I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t want to talk. The world was a silent place for those moments. She had not said anything new. I had heard of the cults before. I did not believe that Abel could be leading one.
The cults had arrived as soon as the dust had. In fact many of them had been there before, they simply incorporated the dust into their vision. A sign, a signal from their chosen deity. A punishment sent down to test the faithful.
There had been endless debates between the believers and the more scientifically minded. Neither were able to explain anything that happened but both remained adamant in their belief that they understood the causes.
At the time I watched the debates with interest, laughing at the arguments of the fundamentalists. Now I am simply amazed at the speed with which any phenomena is taken on, subsumed by humans into their everyday understanding of the world. An inexplicable smothering of dust, circling the globe was so entirely new, so alien to everyone that it is little surprise that everyone claimed they understood it – every theory was just as plausible and just as ridiculous as the next.
To the establishment it was only an aberration, something that would be understood, broken down and tackled given systematic investment in research and infrastructure. The primary causes were not fully quantified they agreed but it was nevertheless a natural progression. The dust followed blue skies as naturally as night followed day. The seeds of this ingress undoubtedly lay in the previous state of affairs. Once the experts had discovered the causes, the seeds that created this disorder, the solution would readily be found. The entire process could be explained through rational enquiry and method. Calls to increase funding for laboratories and research units were met only too gladly by politicians.
Huge facilities were built and great precedence was given to the acquisition of any data related to the dust. Even as ordinary people were crushed by its encroachment the gleaming follies of the world’s governments remained polished and clean.
On the other side of the argument the voices were equally strong, equally clear in their assertions that the answer was at hand. At the time I did not listen. I could not. I was employed in one of those shining facilities favoured by the establishment. I was a crucial cog in the machine of discovery. A vital part of their research machine.
To our ears the believers were defeatists. They claimed the dust was a sign that mankind had sinned, that the corrupt ways of the few had brought calamity on everybody’s head. They called for asceticism. The solution, they said, was simple – to repent, to accept the divine order, to punish those that transgressed and to learn to live true to ancient scriptures. Their talk about divine retribution, a balancing, punishment from on high, seemed only like excuses to give up.
We laughed at their arguments. They were manipulating the gullible while we were battling to find the answers. We were actually doing something, making a difference, while they advocated lamb-like sacrifice. The research institutes were insulated, well-funded, outside the main metropolitan areas. A great deal of our budget was spent combating their pernicious message, sending our own representatives to refute them in television studios and talk shows.
About the time the dust first started invading the homes in cities there were several well publicised mass suicides. At the time we seized upon this news as evidence of the weak-mindedness of these people but I wonder now if it was not in fact our own lack of results that drove these people to kill themselves.
The suicides increased around the globe and our job changed subtely. The funding continued to flow in but there was an atmosphere of blame. The results we were getting showed nothing conclusive. Every experiment, every test we conducted only deepened the mystery over the source of the dust.
We spent less and less time on our research. It became impossible to gather data, the results we generated were increasingly meaningless as all the variables shifted under our feet. Instead we were instructed to preach salvation. The answers were just around the corner. We did not have the definitive results as yet but the measurements were expected soon. Even as it became obvious that we were not getting any actionable results we were expected to shout louder about what we could deliver.
The worst part was that we believed we were doing something entirely new, something that had never been thought of before. We had an awesome arrogance that the same questions had not been considered a thousand times before, a misplaced belief that we were fundamentally better than the generations that had come before us and asked variations of the same question with no resolution, that we were somehow privileged not only to see the right path but blessed with the intelligence to follow it. If the dust has taught us one thing it is that there are no paths anymore except the ones we make ourselves.
Once we found our way back to the safety of the cars we packed hastily. I was bundled back into the cabin. Before he closed the door on me I caught the leaders arm.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Before you go.’
‘I have to. You understand,’ his soft, kind eyes twinkled at me falsely. ‘How would it look if you travelled up front?’
There was a timbre in his voice, a crack. A crack I could slip between.
‘Wait,’ I let my hand linger on his arm. His hairs were hard, bristly. ‘What’s your name?’
‘John,’ he said. ‘John.’
I thought for a moment he would stay, say something more, but he turned stepping down through the door.
‘We need to get moving,’ he said as he disappeared into the storm. ‘It will not be long before they discover the old woman.’
I nodded and he closed the door, sealing me in, sealing me safely away inside. How long had she lived there, I wondered. She must have been alive well before the dust first came.
Petroleum
At one point, so they said, oil made the world go round – petroleum, shale gas, naptha, Liquefied Petroleum Gas, crude oil, anthracite, bituminous and lignite coal. People fought and died over the stuff. It was well documented. People got up every morning and devoted their day to trading, barter or killing to get to this fuel.
The people living in Bonmont were a bubble left over from that time, an anachronism. The energy they relied on was still useful, no doubt about that, but the oil, the source had lost its meaning. There were no longer markets, the skills to maintain the industry were fading, the infrastructure slipping into the sand. Soon the few that knew how to run the rigs in Bonmont would die or be killed, the machinery would be destroyed.
The environmentalists had predicted a global meltdown, global warming, boiling seas, withered crops and crying starved children. The final days, the apocalypse, it was seemingly an image that mankind was enamoured with, an image that resonated with some primeval part of us. Why did writers spend countless hours imagining the end of days? What possible use was that to anyone?
The petrol that those environmentalists had cursed was disappearing long before the dust. People still needed energy but other sources, other markets sprang up. The dead plankton that had not been taken remained in place.
The word petroleum derived from the ancient Greek petra for rocks and elaion for oil. It was of such importance that they taught how it was formed in every school. The remains of Plankton and algae that had lived in the world’s oceans millions of year before us settled to the sea bed, layer upon layer compacting into sediment, building up intense pressure.
Slowly the dead cells of these organisms were coerced to change, organic matter restructured, denatured, turned first into a waxy substance known as kerogen and then with more heat formed hydrocarbons. This pressured fluid filled the cracks in the rocks beneath our planet. It lay there, the final grave for countless tiny lives, unrecognized as a fuel source, unrecognized as anything until the first humans arrived.