The opportunity

Answer

It was quiet. The world, a vast expanse of stillness, felt as if it had exhausted itself, depleted of energy and in need of an age to recover. The wind, once a howling tormentor, had breathed its last sigh. The fire that had painted the horizon with strokes of infernal orange had diminished to embers, its fury spent. Even the earth, a restless beast, had ceased its trembling. And amidst this profound silence, we, a handful of survivors, remained.

Relief washed over us, a fleeting sensation quickly overtaken by a profound, unsettling gratitude. A life spared should be a gift, a treasure unwrapped with feverish excitement on a Christmas morning, each layer of paper revealing a joy so pure it banishes all shadow. But this was not that. This was far from the crippling horror that now gnawed at our souls.

What does one do with a heart that continues to beat after witnessing the abyss? How does one carry on when the rhythmic throbbing in your chest suddenly feels like a cruel mockery? We shouldn't have survived. Had the disaster struck a year earlier, we wouldn't have. This grim realization dawned on us the morning after our unexpected resurrection, and it filled us with dread.

The horror we felt was a far more potent weapon than the ruined landscape that entombed us. Barely conscious, we existed in a state of vegetative paralysis, unable to communicate, unable to break free from the invisible chains of trauma. It crashed over us like a wave of icy water, numbing our senses, stealing our will. Even when I saw grey silhouettes emerging from the wisps of fog on the horizon, I felt nothing. No relief, no hope, only the incessant, nagging fear caused by my own stubbornly beating heart, the rattling breath in my lungs, the relentless pounding of blood in my veins.

Frozen in trauma, we barely registered the arrival of the small group. We didn't even offer assistance when one of the young men began digging us out with his bare hands. He looked barely older than me, his dark hair and eyes shining with a startling brightness. He spoke constantly, as if the sound of his own voice could ward off the lingering darkness. He was unburying us, but also burying us under a barrage of jokes, a counterweight to the earth he displaced.

"You really can't complain," he said, pulling me from the earth's cold embrace. "You're comfortably playing mummy here, and who has to do all the work? Me!"

His bright, inquisitive eyes scanned the earth clinging to me. "Looks nice, your house. Maybe not cozy yet, but at least you don't have to worry about the rent."

His words reached me as if through a thick concrete wall. I wouldn't answer him, regardless of what he said. The constant pressure of the earth on my body was weakening me, a dull, aching pain. I was too alive to die, yet too dead inside to actively want to survive. Until he said something that jolted me back to a semblance of life.

"Crazy what's happening to us, isn't it? Wouldn't you really like to know what it is about? And it wouldn't even be hard to figure out. If any of us were a transhumanist, at least."

Transhumanists: people who sought to integrate their central nervous systems with machines. My father used to warn me about them. For a long time, I considered them a fantastical fringe group. There were barely thirty when I was born. Ten years later, that number had swelled to thousands. How many existed now, I couldn't say. I had paid little attention to their development, only knowing that neurological modifications like theirs had, thus far, been the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Not that I would ever have considered pursuing such a path.

"They will tell you that it makes life easier," my father would say. "That, with their microchips, you will never have to look for information and can just call it up, as if it were your own thoughts."

In fact, that was precisely the message they had been broadcasting for years. They promoted transhumanism as the solution to all of humanity's woes: microchips in the brain that cured diseases, provided instant qualifications, facilitated connections, prolonged pleasurable experiences, and erased unpleasant memories. The foundational pillars of a brave new world.

"From a scientific point of view, an outstanding development, admittedly," my father had acknowledged, but he remained unconvinced. "We are human beings: our lives are about feeling and thinking, so we can grow as individuals. How would we be supposed to do any of it as a humanized machine? We can no longer learn, no longer grow if we let an algorithm do all the work that it involves."

I was still trapped, the weight of the earth crushing me. Still barely able to breathe, barely able to speak, but suddenly, I forced the words out.

"We have to find them," I managed, my voice raspy and barely audible.

I didn't really want to find them. In fact, I was terrified of the prospect of ever meeting one, my father's warnings still echoing in my ears.

"Who is to control which information they access?" he would wonder. "Who is to program the microchip that interacts with their limbic system, with all their emotions, their perceptions, their personality? Depending on who it will be, they might not be the optimized humans that they're believed to become. They might simply be monsters."

The boy had dug me out halfway when the echo of those words began to fade. Not on its own. I tried to shake it off, because no monster could be more terrifying than ignorance. We had to find out why our hearts kept beating when they should have stopped. The boy was right: the microchips in their heads gave them an opportunity to find out.

"Find them," he muttered, chuckling as he continued to dig. "Not a thing out of your mouth for hours, so I wonder if you even have vocal cords, and then suddenly you act as if transhumanists are as easy to spot as an entire rug in a bowl of soup. It's not that easy, alright? How would you even look for them? I doubt they'd respond to a wanted ad in the local newspaper."

Freedom. It was approaching with every handful of earth that he tossed aside. As my hands were freed from their earthen grave, feeling began to return. First, a tingling sensation, then burning needles, and finally, sluggish movement. They tentatively began to help with the digging. The further my body was released, the more unbearable the remnants of my captivity felt. The longer I smelled freedom, the more disgusting the stench of the earth became.

"Forget the transhumanists and keep digging," the boy muttered, his eyes scanning the horizon. "We have to hurry, I have a bad feeling. Do you hear how quiet it is?"

I listened, and heard nothing. No birdsong. No buzzing of bees. Not even the sound of the sea from the nearby coast.

"That's not normal," the boy shook his head. "It's only ever this quiet when something bad is looming." A long pause. "Did you see the toads last week? Hundreds of them, I reckon they tried to flee and then, bang: just flattened on the streets, like pancakes. Just wait for it, might be our fate as well. But, look, in case it is: at least, dying is no longer a thing, anyway. Or is this only affecting my people?"

I sat up and looked for the others, before shaking my head. "No, we are… just as well alive, although we shouldn't be."

Mumbling these words, the shock had hardly worn off. I started wondering how the boy should have died, but hadn't.

"What happened to you?"

At my question, he stopped digging. His smile froze, and suddenly he looked like he had died with it plastered on his face.

"The same thing that happens to suckling pigs. I'll never eat those again, I promise you that!" A sigh, short and deep. "I got impaled by a fence post that was flying through the air, and afterwards, I was grilled over an exploding gas pipe. Once in a lifetime you think you have superpowers and start showing off with impossible-to-survive-stuff like this, but then it turns out that every idiot suddenly survives all sorts of things. Just typical!"

From my knees upwards, I was free. The next time my legs tried to escape their trap, they succeeded. I erupted from the earth like a tsunami wave from the ocean. As if I had never been trapped, I stood on my feet, facing the boy.

What do you say to a stranger who has spent hours digging with his bare hands to help you? Do you ask his name, or would that sound too casual in the face of such a heroic deed? Do you shake his dirty hand, or do you simply go your way and never look back?

"I'm Kevin, by the way," he made the decision for me, still with a smile on his face. "I'd ask you to invite me for a drink for this, but look: I doubt we'd find anything open in completely destroyed towns, I guess I'll have to let you off."

Sometimes, the plural form is terrifying, especially when it remains indefinite. Two, ten, hundreds, thousands of towns: how many was he referring to?

I couldn't decipher his plural. Was Armageddon only happening on this side of the world, or all around?

A groan escaped my lips as the unease within me clamored for answers. Real answers, however, are rare. The search for them is as arduous as seeking gemstones on a river's gravel bed. From the surface, you might glimpse them and think you can pinpoint their location, but the water, however clear, distorts your perception. No matter how diligently you dive down, you won't find them where you initially thought they'd be.

Are they ever worth it? Real answers, worth the risk of drowning? Or would you be better off living with what you can see from the surface: your distorted perception of their actual shape?

Before this day, I would have chosen the easiest path. But have you ever felt truly trapped before? Something changes when you cannot move, when you cannot flee an approaching disaster, and have only the racing beat of your heart to keep you company. Your thoughts become amplified, the only sound you can hear, and they demand to know why any of what has brought you to this point had to happen, as if the reason for terrible things were a soothing morphine injection.

Kevin was preparing to leave. He would have disappeared in the next few seconds, leaving me behind, without an explanation, without a clue as to why these events were unfolding. If I hadn't stopped him.

"Wait!" His arm felt surprisingly hot when I grabbed it. "I know how to find them: the transhumanists."

Sometimes, lies simply lie dormant. When you speak them, you are unaware that they are untrue. I had no idea how we could find transhumanists. All I possessed was a vague idea, barely worth pursuing. Kevin clearly thought so. He looked at me for a long moment, mockery dancing in his eyes.

"Oh yeah? And how? Not even our cell phones work anymore: no internet, no electricity, nothing at all. Almost like in the Middle Ages."

A better time, I thought momentarily. Maybe a better time is ahead: a new old world like the one I had gotten to know, high up in the mountains.

"The police radio frequency," I blurted out. "It is still working, isn't it?"

The transhumanists could hear it, inside their heads. I had heard about it recently: a glitch in the programming of their microchips connected them to it.

"Well, if the earthquake knocked down the power lines," he replied, "the cell towers are probably gone as well."

Probably. He wasn't sure. I seized my chance.

"We have to find Gerard," I mumbled. "Have you... seen any other people here when you arrived?"

"Bad news, buddy," he shook his head, "your survival skills seem to suck. Except for you, I haven't seen anyone buried. Thank God, because I'm not a digger: I've had enough of digging for today."

I fell to my knees and started digging.

"He has to be here somewhere. He was right next to me when the hills came down."

Despite my pleading eyes, he only shrugged and made no attempt to help.

"Maybe he slipped down with them and wasn't buried at all," he tried to convince me, and even though I was aware it was a possibility, my hands kept digging.

"No, he…wouldn't just leave me here. We have to find him."

Actually, I hardly knew Gerard at the time. I couldn't have known if someone like him would, faced with a disaster, have actually looked for someone like me. However, he was the only policeman I knew: our only way to send a message to transhumanists who might have the answers I was craving.

"Listen, buddy, there is no time," I heard Kevin's muffled voice. "We are way too close to the coast. You do realize what is bound to happen in the sea after an earthquake like this one, don't you?"

Suddenly, I stopped moving. There are things you don't allow yourself to think about until someone else mentions them: for instance, the future and everything unpleasant that is inevitably to happen.

"Tsunamis," I whispered.

If it had been a decade earlier, they would have been discounted in our latitudes. But after an earthquake like this... It had torn pipes, blown up industrial halls, crushed entire towns, and sent wind turbines flying.

I jumped up and gazed into the distance. There it was, the sea: a sleeping beauty, calm and silent. Unnaturally so. Kevin could be right, I had suddenly no doubt about it. No circling flight of seagulls in the bright blue sky. No rabbits on the ground, not even ants on their walkabout. Not a single animal was in sight: they had all fled.

Was it due to yesterday's earthquake, or was the actual disaster yet to come?

The sea retreats towards the horizon as if gathering momentum, shortly before it surges forward and washes the earth clean of everything that stands, of everything that walks, talks, and breathes. You can hear it sweep, louder and louder, seconds before a tsunami strikes, and once you can no longer see the ocean, when it has receded so far from the coast that its bed lies bare, it is long too late.

"You're right," I whispered, heavy-eyed. "We... have to go higher."

Roofs, so high that the waves cannot reach them. Mountains, so far from the ground that looking down from their peaks would induce vertigo.

"Ts, right, would be a good idea, but have you looked around?"

Rubble everywhere, when I did. As far as I could see in the dust, the earthquake had ironed the ground flat.

"Look, a tsunami probably won't kill us, either. Could be worse, so."

There it was again: uncertainty. I couldn't have imagined anything worse, nothing more terrifying than that.

Were we really immortal, and if we were, how long would it last? Or was it just certain situations that we survived? Bullets in the body, suicide attempts, cuts in our skin. Perhaps disasters, too: the earthquake, at least, had left us alive. But how could we be sure that we couldn't be drowned?

I started feeling sick. Can anyone imagine what it feels like to face a tsunami? Hungry, the sea rises over the coast, and as fast as a high-speed train, it rolls across the plains. It uproots trees and tears down houses. Amidst rubble and masses of mud, they wash towards you as you slowly lose control. Your feet desperately search for a foothold, which, on a far-off ground buried beneath tons of water, they can no longer find. Everywhere around you, boats are flying through the air as if they weigh nothing. However, all you notice is how the rushing water is determined to get you.

As if it were an opponent of flesh and blood, it keeps pushing your head under. Again and again, until your weakening body fights its way back to the surface, struggling for every breath. And at some stage, you simply give up. With your mouth sealed at the start, but the water presses against your lips and forces them open. The next thing you know, your lungs are filling up with mud. You are choking on dirt. Every single cell in your body desperately craves oxygen, and maybe you'll die, or maybe you won't. Would it even matter?

My eyes went dark. Faced with a tsunami, I suddenly thought, you would beg for death to come and end your pain.

All at once, the prospect of it never arriving felt more deadly to me than the fear of death itself.

"We can't just stand here and wait for it," I said. "We have to find the others and get away."

On the coastline, I saw boats. Their sails, rigid and calm.

"What if we go out?"

My mind was caught in a memory. A storm, violent. In the heart of the night, it had whistled through the cracks of my door, sounding like a fury. It had hurled branches against my window and knocked me awake. Crying, I called for my father, but there was no sign of him. I got out of bed in my pajamas and walked down the creaking stairs, but there was still no trace of him. Only the wide open front door, an indication that he had left the house, regardless of the whistling monster.

Suddenly, I could hear his footsteps. He was on the roof, securing the tiles that the wind had loosened. How I wished he'd simply been hiding under the covers of his bed until the danger passed. He would never have done so.

"When you have a problem," he used to say, "you face it head-on and don't run away. You look it in the eye and penetrate into its centre, into its heart, because difficulties can only ever really be solved from within."

When this memory faded before my eyes and left me with the urge to face the head seas of the approaching tsunami, Kevin's eyes lost their grace.

"Have you lost your freaking mind? That's a terrible idea! Don't you realize that tsunamis are coming from right there?"

That was exactly the point. Out there, in the open water, they are brewing, and as they are taking shape there is nothing in their way, nothing at all to stop them.

"They just brush over the sea and don't do any harm," I said, "as long as nothing tries to stop them. It is the coastline that forces them to slow down, and only when they do, the actual wave starts building up."

To be honest, I didn't know if I was right. All I relied on was nothing but a feeling, and maybe that's the only way to ever convince others of what you believe in.

"Ok," Kevin nodded, to my surprise. "Sounds reasonable enough. But we don't have a boat, do we, and even if we did: who would steer it? You?"

I had never thought about how ships worked, had never been to sea before, never swum the ocean. For all my life, I had only seen it from afar and accepted it as something unreachable. I had never wondered what waves felt like under the bow of a boat. What the salty air would taste like as it hit your face on deck. What it would be like to meet infinity where the water floats into the horizon. Not before this very moment.

"I've never done it before, but I'll steer it if you help me."

I hadn't known Kevin for more than half a day, hadn't exchanged more than five sentences with him. Still, I wouldn't have made it without him, a stranger.

Without him, I would not have found my people again, widely scattered across the plain that used to be a hill. I wouldn't have reached the coast, transported there in a car provided by his men, three in number. I would not have convinced the others of my plan and would never have put it into practice without him. I would have never felt waves under the bow of a ship, never tasted the salt of the ocean on deck, never met infinity where the water floats into the horizon if it hadn't been for him. Without him, I would never have taken the helm: neither that of the boat that day, nor that of our destiny that the tsunami was to leave to me.

We didn't see much of the catastrophe from where we were when it was happening, many miles away from land. Only gentle waves, hardly recognizable and nothing compared to what it looked like for anyone on land.

The tides in time-lapse. Minutes thereafter: a giant wave crest, mounting at the coast, as if someone had thrown an entire planet into the water. It reached a few miles inland and covered whole localities with mud and the rubbish that was floating in the sea. Someone who saw it from the coast once told me it was like the ocean got sick all over what man had built in the past decades. Not just once: for hours, monster waves kept washing back and forth.

Fascinating how much distance matters to the point of view. We were there, but we were not, while something terrible was happening, and the further away you are from something, the smaller the terror that it leaves.

Hardly any of it reached me at the helm of our boat. Gerard, we had dug him out, gave me a hand. In his youth, he had worked as a lobster fisherman, only for a few weeks, but nevertheless, nowadays he knew at least a bit about ships on the high seas and found his way in the labyrinth of levers and buttons that lay before my eyes while steering.

We spent twelve hours out there, surrounded by nothing but water. For six of them, I barely remembered my own plan. I no longer thought of transhumanists and barely realized how surreal everything that had happened was, so surreal that I couldn't have imagined any of it until the day it happened. Once only disasters keep coming, it is probably always like this: stealthily you get used to them, and the next time you open your eyes, they suddenly seem like normality.

Funnily, even the greatest distance to a disaster that is happening right now doesn't keep your body from feeling distressed. You don't have to experience it, don't have to be able to see or hear it. As soon as you know that it is happening, you can somehow feel it. Simply knowing about it makes the world seem darker. Even light blue waves beneath a cloudless sky cannot change it, and the most beautiful picture before your eyes won't stop the adrenaline from rushing through your veins.

Your heart beats differently, your muscles turn tense, and every thought you could possibly have suddenly escapes your head before you are able to grasp it. A typical stress reaction, meant to keep you alive. We're still experiencing it even though we wouldn't need it in order to keep on