Save me? Save you.

She stood at the glass pane before her and stared out across the city. At this height on a clear day she could see a mile or two but she remembered as a little girl being able to see the horizon far in the distance. The horizon was no longer a point of reference, air pollution was too choking to make it relevant.

Her eyes twitched and then spasmed, a quirk she had carried through since a baby, a reminder of her first seizures and her first memories. There was sunshine and rain, leaves and squirrels that would scurry from tree to tree. Only pockets of habitat remained now though, protected and shielded, guarded just in case there ever was a chance to start again.

Start again.

That's what everyone wanted but it was too late, it always was. By the time she was born the ball had rolled too far to be returned and the critical point had been missed while those who could do something squabbled for decades over what to do, worse, whether they should do anything at all.

They stalled until reduction of pollutants was not enough, they slowed any attempts made if it shaved even the slightest from their bottom lines. They terminated any who had a chance, just to discourage others who might try. Most of them are dead now, aged out of existence or strangled by the filth of their own creation that tore at their bodies.

Many are dead or dying. At first as the waves of lives fell people thought it might reduce the emissions and consumption enough to turn the tables but that could never happen, the weight of the earth had shifted, there was no going back. Once so far along, there would be only one solution possible.

A technological one.

The problem was, none came in time, no energy process was efficient enough, no mode of transport could save enough. Consumption would always be too high. The dream to populate Mars was stamped nonviable and unsustainable even as they tried in vain. If there was a solution, the collective intelligence was unable to provide adequate answers. There was flashes of brilliance from beautiful minds of course though never enough to turn deficit to gain.

Her eye twitched again and she moves away from the window to sit at a clean desk. In a city decimated and housed in a crumbling earth, she lived her years to this point in study, reflection, growth.

Hope.

The pollution ate away at the bodies of most with cancers, mental health issues, physical atrophy and all manner of illness. Symptoms of a toxic world filled with compounds that lay outside of the narrow band humans thrive and almost to the point where none can survive. Almost.

Her father saw it first. After the unexplained seizures she had suffered as a child her parents watched her closely and despite the physical ailments she suffered, her mind raced ahead and soon well past the thinking ability of her parents. As he watched her develop, he put together a theory as he was prone to do.

Nature evolves all living things with the best suited for the occasion surviving into the next round. Humans had been gifted with opposable thumbs to build and then the prefrontal cortex to imagine itself in a future, a combination that led to destruction and pollution. But, evolution is never finished with a species until the species is entirely extinct. What if the very environment we had destroyed could influence and birth the next stage of evolution, the minds that could reverse and rehabilitate the damage that was done? A radioactive spider bite that creates a superhero.

He was her first teacher, her first word was Daddy. He was her last teacher when she laid him to rest a decade earlier next to her mother. Since early childhood, he couldn't teach her anything other than love and compassion and she no longer needed a teacher for that.

While her body failed, her mind excelled.

Her father was right, nature had tipped its hand and shown its cards and while most succumbed to the pressures of environmental hardship, a minute few had been triggered, awakened, switched. She was one. As a child they had tried to cure her and she had said, Don't you see, I am the cure. The world needed technological revolution of the most extreme kind and that required the most extreme of minds to find the solutions to the unsolvable. The ace nature held was the one it always had in hand.

The twitch came again, a micro seizure that she knew would likely finish her life one day but, it would not be today. She recognized and acknowledged each of them though and let it be a sign that there was work still to be done.

The desk was clear.

She sat at the desk but there was nothing on it, it was completely devoid, just a clean white surface. All that she needed. This was her place, her space, her canvas to paint the most complex pictures humanity would ever see, if they had the privilege of seeing her mind at work, her imagination create the fantastical and the practical. The solution.

She got to work as she did in almost all of her waking hours and many of her sleeping hours as she had trained herself to target process thoughts through her dreams. Only occasionally did she indulge and let her mind wander to the faces of her parents and the sound of her on childish laughter as they ran together through the parks surrounded by maple and birch trees.

Simplicity was born.

Her parents had done all they could to buy the time, a sealed apartment, the best food and healthcare manageable and a plan to service it for as long as their economy would permit. She hadn't stepped from the apartment in the ten years since the funeral and only twice in the last fifteen, the other occasion was to farewell her mother.

They had believed her words when she had said she was the solution, they believed while others wrote her off as one of the affected, the ill. They wore themselves down to translucency to give her the chance to do what she said she would.

While those who had come before looked for complex solutions for complex problems, she had always known that all that was needed was enough time to think and enough space to create. Resting in the recesses of her mind a lifetime of experience and thought drawing inspiration from all sources, dismissing none until they were proven unworthy, her it lay.

The cure.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]