Even Sari and Gemma were beginning to gravitate towards the TV, moving like zombies infected by whatever strange distress had permeated the air. Grown-up fear was different from child fear, Francis thought. It smelled different, for one thing. It was as invisible and yet readily detectable as the chemicals that Alto was always telling her to avoid: formaldehyde, benzene, ethylene glycol… You couldn’t see them, but they seeped into you while you slept, giving you headaches and nausea and weird nightmares. But that was the problem with things like the BREEZ app. It could detect and warn you about all the dangers on earth, but it couldn’t tell you how to stop them.

“Francis?” Alice was gripping her daughter’s upper arms. “Are you—“

Francis grabbed the cardboard box from the folding table and ran from the rec room. She didn’t stop to see if anyone was following her.

“…And here come the pilots, Irene Allen and Hakeem Jabal, who have logged many hours on experimental stratospheric flights prior to this one. We spoke with Jabal last month about the mission, and his optimism—“

She made all the way down the hall and into the elevator, but someone stuck a foot between the doors and stopped them from closing. Francis looked up into the calm, sad eyes of her mother.

“Leave me alone,” Francis said. She was gripping the box so tightly that it was starting to give way in her hands. Her mother stepped into the elevator, letting the doors close behind her, and gently lifted the lid. Inside was a slightly squashed chocolate cake with fudge icing. Loops of white icing spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRANCIS on the top.

“You have such good friends,” Alice murmured. She closed the lid before Francis’ tears could drip onto the cake. “Oh, Francis. I’m sorry. I didn’t forget. It’s just…”

She trailed off. Then, after a moment of wretched silence, she seemed to reach some kind of conclusion. She reached past Francis and pressed the button for the rooftop. The elevator rattled upward as mother and daughter stood in silence, punctuated by an occasional repressed sniffle.

The elevator creaked to a stop, opening out onto the empty observation deck. Elysion Heights had been built at the height of the climate refugee housing shock, spurred by inland migration caused by coastal erosion and rising floods. Construction had been quick and cheap, with little regard for beauty; but someone in the design process must have realized that if the residents were going to be confined indoors for most of their lives, there should at least be a place where they could stand and look at the sky. The transparent roof was currently folded down to keep the polluted winds at bay, but the city sprawled below was still visible through the smog.

“It’s not the beach, but it’ll have to do.” Alice took the cake box and set it on one of the many mismatched tables scattered around the deck. “Much less crowded up here, no?”

“I’m making you miss the big important news,” Francis sniffed. She was keenly aware that she was acting like a baby, and hated herself for it.

“I don’t need to see it,” Alice sighed. “We all knew it was coming. Well, your father, he thought that after our last big awareness campaign went viral… But no. One smooth-talking businessman with a couple of fancy jets later, and here we are.”

Francis snuck a peek at her tablet, saw Alto’s red cheeks and cartoon sweat drop, and put it away. But something about the color, the timing, made a connection snap together in her mind. She should have seen it before: Alto, the cartoon cloud, had the same cheeky smile as the children from the mural.

“Mom, are you… P. O.?”

Alice looked surprised. “Where did you hear that?”

Francis told her mother about the volcano painted on the wall in the rec room, its tiny signature.

Her mother made a delighted sound. “That’s the nickname your father gave me, back when we were dating! He called me that whenever I got to complaining about the state of the world. ‘Yes, oh Pessimistic One’, he’d say. And the way he said it made me laugh every time, which was about the only way to get me to shut up in those days…”

“Where did you learn how to paint? I thought you were both scientists.”

“I illustrated children’s books before meeting your father,” Alice said, a little dreamily. So unlike her usual detached, workaholic self. “Eventually I joined the education and outreach division of an environmental justice non-profit, where he was also doing his research.”

“Plants?” Francis guessed. The green thumbs must have been called that for a reason, and her father was one of the originals…

“Volcanoes!” Alice laughed. “Your father once called them nature’s original mass polluters. Spew a ton of particulate matter into the air, block some of the sun’s shortwave radiation from warming the earth… Like most of our fancy tech ideas, nature’s already beat us to it several times. Vesuvius, Tambora, Krakatoa, Pinatubo, to name just a few.”

“So these planes,” Francis said slowly, “are really just doing the same thing as a volcano?”

Alice nodded. “I once went to a biomimicry workshop at a conference, back when there were conferences about this sort of thing. Everyone presented these clever designs inspired by hummingbird wings and honeycomb structures… But stratospheric aerosol injection is just controlled volcanism.”

Francis enjoyed the moments when Alice was so distracted that she forgot to treat Francis like a child. An adult wouldn’t have to ask what stratospheric aerosol injection was, so Francis asked what she thought was the more important question instead.

“Will it work?”

Alice sighed. “Probably. At least in the short term.”

“Then why is everyone so upset?” Francis said. “Isn’t cooling the earth down a good thing?”

Alice looked through the plastic canopy to the west, where the sun was setting, as she thought over how to answer her daughter. “I suppose it’s because it’s the wrong lesson. That if we throw enough money at the problem, we can fix the mess we’ve made. At best, solutions like SAI can only buy us some time.”

At this, Francis felt a little knot in her chest give way. She could tell the adults were upset by Benson Catmull’s actions. But Francis couldn’t help but think that a bit more time couldn’t hurt. More time for her to grow up, to really understand her parents’ research. More time to help Matthew become the person he was meant to be. More time to hang out with Sari and Gemma, and see what they would go on to do with their lives. More time to finally go to the beach, even if it was under a differently colored sky.

Francis took her mother’s hand and squeezed. “You know, mom, I really do want to know more about this stuff. You don’t need to hide it from me any more.”

“I know.” Alice turned to her daughter and smiled. “But for now, let’s focus on what we can actually change, in the moment. Which is turning this delicious cake into an empty box with some crumbs at the bottom.”

They ended up watching the SAI launch on Alice’s phone, still sitting on the observation deck. Francis texted Sari, Gemma, and Matthew to come up; they let Raymond stay downstairs with the other greenies to mourn the end of an era. Francis could almost feel the presence of the other viewers around the world, all trying to make sense of what was happening. Wondering if it would work, at least long enough for the better thing to come along and save them all. The sky over Elysion Heights was filled with grey clouds, but out east, where the television cameras were, the sun was beating down hard on the grey tarmac of the launch site.

Eventually, the planes went up. They looked like tiny needles, piercing into a deep blue that would soon no longer exist. And the world was different after that.

***

II: JASMYN

Jasmyn woke up unable to breathe. Part of her knew she was awake, at home, in bed. But the molten glow of her nightmare was still with her, inside her, deep in her lungs. Smothering. She could taste the ash of the demonic cloud on her tongue.

Since childhood, before Jasmyn turned 18 and moved in with Teller, Jasmyn’s mother had berated her for breathing “more than her fair share” whenever the air got bad. She was conditioned to breathe in short, shallow bursts, through the nose and never the mouth. It made sense: food was rationed when supplies were low, so why not oxygen, which was arguably more precious?

Slivers of sunlight eked through the thin slats over the bedroom’s single high window. The automated shutters were broken and wouldn’t shut all the way. Another fine morning in Elysion Heights. Jasmyn sat up and planted her feet on the dusty floor, groaning as the weight of her belly settled. The other side of the bed was empty; Teller had left for work hours ago. She pulled on sweatpants and shuffled the six steps to the kitchenette, which confronted her with its miniature swamp of unwashed dishes and last night’s leftovers. There, the embers of her nightmare persisted into the dull ritual of making coffee, threatening sparks.

She had dreamed of infinite explosions from deep underground, orange liquid burbling up from the depths of hell to burst in bright arcs across a charred landscape. She’d seen a black plume of ash rise up like a boxer’s glove, about to uppercut the already wounded sky. In its shadow, everything died.

There had been no Teller, no husband, in the dream. But the baby had been there, somehow outside of Jasmyn’s body, yet she couldn’t recall any details. What it looked like. Whether it was a boy or a girl. All she knew is that she had been afraid, and the baby hadn’t. That was dream logic for you.

She was lost in thought when the frayed burr of the doorbell finally punctured her consciousness. Her first impulse was to ignore it, but the sound persisted. Eleven more tiny steps to the peephole. A blue-haired person of indeterminate gender stood in the hall. Next to them was a tall pushcart covered with a semi-transparent tarp, through which could be glimpsed a proliferation of indistinct green shapes. The tarp was wet with condensation; trails of water dripped like tears down the inside of the plastic.

“Special delivery,” called the woman (she was a woman, Jasmyn decided, based on the shape of her cheekbones). The name tag on her brown coveralls read “Morrison”. Jasmyn unlatched the door and peered through the crack.

The young woman consulted her tablet. “Jasmyn Shelton? Unit 1438?”

Jasmyn nodded.

“I’m Gemma Morrison. I’m with the…”

Jasmyn recognized the jumpsuit, if not her face or name. “You’re with those green thumb people,” she guessed. Jasmyn had never interacted with one face to face, though she occasionally went to their monthly community nights in the rec room for the free food. She always left before anyone could talk to her or give her a pamphlet.

“That’s right,” Morrison said. She had the same smile a lot of the greenies shared, hopeful and anxious at the same time. “We have a new community initiative, and I’m on the distribution task force. We’re calling it the Modular Unit Flora Filter Distribution Network. MUFFIN for short.”

“That doesn’t spell…”

“I know, I know. Someone thought it made for a cute acronym. Did you see our community notice in the elevator about it?”

The apartment that Jasmyn shared with Teller was a family unit that they’d won in the tri-annual housing lottery. It was on the same level as the retail promenade, which meant she rarely needed to leave the fourteenth floor. Besides, the elevator was prone to breaking, and it scared Jasmyn to be trapped in there with some of the more unhinged residents.

“We don’t need whatever you’re selling,” Jasmyn said. “Even if we wanted it, we couldn’t afford it.”

“But it’s free,” Morrison insisted. “MUFFIN is one of the initiatives paid into by the CommFund, which comprises about 23% of Elysion’s current tenants.”

“That like a tax?”

“Kind of, yeah. But it’s voluntary, you have to sign up for it. The ones who choose to pay subsidize everyone who doesn’t.”

This sounded to Jasmyn like government talk, which meant Teller would be even more against whatever it was. To him, the government was the reason everything was falling apart. He said that they were either competent and untrustworthy, or trustworthy and incompetent, or both. If they weren’t fucking you over, they were simply fucking up.

“My husband doesn’t like me talking to strangers,” Jasmyn said. “Especially government people.”

Morrison frowned. It was the first time since their conversation had started that Jasmyn had seen the woman look upset. A second later and the smile was back, just a shade more brittle.

“Oh, we’re not government. More like government rejects. Renegades, you might say. Anyway, here we are, trying to get by with bargain bin parts and the kindness of strangers. If you drop by the rec room on Open Lab Tuesdays, I can tell you all about it—“

“Never mind all that. Let’s see this free whatever-it-is,” Jasmyn said impatiently, waving her hand at the cart.

Without ceremony, Morrison reached under the tarp and hauled one of the green things out onto the floor. It was some kind of plant with thick, diamond-shaped leaves, growing out of a squarish crate filled with sandy soil. The crate measured about two feet on each side, and was covered in blinking gizmos and little LED displays. Wires sprouted from the soil like roots and into the gizmos. It looked both high-tech and low-tech at the same time.

Jasmyn pointed at a tiny screen on the side of the crate. On it, a little cartoon cloud bobbed up and down, surrounded by fluctuating numbers and symbols.

“What’s that?” said Jasmyn suspiciously.

As if on cue, a tinny voice spoke out from the display. “Hello, Elysion Heights resident, I’m Alto! If you have any questions about your modular unit, or require any maintenance, just let me know.”

Jasmyn recoiled. Morrison quickly pressed a switch on the side of the display to turn the sound off.

“Sorry about that. I find it as annoying as you do, but Alto’s been with the greenies for a long time. Ahem.” The blue-haired woman launched into her pitch. “Basically, the MUFF is designed to detect air quality with the sensors, improve it using a bioengineered organic filter—this plant—and inform residents about whether it’s safe to breathe. We designed it specifically for indoor use, so it barely needs any water.”

At the word “bioengineered”, Jasmyn side-eyed the other woman. “You folks like playing god?”

Morrison didn’t miss a beat. “Alto is better than I am at explaining how this works, but pretty much all plants take in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen in return. So we just tweaked a few genes to maximize that rate of exchange. If there’s nobody home very often during the day, this variety is particularly useful. CAM photosynthesis makes it so that the bulk of oxygen output happens at night. Bad air in, clean air out.”

Jasmyn was starting to feel the heat of the day creeping up on her. Teller’s gig app, OddJob, took him all over the city, but sometimes work was slow or he would start getting fatigued from the heat, and he often came back to the apartment at random hours. He usually expected Jasmyn to be up by then, ready to prep a microwave dinner or put a cold wet cloth on his forehead as he lay semi-delirious on the couch. Whenever he was out, Jasmyn spent most of the day worrying about when he’d come back. If he’d come back.

The thing was, whatever Teller was catching wasn’t just from being outside when the air was bad. Even Jasmyn, who sometimes went weeks without leaving the apartment, had been getting headaches and dizzy spells that came on more frequently and lasted longer. She worried about what this might mean for the baby, but Teller’s OddJob ranking didn’t come with spousal insurance, and she hadn’t been able to afford a visit to the doctor.

“So you really think a mutant plant is going to fix all this?” Jasmyn jerked her head to indicate the entire world. “Are the greenies gonna pay my rent and fix my busted window, too? They gonna pay for diapers and formula once this baby pops? What about the fact I almost got mugged in the elevator last month, is a cartoon cloud going to help with that?”

Through her outburst, Jasmyn felt the baby kick her gently from within. Suddenly, she felt one of her spells coming on. She slid sideways, caught herself on the edge of the doorway.

Morrison moved forward, alarmed. “Are you okay?”

Jasmyn tried to wave her away, but her arms wouldn’t work. She felt like she was going to throw up.

Morrison’s voice was faint above her. “It’s probably formaldehyde sickness, judging by the sensors. Damn coolant system was never tested for harmful VOCs… Do you want me to call Teller?”

“Water,” Jasmyn whispered. “In the apartment.” She would be okay in a minute, but she didn’t want Morrison to witness her pain. She did not like the idea of showing weakness in front of strangers.

As Morrison stepped past her into the darkened unit, Jasmyn sat against the wall and stared at the MUFF. Even though she didn’t know much about plants, given how few of them there were in the building, she could see how unusual it was. Its broad, sharp leaves made for an imposing silhouette. The crate in which it was housed seemed alive, too, as the meters and devices attached to its surface clicked and beeped softly. According to the labels, they were measuring things like temperature, humidity, moisture, barometric pressure, CO₂, HCHO, TVOC. She could well believe that it was these mysterious strings of letters and numbers that were making her and Teller sick—it fit with a lot of the info that Teller got from those internet videos he was always watching—but what was one plant going to do?

Morrison came back out with a bottle of water. “I’m so sorry this is happening. These newer buildings went up in droves after all the deregulation acts got shoved through during the flooding crisis. Ever wonder why they were so cheap? Turns out, getting rid of safety standards is more expensive in the long run. But we pay the cost with our health.”

Jasmyn took the bottle.

“Did you call your husband?”

Jasmyn shook her head. Morrison crouched on the floor and waited with her as she drank.

“You know,” the blue-haired woman sighed after a while, “I never did answer your question.”

“Hmm?”

“Whether I thought the MUFF would fix things.” Morrison shrugged, then laughed at her own helplessness. “Normally I might be more optimistic, but… Well, today is another SAI launch. You’d think that after fifteen years of pumping acidic dust into the stratosphere that things would have improved, but it’s like we’re running just to stay in the same place.”

Now this was something Jasmyn could speak to with some authority. “My Teller, he never did approve of that plan,” she said, strength returning to her voice. “Who knows what they’ve been spraying on us this whole time? If there’s one thing I agree with you greenies about, it’s that someone ought to stop that nonsense. That’s why I never go outside.”

“Do you remember when the planes went up?” Morrison seemed genuinely curious. “I was just a baby, but apparently it was a huge deal here.”

Jasmyn had been in her teens and living with her mother when the first launch had happened. She dimly recalled watching it on her phone at school and not thinking much of it; there had been too much else going on in her life to bother with current events. Now, the launches weren’t even news. They were just something that happened every couple of years, without fanfare.

“Not really,” she mumbled. “All I know is, they’re poisoning us inside and out.”

The MUFF peeped, as if in agreement. Alto, the cartoon cloud, bobbed silently in its little window. Seeing it reminded Jasmyn of her nightmare, the blanket of black dust covering the sky, the eternal fires down below. Not so different from where she lived now: a world without plants, of dark corridors and tiled floors, buzzing fluorescent lighting, bright bars of harsh sunlight slicing through open slats of dark metal. Perhaps the dream had been the baby’s, not hers… But then, why hadn’t it been afraid? Did it know something its mother did not?

“Look, I’ve got to get going,” Morrison said finally. “Gotta get the rest of these deliveries out. Do you want me to leave this one with you?”

“I don’t know,” said Jasmyn. Her headache was starting to come back. “I guess… Yes, fine. But…”

Morrison waited patiently.

“I don’t know if I can take care of it myself,” Jasmyn whispered.

“Oh, I know Alto is annoying. But like I said, it’s very easy to take care of if you follow its instructions—“

“I mean, will you come back around later?” Jasmyn said quickly. “To check up? I can’t move around so well, and our place is pretty cramped, as you saw, so I might need some help getting it moved in. And maybe you can explain this MUFFIN thing to my husband. I’m not so good with this science stuff.”

“Sure,” Morrison said, brightening. “Maybe you can bring him by the rec room this Tuesday. We’re making chana masala! All are welcome, as always.”

Jasmyn stood and prodded the MUFF with her foot. The glossy green leaves barely trembled. She felt like she should say something, but all that came out was a stiff little “Thank you.”

“Of course,” said Morrison. The smile was back, less weary this time. Just a little. “What else are neighbors for?”

That night, with Teller snoring softly beside her, Jasmyn lay awake and let a name drift into her mind. It was two syllables, strong-sounding and mysterious, and seemed to glow as if forged from fires deep within the earth. It sounded like it came from the future. She didn’t know what it meant, if it meant anything, but for the first time in a long time, she knew it wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

“Tephra,” she murmured, and slept.

***

III: ANISE

Anise had just managed to reach the roof when the tears started. They burst out of her eyes and down her cheeks, dripping off her chin and staining her blouse. Yet the rest of her body was still, not racked by shuddering sobs; it was like rain unaccompanied by lightning or thunder, neither sound nor fury. She felt quite calm, numb, even. She threw back her head and looked up through the observation deck’s glass ceiling into the usual golden gloom of the afternoon sky, waiting for the storm within to pass.

She had been working on swapping out the old bioscrubber panels in the eastern wing when the news spread throughout the maintenance crews. 92-year old Hector Cruz, the last of the “true blue” babies, had passed away at 9:02 PM on a Tuesday night, surrounded by loved ones and a holo news crew. He took with him the eyewitness memories of a pre-SAI sky, whose alien azure had filled Anise with a fierce, inexplicable longing all through childhood and into her twenties. She still had vintage posters on her bedroom wall that were nothing but pure blue rectangles, left over from a decades-old anti-SAI campaign that ancestral activists had spearheaded long ago. They had failed, of course, but the dream lived on.

Cruz had been the last human alive to have seen such a blue in person. Anise only knew it through old photos and movies, video footage and written accounts. Her upbringing in the citizen laboratories of E-Block, formerly known as Elysion Heights, had provided her with a smattering of technical jargon—particulates, backscatter, diffusion—that was somehow incapable of truly describing what she was seeing when she looked up at the sky. Even her grandparents had never known anything different.

Was it the collective loss of this memory of blue that had triggered the tears? Was it just misplaced nostalgia for something Anise had never experienced? Was it the fear that she wouldn’t get to see it in her lifetime, despite all the efforts going on all over the globe to reach carbon negative?

Or maybe, worst of all, Cruz’s death meant that the world had already moved on. Nobody actually needed blue skies to survive, that much had been proven. There was always a more pressing issue to solve: war, geopolitics, the economy. All the usual suspects. There were now several generations of people who had been born under a perpetual cloud, and many were on record saying that they preferred it that way.

But only because they don’t know any better!

“Are you okay?”

Startled, Anise dropped her tablet. Fortunately, half the rooftop doubled as a semi-outdoor playground, and was covered in rubber mats to minimize injury. The device bounced once and came to rest, seemingly unscathed. Anise knelt to pick it up, and in raising her head caught sight of the owner of the inquiring voice. It was one of the younger children, a boy with curly hair like a dark storm cloud behind his head. He was sitting alone on the see-saw with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, staring at her.

Anise searched her pockets for a tissue and couldn’t find any, so she resorted to wiping her wrist across her eyes. She felt sodden and ridiculous. “Yes, I’m fine. You must be… Coby? Coby Kreyling?” She occasionally took a break from the labs to help with rotating teaching duties, and had picked up a few of the students’ names. Anise had always been better at memorizing the names of plants than people.

“That’s me,” said the child, and let out a little sigh. He sounded world-weary for his age, aside from the distracted way he kept kicking his grubby sneakers against the ground. “Why are you up here, anyway?”

“Good question.” Anise stashed her phone and came over to the see-saw. “May I?”

“You may,” said Coby gravely. He slung one leg over his seat and gripped the handle as Anise sat gingerly on the other side. They see-sawed back and forth for a while in silence.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“Class got cancelled. Tephra had to give a video talk for some youth conference in Libya.”

“Which class?”

“World. We’re reading Frankenstein.”

“World” was shorthand for “Words that Made the World”, one of Tephra Shelton’s classes. It combined literature and climate history, plus a healthy dash of what Teph called “instructive tangents”, meaning whatever they found interesting to talk about at the time. Which was anything and everything.

“Do you like scary books?” Anise asked. She shifted her weight so that they were both level.

Suspended in the air, Coby swung his legs back and forth. “It’s not that scary. The volcano was scarier.”

“Volcano?”

“The one that made Mary Shelley write the book,” explained Coby. “It erupted and messed up the weather and that made everyone get stuck indoors. So they all sat around and wrote scary stories about monsters and stuff.”

“Oh, I didn’t know about that,” said Anise. It sure sounded like a Tephra Shelton lesson: off-kilter and full of seemingly random historical facts. Teph was an elder greenie of indeterminate advanced age, who’d been born on E-Block’s 14th floor and never left. They had long grey hair and scraggly eyebrows that went off their forehead in a tapered scrawl, as if whatever creation deity that had drawn them had forgotten to lift the pencil off the paper. They had never outright claimed to have visions, but it was well-known that if Tephra Shelton took you aside to whisper a dream they’d had about you, it ought to be taken as seriously as a flood warning.

Despite these eccentricities, Tephra was beloved as a teacher. They took children more seriously than adults, perhaps because they were naturally predisposed to following Teph’s convoluted way of thinking.

A memory suddenly came to Anise. “Speaking of volcanoes, there used to be one downstairs in the rec room,” she recalled.

“Huh? Like a hologram of one?”

“Oh, no, it was painted on the wall. It got torn down ages ago, before I was born, so they could install the moss membrane filters. Sometimes I like to go into the archives and look at what this place used to look like…”

Coby nodded and said a word Anise didn’t recognise, probably slang. But it sounded affirmative.

They sat in silence for a while. The air was beginning to cool as the sun sank below the city skyline. Their sister building, F-Block, cast a long blocky shadow across the former freeway that was now mostly used by the ABC collectives for outdoor markets and bicycle races.

“Coby, can I ask you something?”

The child’s shrug said yes. Anise went on.

“Are you looking forward to the day the sky turns blue again?”

“Mmm… I guess so?”

Disheartened by the lackluster response, Anise tried again. “You’ve seen old pictures, right? Of how things used to be before the SAI planes went up?”

“Yeah, it looks so weird!” Coby seemed to sense Anise’s sadness and paused to think. “Pretty, though. I dunno. It’ll be different, I guess.”

Before Anise could say anything more, someone shouted:

“There you are!”

Anise and Coby looked up at the sound of the drone whirring through the doorway to the observation deck, which Anise had left open. Shuffling behind Alto was the hunched figure of Tephra Shelton, wrapped in their usual colorful layers. They caught sight of the duo on the see-saw and gave a little wave with the hand that wasn’t resting on the head of their walking cane.

Alto’s cherubic face on the frontal display was a serenely pale blue, but its computerized voice was stern. “You left me hanging, Anise! I’ve been all around F5 twice now. Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

Anise pulled out the tablet she’d dropped earlier and winced at its darkened screen. “Sorry, Alto. These mats must be harder than I thought.”

The drone settled grumpily in the middle of the see-saw and rotated its cameras so it could look at both of them at once. “Well, there’s still plenty of work left tomorrow. Haj is hoping we can finish floors 6 through 11 with all hands on deck. One of the mounting devices isn’t working, so we need to call our suppliers over at G-Block to take a look.”

“Understood, Alto,” Anise said gently. The little robot’s persona ran on an open-source, low-energy model hosted on the local intranet, and at some point in the last decade had been updated to include more “human” qualities. The result was that of a slightly overbearing site supervisor, but someone must have decided that this was preferable over the eternally cheery helper of years past.

Alto’s drone body tilted towards the boy. “And you, Coby Kreyling, are late for dinner. Come on, I’ll let Aunt Luce know we’re on your way.”

Coby rolled his eyes and hopped from his perch. “Bye, Anise. It was nice talking to you.”

As Coby’s footsteps and Alto’s whirring retreated back into the building, Tephra turned to Anise. Their dark eyes gleamed in their face.

“Come,” was all they said. “I prefer the swings.”

Anise and Tephra sat on the swings, not swinging. The sun was now well hidden by buildings, but had not yet sunk below the horizon. In the evenings, the deep blue of night slowly swelled to supersede the day’s grimy yellow. The skies of the 21st and 22nd centuries looked the same in the dark. But Anise felt the difference like a wound in her heart.

Tephra held their cane between their knees, both gnarled hands folded over the head, and stared straight ahead. “I sense you have a lot on your mind, An.”

“I just don’t understand how we could have made all these technological advancements, like Alto, and still be nowhere near discontinuing SAI,” Anise blurted out, letting her bitterness rise to the occasion. “Even after the sky injections were transferred to the International Consortium, there still aren’t any metrics for when they plan to stop. The planes don’t even have human pilots in them any more.”

The elder greenie nodded slowly. “The enemy is always presenting us with lessons we are failing to learn, and there is still much work to be done. Change is difficult, and balance even more so.”

In a typical Teph conversation, the best thing to do was to let the words run through your mind like a steady river flow, not stopping to think too hard. The meaning usually came later, like the solution to a puzzle, after a good night’s rest. They were never exactly comforting conversations, nor were they earth-shattering revelations. It was like talking to someone in a dream.

“Let me put it another way, then.” Anise permitted herself to rock back and forth on her heels, making the swingset creak under her adult weight. “Think we’ll ever see a blue sky in our lifetimes?”

“Hmm. My lifetime, or yours?”

“Teph,” Anise pleaded. “It’s a simple yes or no question.”

Tephra sighed. “I remember when you were a little student of mine. You always did crave a straightforward answer, and I never felt equipped to give one to you. This is about Hector Cruz, isn’t it?”

Anise nodded. She could feel the tears coming on again, but concentrating on the swinging helped.

Tephra Shelton’s smile was like a sudden bright crack in the earth. “When I was a little bit younger and more mobile, I took a lightflyer down to Mexico City to visit him. A lovely man, with a beautiful family. And an amazing knack for getting into more trouble than it was worth. I’ll never forget the time when we were helping to stage a waterkeeper blockade over on the east side…”

For the next forty minutes, Anise lost herself in Tephra’s recollection of their old greenie activist days, which always seemed to involve more illegal acts than were strictly necessary. It didn’t matter that Anise had heard a few of the tales before, for Tephra had a storyteller’s knack for making each rendition feel new and exciting. Hector Cruz came briefly alive in her mind: not just as a symbol of a bygone era, but a flesh-and-blood human being with quirks and flaws, lovers and enemies.

By the end of the hour, Anise couldn’t have said why she felt better, only that she did. Meanwhile, Tephra’s stomach was rumbling audibly. Anise helped the elder greenie to their feet and walked them to the elevator.

Tephra stuck their cane between the automatic doors to prevent them from closing. “Aren’t you coming down too, An? There’s bound to be plenty of leftovers.”

Anise glanced over her shoulder, then back. “Thank you so much for the talk, Teph. But I think I’ll stay up here a while longer.”

“Very good.” Tephra made as if to withdraw her cane, then seemed to think of something else to say. An afterthought. “You know, Cloud Drop succeeded because the initiative was cheap, and posed no threat to the hegemonic world order. If the green thumbs and our allies had won the day, stopping the planes from going up, who knows what might have happened? It was a good thing to try and stop them, and good things can come from failure. Now our task is to find the next good thing to do, which may be something different altogether.”

The elevator doors closed.

Once she was finally alone, Anise strolled to the community rooftop garden portion of the roof and lay down on the limecrete, still warm from the day. She looked up at the rusted struts holding the aging solar array above her head, like a fragmented umbrella. The solar panels contributed energy to the intranet, which included Alto’s persona instance. These ones were worn and in need of replacing, but they still had a few more years of life. By that time, they should be able to raise the funds needed; a local agricultural co-op had promised to match every dollar raised by the CommFund with two from their profits, and it was forecasted that the harvest would be good this year.

From this vantage point, looking up through the solar array, the sky didn’t look so bad. It didn’t look good, either. It was simply there, existing. Anise expected this to feel like a betrayal of some kind, but instead she felt a kind of release, a letting go. Anise could still mourn the death of a man she’d never met, and the blue of a sky she might never see. She could still work with agency and urgency and fear for a future that had come within a hairsbreadth of extinction.

But for now, rest. That was important, too.

As her skin soaked up the last of the fading warmth, Anise imagined she could feel the building’s micropores opening and closing, setting in motion the complex process of gas transference that could filter carbon dioxide down into the psuedo-organic substrate within the building’s internal walls. From there, the sequestered CO₂ would interact with prepared wastewater and the solar energy stored within artificial photosynthetic cells. Eventually, sunlight from the new dawn would be harnessed to break the CO₂ into oxygen and carbon, the latter of which would be used to strengthen the building’s outer shell. E-Block was like a sea creature, slowly forming its own protective shell, or the coral reefs, which had recently made an unexpected comeback. The building itself grew, breathed, was nourished. And nestled inside, all their little lives.