H-1 UMAN-1

Chapter 12

I never asked for this kind of life, you know. Most people that I know, if not most people in general, would call it a good one, what with the world having gone to shit recently. I don't know how many people actually noticed what happened, though, because of where I live. You see, it's interesting being a lightkeeper's wife, and especially out here on Matinicus Rock. You don't know where that is, it doesn't surprise me. I live just about three miles off the eastern coast of Maine, which, just in case no one has noticed, is now an island.

Of course, I don't really understand how you could not notice, but people are ignorant. That's something I've learned over my twenty-odd years. Don't ask me how many, exactly, because I've lost track. No, I've been much too busy trying to keep ships and the like from sailing through the fog that surrounds this rock day in and day out, and that's a twenty-four hour job. In all honesty, I'd be lucky if I get three hours worth of sleep a night. But there's no use in complaining, now is there?

No clue, really, not a darn one. All I know is that I'm pretty screwed, what with what happened to me- and the whole town- last night. See, I don't live so far offshore as to never heard about what's going on three miles west of me. In fact, I hear more about what's happening on the Maineland (sorry, bad joke there) than I do of my husband. When we were first married, we got along like the rest of them, and yes, before anyone asks, we did indeed spend quite a substantial amount of time in bed. Honestly, you're a new couple, who wouldn't?

But I don't see so much of my sweetheart anymore, not with him always away. See, I may be just the 'lightkeeper's wife,' but with all the time he spends looking for what he calls 'a real profession' on the mainland, I've been the one whose hands have kept this stone and steel behemoth's three hundred year-old Fresnel lenses polished and shined, because if I don't, the light'll go out, and if I let that happen, even for a second, on the gateway to the busiest shipping channel on the Eastern Seaboard, holy hell, that would mean disaster.

Yes, I said would. Just think about it- here on the Maine Straights, we get more trade here than in the Straits of Malacca ever did, but that was before the oceans rose and there were no more Straits of Malacca any more. Well, there are now ships bound for the Arctic Circle every day now, and whatever for, you ask? Well, ever since the international community realized that we were going to drive ourselves extinct within a decade or to if we didn't seriously get out of the path that we had sent ourselves down.

So instead of letting that happen, the world said, let's build ourselves homes in the Arctic Circle. Build them underwater, use electrovoltaic cells to heat them. It may seem like a crazy idea, but since the oceans have risen over a hundred feet (that's roughly thirty meters, I've never really learned the metric system, so don't come after me for it) in the last decade.

Yes, you read that right, I said the last decade. We thought it was bad, what with the Equator burning up and species dying off left and right, but like humans always have been, we kept an eye out only for our good. Destroy the environment? Bah, who cares? Kill off millions in another world war?

No big deal, the population was getting too high anyways, who who gives a darn?

But here's what actually got to us- the threat of our own lives ending, courtesy of our stupidity. That, and based on what I've been hearing about these last several years, there's some mutant superbug out there, but it hasn't come to bother me. See, here on this island, I'm pretty self-sufficient. It wouldn't surprise me if no one knows what that particular word means, either, not with the time they spend all hooked up to the interwebs. It means that you take care of yourselves with your own hands instead of relying on the government to give it to you on a silver platter.

No, out here, we're pretty much untouched by germs, and Maine enacted quarantine laws some three years ago. Self-sufficient, though- it means that you get up off your lazy rear end every once in a while, get your asses (pardon the language, if you will) and act like responsible adult- you do the work that needs to be done, and while it's rare these days, actually get your hands dirty if need be? Is it really that hard to understand, you can't just let the world pass you by, you have to, oh how does the expression go- grab the bull by the horns?